Reflections on puree week 1

I have finished posting my daily pureed food menus for now - though I'll post my daily menu again if I eat anything particularly interesting (or problematic)! Over the past week I've made one or two useful food 'discoveries'. The first one that springs to mind is the Weight To Go smoked haddock and potato meal I had yesterday. This is 300g, so quite filling, and just 220 calories. This meal is absolutely delicious. The meal provides plenty of carbohydrates and protein, and can be completed with a portion of mashed vegetables. Despite its hefty price tag (£2.99), I have today, ordered five more of these! Another discovery was the vegetarian cottage pie from Tesco. It's 400g and is suitable for two meals at 175 each. I think it was £1.79. I've also bought three of these today and will be putting a couple of them in the freezer.

This week has been challenging in terms of dealing with food preparation, eating and meal times at work. At home, everything is fine because, I guess, I am in control. But at work, I have a whole range of demands on my time - some known well in advance, and others that come up at the last minute - so it's not always easy to predict what I will be doing, at what time - and indeed, where. To help with this, I have been trying to do as much food preparation at home as possible. I've been accumulating some Klip Lock (or something like that) storage containers from Tesco. They are dead cheap and come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. I've got some that are 400ml and ideal for transporting small meals to work for lunch etc. I also have a round 240ml container that's ideal for heating up low fat creamed rice. I've been taking my breakfast to work and preparing and eating it there - so a beaker of orange juice, beaker with soya milk and a packet of Oatso Simple porridge.

A word of warning about porridge though - after several experiments I can now tell you that if cooking in the microwave, use a proper, china bowl. Thin, plastic storage containers, although designed for microwave use, allow heat exchange much more rapidly than thick china and so you are much more likely to get a microwave explosion (I've had at least two this week). As soon as I started using a china bowl the explosive activity stopped!