Pasta, pasta everywhere and not a bite to eat...

So it's the end of the bank holiday weekend, which means back to work.

Which also means back to widow duties.

Which means yet another pan of pasta on the stove.

There's an unwritten rule in this 'modern' Franglais household - I do the cooking, the Frenchman does the ironing. Probably due to the fact the he can't boil an egg without detailed instructions.

It's safe to say, I don't wear a shirt to work very often either.

Granted, pasta is the one thing he is able to cook by himself. But unless I want to eat plain pasta every day for the foreseeable future (and give myself an early coronary from the vast quantities of butter and salt that are included if he's left unsupervised in the kitchen), I am in charge of the cooking.

I find it impossible to comprehend the sheer quantity of pasta the Frenchman can ingest in one sitting, twice a day (I vetoed cooking pasta for breakfast, I have my limits) and not be the size of a house.

For example, this weekend I headed out to a hen do, after cooking two enormous pans of pasta on Saturday morning: one for a girly picnic (to line the stomachs of 7 hungry girls in preparation for a alcohol fuelled weekend) and one for the Frenchman's dinner. He promptly text me afterwards to tell me he was still hungry and could've eaten twice that.

Despite trying in vain to make him eat a balanced, healthy diet - he can be a very fussy eater (unless it contains, sugar, salt or saturated fat, he's not really interested) and it's taken me years to make him try certain vegetables. He doesn't really know the difference between proteins, carbs, vegetables and fats, and he really couldn't care less. I'll never forget the confused look on his face when I informed him that croque monsieur wasn't exactly a healthy meal: "what about if we add the fried egg and make it a croque madame? that's better right?" 

So in order to make him eat enough of the right stuff to sustain him through training, I often have to give up and resort back to my old trick of hiding vegetables in a pasta dish.

Now, I like pasta as much as the next girl not on Atkins, and I can be an inventive cook - but even I am fast running out of ideas for spicing up a bit of fusilli (unless you count the inappropriately shaped pasta I found during the hen do excursions this weekend).

I'm also aware that pasta isn't expensive. But as I'm going through a box every two days, I'm going to need to take out shares in Barilla to start making a return on this expenditure. When you add in the cost of the vegetables, meat and fruit etc I'm trying to get him to eat… this cycling malarkey will end up bankrupting me.

But as a reward for the numb tastebuds and extra inches on my waist, the Frenchman has promised me a pasta-free week after the race (yes ladies and gentlemen, a WHOLE WEEK!) and the very thought of it is making me salivate.

So now the count down is now on with a vengeance - only 33 days and about 16 boxes of pasta left to go…

But in the meantime I'm very open to dinner invitations.

Unless you're going for Italian.

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p.s - The Frenchman is raising money for leukaemia research through his race, a cause very dear to his heart - so if you read this, please, please, please take a little bit of time to sponsor him at http://laurettefugain.alvarum.net/teamrondy2011. Every little helps.

It's the French equivalent of 'Just Giving' and is very easy to donate, even from the UK!

And the more you donate, the easier all this pasta will be to digest ;-)