Entries tagged with “healthy breakfast”.


My friend Sinead is a new mother and working hard to get her “5 a day” of fruit and veg. My friend Aoife is always trying to eat healthy. I’m making an effort to stay away from the tempting variety of cakes and sweets that seem to be everywhere here in Ireland.

These Wholemeal Blueberry & Lemon Muffins fit the bill for all of us. Made with wholemeal flour (different from whole wheat flour), yogurt and lots of blueberries (known as one of the foremost “superfoods”), these are delicious and relatively healthy. Calorie-wise these clock in at around 230 calories a piece with a good amount of fiber and loads of antioxidants. Enjoy for breakfast or as a satisfying mid-afternoon snack!

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Me, just after waking up. I know you are sooo attracted to me right now!

Ever since I moved to Ireland, my hair has been less than cooperative. Gone are the soft, touchable locks of my LA days; here my hair is unmanageable and constantly tangled.

The reason is the hard water that is prevalent throughout Ireland. According to this map, I live in an area with “moderately hard” water (I can just imagine those poor folk who live in the “hard” areas!). For pipes this means lime scale buildup. For hair, it means disaster. The water here makes my hair very sticky, and by that I don’t mean sticky like honey or melted marshmallows. The best way to explain it is by comparing it to spaghetti. When you first drain cooked spaghetti, it’s loose and easy to toss with a fork. But if you let it sit in a bowl for five minutes or more, it starts sticking together. If you stick a fork in it, you’ll get clumps of spaghetti instead of nice, individual strands. My hair = five-minute old spaghetti. Fork = my hairbrush.

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It’s easy to forget who you are when you first move to a new place. Before I moved to Ireland, I had been living in the same apartment in Los Angeles for over three years, and had settled into a relaxed but fairly regular routine. If I were to speak about myself in the third person, a la a voiceover description of a character in a film, it would go something like this:

Clare wakes up without an alarm clock at around 8 a.m. every morning, unless it’s a Saturday or Sunday as she would have been out with her friends trying a new restaurant or lounge which meant a few several glasses of wine that night and a bit of a headache the next day. She works from home, often in her pajamas, though lately she’s been making an effort to ready herself in the morning like every other working person she knows. In the shower, she always shampoos first, then conditions her hair, and soaps up while the conditioner sits in her hair. After rinsing the soap and conditioner off, she washes her face. She always saves the face-washing for last, though she doesn’t know why. For breakfast, lunch and dinner during the week, Clare whips up a variety of healthy dishes as she enjoys cooking. Her gym, just up the street, is a place she visits at least 5 times per week. She’s addicted to LOST and – though she wouldn’t admit it publicly – loves to sing along to old lounge tunes in her living room (with the curtains drawn, of course).

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