Sunshine... and a few little experiments

The sun showed her beautiful face yesterday (OK, briefly) and it was SO good to see it. She's here again today and came back from a lovely walk at lunchtime... albeit wrapped up like Nanook of the North as I'm not anywhere close to getting warm today!

It really lifted my spirits... and boy, do they need the lift! My throat thingy has returned with a vengeance and I'm not sleeping so well again. This is down to the need to get up for a drink several times a night to soothe the throat... and then again because I need a wee - grrr. Makes me tired and cranky in the morning, and not a very happy bunny in general.

Thankfully, the nasty little buggy beggar seems weaker than it was the first time around, and I still feel mid-range grotty... but more in waves, interspersed with OK-ish spells. Still, I'll take this 'improvement' as a positive and try to keep looking for life's little plus points... and the fact that I can now see 'spring' beginning is a major plus.

Now, to those experiments... just a moment please, let me don my white coat and gloves and fetch my very best mad scientist mindset.

Every day (because we eat breakfast so darned early) I make us each a little 'lunch-box' of something that my lovely hubby and I call 'fake porridge' for a low-carb, mid-morning snack.

It's a cunning mixture of psyllium husk, ground flax seed (and usually a mix of other seeds ground up too) and full-fat goat milk, with a small handful of berries - either blueberries or a few pomegranate arils. Lovely hubby sometimes adds a little drizzle of double cream to his, just before he eats it, but I don't have that luxury at work. It may sound odd, but it's lovely and it usually hits the spot.

However, as nice as it is, I've been getting a tad bored with it, so have been playing about with making it a little more exciting over the last few weeks. Not wishing to make lovely hubby my guinea pig, I've 'messed' a tad more with my pots.

I've tried adding cinnamon or mixed spices, or dried mint (er, not such a great success), or dessicated coconut and whole seeds at various times. A spoonful of grated ginger is nice too. I briefly toyed with the idea of adding dark chocolate chips (I did find some nice high % cocoa ones with low carb content) but decided that may be a bad move and lead to serious temptation for both of us. Oh well, a nice thought :-(

The experiments have mostly ranged between 'acceptable' and 'mmm, pretty darn good'. But today, I felt even more adventurous than usual and added some coconut, the lovely grated ginger and a scattering of Turkish red pepper flakes (ipek pul biber) to my little box.

Wow! Wish I'd taken a photo as it looks so pretty with the little red flakes just peeping through around the blueberries. And I wish you could have tasted it - it was gorgeous. Tasty and warming, which is just what I need at the moment. Filling and satisfying too - well, that is the point after all.

Hey, this might just be a winner, so I'll try again tomorrow and make sure this was not all just a tiredness-induced fluke!