Weds 19th Nov.

I’ve started to look forward to tea and coffee breaks again, as I don’t notice much difference with coffee, and tea is also starting to taste “normal” with soya milk At first, I tasted the soya more than the tea, but now it tastes like tea again. Hurray!

Once again I have leftovers for lunch: yesterday’s pasta with some extra sweet corn.
Then it’s on to the internet for some important research. Paul and I are off to Brussels next week. It was supposed to be a surprise for me, with me being whisked off at the last minute, but Sally thought we were doing something on one of the dates, so Paul had to check with me. Of course, she could have just looked on the calendar and seen that we weren’t, but never mind! So, I look up vegan restaurants in Brussels on the Happy Cow website: http://www.happycow.net/. You may snort in disbelief, but it turns out that there are two vegan restaurants, five vegetarian restaurants, and two veggie friendly restaurants, not to mention several health food shops. So we should survive. Of course I could be being hopelessly optimistic. Our experience of going to veggie restaurants we’ve found on the internet hasn’t always been good. Sometimes they no longer exist or they’re closed for August (Paris is particularly prone to this one), or they turn out to be – frankly – a bit strange! Often though, the experience is positive. I think the best one was in the Lake District. Was it Ambleside? It was an Italian restaurant, in the cinema complex, which does a film and meal deal. The food was fantastic - authentic and sophisticated. And we got to see Indiana Jones too. Well, we’ll see what Brussels comes up with. It is so wonderful when I go to a vegetarian restaurant to look at the menu and know that I can have ANYTHING I LIKE from it! I love them all, from the sophisticated gourmet ones to the brown rice and lentils types.

Talking of brown rice and lentils, that’s what we have for tea. The lentils are in the form of a curry, consisting of split red lentils, onions, mushrooms, creamed coconut and various spices. I use brown basmati rice, which takes longer to cook but is more nutritious than the white version.

Sally’s packed lunch for tomorrow is peanut butter sandwiches. I won’t be having leftover curry and rice as there isn’t any.