One problem with this last trip to the US was that we got almost no exercise. Usually I lose weight on vacation just from walking more and eating less, but this time I think I gained about a kilo. I don’t care about the actual weight much, but my gut is looking bigger and my arms are looking smaller. I do care about that. So this week I’ve been trying to get back into it; since getting home Monday night I’ve done weightlifting twice, erged 10km (as well as short distances to warm up for weights) and even clibed 11 flights of stairs today. My weight still seems to be going up, as it always does when I begin exercising. I tend to think it’s because of muscle gain, normally, but right now it’s probably too soon for that. It also seems that weight gain and loss have delayed effects for me, so I think that’s what’s going on here (and also might be one reason why I typically lose weight over the holidays, right after erging the 200,000 meter Concept II Holiday Challenge).
Of course the anniversary dinner we had last night might be implicated as well, especially the dessert portion of it. When, after we finished off the bottle of wine we’d ordered, I chose a dessert described as a “Beaujolais soup, with summer fruits and Braman (?) sorbet”, I wasn’t expecting the Beaujolais soup part of it to be, well, mostly made of Beaujolais. Good thing the restaurant was right around the corner from us, because it’s entirely likely I wasn’t quite walking straight. (One more thing I love about where we live: being able to walk to a gazillion bars and restaurants). If anyone cares about the rest of the dinner, we began an amuse-bouche of a tiny cup of French onion soup – with a crouton of bread topped with cheese, as it’s served in Frnace and in the US. More often here there are just a few croutons and little or no cheese. For appatizers, we had Caesar salad for Rudder,and for me a grilled half kreeftje (small lobster, apparently) with mustard sauce and a sweeter sauce drizzled under it, on top of pasta with a buttery sauce. The salad was small, but had a whole strip of bacon on top and large pieces of chicken in it; the kreeftje didn’t have a grilled flavor but just tasted of lobster, and had a bit of butter on it instead of a cup of clarified butter – I just find it interesting how foods are served differently here. Rudder had some sort of red fish for his, I think called rode poonfilet – a lot of the types of fish are different than those on the other side of the ocean, so often we just can’t translate. I had a stoofpotje with chicken, shrimp and red curry, which sounds like a robust casserole but turned out to be very delicate and tasty , with more pasta and very thing frie onions on top. Yum. Oh, and Rudder had a tower of fruits for dessrt, made of strawberries supporting a sweet wafer, topped by a layer of raspberries supporting a smaller wafer. I generally do think that when berries are in season, it’s a good idea not to bother with complex desserts.