Weekend Cooking: Plum Flan and a Diet

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. It is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

The Farm and the Flan

This week I finally made it to the nearby farm that sells home-grown produce. I’d been there before, but it must have been a year or so ago. It’s only a 30 minute cycle ride away from our house, so I can’t really say why I don’t go more often.

I do love going there as it’s such a rustic place with a dog greeting you as you arrive, and a ginger cat curled up on the drive. And they have a good selection of foods on display in their barn. Since it’s apple and pear season, they had several crates full of the fruits, and they even had a choice of varieties of apples.

I came away with: pears, red plums, strawberries, beetroot, cream cheese and a bottle of apple/pear juice.

I had already a use in mind for the plums: the Each Peach Pear Plum Flan from Kirsten at Peace, Love and Muesli. When I saw the recipe on her blog, I knew I wanted to make it with the first bag of pears I got my hands on. So this week I made it (with just the plums).

Now, the black on top isn’t really black, it’s caramelized brown caster sugar. A bit less of it would have done just fine, but as it was, the flan was really, really good.

I mean: really good!

And the only ingredient I don’t normally have in the larder were the plums. Sometimes, I buy a food (like the plums in this case), then at home I look up a recipe and find that I need to buy several other food items before I can make it. Not this time. Very easy and very tasty. Here’s the recipe.

A Diet

Flans and diets obviously don’t really go together, although they can do. As I decided a few pounds fewer would look really nice on my figure I looked for a diet that I could keep to without too much trouble. So I found this diet that isn’t really a diet, but a way of keeping track of the calories you consume and the exercise you take.

It knows lots of foods and their calorific value already (users can enter new items themselves) and I was happily surprised to see that the Dutch dessert I had eaten as well as the British cereal were already in the system (the exact brands that I used). It had loads of American foodstuffs as well (I think it’s originally American).

It works like this: at the very start of your new diet plan, you do tell it how much weight you want to lose and it suggests a maximum number of calories per day. In my case, it’s 1550, so that allows for some decent meals. You fill out for each meal what you ate and this is taken off your allowance for that day. The only thing you have to worry about is that you don’t consume more than your allowance.

And when you do some exercise, the calories you burn are added to your daily allowance! I love that kind of diet because it allows you to eat whatever you like, as long as you don’t overdo it.

Those diets where you can’t eat chocolate? I can do them until my chocolate craving gets out of hand and I eat a month’s worth of chocolates.

With this new diet, I can go on a long cycle ride and then have my cake and ate it. Or my chocolate, or indeed a plum flan.

The programme is called My Fitness Pal, it’s online (there’s also a mobile version) and it’s free. I’m Leeswammes, if you would like to join and link up with me. Please do! I need some support.