mimi spencer's thai salad

Once again fasting day dawns with a vengeance. This end of the year gets harder not only because the last thing you want after a wet and woolly ride home is a (very small) salad, but I’m convinced the body simply needs more stodge in the winter. Are there any diet stews and casseroles out there? I suppose a bulky-yet-veggie-packed soup sort of counts, but only just, and the best soups require the addition of left-over parmesan rinds and large hunks of bread, so maybe they’re similarly to be avoided on diet death day?

Ana is suspiciously quiet on this subject tonight. In fact she seems alarmingly happy to watch Rick Stein’s Indian thingamabob followed by Tom Kerridge’s super-fat pub food without any visible signs of drooling or light-headedness, whilst I can barely muster the energy to sadly grate 4 carrots into a bowl and count out 20 prawns.

As it turns out, she’s already caved in, blaming half-term of course, and made herself a sandwich earlier, as well as having ‘something else later’ because she was bored. Adding insult to injury, she then takes the slightly bigger portion of dinner…

Luckily enough this is another one of those 300-odd kcal meals that’s bewilderingly satisfying. Partially I suspect because the punchy thai-style sauce is lip-smackingly good, but also because of the counter-intuitive fact grated carrots seem to take up more stomach space than non-grated carrots. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is.

sources
thai salad - mimi spencer & dr michael mosley, The Fast Diet, p143