Turkey, Turkey, Turkey...

As previously stated, this year I wanted to make sure that no food would be wasted if I could help it, and I'll start with the most obvious - The Turkey!

We'd finished most of the meat by Boxing Day evening and once the bacon was being opened for lunch on the 27th I knew it was all over for that poor turkey. It was only a matter of time before its batter bones would be flung to the bin or even worse, just left to go a strange shade of green for weeks in the fridge.

Not this year, Turkey.. not this year. 

I went for the standard turkey soup (to be honest, I'm not sure if there really is anything else you can do with it) so went ahead and started the stock. Seemed easy enough, just breaking up all the bones to fit them into the pot, cut up a few veggies and then boil it for about four hours. And before long, I was doing just that...

Let's get Wasted!!

Around Christmas it's hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the season and up your food intake (and often this means your bin bags getting bigger.) Christmas is a time for giving, and whilst this it is wonderful to see the joy in a loved ones face when you give them something they really wanted, it's still important to keep the environment in mind.

Now I'm not going to start preaching about giving your friends and family kitschy homemade gifts they have no use for, or buying only second hand charity shop gifts they don't really want - the whole point of this is to show that you give live a normal life while still keeping an eye on how much you send to a landfill and how big your carbon footprint is getting.

This year my family and I decided to give each other 'temporary' gifts; stuff we could use up like bath bombs and chocolates, so the house wouldn't be cluttered with things we only use once. I also wrapped all my presents in pieces of tissue paper that had been used as packaging in the past. Just tie some sparkling ribbon stuff we'd had lying around (for literally years) and I reckon they didn't look half bad. 

The food is my favourite part of Christmas (me and the rest of the world!) but it's also the time when the most food is wasted. Everyone (especially my mum) gets over-excited about how much food everyone is going to eat, how we're going to need two desserts for every day as if sitting around watching Christmas films makes our blood sugar dangerously low.

enough food to feed the whole of
Hogwarts

Although there's nothing I can really do about my mothers food shopping habits, I will be keeping my eyes on what's close to being binned unnecessarily, when it could be frozen or eaten up. I'll also be trying to remember that just because it's Christmas doesn't mean that I can pig out and put on a stone and a half. 

Aside from turning out ALL (including the pretty tree ones) of the lights when I go to bed, despite my insane family wanting to keep them on all night, I will be trying my best not to rant on about saving the planet. I'm aware that especially at Christmas people don't want to think about negative things, so I'll just have to be a bit subtle about recycling all the paper..

Move It!

gotta get my running t-shirt back on!

For a brief time during university, a few months before my final exams (while the stress levels were at a crazy-high level) I used to run. I stopped primarily because my knees started hurting - I think because my trainers weren't particularly for running, and I was running on the roads every night - but once my knees were better I never went back to it.
Don't get me wrong, I've been missing it, and I've wanted to get back into running (or at least some sort of exercise) for a while now but as the nights have got longer and darker it's only made me feel less enthusiastic.
But I've finally done it. I've finally got back into it. I realised with horror that in two and a half months time I would be on a beach in Thailand and I could either be feeling horrible about myself, or I could be feeling slightly less horrible about myself. I figured that doing exercise and watching what I eat a bit more closely might help with that.

only made it to week four...

Seeing as I have exactly eight weeks until I leave for my Asia to Australasia trip, I figured going back to my old running app would be ideal. It's called Zombies, Run! and it's amazing. I loved it when I was running before, so I reckon I'll just start it from the beginning again and hopefully make it to the end this time.
I'm doing the 5k version so there's a series of running exercises that slowly build up your running ability until the end of the eight weeks when you can supposedly run 5k without stopping (we'll see...) You listen to your own music, and in between there's 'radio broadcasts' which tell a story (which I ended up really caring about and I'd end up running just to find out what would happen next.) Oh, and you're being chased by zombies... What's not to love?!