What's going on?

I didn't mean to black out on you guys, but the job that provided me with all my much-appreciated writing time has ended. This has thrown my writing life into a bit of a shambles, but rest assured, the days that have passed will be covered. They happen to be quite full of food which makes making up for not having written them all the harder. Soon enough you will know what I have been eating since last Thursday.

Addendum to Thursday

A brief description of the Indian food I weaseled out of explaining:
My roommate and I decided that stuffing ourselves with swill, drinking beer and ganking some n00bs on Halo3 would be a great way to celebrate my Japan check finally coming in. To this end, we collectively ordered a great deal food from our favorite, more-or-less local, Indian delivery joint.

Up first were a few samosas. We get the vegetarian samosas because it makes the vegetarian roommate happy and because they're just plain better than the chicken ones. The delivery joint was nice enough to give us two cups of each of the chutneys, so there was no need to be shy while slathering the deep-fried dumplings with spicy green cilantro goodness or heaping up the very odorous and spicy onions in the mysterious red sauce.

For those of you not familiar with Indian food, I am deeply sorry. I would recommend doing an internet search for the closest Indian restaurant and then going there right away. Ideally you will find a buffet and be free to explore things you will not know the name of nor be able to explain their deliciousness to your other sheltered friends. If you cannot find a buffet, order vegetable pakora, vegetable samosas, several naan, chana masala, saag paneer, lamb vindaloo, chicken korma, some basmati rice and a lassi to drink plus gulab jamon for desert. You may want to take the forementioned sheltered friends because that is enough food for 5 or 6 people. Go on, git. It's ok, I'll wait.

During your recent epic dinner experience, you probably noticed the three sauces they brought to your table. There was a brown one, a red one and a green one. The brown one that tastes like rasins is tamarind chutney. This used to be my favorite condoment in the world for about 4 months in college. I am now over it, but occaisional use on naan or pakora is still very rewarding. The red one is very obviously onion chutney. It is sometimes the spiciest of the three, although the green cilantro chutney can be very spicy, and sometimes there is a white coconut chutney that can be deceptively spicy to our Western sensibilites where white things are usually bland like white bread, milk and Al Gore.

As for our actual order, we had: vegetable pakora, a mix of vegetables battered and fried in oddly-shaped lumps, perfect for chutney abuse; naan, a soft, fluffy yogurt-based bread that is traditionally used like an eddible shovel while consuming curries; chapathi, another indian bread similar to naan but unleavened so it makes for a denser yet more pliable shovel; papadam, sort of like a giant tortilla chip made from chick pea flour; poori, yet another Indian bread, this one deep-fried (Imagine a chalupa shell inflated like a balloon into this eddible football/frisbee hybrid sport food. I apologize if your imagination just broke.); chana masala, chickpeas with onion, tomato and a lot of cumin; keema kurma, ground lamb in a creamy almond sauce; chicken vindaloo, a very spicy curry with an amazingly convoluted cultural history that you can learn about here; and some chick pea soup that comes complimentary every time we order from this restaurant which happens to be quite good but which I don't know the name of because I never actually order it.

I don't know if that counts as a run-on sentence, per se, but I'm gonna leave it there. It was a great dinner.

Thursday in the great outdoors

I didn't eat breakfast this morning due to prolonged exposure to snuggles, so my coffee, Flavia espresso roast with the French vanilla creamers, hit an empty stomach. As a reslult, by the time lunch rolled around I felt VERY HUNGRY.

That just made finally eating those tuna wraps from Tuesday that much better. Having lunch in the park also put a nice sparkle on what would otherwise have been pretty average lunch fare. Not too bad considering they sat in the fridge for two days. I also had half a bag of potato chips before I got bored of them and stuffed them back in my bag.

The real highlight of lunch was desert. I decided to splurge after lunch and hit up one of the Central Park ice cream carts. I had a strawberry crunch bar and my partner in park lunch had a mango fruit bar. The strawberry crunch bar gave me some serious flashbacks to middle school, the last time I ate strawberry crunch bars on a regular basis.

Dinner came in stages, or more like waves. First, there was the lonely scallop trying to get along with two shrimp in a sad little plastic bag in my fridge. I didn't want them to sit there any longer, so together with some leftover refried beans, they combined powers to form a seafood burrito.

Then i ate a lot of Indian food. the end.

The Wednesday after

I've been so productive writing that I've felt kind of lazy in the mornings, hence another Jeno's frozen pizza for breakfast. Today's selection was sausage.

The one problem with Jeno's pizzas is that 1 in 10 of the ones I get from my local grocer don't have much cheese at all. My usual fix for this is shaking a liberal amount of parmesean cheese onto the top. You should be careful to leave space at the edges, though, because the parmesean has a high spread factor when it melts.

Wednesday was Administrative Assistant Appreciation Day or something like that. It used to be Secretary's Day, but we don't use that word any more because it's too kinky. It's much harder to fantasize about an "administrative assistant," unless, of course, you have a fetish for asonance or words with lots of sylables.

My workplace being such a delightful place, the faculty all donated towards a special brunch for the admin asst dept. I'm going to do my best at remembering all of the stuff I ate, but I really just gorged on what may well be my last cookie parade for a while. Sadly this assignment ends on Friday and I doubt any other assignment will provide me with such a bountiful supply of cookies.

There was a really good rye bread. I cut a thick slice, spread on some spicy brown mustard and layered some great pastrami on top. It was the sort of great you get with a simple confluence of quality ingredients.

I passed on the bagels and lox because I'd just listened to an NPR report about global fishing practices and environmental and food safety experts pretty much decry farmed salmon as one of the most terrible fish a human could consume. Since there wasn't much chance of it being free-range Alaskan, I thought it best just to pass.

I ate 3 of these delightful mini cinamon rolls with cream cheese on one of them, about 7 ginger snaps, a "black and white" cookie (a soft sugar cookie with black chocolate icing and white orange icing), some butter cookie, an amoretti and a bagel with a slice of summer sausage. I feel like there were more cookies and pastries involved, but I don't remember the details. The whole thing was in the faculty lounge, too, so I had a Green Mountain Sumatran roast for my morning coffee.

It was enough food that I didn't eat lunch, although I did take the bag of ginger snaps with me and snack on them the rest of the day.

Dinner was another bit of simplistic glory: BST sandwiches, bacon, spinach and tomato. On wheat toast I spread a little Miracle whip, layed out a nice bed of baby spinach, some sliced vine-ripened tomatoes, bacon and cheese. The girlfriend opted for munster. I tried the longhorn cheddar because it had more bite up front and would stand out more against the bacon. I'm sure the munster with it's creamy tones and late bite finish was just as good.

Never one to let bacon be the only thing I fry in my bacon fat, I cut a potato as thin as I could manage and made some bistro fries, or whatever less pretentious name you might want to call them. I seasoned these with a little salt and pepper.

The whole thing danced very nicely around a bottle of Yeungling lager. The donut I had for desert didn't go so well with the beer, though. It was a bad donut to begin with, $1.69 for an 8-pack of glazed donuts was a risky wager from the start, but I think there's a good reason why most people have their donuts with coffee or tea, and not beer.

Don't try this at home kids.

A Tuesday without cookies

Sad though it may be, there was no cookie parade this Tuesday. It seems as though the whole world is in disarray. I haven't been particularly hungry and my circadian rhythms are still messed up. This, to me, is apparently my whole world.

I woke up this morning a little before 6AM and I wasn't sleepy at all. There wasn't even any point to laying in bed and trying to go back to sleep. I wanted to get up and be productive. It was a disturbing feeling. I shot right to the kitchen to throw a Jeno's combination

Breakfast was a combination Jeno's pizza and a pair of Nutty Bars. I opted for easy breakfast to take some time on lunch. I made a nice tuna salad with carrots, celery, miracle whip and ground horseradish. Even if you're not a fan of the heavy horseradish burn, just a dash in anything you use canned tuna in brightens up the dish and mitigates the "fish from a can" funk. I made three tuna wraps with the tuna salad, munster cheese and the dregs of the TJ Spring Salad Mix.

I didn't eat them, though. In fact, they're still in the fridge in this office. Sometime after coffee (Green Mountain's Sumatran) one of the other administrative assistants came down with a bagged lunch from some event upstairs. It was, funily enough, a tuna sandwich, partnered with an apple and a bag of potato chips. I had half of the sandwich, but it was the high-grade light tuna that still kind of looks like fish and is really dry. I'm more of a "chunk light in water" kind of guy. I used a whole packet of Helman's mayo on just half of the sandwich and added the other half to my growing tuna collection in the fridge.

The apple was also a bit of an odd coincidence since I'd just been chastised over the weekend by a concerned reader about the lack of fruit in my diet outside of the berries that mix into the cookie parade. He said, "Apples bla bla good for you bla bla dietary fiber by volume bla bla bla," or something. I can tell you the bean burritos really provided all the fiber my colon needed, but I thought it would be wasteful not to eat the apple. Mottai nai yo! It was a golden delicious and I actually really enjoyed it. Never once did I think of dipping it in caramel or sauteing it in butter and cinnamon. It was very filling too so I suppose my friend was right with the "bla bla fiber bla" bit.

Besides all the water I have to drink because of riding my bike in this glorious weather. There wasn't too much else to the day. When I got home, I wasn't very hungry. It must have been a magic apple. Yep, probably a magic apple.

Sometime around 9PM I figured I should eat just in case I was hungry, so I had a bowl of spicy ramen that was actually labeled "udong noodle soup" in the "English" on the package. I suppose the noodles were a little thicker than your standard ramen, but they definitely weren't udon noodles. They were from China, though, and my understanding of kanji in Chinese usage is not so hot that I know what they were actually intended to be if not "ramen."

They were a nice step above Maruchan. They had the packet of dried sea weed, corn starch puffs and pepper flakes that most U.S. distributers don't bother to add. The packet was labeled "frying soup base" for some reason that I couldn't discern. It was nice and spicy and went very well with issues 4-10 of All-Star Superman and a Yeungling. It's nice to see Grant growing up a bit

Monday goes back to the grind.

Let's see, where to start? Usually it's breakfast. Today it takes a little bit of lawyering and etymology to really see what's going on here.

I had a slice of banana bread with margarine as "before-bike-snack." Now, technically I have here "broken my fast" of some 8+ hours, but I haven't had any substantial kind of nourishment yet, and would eat a more substantial "breakfast" in about 30 minutes, so was this my breakfast? I think that this maybe falls into the hobbit hierarchy of meals somewhere, but I'm not so well versed in the difference between first and second breakfast. Perhaps my readership can enlighten me as to the subtleties involved.

After riding to work I had a banana waffle sandwich with peanut butter, margarine and syrup. I made sure to really put the waffles through the figurative wringer. Here the figurative wringer is a litteral toaster, but "through the toaster" is not such a compelling idiom. I wrung the waffles through my toaster twice at a high setting and the pale side actually started to brown a little.

One good thing about this resiliency to burning is that you never really get that desicated, empty feeling that you might get with other frozen waffles when you toast them so much that even the membrane between the ridges begins to brown. Some people might like their waffles like this. Some people also like flacid bacon. You will not find me anywhere near that venn diagram.

Then I had my coffee, of course. It was the Flavia French roast with two French vanilla Coffeemate creamers, nothing special, nothing terrible I haven't already bemoaned in previous entries.

Lunch was a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I couldn't resist the temptation of just throwing it in my bag and not take the time to make myself lunch before leaving for work in the morning. I did bother to spread margarine on two pieces of wheat bread. If you were unaware, this is the official side item of Chef Boyardee's asssorted fare. Failure to comply with these regulations may warrant UN sanctions depending on the degree and necessity of deviance.

Over the course of the afternoon I started eating a tootsie pop. This was due largely to the fact that I was given a tootsie pop by one of the professors here. I'm not a big fan of candy, and tootsie pops are pretty near the bottom of my "comprehensive ranking of world candy according to my own personal preference." I didn't want to be impolite, though, so I took it and thanked him for it. Later, because I had it, I decided to give tootsie pops another shot. It was red raspberry and the candy itself was pretty good. By the end of work I hadn't even gotten to the point where the candy shell wears thin and you can start to taste the chocolate fudgewax inside. I thought it might prove dangerous to ride my bike and eat a lollipop at the same time, and I had pushed my sugar tollerance well beyond it's usual bounds, so I wrapped it back up and set it neatly on my desk in case I wanted it later, which I still don't.

When I got home I had a celery stick with peanut butter for first dinner, and then bean burritos for second dinner with crispy tortilla and salsa as a transitional course.

I have a bit of an addiction to Taco Bell bean burritos. When finances allow, I often have them add sour cream, nacho cheese and/or guacamole. There is something so appealing about all of that goey satisfaction barely reined in by a tortilla that is quickly becoming less sturdy as it soaks up goo from the inside. It's quite possibly one of the most perfect swill delivery systems known to man. If only they still had the chilitos and I could add a squirt of that chilimeat paste, a slice of bacon, and maybe a squirt of the baja sauce to the mix...

But Taco Bell won't cater to my dreams like I would like, and so I must take matters into my own hands. Buying a can of Taco Bell brand refried beans costs about the same than a bean burrito, and usually ends up making about 5-6 burritos for me. The one thing I cannot buy nor find or make a comparable substitute for is their red sauce. I can make lots of other sauces that might test better to most audiences, but it's just not quite the same. I can buy crapy yellow cheese. I can get all kinds of onions. I just cannot get their red sauce.

I compensate by making the beans themselves more interesting. Yesterday I started with a Tbsp. each of olive oil and butter in a frying pan on low heat. Then I added about 3 cloves of garlic and let it cook until it started to soften. Then I added diced onion(1/2 a small one), green pepper (1/3 a big one), red pepper(1/3 a medium one) and jalapeno (1/2 a pretty average one). I let the juices release a little bit into the oil, then I added the can of refried beans, a dash of bourbon and a few Tbsp of water.

The water just helps you actually stir the refried beans, but you don't want to over-do it or you'll lose some of the complexity of the vegetables when you have to cook down the water before it's a good thickness for serving. It doesn't take much bourbon, maybe a teaspoon. Sometimes I use tequila. It just adds a nice warm edge to the beans. If I had a kitschy restaurant, these would probably be called "Borracho Bean Burritos," although they don't really have enough booze to get you drunk. I had three burritos and a Yeungling and put the rest of the beans away in a filing cabinet, I mean my refridgerator.

The burritos were topped off with a little of the TJ's Spring greens mix, which just had to be used up ASAP before it all turned to swamp slime, some diced tomatoes, a dash or three of McIlhenny's chipotle tabasco sauce and a mix of munster and longhorn cheeses. Letting the garlic and the jalapenos cook in the oil before adding the beans really lets their flavors permeate the whole thing with a very sturdy broad palate to which the onions and peppers lend a bright sweetness. If only I'd had some sour cream on hand, they would have been just about perfect, save for the guacamole, bacon, nacho cheese and chilito measte (meat+paste, Ed.) , of course.

Later, for desert I had a Little Debbie's Nutty Bar. Actually, I had two bars, since they come in a twin pack, and who eats just one of those things anyway? They're so light and crispy, there's really not much to them anyway. More than adding calories to my evening, what they did accomplish is instilling in me a desire to drink a tall, cold glass of milk.

For as much as I cook with (and occaisionally chug) heavy cream, I almost never drink milk. I used to have problems with dairy products. I couldn't live without cheese, but cheeses never bothered me the way straight milk does. Even when I don't get stomach cramps, my body just makes so much mucus that the metabolic aftermath is a sufficient deterent to dunking cookies or eating much cold cereal for breakfast. This thirst for milk has not abated yet though, and it appears as if more drastic action is necessary.

Maybe I'm turning into a were-cow. I do enjoy salads a lot more than I used to...

Sunday was all over the place.

For starters there was a B-Relaxed Vitamin water on the train ride down to Jersey. Then when I finally got there I had a padinha with some butter and a handful of these coconut and cocoa cookies that my girlfriend's mother had made. They were a little overwhelmingly sweet but otherwise really good. Japan has just pushed my chocolate preferences way towards the bitter end of the spectrum. Eating milk chocolate for me is how I imagine an 18th century farm hand might feel if you gave him a glass of skim milk. Ah, imagining...

Breakfast was just a quick snack, really. We had bigger plans for the day. There is a park near my girlfriend's house that has cherry trees along a winding river bank so we set out for a nice hanami picnic.

"Hanami" litterally means "seeing flowers" in Japanese and is a very popular excuse for early barbecues and getting drunk in large groups of your co-workers in public spaces. As the cherry blossom trees start to bloom, everyone starts talking incessantly about hanami plans and the plane fares skyrocket. It is an amazing time of year, though, and visiting Himeji Castle during "sakura" (cherry blossom) season is still one of my most vivid memories of Japan.

This year, the girlfriend and I set out to pay tribute to the Japanese style of celbrating western holidays while observing this Japanese tradition in New Jersey. We bought a box of thighs and biscuits with some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side from Popeye's and had ourselves a fried chicken picnic under the cherry blossoms.

In Japan, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, thanks to some kink in the cultural appropriation system, there is a huge spike in the consumption of fried chicken. KFC's take orders weeks before hand and some locations may not be open for anything but picking up pre-orders. Convenience stores open tables in front of their stores selling fried chicken to lines of customers so that bewildered foreigners can still find their way back to the beer cooler and instant ramen aisle without being walled in by the throngs of people eager to buy fried chicken.

I believe this is due in part to turkey being very expensive and not very popular in Japan. Most Japanese people I discussed the issue with had never had turkey before. I imagine this is due to a confluence of the difficulties of importing meat and the relative lack of iconic hype that turkey has in comparison to fried chicken. Fried chicken has an infamy in the Japanese image of American cuisine rivaled only by the mighty cheeseburger.

So, in the absence of a bento box and affordable sake worth drinking, we remisappropriated (Ed. sorry, I try but...) fried chicken as the official food of celebrating Japanese holidays in America. It was great, and made all the more awesome by my girlfriend's habit of peeling the thick layer of skin off the chicken thighs. I took these discarded sheets of awesome, loaded them with mashed potatoes and made these sort of comfort food cannolis. For those of you worried about my cardiovascular health, I also put in over 60 miles on my bike this weekend, so a little gorging on gratuitous amounts of fried chicken skin isn't going to be too detrimental to the big picture, I hope.

After all that awesome, I really wasn't in a mood to cook much of a dinner when I got home, but I did really want to try the dim sum items I'd gotten in Chinatown this week, so I busted out the wicker dim sum steamer cage and steamed a pork bun, a leek bun and some pork and black mushroom gyoza. The pork bun was the Chinese split-top variety stuffed with the sweet barbecue pork. These are a favorite of mine and for frozen pork buns that come in a six-pack for $1.50 they were surprisingly passable.

The leek buns were much better, though. There was a much broader complexity to the flavors at work and they were actually a lot juicier and more succulent than the pork buns. My roommate and I both ate them with liberal amounts of this Chinese chili oil I found that has peanuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and walnuts soaking in the oil along with the dried chili flakes. It's not very spicy but has a lot of flavors going on that lend complexity to the oil itself while also providing for lots of different pockets of flavor as different chunks of nut pass over your pallet. If you don't find "chunks of nut" to be an appealing description of food stuffs, this is not an appropriate condiment for you.

Later in the evening I had a slice of left-over pizza which I reheated in the oven as I preheated the oven for banana bread. I followed the following recipe using 4 bananas: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php The banana bread came out very soft, almost too soft as I couldn't really cut it into slices. It could have used a little more salt, to my tastes, as well, but would have worked wonderfully as muffins instead of bread, since the texture lent so well to tearing and not slicing. I had a nice thick slice of the banana bread while it was still warm slathered in margarine as a bed time snack.

And not to back track after that nice Norman Rockwell moment, but I thought I should take a minute to illustrate how my food preparation compulsion plays out with the fairly inoccuous act of eating leftover pizza. Most people, I am led to believe, will simply take the cold pizza and begin eating it while it still holds the chill of the fridge, if they bothered to refridgerate it at all. Many people even claim to enjoy that cold, coagulated cheese and grease texture as a nice breakfast treat. I am not one of these people. While I understand expedience and can eat pizza cold when forced, I don't see how you could honestly prefer it to it's reheated form.

I took the pizza and threw it on a sheet of foil, then sprinkled dried oregano, red pepper, dill and Adobo seasoning on it before allowing it to reheat in the oven as it pre-heated to 350F. My banana bread didn't taste like pizza and my pizza didn't taste like cold butt. Everybody wins. No, it's not just the temperature, it's really more texture. If I had to microwave it, I would have just eaten something else.

And yeah, if it's a plain cheese pie, it's definitely going to get doctored up. At least I'm past my "corriander and tumeric on everything" phase and my "truffle oil and allspice on everything" phase. You should also consider yourself lucky if I never made you food during my "thai fish sauce and/or amaretto extract on everything" phase. I have no idea what I was thinking. Sometimes that stuff pans out, though, like vanilla and sage or honey and cilantro. So parents, when your son mixes every spice in the cabinet with vinegar and water, then freezes it for a week, then tries to convince you to eat it and give him feedback, be supportive. He's not autistic, just ambitious.

the bones of friday

Usually, before I write these things, I make an outline of the food I ate for the day. This is the outline I made for this post, and then half forgot, half neglected to flesh out at all. It's already Tuesday and my window for reasonable excuses has expired, so I'm just going to post it as-is for your edification. In my defense, it didn't really eat that much, and nothing of note that doesn't cast just as effective a shadow of mystery in its current blank verse form.

din't eat breakfast.
gasp.
had coffee, felt funny
had a salty nut bar
japanese curry left overs for lunch
lots of water
pineapple lifesaver with an odd mint tang
bowl of rice with spicy chinese nut sauce
empanadas, beef, 2
tortilla chips
vimin water 1, Focus

Did I eat on Saturday?

Well, only sort of.
This weekend I got all of my nerd-rocks off in a furious bout of geekery I've not seen the likes of since my days of all-night AD&D sessions after band bonfire parties. Ah, high school, what wanton thomasfoolery I did partake in when I was a wee nipper.

This Saturday in particular, if we start at midnight, we will find me sitting in a boxing gym, sipping on an Energy VitaminWater, filling out my registration sheet for a Magic: The Gathering pre-release tournament. Yes, I was up until 5AM for the chance to play other cardnerds with a new set of cards that wouldn't be officially released for another week. While I thought the midnight tournament would draw out the real ubergeeks and I would have to suffer through hours of "humor" based on minutae of dorklore that I wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate, I actually found myself mostly interacting with more of the bad boy, rock star, James Dean Osheroff types.(James Dean + Douglas Dean Osheroff=terrible joke, Ed.)

And then after all of that amazery, I caught a scant 3 hours of sleep before my biorhythms jolted me awake at 8:30 as my hypothalmus freaked out that I would be late for the work I didn't have to go to because it was SATURDAY. Stupid hypothalmus, Saturday doesn't need circadian rhythms.

Then I remembered that I DID have to go to work, kind of, because I was helping my friend host the performance stage at the New York Comicon all day. Ok, you get a freebie this weekend, hypothalamus, but I better get to sleep in next Saturday.

My rude awakening coincided with my roommate and his visiting brother crawling out of their hangover coccoons in search of greasy starchy things to soak up the poisons and fuel their early morning recovery efforts, so we trundled off to that obnoxious fast food restaurant with the clown mascott that was much better in Japan. I had a McSkillet burrito, which, as my roommate's brother quite rightly observed, never touched a skillet at all. I also put down a hashbrown, only redeeming food item on the breakfast menu since Americans don't seem to like fish sandwiches for breakfast, and their reconstituted orange juice.

If you've never had a fish sandwich for breakfast, it is actually amazing. While in Japan I was eating a lot of McGriddles just to get my fix of American breakfast sausage. It is nigh on impossible to get any kind of sausage in Japan that isn't actually a deceptively marketed hot dog.

Then, as I waded through Jedi and Bleach characters, I downed a Focus VitaminWater in the morning and had a Red Bull as I started to fade in the afternoon. I also had some celery sticks with peanut butter for lunch and scored a free mini Butterfinger at one of the artists booths. It wasn't much food, but I didn't feel very hungry. By 5PM I'd pretty much had it with people in general, though and I had to get out of the convention center or risk getting surly with the next high schooler in a black kimono that poked me with his model Zangetsu while oggling some equally as adolescent 30+year old in a Princess Leia costume of questionable anatomical suitability.

When I finally got home and showered I wanted to go straight to sleep, but sleep did not come. I guess 7PM was not a suitable bedtime for my power-tripping hypothalmus, so I turned to chemical inducements. I had a big starchy bowl of beef ramen with some tofu, green onions, green peppers, an egg and some bar-b-que Frito's Twists in it along with a Yuengling and then a Magic Hat #9.

It had been quite a while since I'd had a decent beer out of a cold bottle and it was a great feeling. I almost couldn't finish the #9 because the chemical inducement was proving very effective. I slept 12 hours Saturday into Sunday. That was also a great feeling.

Thursday always doubles down on the cookie parade

This was my first encounter with the Trader Joe's frozen banana waffles. I noticed with mild apprehension as I pulled the box out of the fridge that this was a gluten free product. I was rightfully suspicious of the texture, which, while not entirely offensive, was not exactly what you expect from a waffle, anyway.

You expect waffles to be light and spongy on the inside. This was more like a plantain fritter that happened to have been grilled in a waffle maker because Aunt Inez needs a new prescription. The flavor was also only mildly banana-like. If you had not told me they were banana waffles, I might have eaten a whole one before I noticed the hint of banana flavor.

They also took quite a bit of toasting, and even after two dips on the higher end of the light/dark knob, one side of each waffle resisted browning regardless of my attempts at flipping and slot-switching. C'mon, TJ, fix yo' waffles, man. Shits is supposed to brown on BOTH sides, homey.

...

So I ate one waffle with just margarine and a little syrup to really engage the texture and nuances of this new food experience. That's when I first got the plantain punch. I toasted the other two until (one side) was quite brown and that seemed to mitigate some of the smooshy, starchy feeling.

The other two waffles I toasted I made into a sandwich with margarine, peanut butter and syrup. I put margarine on both, then spread peanut butter on one, poured a little syrup on the other, then made the peanut butter and the syrup make out like teenaged trailer trash at a summer concert festival. That means "pressed up against each other as much as planar geometry will allow" for those of you not fortunate enough to have been there.

The morning's coffee was Flavia's French roast with a French vanilla creamer. I drank it. It provided caffeination. Otherwise I couldn't really explain any of the nuances or subtleties that you might expect from classy food journalism such as this. I just don't know that the effort is worth it. Flavia coffees are similar to Japanese beer. Differentiation is damn near impossible except in the case of marked poor quality.

If you will permit me a flashback in the interest of illustration, I am reminded of a particularly balmy evening in Kyoto last summer. My friend and I were facing our pending return to America, land of the microbrewbow (like a rainbow, but with lots of... yeah, ok, fine.) and so had decided to trully put the Japanese beer available to us to a taste test before such experiential data were not so easily available to us.

We bought a can of each of the beers available to us at the top price tier available in FamilyMart as well as one can of hoposhu.

"What is hoposhu?" you might ask. Well, Japan doesn't really have a lot of hops farms, and importing the stuff gets kind of expensive so they've created this malt beverage that is kind of like beer, but instead of using actual hops they add chemicals in an attempt to capture that bitter, floral magic that makes beer something more than wet cheerios gone bad. As opposed to adding a digital clock to my shower cap, in this case Japanese ingenuity has not made the world a better place. They have created the most effective way to cause a hangover that I have ever experienced, though. The throbbing starts before I can even finish a can. The pain sets in faster than I can derail a linear narrative.

So we take all these cans of beer and some plasic cups back to his apartment and label them with numbers and make his girlfriend pour moderate amounts of each beer into two cups for each of us (4 cups per beer), take note of which beer was in which numbered cup and then randomize the arrangement of cups while we sat in the other room and listened to aliatoric compositions peppered with fantastical narrative. She's quite possibly the best girlfriend he's ever had.

Blindfolded, we'd taste a little of each beer and try to match the cups into pairs based on the beers that tasted the same. The blindfold wasn't trully necessary, the color variation was not significant, but we wanted to be as fair to the taste of each beer as possible. Through repeated itterations as the beer warmed, the only consistent pairing was the hoposhu.

Arguably, you could get similar results from Coors Light, Miller Light, Bud Light, and Natty Light. I haven't tried this yet so some more testing is in order. What is true about American beer that is not true in Japan is that options are readilly available. The import beer market in Japan is improving, but it's not cheap and the relatively low import volume agrivates the stresses on the beer from shipping and long storage on shelves awaiting savvy locals and desperate expats.

Enough about beer on a day when I didn't drink at all.

I had another lunch date with Tie-Fighter in Central Park. absolutely glorious. I got lamb kofta on a pita from a halal cart on 62nd and Broadway. It was pretty good, though not as good as the lamb shishkababs from the cart on 62nd and Madison. Comparing those succulent chunks of grilled lamb to kofta is a bit like comparing filet mignon to hot dogs. Even with great hot dogs, I'd rather take the steak for the same price, which they are. $4 for both sandwiches, but I didn't have time to ride all the way to Madison through the park and then down to our meeting place. C'est la vie. I hadn't had halal cart for over a month and the kofta pita is an old friend who is always welcome.

Upon returning from my delightful park time, I was invited up to the 4th floor to get rid of the usual overage from the weekly faculty luncheon. I wasn't too interested in the real food, though I had a pita chip with some hummus just because there was actually a little hummus left today. More prominently in my diet was a cup of tea and a cookie parade.

The parade had a lot of my standard favorites, but there were some new players I hadn't seen before. In blatant indifference to the nutrition involved, I consumed: some kind of rolled pastry filled with a nut and brown sugar streudel, a nut tart with cashews, macadamia nuts and other nuts I didn't bother to identify before I devoured it, 1.7 sq. in. of an apricot variation to the regular fruit bar, one of the blondie/brownie cheesecake hybrids, a chocolate biscotti with the mystery nuts, a chocolate covered biscotti, a chocolate covered walnut brownie, and 3 pieces of pineapple.

Then for dinner I made Japanese curry and rice with the girlfriend. I screwed up the recipe a bit, though because although I did read the ingredients and realize that there was no meat or vegetables in the curry sauce, I did not read the recipe or even open the box before boiling some carrots, potatoes, onions, bacon and tofu to go into the curry sauce. I expected it to be prepared curry sauce in one of the pouches that you just reheat. I was going to pour it over the veggies and, voilla, done.

The curry packs were, in fact, dried cakes of curry base. I realized this just after I'd discarded the water I'd used to cook all my veggies (and a lil bacon) so I lost all that wonderful flavor and nutritional value and had to reconstitute the sauce with just plain water before putting the vegetablacon back in the pot. This took a long time and although the end result was pretty good, our food joy was tempered by the long wait. Let that be a lesson for you kiddies: eat more oatmeal. Fiber is very important.

Wednesday of the D'Ubervilles

Yeah, lame title, sorry.

Breakfast was burritos, as my more loyal and/or attentive readers darn well already know. Eggs+bacon+green pepper+green onion+goat cheese = 7.1 out of 10. Not the best breakfast burritos ever, but better than the hot dog and green pepper ones. Are you all abusing the definition of burrito at home? I hope so.



And then there was coffee. That should have come before light in that Bible story, because a cup of coffee goes real nice with sunrise. It also goes nice with almond flour sugar cookies. It doesn't go so nice with Flavia Milky Way hot chocolate. Not even the Milky Way brand label could trick me into thinking there was any flavor at all in that crap. I tried to trick the machine into making a Milky Way/Espresso combination, but it didn't pan out and I just ended up with a small cup of Milky Way hot chocolate. I made myself a normal sized cup of coffee with the Espresso and titrated a little of the Milky Way mess into my coffee, carefull not to allow too much of the obnoxious chemical chocolate to overpower my obnoxious chemical coffee.

After I emptied my coffee mug, I refilled it with Chef Boyardee Ravioli. I had a nice lunch on the cafeteria patio while working on a new dramatic script. Now that I've stopped writing this one scene, though, it's proving difficult to pick back up. It's amazing how quickly and thoroughly your mental muscles will atrophy from disuse. Even the mental sit-ups of recounting my diet proove taxing at times. (hence me not posting this meager offering till Friday morning)

After eating such a classy lunch, I decided to have a really classy snack. There were still four cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches in my desk left over from the last time I posted about eating them. Yeah, it's been a while. They were mostly broken and crumbled and I had to drink a mouthful of orange chunk and powder to finish the bag. I think I hear Mark Sommers whimpering in the distance.

Since I had that canned pasta for lunch, I was in the mood for something different for dinner. I had pasta, spaghetti and tomato sauce with parmesean cheese on top. Only the sauce was canned; the spaghetti was dried, as per usual and the cheese was pregrated in one of those plastic shakers with the three holes on one side of the lid and the big smile on the other so that when you open both sides of the lid it looks like a wierd hybrid of Oscar the Grouch and the Trasmetropolitan smiley-face. I made some whole wheat "garlic bread" by toasting some $2 loaf wheat bread, "buttering" it with "I can't believe it's not butter" spread and seasoning it with Adobo seasoning.

Despite the gigantic portion of spaghetti I made, I just did not feel full afterwards. so I took a celery stalk and filled the main groove with crunchy peanut butter. I just cannot get over how good that is, seriously. Have you tried it? It's the best thing since graham crackers and butter. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll explain it later, and you'll either be the happiest you've ever been about food since you were six or you'll throw up in the back of your mouth a little bit and worry about my cardiac health.

tuesday cookie parade

After that miserable showing Monday night, I had to get myself back into actually eating, so I made sure to wake up with enough time to cook breakfast. Burritos with egg, bacon, green pepper and goat chese.

Yes, they were fantastic. No I won't bring you some. Obviously, I've already eaten them as I've written this the day after as per the title of my blog. You'll have to make your own.

They weren't quite as good as the burritos from Friday, though, so if you're going to go through the trouble of cooking things based on reading this blog, you should probably make those instead. I've just finished more burritos today, not to ruin the surprise for tomorrow, but they're mere shadows of the Aristotelian ideal form of breakfast burrito which I ate on Friday.

I also made something for lunch that I feel must be confessed here. I'm affraid I've angered the gods of vegetarianism. I don't even believe they exist, and yet I've tasted their ire over a sin against their chosen one, tofu. I'm a reformed vegetarian, and I'm not about to jump back on the wagon because of this incident, but I do feel I should apologize to tofu for the terrible thing I did to it.

I cut a hefty slab of Trader Joe's extra firm tofu and cut it into six pieces about 0.5"x0.5"x3" and I fried them in the bacon fat that had rendered as I was making bacon for the burritos. As I was flipping the tofu to get nice and golden on the opposite side as well, a glob of tofu juice and bacon fat shot out of the pan and hit me square in the right eye. Thankfully, I can still see, but I think the message was clear. Tofu no likey bacon bath.

The insults weren't over, though, because the fried tofu then resisted any attempts to season with soy sauce, sesame oil or mirin. I made a wrap with the tofu and some of the TJ's Spring Greens, and all of the seasonings just ended up soaking into the tortilla leaving this spongy bland mess in the middle.

The real lesson here, season your tofu before frying. It responds very well to marinades. Also, tofu has a lot of moisture, so make sure to seal the evil tofu sprites into your cauldron with a lid when flying or else, much like in other folk wisdoms, you will go blind.

I didn't end up eating the wrap for lunch, though, because free lunch reared it's gracious head and I went to throw out my folding chair for the cookie parade. Besides a ham & brie sandwich and a cup (there were no plates left) of salad greens, ravioli, feta cubes and cucumbers, I did my best to keep the cookie tray from going to waste. In no particular order, the following marched into my face: 2 chocolate covered biscotti, 1 choconut biscotti, 1 peppermint creme brownie, 1 cappucino brownie, 1 blueberry, 1 blackberry, 1/2 strawberry, 2.3 sq. in. of fruit bar, and 1 cheesecake blondie/brownie. I threw a few pita chips with humus in there along the way too.

And then there was the day's coffee. I went for Green Mountain again, this time trying a blend called "Dark Magic" or some equally as sappy play on the word "dark." It wasn't that dark, but not as bad as I expected. As far as consistent quality across various "flavors," Green Mountain is definitely better than the Flavia.

The bacofu wrap I ate later at UCB Harolds Night along with a chocolate covered biscotti and a sugar cookie that I'd saved from the cookie parade. The wrap was not the worst thing I've ever eaten, but maybe the worst food I've ever blogged about. That recipe definitely needs some thorough revision, or perhaps bacofu will proove to be plainly taboo. Either way I enjoy a good food challenge.

A monday without fanfare

I think I burned out on food over the weekend. The things I ate yesterday are barely worth mentioning. When I have a really good meal, I get this feeling for a few days where, if I'm not eating something amazing, I'd just rather not eat all all. Microvaved hot dogs in tortillas just will not cut it. It's got to be flame-grilled brats with mustard and kraut on long deli rolls or I'd rather just be hungry. This is what I get for growing up in a family of cooks; I get spoiled.

So yesterday my appetite was being a brat, but I managed to force breakfast down. I woke up at 8AM and had to nudge the chronological Venn diagram of "Making Breakfast:Taking a Shower" so far over each other that you could use the slivers of single-value space to floss with, figuratively, not literally. There was no time to actually floss. I just had to toss a Jeno's in the oven while I showered and try to get wet, soapy, not soapy and then dry fast enough to take the pizza out of the oven before it was charred beyond my means to digest it.

I pretty much succeeded at this, and even managed to get dressed with a tie and everything and get to work on time, pizza, banana and chocolate cup cake in tow. I did not manage to pack anything for lunch, though. I decided I'd buy something in the area if I had to, but my workplace has a daily average 60% chance of free food, so I wasn't too worried about it.

And aren't ties great? I chose to wear it largely because it was already tied and hanging on the same hangar as the first dress shirt I grabbed out of my closet. I thought, "I'm going to rush to work and probably look a mess when I get there, so I might as well look a professional mess instead of a slacker mess."

It did help aleviate some feelings of shame as I went into the faculty lounge to sneak a cup of coffee. Looking more like faculty than students, I didn't worry about stirring up any vitriol over coffee machine clearance.

You see, there are two coffee machines I can use for free here. One of them is a Flavia and one is a Green Mountain Coffee Co. Both are instant coffee in little pouches that get infused and squirted into your cup with no real brewing involved for the last few months of it's life. Maybe it's just because Flavia machines are everywhere and I've had all of their "coffee" "flavors" at least twice and find most of them appalling, but I prefer the Green Mountain coffee. This machine, however, is in a locked faculty lounge, as opposed to just open on the 4th floor like the Flavia machine. Also, the Flavia machine requires that I get these quarter-sized drink tokens from other full-time employees in the department, so I feel a bit like an itinerant beggar. With the Green Mountain coffee I have access to a key to that room as part of my job. My supervisor has told me I'm allowed to drink whatever coffee I want. Why should I feel guilty drinking the Green Mountain Coffee? Probably because I was raised Catholic. It may also be in part due to the way the other people in my department refer to the Green Mountain Coffee machine. I get the feeling there is some departmental animosity over the inception of that machine that has since been spackled and painted over. You wouldn't know it from a casual viewing of the living room, but from the occaisional eye-tick towards that uneven part of the wall, you notice the spot where daddy punched through the wall after mommy and you went to grandma's for a few months.

So yesterday I had a cup of the Green Mountain Columbian with two creamers. It wasn't bad for coffee that had been sand just seconds before.

Over the course of the morning I had the Jeno's pizza, a combination pizza since the local was out of supreme. It was a touch dark but still very edible. Then I had a banana and tried to eat the cupcake. This proved difficult, though. You'd think I'd have learned not to put cupcakes in my bag, especially with the bike lock rumbling around in there on the way to work. I would not be put off, though. The smell of chocolate cupcake and banana had been driving me crazy all morning. I could get to the banana easily enough, but attempts to remove the cupcake from it's ziplock bag resulted in covering my hand in icing past the knuckles without getting ahold of much cupcake. I went to the cafeteria and got a spoon. Upon my return to my cubicle, my tongue errupted in a fanfare of triumph as the cupcake mournfully resigned to it's Alamo-like fate. It did a valiant job of putting up a pretty effective icing screen, but once I got the paper wrapper out, it was all but over. I don't know how much of my enjoyment came from the actual cupcake and how much came from the problem-solving involved in getting as much of the icing as possible out of the bag and into my mouth, but man, that was a good cupcake. Many thanks to my friend from Philadelphia who brought me the cupcake as left-overs from her niece's 1st birthday party.
It's rather odd that I've now written about cupcakes twice in three weeks, as I feel like I never really eat cupcakes. Before the last one in my blog, I think the last cupcake I ate was last September during the Austin City Limits festival. I'm not really a cupcake kind of guy. I'll eat the occaisional muffin, but even then I'm more of a croissant or bagel person.

I think what I'm saying is: please don't mail me cupcakes. I mean, I'll eat them if you do, and then I guess I'll have to write about them here, but if you really want to get mentioned on my blog for your 15 minutes of unfamy, I would prefer that you mailed me a fruit roll-up. I have not eaten a fruit roll-up in over ten years and I am not sure if they even still make them, but go ahead and mail me a fruit roll-up. I dare you.

Lunch was indeed free, much to the chagrin of Robert A. Heinlein. Well, I am working here so I suppose that I worked for it, but really, I could be working somewhere else, probably working harder than I do here, and they would not provide me with free lunch or even treat me with any sort of respect or dignity. Setting pizzas on a counter with plates and sodas and being told please and thank you is a small price to pay for two slices of pizza.

The pizzas weren't bad, but for the price we ordered them for, it was a bit ridiculous. It sparked my officemate to get into a rant about the falling quality of pizza in the city. I really am not qualified to give an opinion on quality over time, but based on quality versus hype, the pies in this town are not all they're cracked up to be. I'm open to attempts to change my mind, though.

After I finished the pizza I really didn't eat much of anything else yesterday. When I got home I didn't feel like eating right away, and then before very long it was after 9PM and I hadn't eaten more than a handful of potato chips. I didn't want to eat anything too big and then go right to sleep, but nothing small was appealing, so I had a few tortilla chips with some tomatillo/cilantro salsa just to have eaten something possibly providing nutritional value.

I pretty much skipped dinner, though, and it was very strange to not feel like eating. It felt almost as strange as writing a whole blog without a run-on sentence that lasts more than four clauses.

Sunday is for fleeing Manhattan

Ah, Chuchifritos, you make the Barrio complete.
About a block from my apartment is this great restaurant that is open all the time and sells pretty much only fried food. I took my friend from Philadelphia on her way to her bus home. My favorite grease ball (quite literally) is the papas rellenas, a deep-fried ball of mashed potatoes stuffed with seasoned beef much as you might find in tacos. One of those and a "beef patty" made for a greasy, heart-clogging, deeply satisfying breakfast. The beef patty is similar to an empanada, but their dough is a little flakier and extends well past the pocket of seasoned beef so that the end result is about twice as tall as an empanada, with all that extra height providing a flaky wonderland of heart failure. I try not to eat there too often, but the appeal of a brightly lit buffet sporting a plethora of fried food is hard to resist. It doesn't help that the food is so cheap, filling and gratifies my deepest, darkest grease-yearnings. We're talking deep fried pork ribs with the layer of fat still on the meat. Even if your religious views don't condem consuming swine, these probably qualify as pretty damning. They were a bit much for breakfast, though, so I'll wait for a later blog to elaborate.

I washed all that fried crap down with a Energy VitaminWater because I like B vitamins. I'm not really sure what the deal with guarana is, but I have this image in my mind of tribal shamans wrestling panthers on a bed of orchids, and then pressing the orchids to collect the panther sweat and orchid tears, allowing it to ferment for a few months, then distilling it, drinking it and screaming out long run-on sentences, actually a form of prayer as well as their leading literary tradition. That probably doesn't have much to do with guarana at all, but Grant Morisson is writing my cultural speculation for the week, so that's what I got.

Then I headed down to New Jersey to check in on my girlfriend on the mend. Her mother made us a great dinner. I'd never had Portugese food before dating her, but now it's one of my favorite foods ever. It has a lot of the rich, meaty qualities of provincial French cooking with a slightly bolder palate at times verging on Mediterranean.

I don't know how terribly I'm butchering these accounts, having watched the first 30 minutes of Mirrormask instead of watching the food being prepared. I really should help in the kitchen more, though, because I'd really like to put some of these recipes together myself. I apologize in advance for butchering these recipes with inaccuracy.

There was a stewed pork chop in a tomato sauce that I have had at their house very often. It's very simple but one of my favorite things. The pork gets very soft and tears apart, similar to the texture of corned beef or the Philipino dish Adobo Pork.

Then there was a chicken breast that had been broiled, I believe, with vinegar and diced peppers. The texture was perfect and the bright flavors played very well with the somber tones of the marinated portabello mushrooms on the side. There was also a rice pilaf and oven fries which helped to balance the vinegar in the rest of the dinner. All in all it was a very hearty, satisfying dinner.

Afterward my girlfriend and I went for a walk and ended up stumbling upon a small fair near her house. Though we were very tempted by the prospect of deep-fried oreos, we decided to pass on the carnival fare. We ended up meandering through a K-Mart and I got a slurpee on my way out. I hadn't had one in a long time. I layered squirts of cola with squirts of the red flavor that has nothing to do with the fruit they slandered when time came to market it. I topped it off with a little root beer to raise the fluid to ice ratio and away I slurped. It proved to be a little too syrupy for my grown-up palate, though, and I tossed the last third when we got back to her house.
I had a very crispy flaky cookie that looked like a butterfly wing that I can't remember the name of, although I've seen bigger versions of similar cookies called "elephant ears." This box probably said "butterfly cookies" and I only retained that information as a descriptive memory, not a categorical definition. My brain is like that.

Much later, when I got home, I had a few potato chips just because they were there, and then crawled into bed and fell asleep in the middle of still digging chip-mush out of my molars with my tongue.

Saturday starts slow, but once you get it going…

Off on a pretty good roll from Friday, I set out on an early morning (11:30AM) grocery run down to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square. I took my bike and dropped it off at a nearby bike shop to have the rear tire replaced while I shopped. I love Trader Joe’s. Everything is so cheap, but still good quality. Even the wine is cheap and they carry Pacific Rim Riesling, a favorite of mine, for about $7 a bottle, cheaper than buying a bottle of Miller Light in some bars in this town.

Their free sample was some Oat’n’Honey kind of cereal. It wasn’t bad, but it was just the shot of it and I didn’t bother to put any milk on it, just tossed it down.

The bike ride back was magnificent. The weather was gorgeous and I hadn’t had a good ride in over a week, so it felt like being able to walk again. You don’t realize how slow walking is till you ride a bike on a regular basis. It’s like ascending to a minor tier of divinity. Even on only a shot of cereal at 2PM I felt absolutely great.

The dinner menu was big, so I didn’t want to eat too much during the day, but I did have an egg roll and three vegetarian dumplings from a new Chinese delivery joint in the area. I also had a handful of “chili peanuts” that one of the roommates got while out shopping for fruit to make booze smoothies. The chili peanuts were saturated with the same kind of vinegar powder that they use to make salt and vinegar chips, but these were way stronger. It was not an experience I enjoyed, because it wasn’t spicy as much as it was just uncomfortable. There were also a handful of potato chips tossed into the afternoon mix as I prepped for dinner.

And I haven’t rescinded my boozeban entirely, but I did have a few drinks in the afternoon and evening. It started with the booze smoothies as we made desert and set it aside to stand. Then there were a few bottles of white wine passed around. I was too busy cooking to notice what they all were, but I did notice a green monkey on one of the corks, if that means anything to you wine aficionados out there.

“So what was this dinner that was the only thing you really ate all day and yet alluded to being so great in the title of this posting?” Well, dear reader, it went a little something like this.

First course was a simple greens salad idea I’d been tossing around. I took a French Baguette and sliced off two 3/8” slices per plate of salad, then toasted them lightly so that the brown just started to encroach from the edges into the center. Then I laid the toast as a bed and set mixed greens on top. I was using Trader Joe’s “Spring Mix” which features arugula, various baby greens and the odd leaf of radicchio. Then I cut a small, flat hole in a tube of goat cheese and used it like a pastry gun to drop a few curls of goat cheese on each salad. Next was a drizzling of Balsamic vinegar and olive oil followed by a dusting of fresh ground black pepper and toasted almond flour.

The next course, and all the following courses, were stolen from an issue of Gourmet magazine. I believe it was March 2008. It has been my bathroom reading for a while and I’ve been looking for an excuse to make some of the recipes for a while, so when a friend from Philadelphia said she was coming to visit I thought I would go ahead and give said recipes a toss with the inevitable variations and that come when you hand me a written recipe thereby giving me an excuse for an unwieldy run-on sentence.

So after salad came seared scallops and shrimp finished in a beure-blanc sauce with shallots. This was very cheap and easy compared to how fancy it sounds and how good it was. The seafood was Trader Joe’s frozen goods, so I didn’t even have to clean them. After thawing, I patted them dry, then seasoned the scallops with a little salt and pepper. Then I seared the scallops at a medium high heat in two batches. Next came the shrimp.

After searing and reserving the seafood I added two cloves of diced shallots to the pan, and as they clarified I added a cup of the Pacific Rim Riesling to the pan to deglaze. Then I added the juices that had rendered out of the scallops onto their plate back into the pan and melted 7 Tbsp. of butter into the pan at a medium heat in 1Tbsp pats, about 3 at a time until just melted. I plated them as two scallops with a shrimp curled on top between them, all covered with the sauce.

The main course was an Alsatian coq au vin variation that used Riesling instead of a red wine. I bought a halal chicken because they are much cheaper than the Purdue cyborg chickens available at my local grocer and seem to be a much better quality of chicken too. It was a bit difficult to explain the way I wanted to have the chicken cut, though. I made a sketch and showed it to the butcher, and he got pretty close to a French style. The thighs and legs were cut at a slightly odd angle that made the legs big, but the thighs a strange shape, and the breasts were not so much halved crosswise as two-third/one-thirded crosswise, but it all fit in my everyday pan, so no worries.

The chicken was also prepped with a simple salt and pepper dusting, then browned in butter and olive oil and reserved. Then I added diced shallots and green onions to the pan and afterward deglazed with Riesling similar to the scallops. Then I added a half a cup of heavy cream before reintroducing the chicken and it’s juices, then adding some mushrooms and asparagus, covering the pan, and then putting it in a 350F oven for 20 min. while I made the aforedescribed sea food dish. At the same time, in water spiked with a little chicken broth, salt and Riesling, I stewed some potato, carrots and whole green onion bulbs with about 2 inches of stem. The chicken was plated with the vegetables to the side and covered with the cream sauce from the chicken.

Then we had to back off eating for a while, so we had a wine course while I plated the desert and let it heat a bit in the oven. Desert was a crepe cake. This entails piling crepes with layers of whipped cream in between. We don’t have a mixer, so a good stiff whipped cream was sort of out of the question, so I made a raspberry-vanilla yogurt sauce that was a brilliant shade of pink to go between the layers. We set it to stand in the fridge so that the yogurt didn’t run too much, and then I plated it in pie slices drizzled in condensed milk and dusted with the rest of the toasted almond flour and some dried, rubbed sage before throwing it in the oven till the condensed milk on the plate started to steep the almond flour into a picturesque blonde cream color and the sage started to give off a little extra aroma.

The whole thing was very well received although I wasn’t that happy with some of my plating, as usual, and the timing for serving several courses to my friends while still being sociable and eating myself. I would have liked to have served the scallops a little quicker after being seared. Although the flavor and texture were there, they would have really exploded across the palate if I hadn’t had to mess with some of the salad preparation while cooking them. I had my friend help me with the desert, but my kitchen really doesn’t leave room for someone else to work at the same time, so the rest of the courses became a juggling trial. For first runs of all the recipes, though, I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s the best meal I’ve made so far this year, anyway.

Later that evening we decided to go out for a bit of dancing. I had a cup of coffee and a Energy VitaminWater on the way down to Astor Place on the 6. Then we went to Rififi’s and had a round of PBR, and then a round of Bass Ale while gradually deciding that the DJ sucked. We got home just in time to watch “30 Days of Night” with my roommates, after which I decided to watch “Lelo & Stitch” as a bit of a mental sorbet course.

It was great to have a few beers after three weeks of dry living. I should have definitely stayed off the coffee, though, because I was up until 5AM trying to wind down. Watching a 6-year-old vampire get her head chopped off with an ax probably didn’t help, either.

Sowwy!

Posting over the weekend got a little out of whack thanks to some internet difficulties. The posts for the weekend should be up by Monday evening. Sorry, guys.

Friday stands for ossim.

Friday is always a good day to really push for indulgence. In the case that you over-do it, you have two days to get over it before necessity rears its ugly head, and if you manage to engage fully yet responsibly, you get a good rev on your engine before firing on all cylinders on Saturday. This week, I went for the later.

To fuel the big push into the weekend, I revisited the awesome sandwich that started my work week. Unfortunately, I was out of the padinhas so I had to turn up the ossim knob with the contents. I started with the bacon in the pan just like Monday, but threw in some diced garlic, then some onions, mushrooms and asparagus, adding the eggs just as the onions started to soften. The garlic started to brown a little from being in the pan with just the bacon as it was crisping, emboldening it to a front row player in the mélange. I went with Munster cheese and wrapped the mess into two flour tortillas.
Then I had my daily banana on the walk to work as the burritos cured in my bag, radiating heat through to my lower back as I watched the darkened walls of the 2 flicker by.

I thought I’d try walking through that same tent tunnel and see if my iPod would enhance my breakfast experience yet again. I did get a nice picture of the scene, but the music was a little muddled: Andrew Bird’s “I” into Kanye West’s “Home” which did pump me up for the morning anyway.

Then I thought I’d take advantage of the Green Mountain coffee machine in the lounge on the 1st floor. Today I went for their Sumatran blend with just the regular half and half. It was really putting a beautiful sheen on Friday morning and by 10:30 I thought I’d done enough work to put me close to lunch.

We were still very far from lunch, though. First I had to get through one of the more awkward experiences in temping, the department planning meeting with the department you’ll only be a part of for the next two weeks. It factored into my blournalism, though, because I had a small carton of apple juice. It was packed in one of the short milk-cartons that I most readily associate with a field trip to the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History when I was in 2nd grade. I remember a brown paper bag with a peanut butter and jelly and a small carton of orange juice only partially reconstituted from concentrate and still more like humming bird food than juice. I have such a vivid memory of the way the paper of the carton played into the “flavor” of the “juice.” The two are inseparable facets of that singular potent recall.

When lunch finally did come it was not very impressive, but very comforting. I had Chef Boyardee’s beef ravioli and two slices of white bread with butter. There’s not a lot of room to get poetic with Chef Boyardee products, but I hadn’t had a can of ravioli in months and it felt really good to dig into one of my favorite foods of yore. Perhaps the Kanye song this morning was my iPod’s attempt at foreshadowing.

I’d already had dinner planned for a few days. I was just waiting for a night when I had the time to mess around in the kitchen. I sautéed a link of sweet Italian sausage that I'd taken out of the skin. Once it had rendered some juices into the pan, I reserved it and started browning some bacon and garlic. A lot of people decry the browning of garlic, but I love it. Sure, there are some recipes where you want to avoid it, but this was not that time. Don't be afraid to brown your garlic, children!

After the bacon and garlic were both pretty thoroughly crispy I added some veggies. I went for asparagus, mushrooms, celery and onions. Then I dumped the leftover rice porridge from a few days ago over the vegetables, added some water, dill, sage, black pepper and oregano, gave it a good thorough stirring and let it simmer till the water reduced. Then I added some ricotta cheese, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese and Adobo seasoning.

Once the mixture started to bind, I scooped it out into bowls for my roommate and I. He added a liberal shot of hot sauce to his and was very happy with the result. I opted for more Adobo seasoning. A little extra butter would have been nice too, but not really the healthiest option in a dish that already had copious amounts of olive oil, sausage grease and bacon fat in it. It was one of those meals that demands you devour it. Each spoonful just urges you to shovel another one in so that you can gorge on it. I will definitely make it again, and if this were one of those trendy recipe sites, I'd call this my "Provincial Fried Rice."

This isn't about cute names and stars out of five, though. This is about me writing about all the things I ate the day before because if I don't do it, then who will? Neither am I popular enough to have stalkers watching me eat nor can I afford a ghost writer to recount these tails for you with extra professional flourish. It's just me, for some reason dedicated to recounting the inane in great detail on a daily basis. Enjoy.

Mokuyoubi wa kirei deshita

Breakfast was, was...
well, shit. I forget what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it was bound to happen sometime. I know I had a banana. That's for sure. I had a piece of toast too. Was that really all?

Anyway, I definitely had a banana and a piece of toast. Breakfast was mostly inconsequential anyway. What really mattered today was lunch.

Lunch was glorious. It was too nice not to sprint out of the building and across Central park to meet a friend for lunch out on a bench. Among the highlights of passers by were a most adorable little jack russel terrier and a small child, maybe about 5 years old, taging along behind his mother carrying a giant stick. My friend and I both complemented him on his stick and he seemed to hold it a little higher, emboldened, as his mother just shook her head.

As for actual food, I started with a wrap i'd made with swiss cheese, roast beef and the peppered turkey breast. I spread a little brown mustard in there, then I added a carrot, cut in to sticks. I started doing that with the tuna and hummus wraps I made because the texture of the mushy food inside the wrap was a little off-putting, especially as the mush looses moisture to the tortilla causing it to take on a saggy, skin-like consistency. The carrots provide a nice bone-like crunch that is no less disconcerting but much more entertaining.

Then my friend and I had a nice walk around central park, taking picutres of his tie and eating the "Giant Peach Cookies" my Japanese friend brought me as a present from Atlanta where she'd spent the weekend before coming to Manhattan. Though the fictional peaches used to make the cookies may have indeed been "giant," these cookies were in fact bite-sized. I am thoroughly baffled by the apparently subconscious, nearly magical ability of the Japanese to find ways to break the English language. I aspire to cause equivalent delight in Japanese people as I (mostly unintentionally) mangle their language that defies my attempts at cognation (the process of forming cognates? Ed.) and translitteration.

Our nice meander as we discussed modern art and transformer porn left us at the southeast corner of the park, and left me with a nice jaunt back to work with a PBJ and some water to punctuate the nice girls who deigned to wear clothes in the blistering 70F weather and the other people who decided to wear a jacket while walking their dogs or a few other people's dogs just in case the sunshine was a big scam. Spring time in Central Park, folks. Just like the movies.

After that delightful dining adventure, I was all too happy to have a tame, low-investment dinner. Celery and peanut butter as an appetizer and a baked potato covered in chili for a main course, by which I don't mean a broken, steaming spud laden with beef seasoned with chili powder and some dregs of what might have been peppers and onions, but rather a bowl of my roommate's left-over chili that I like even better than my own chili and which is actually fairly balanced nutritional fare sporting a plethora of different legumes and vegetables (things like carrots and chickpeas that are probably going to have chili purists up in arms) which I microwaved and into which I quite unceremoniously plopped a whole baked potato and then proceded to shovel into my person with a spoon. Whew, glad I got my run-on quota out of the way.

I recommend my readers try this, but I also recommend that you only half-fill a large bowl rather than filling a normal bowl so as to allow for displacement as you dig at the baked potato. I get a certain ammount of glee at the presentation-hack involved in the big unsightly rock in the middle of an overlarge bowl surrounded by an unsightly mess of red bits leaving greasy tomato stains around the edges of some nice white porcelain. Anybody want to help fund my restaurant ideas?

Wednesday seems to be a favorite with the stomach flu virus.

Ah Spring. Spring makes me do crazy things like stay up late playing Xplorers C&K as I battle the kind of insomnia that kept me up many nights as a teenager reading Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L'Engle. I do something to keep from just lying there, staring at my ceiling, waiting for the sleep truck to hit me. The problem with doing something you actively enjoy just before bed is that more often than not you are only delaying the time your brain takes to just let everything settle.

That is why I was running just a little bit late yesterday and had to rush out the door without really having enough time to make a propper breakfast. I had to opt for the "oops, I'm gonna be late" version of my breakfast burritos, which is wrapping a hot dog in a tortilla, microwaving it for 30 seconds and then eating that and a banana while walking to the subway.

Then, at work I drank the last of the free coke I'd saved in a VitaminWater bottle and another bottle of Poland Spring.

Lunch was leftovers of the black bean and tuna pasta and a cup of Earl Grey tea. It was pretty filling for my small portion size. I feel like this is my worst post ever so far, and that takes some doing. Maybe I need to restart my coffee habit.

My girlfriend was really sick today, the way that I was sick when I started this thing only worse. She left work almost as soon as she got there and came to see me to get the key for my apartment so that she could go lay down. When I got off work I went to take care of her. As a vote of solidarity I made us a dinner we could both get down.

I made a very simple chicken stock with a chicken leg I had in the freezer and a little salt, removing all the foam and as much fat as I could manage from the top. Then I added two cups of rice and kept it wet enough to be a little soupy. Then I added some carrots and reserved chicken meat and let them cook in until the carrots were soft.

While I was cooking I had to indulge one of my better habits. I'm infatuated with celery and peanut butter. I don't know when it happened, but if I have both in the house, I eat at least a stalk a day slathered in crunchy peanut butter. I'm exceptionally fond of opening fresh jars of peanut butter when I can use the celery directly as an edible utensil for peanut butter retrieval.

The girl friend and I had our rice porridge and a piece of toast each. I hit mine with a little Adobo seasoning. I was a little worried the porridge would be too complex for my girlfriend's sick tummy, but she finished hers about twice as fast as I ate mine. I guess not eating anything all day will do that to you.

I won't get into the gruesome details here to spare my girlfriend having to read about her sickness after the fact, but she was still ill this morning. I guess I'm not such a good nurse after all. I'm gonna try to pull a Peter Pan to make up for it. If you're reading this, please send some good mojo out to my girlfriend so she gets better soon.

"I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies!"

Tuesday is not today. (unless it's a later Tuesday than the one described here)

According to my quiz, at least two of my readers are liars. I already figured that, though, because the internets are full of liars. At only 30% liars, it appears that my readership is above the interweb moral average. Good job, folks.

I know you know I don't like non-breakfast foods for breakfast, but there is one more exception to the bacon and/or eggs and/or cereal rule and that is:
Gyoza!
You may know them as pot stickers, but these dumplings, preferably filled with pork and some incidental vegetables, are really great for breakfast. I started doing it, much like the pizzas because they were cheap and easy to make in the morning, while still being warm food that packs a nice greasy punch.

I like to buy the frozen ones in as big of a bulk packaging as will fit in my freezer. When I cook them, I heat a little sesame oil in a frying pan, then I arrange the frozen gyoza into the pan so that the flat side is on the bottom and the little ridge points up. You don't want to brown them yet. You have to pour enough water in the pan so that 1/8 to 1/4 inch is standing in the bottom of the pan. Throw a lid over them and let them steam till the noodle becomes translucent, then remove the lid and let the water cook off. You can then let them brown (just on the bottom, you don't need to flip them or anything) to your desired crispiness.

I usually eat mine with chili oil and a mixture of soy sauce, a little brown sugar, and vinegar. You can buy different variations of the soy sauce/vinegar mixture in most Asian grocers. It will probably have a picture of dumplings on the bottle.

Yesterday I ate 8 gyoza for breakfast. They weren't very big, though so I got hungry well before lunch and ate a chocolate bunny head as a snack, as illustrated bellow.

As you may have noticed, I had a lot of sugar this Tuesday. In addition to the chocolate bunny head was cola, which I should not be drinking but am drinking regularly because it is regularly free. It's better for my heart than coffee, but a lot worse for my teeth and gastro-intestinal tract. In an attempt to improve, I had gingerale with lunch and it wasn't even flat.

The Surgeon General approved portion of my lunch was two sandwich halves, a tuna salad to which I added cucumber slices and a little mayo(Honestly, Mom, just a little.) and an Italian cold cuts hoagie from which I removed the pickled, roasted red pepper and added a thick layer of salad greens and red onions. The Italian meat in question was pancetta and

an indeterminate variation of salami. Both sandwiches were quite good, although the bread on the Italian hoagie got all soggy where the red peppers were. Note to my readers who work in the design kitchens of Whole Foods, please keep the peppers to the side during delivery.

The rest of my lunch is what I've come to think of as my weekly cookie parade. This week's participating cookies/sweets were: a blueberry danish, an apple and walnut danish, a peppermint creme brownie, a cappuccino brownie, two chocolate covered biscotti, a chocolate biscotti with some kind of nuts in it (I still don't know!), about 4 square inches of jam bars, two strawberry halves (not from the same strawberry), and two blackberries.

Since I eat lunch at 2PM and I met my Japanese friend immediately after work for a quick dinner before she was off to see Hairspray, I really wasn't hungry at all, but I figured I should take her somewhere interesting as it would be her last real meal in NYC, for a while anyway, and I wanted an excuse for a really long run-on sentence.

We went to The Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien Hotel. The burgers are great and priced to fit their Midtown environs. I was now trailing two Japanese girls as my friend had picked up another friend during her Japanese-speaking tour of Manhattan that afternoon. The ordering process is a bit intense as the place is always packed and always has a line. The only place I've seen with less patience at the counter are the blights of the Philadelphia cheesesteak community, Pat's and Geno's.

We managed to get everybody the burger they wanted without too much drama, though, and soon enough I was tucking into a medium cheese burger with the works, pickles, onions, letuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard and mayo. I also got a bag of fries for the group. Even if you're not two Japanese girls and a guy who just finished a cookie parade two hours ago, one bag of fries is enough to share between 2.4 average Americans.

That's when Brett Favre walked in and I thought "Damn, that guy looks a lot like Brett Favre." Nobody else in the Joint seemed to notice, though, so I thought maybe I was halucinating. I pointed him out to the Japanese girls, but they, of course, had no idea who he was and so could not weigh in on wether it was really him or not. I didn't want to harrass the guy at dinner though, so I let it drop. We finished our burgers and then left.

We waited in the lobby for phone calls to be made and toilets to be used before heading out onto the street. There I saw a herd of beefy, college-aged guys yelling "Yo, Brett! Come on, let's go Brett!" At that point I was 87% sure it was Brett Favre after all. I sent the two Japanese girls back into the lobby where Brett had just rounded a corner to get their compulsory "Japanese tourist with random famous person they don't know but a friend pointed out" photo.

Brett came around the corner first, and then quickly entered a large shiny vehicle and lurched down 57th Street. My Japanese friends came around second looking rather disappointed. Perhaps I should have coached them better on how to pronounce his name, but they were rejected. I didn't see the rejection, and so I can't really remark on Mr. Favre's personality, but seeing as how my last quiz is over, I'm going to throw this one over to the polls.

Monday was made of 100% post consumer material

The right way to start a Monday is with bacon and eggs. I threw in some mushrooms and asparagus and a padinha for awesomeness. Chop two slices of bacon and fry them in a pan. When the little bacon nibbles get crispy, throw in two mushrooms, diced. When the mushrooms start to soften, add a stick of asparagus, sliced into thick coins. As the asparagus brightens, pour two eggs, scrambled into the pan, reduce the heat to a medium low and flip the curding eggs until just barely set. Throw that mess on a sliced padinha with some munster cheese and wrap it in clingwrap until you get out of the subway near work. Then you will have approximated my breakfast from yesterday.

I couldn't wait till I got to work to eat it. I'd been thinking about making this sandwich since the night before. So, as I walked through the Lincoln Center's courtyard, I unwrapped the sandwich and dug in. As I started to eat, Ennio Morricone's "Theme from 'A Fistful of Dollars'" came on my iPod, and I turned around the corner of the New York City Ballet's building into this long, white, tent-like tunnel. I don't know exactly why they had installed this temporary structure, but the rhythm of the poles and the breaks in the tent material and the soundtrack all conspired to make my sandwich feel very important. It was the best breakfast I'd eaten since Easter.

Then, I skipped lunch so that I could get out of work early and meet a visiting friend from Japan with enough time for dinner before I had to work for a show down in SoHo. I did finish off a bag of wasabi peas in the afternoon, though, which was about 12 peas, which is not very much food really. I also decided to drink some cola to keep my sugar up. I barely took a sip or two, though because I don't really like cola, it was just free from some event at work.

My friend and I ended up going to Lombardi's for dinner, which is a pretty good pie, if not overpriced, but for someone's first slice of New York pizza I wanted some place with a little atmosphere and Lombardi's is pretty much a NYC landmark. She being Japanese, she wanted anchovies on the pizza. I managed a 50/50 split of anchovies and their meatballs as a bit of cultural exchange. I did have a slice of the anchovy half and while I expected it to be abusively fishy, I wasn't prepared for how abusively salty the anchovies were. My Japanese friend, of course loved it. I can see why people like it, but I was absolutely overwhelmed. Of course I often actively seek out levels of garlic that most other people find toxic, so I can't really pass judgement on those who love briny fish on what would otherwise be a pretty good pizza. On the whole, though, I really like their pizza, and would really, really like their pizza at about half the price.

Then, before working as a projectionist at an event in SoHo, my Japanese friend and I had an espresso and a coffee respectively at the bar where the event was to be held. I was trying to keep off the booze while still being a gracious and welcoming host in the best Japanese tradition. After the show finished, though, they gave me two free drink tickets and I felt it a shame to go to waste, so I used them to introduce my Japanese friend to a grand American tradition, PBR. Then I tried to explain to her in my rusty Japanese what a hipster was. I think she understood the basics, but I never did manage to explain the supposed ironic cool of drinking shitty beer.

After the PBR we floated to the nearby La Linea, because I'd read reviews and wanted to check it out. It had a great relaxed hip-hop vibe and the decor was very loungy. It looked like a great bar that just happened to be empty because it was Monday. I wasn't planning on ending my detox, but I figured that having a friend visit from the other side of the planet was a lame time to be off the sauce entirely, so we had a drink each, for a total of $18. To add insult to injury, the sign said that happy hour had ended about 10 minutes before we got there, and before we were half-way done with our drinks, the bartender came over and told us that happy hour was back on again for the night, everything half-priced. I don't know how fair it is for me to badmouth a bar that re-opens it's happy hour, but it left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth that I didn't want to waste my $9 Jack and Ginger on washing away.

But, as you will see tomorrow, I'm right back off the sauce and on to actually eating 3 meals a day. Hopefully less arduous work will leave more time for me to tell you about why Brett Favre is kind of a dick.