Day - you guessed it - Three of The Six Week Cure

Hm, how did I end up going for such an unimaginative title for this series? I guess it's a bitter signal of the stress of the past couple of weeks. Not long now and work becomes a smooth cruise to summer. Amazing that I'm already lusting after holidays, when I'm only recently returned from Thailand, and it's the third week of term! Yikes. My first exam period as a VCE teacher. Scary stuff. I can't wait to see how the cherubs do on their exams, but at the same time...

Anyway, onto the tastier topics -

I had my three shakes as breakfast, morning tea and afternoon tea (no lunch, technically). 8am, 11:15am and 3:30pm, to be specific. I increased my scoops to 2 per shake, and I'm trying a new type of cream - I have upped the fat content from 45% (the old highest amount) to a whopping 52% thanks to the new double cream at Coles. I'd still love access to raw cream, or at least organic cream, but no dice at the local. I'm going to the organic grocer to pick up this week's veggie box tomorrow, so I'll suss out her tiny dairy section while I'm there. Her prices are outrageous though. I also suspect that if I asked Coles to supply some organic cream, they'd do it. The local is very much about supply and demand - we've noticed that the beau's old granola brand is only available in the teeny box size now that he and his appetite for the huge boxes has left the premises. We only go there at all if we have no time during 'normal' business hours to visit the organic stores. We have our meat delivered, and we pick up our veg. Truly, the only need we have for Coles is dairy, and that's usually just for the beau. I'll be so happy when we don't need to visit their food section at all! I may still avail myself of their hosiery dept. from time to time... :)

As promised and long-lusted after, I planned to enjoy my last piece of pork roast for dinner. I hoped to come home straight after the final school bell and get that baby in the oven. We had tickets to a movie in the city, so we would need to leave before 6pm. Heaps of time to prepare and enjoy a porcine feast. Ah, fate. I didn't end up leaving work for two hours, leaving me 30 minutes to cook and eat the pork roast, with its heady layer of fat and skin just begging to be crackled!

I heated the grill press.

I removed the skin, oiled it, and whacked it onto the grill.

Once it started to vaguely crisp, I plopped the rest of the roast in with it.

I continued turning the crackling to help the fat render and skin fry.

With five minutes to spare, I served up two pieces of luscious, perfectly cooked pork to each of us, hoarding the not-quite crackly crackling for myself:


Since this would otherwise be a single-shot post, have another shot of my tasty tasty pork dinner, in the arrangement it landed as I flung it on the plate in my urgency to scoff and scoot off to the cinema:


Meanwhile, my new protein powder, and leucine powder have arrived! Interestingly, my new protein powder already has a massive amount of leucine in it - 2.7g leucine per scoop vs. 1.3g leucine in my current powder. Eades instructs us to take 2.5g per shake, so if I double-scoop my shakes from now on, then even my original powder provides me with enough leucine. So I may have wasted my money here, but hopefully it is useful down the track, even if I don't need to add it to my powder... I'll need to do some more research, and see if I could benefit from it when the shake programme has ended. From what The Six Week Cure states, I probably already get plenty of leucine anyway, and I'm not really a prime candidate for lean mass loss. So I'll be looking into what benefit it may have for my mother, primarily.

Along with the leucine powder, my new protein powder also came with a packet of raw organic cacao powder, which I am keen to try, despite its carb count. I'll check to see how hefty a hit the necessary amount will be before I give it a whirl - probably around 3g carb per shake. I also received some organic vanilla to flavour my new neutral powder. I wonder if I'll need to dust off my hardly-touched bottle of stevia powder in order to make the shake palatable...

The beau is whisking me off to his work's BBQ tomorrow night - an unadulterated couple of steaks have already been set aside for me! Ah, sometimes this is just too easy! :)