Burning calories

If anyone tells you that doing housework isn’t good for you, let them know that’s bollocks. I walked around two miles today and that was just in the house.

On Sunday I loaded a pedometer app onto my phone and it’s been recording my footsteps all week. Given that I do pretty much the same thing every day, it’s fairly easy to determine my average distance for a non-housework intensive day. The app then uses the footsteps taken to determine distance travelled, average speed and calories burned.

And this week, today was my biggest walking day. I walked a total of 10,153 steps which equals around 4.5 miles and burned about 840 calories. It seems that my usual walking equates to about 2.5 miles which means I somehow found two miles of distance in our tiny house. I reckon going up and down the stairs took care of at least one of them.

As a break from the almost constant joy that is Cleaning the House, I made some butterscotch puddings. Butterscotch is one of Mirinda’s favourites and I’ve never attempted it before. While it only takes ten minutes to actually make, it’s a bit fiddly. As I put the ramekins in the fridge to set, the smell was delicious…and very butterscotch-like. Fingers crossed.

I also made a batch of almond fingers because we’re having Sarah and Nick over for lunch on Saturday and Mirinda ordered them for dessert. As usually happens, there was a lot of leftover filling so I mixed it with a bit of double cream and topped the butterscotch puddings with it.

Sarah works with Mirinda and Nick is her husband. Regular readers may remember that Sarah was with us in Beijing a couple of years ago. I’m looking forward to it as I haven’t seen Sarah for ages and I’ve never met Nick.

The full menu will be:
Scallops with chilli and coriander
Lamb tagine with jewelled couscous
Almond fingers and pistachio cakes

Here’s the almond fingers…

…I’ll be making the pistachio cakes after work tomorrow.

And here’s an allium update. They’re looking a bit fuller now.