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.