Healthy Food, Exercise & Vitamin D

Saturday morning. The sun was shining brightly and it was market day. So my youngest and me head off down to Cascais to buy fruit and veggies for the week. We parked a little way away, since as always, it's completely futile to attempt to park anywhere close to the market, but I didn't mind, because like I said, the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. I grabbed my large green canvas bag, sunglasses and wallet from the glove box, freed my lad from the confines of his safety seat, locked the car and we headed off. As we walked down the hill past the shopping mall I could feel the sun beating down on the back of my neck. I looked up to a cloudless sky and thought to myself, "How wonderful. This is it. Summer is on it's way."  The sun had clearly shone enough to fill up my body with vitamin D and it had put me in a tremendously good mood as I crossed the road and went down the ramp into the market place.

The market was busy, as it always is, but most definitely a nice kind of busy. I like to wander about a bit to start with when I get to the market, checking out the prices, familiarising myself with which stalls sell which veggies and generally just taking in the market atmosphere. I settled on a stall in the centre of the market that had most of the vegetables on my list; potatoes, onions, a few other veggies and the one thing I really mustn't forget, a nice cauliflower for the chick pea and cauliflower curry I had planned for tea that night. Next I found the stall that sells the bags of dried beans. It's so much cheaper to buy dried ones from the market and soak them overnight than buying canned from the supermercado, so that was the next two things crossed off my list; chick peas (to replace the ones currently in soak at home) and kidney beans. Only fruit to go. I'd already decided to do the healthy thing and pay a wide berth to the bakery stall with all it's deliciously tempting cakes. The bread would have to wait until the supermarket later! Besides, my lad was starting to get bored of the market, so I quickly found a fruit stall. All the usual stuff, apples, pears, and oh, look, plums back in season. A little on the expensive side, but they looked so nice that I couldn't resist getting a few. I thought for a moment about buying a melon, but they were slightly over-ripe, however, it was while I was looking at the melons that, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the anonas (or custard apples) at 2 euro per kilo, a euro cheaper than the plums. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I'd never had them before, so it was a complete guess as to what might constitute a ripe one, so I just simply picked three at random. So, having loaded up my green bag with almost too much to carry, I paid the stallholder and then, just as I turned to walk away, I remembered that I hadn't bought any bananas. And all my kids love bananas, so what sort of Dad would I be if I turned up at home after spending the entire morning at the market and forgot the bananas? I'd obviously overstepped the mark though in my son's eyes, since just as I paying for the bananas, he reached out, grabbed and apple and took a bite. I was horrified. The grocer wasn't though, thankfully, and he even refused my offer of payment for it. And that was the shopping done, so we set off back towards the car.

It was on the way back up the hill past the shopping mall that I realised that I could no longer feel the sun on my neck. And then I realised that since I was walking in the opposite direction, I should be able to feel it on my face. My hopes for a sunny day had been dashed away. It wasn't raining but the clouds were very dark and if it wasn't for the hilarity of my cheeky monkey of a son stealing an apple at the market my whole mood would have been a very different one to the mood that occupied my soul on the walk into the market an hour or so earlier. I wasn't too surprised though, because I'm sad to say that the weather here has taken a turn for the worse. I'm sure farmers and gardeners all over the country are feeling a little happier about things since the nice heavy rains a few weeks back at the end of March. However, I do think it really is about time that Spring got here and actually sprung without recoiling back into winter again. I have some friends coming over from England in a couple of weeks time and I really do hope that the current cloudy, windy, drizzly (Erm, yup, drizzle!) weather dissipates and the sun comes shining through. The last thing they will want is to come to Portugal to experience what could quite adequately be described as "Very English Weather." But enough about the weather...

This morning I went out for a walk, determined to get myself a little slimmer. When I first arrived in Portugal last summer I walked everywhere. I had to. I didn't have a car and so there was a lot of walking to get the older kids to and from school, to get to the shops, or just for the exercise and the gorgeous views along the promenade. Of late though, my walks seem to have become less frequent. And so in the knowledge that I would be frequenting the bar later for the Chelsea v Barcelona match, I set off bright and early, with my little apple-stealer strapped firmly into his three wheeler, towards the promenade to make a pre-emptive strike against a belly full of beer. My son and I made a quick stop off at the bird park in Monte Estoril for him to have a few minutes out of his buggy to play on the swings and slide, during which time the sun came peeking out from behind the clouds, filling us both up with vitamin D. We resumed our trek down to the promenade just as the clouds obscured the sun once more. Usually the prom is busy in the mornings with people exercising, walking, striding very purposefully along, and a few runners too. But not this cloudy morning. It seemed that I was one of just a few people who had decided to throw caution to the not inconsiderable wind and risk the ever threatening rain. So I did my walk. In fact, I went a little farther along the prom than I usually do before turning around for the return journey back up the long steep hill to home. What's more, with a couple of hundred yards to go the sun decided to peek out around the clouds once again. A round trip of two hours. That should sort me out for at least 4 or 5 beers!

Oh, nearly forgot. The custard apples. Quite possibly the most annoying fruit to prepare. I was not sure whether the skin was edible, so being cautious, I peeled it away leaving a creamy white pear-like fruit beneath. Delving deeper into the flesh reveals lots of hard black seeds spread throughout which needed removing before the children could be let loose. Finally, the taste. Well, I prepared two of them for our family to share, one in hindsight a little more ripe than the other. The harder one had a kind of sweet and sour taste to it with the texture of a hard pear. The second softer one had much less of a sourness to it, leading me to believe that the first was not quite ready to be eaten yet. The third anona remains in the fruit bowl, ripening, to eat another day. Hopefully a sunny day!