Despite being on some weird kind of diet, best described as the „Jamie and Her Husband Try Fruit For a Change“-Diet, I made some lemon iced tea yesterday. The main reason was that I have some lemon squash juice that is a bit past its expiration date, but only a couple of days, so I can’t bring myself to throw it away and had to find things to use it for.

I quickly settled on lemon iced tea, because it seemed easy and I always wanted to try to make some myself. So I looked around on the internet and found a recipe which I altered slightly and made my own. I’m still not satisfied for several reasons, so the next time I will change it a bit until I found just the right way to make the perfect lemon iced tea.

Here’s how I made it:

3/4 l of water
2 bags of ordinary black tea
75 g sugar
60 ml lemon juice
1 cinnamon stick

I boiled the water and then removed the pot from the heat, added the tea bags and let it just steep for about half an hour or 3/4 of the length of an episode of The West Wing.

Then I used my new digital scale, which I’m oh so proud of, and measured exactly 75 g of sugar. Of course it wouldn’t have hurt had it been 74 g or 77 g, but hey, since I now can measure everything to the very gram of it, why shouldn’t I? This is why it’s so much fun to have a digital scale.

I added the sugar and lemon squash juice and stirred until I was pretty sure all the sugar had dissolved. I then filled a bottle with the tea and added a stick of cinnamon. The cinnamon was a spur of the moment thing, since just this Saturday I had bought a bag of cinnamon for remarkably little money at a Japanese grocery store and they were lying around on the counter when I made the iced tea.

Then I just put the bottle in the fridge and waited until… today!

So today was the day I tried my first glass of homemade lemon iced tea. It wasn’t too bad, but it could need a bit of improvement. For once I think that it was both too sweet and too bitter, however that’s possible. So the next time I will take the tea bags out earlier (say after twenty minutes maybe) and add less sugar (I guess around 50 g). I’m not sure yet.

The good thing is that this is such an easy thing to make, so it doesn’t matter if you have to experiment a bit first, since it’s cheap,quick easy to make. No fuss at all.

Today when I rode the elevator up to our offices I took a look at myself in the mirror (Yes, I do prefer the elevators with mirrors. I mean, whereelse can you quickly check how you’re looking better than while going six floors up or down?) and noticed that I have an extremely good hair day.

My hair just is perfect today. My bangs are exactly where I want them to be and instead of being just boringly straight my hair falls down in subtle (yes, subtle!) waves. Wonderful.

It’s amazing how my spirit can be lifted just by the simple fact that I have good hair today. But it does. I’m sitting in my office and feeling pretty. In fact I might just be a little too much in love with myself today. And please let me be. Those extremely good hair days only happen every now and then, so they’re very precious to me and not to be spoiled.

I really really really like Hello Saferide. And so should you. Just sayin‘.

Sadly, on 21st July 2006, only a few days after marrying medical student Brent Morris, she died of a heart attack.

I can’t believe that J. Madison Wright died. Now I’m sad. I know that I didn’t even know her, but reading that someone four years younger than yourself died of a freaking heart attack just shortly after getting married just isn’t fair. Stupid world.

The husband and I are trying to lose weight these days. One reason why we would do such a tedious and cruel thing is that we actually have gained way too much pounds the past couple of months or so. You just know that something is wrong when some of your own clothes don’t fit anymore. Another reason is that we want to be really pretty tourists when we are in France in September. Like I want all the French people admire me for my utter beauty and marvellous language skills. Yeah. Sure.

Anyway, I’ve been browsing my cooking magazines for hours ever since we decided we’d lose weight, which is a remarkably stupid thing to do when you don’t want to eat so much. What can I say? If I can’t eat it I at least like to look at it.

Then I read somewhere that grapefruit actually helps you burn fat, so I decided to buy grapefruits despite the fact that I never ate a grapefruit before in my whole life, and for a perfectly good reason, because I don’t like food that’s bitter. I don’t like bitter vegetables (go away, brussels sprouts), I don’t like bitter fruit, I don’t like coffee and I think there’s a reason that sweets are called sweets and that bitter chocolate conflicts with the very concept of sweets. Bitter in my world is bad. I believe that I have very sensitive taste buds.

I bought two grapefruits nonetheless, with nothing but my metabolism in mind. Then I asked my mother what she thought I should do with them. She told me to fillet a grapefruit, sprinkle it with a bit of sugar and put it in the fridge for a while.

So that’s what I did. It wasn’t only the first time I filleted a grapefruit, it was the first time I filleted anything. Filleting fruit always seemed too much work for me, plus I was afraid that I might be disappointed by the outcome. It turned out to be as messy as I though, but I was pretty satisfied with the result. I had a whole plate of carefully filleted grapefruit, sprinkled it with two teaspoons of sugar and then put it in the fridge for about 20 minutes. I think.

Care to know this Sunday’s breakfast? Here it is

1 grapefruit
2 tsp. sugar
2 yoghurts (natural, unsweetened)
4 tsp. honey
additional fruit (optional, but recommended)

Serves 2 dieting people

As I already said I filleted the grapfruit, sprinkled it with sugar and put it in the fridge. Just as my mother told me. I’m a pretty good girl when it comes to that.

I then put each yoghurt in a little bowl and added two teaspoons of honey each. Just let it drizzle on the yoghurt. It looks really pretty that way and you can mix it together with the yoghurt later. We have vanilla-flavored honey right now which, in addition to being really expensive, tastes really good. I will try out the cinnamon-flavored next. Don’t worry, just choose what honey you like best.

I also added about two tablespoons of strawberries which we still had from the evening before to the yoghurt, but you can add whatever fruit you like or just leave it with the grapefruits and yoghurt. It makes a delicious breakfast, and with the addition of a bit of sugar and thoughts of how much work I had put into filleting the fruit I found myself actually enjoying the first bites grapefruit I probably ever had.

#1

The husband decided to get new glasses and had his eyes checked out. Turns out he can actually see a lot better now. He’s still short-sighted (just like me), but about one diopter less than when he got his last glasses. I blame presbyopia, which is scary because it means he’s getting old.

#2

My mother found my first grey hair. It was actually more white than grey, which is the only comfort I can find, since I think that white hair is more elegant than grey. But it was a non-brown hair nonetheless. This is not good. I thought I’d be completely fine with it once it happened. Turns out I’m not. I don’t want to have a grey hair. I’M ONLY 25, FOR GOD’S SAKE! I’m too young for this. It’s also strangely fascinating, BUT I’M STILL NOT FINE WITH IT.

Jamie: Okay, you’re going to hate me.

Erin: Hee.
Erin: I was just about to send you something.
[…]
Erin: And why? Why would I hate you?

Jamie: Because this is where I will spend two weeks in September: http://www.provenceweb.fr/e/var/artignos/artignos.htm

Erin: HATE YOU.

Jamie: I knew it.

Yesterday the package with all my fancy rice products came. As always things you order online hardly ever look the way you expect them.

The stuffed piggy for example was a lot bigger than I thought it would be. It’s cute anyway.

The lunch box and cooking bag on the other hand were somewhat smaller than I expected. But then I expected them to be smaller than I expected, so it wasn’t a big surprise. It was more like I couldn’t possibly imagine how big (or small) they’d be, so I was prepared for a surprise. The bigger surprise was that the lunchbox turned out to be round, not oval as I thought. I don’t know why I thought, I bet you might have even been able to figure that out from the webpage, but I don’t care for sizes as long as it’s pretty, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention.

Then the spoons were more or less like I thought they would be. If anything then they are prettier than I thought.

When I unpacked the cups the husband was all „Now what do you think we need those for?“. I honestly have no idea. The thing is they are A LOT smaller than I expected. they’re just teeny little plastic cups and I can’t imagine why we would want to use them at home. So this was basically what I told him: „I don’t know. I thought they were BIGGER.“ Well, they are going to be used a lot once we have kids, I guess. We might even need more then.

On the other hand, the cooling bag is big enough to hold food for two average grown-ups, the lunch box fits in nearly perfectly as do the cups. So it’s all perfect for when we are in France and want to take some lunch with us when we go hanging out at the lake. Or whatever it is we will be doing there in September.

Plus, it’s all so very pretty.

I keep returning to my newly re-designed page, looking at it and telling myself „Good job, girl“.

I’m nuts.

And now I proudly present: My first faux bento. There’s a lot of room for improvement, but I do believe that it’s a good start.