If I were writing a menu that served the food I ate this Sunday, there would be "Hashbrowns," simple enough, and "Apple Cider Failcakes," which might need more of a small text explanation.
I meant to make crepes, the easy kind you make in a blender. They're not perfect, but they're easy and good enough for getting some kicks in the "flat things covered in syrup" category (of kicks). I thought I'd be economical and use the food processor instead, since I already had it down to effortlessly shred my potatoes for the hash browns. Here, economical refers to me not wasting energy to get the blender out from under the counter, pretty much exactly where I was standing. This was my first bad idea. The blade for the food processor didn't really mix the way the blender did and I ended up with a lot of dry flour stuck to the sides and bottom of the processing chamber that I had to mix in with a fork.
My second mistake was starting to make crepes without checking to see if we had milk. We didn't. At times like these, either you go shopping or you improvise. I improvised: 2 parts pomegranate apple cider, 1 part sour cream, blended thoroughly with a fork and measured out to match the recommended volume of milk. I don't know if that was a mistake, per se, but I did not end up with crepes. They were too sturdy for crepes, but very delicate for pancakes. Even though I'm calling them "Failcakes" I think I'd make them again. They'd need a touch more salt to balance the cider, but otherwise, they were very edible, if not exactly what I was going for when I started cooking.
There was no lunch for Sunday. I needed to shake off the bad kitchen mojo from the morning before digging in to cooking for dinner. I had a few friends over for Indian. This was a bad idea for dinner at the end of June, but I persevered through the perspiration to come out with a great chana masala and a passable saag "paneer."
I made fresh garlic/ginger paste in the food processor at about a 1:1 ratio. A generous tablespoon of this in some hot oil is a good way to start off most curries. You may also want to add chili paste, although with these dishes I didn't use any chilis for the chana and I blended the chilis directly into the spinach for the saag. As the paste starts to give off its juices to the oil, you want to add your spices to the oil to let the flavors break out and grow. Chana masala works primarily off the magic of whole cumin seeds and the onions that you brown in the oil before adding the chick peas. With saag, I like to build with a lot of chili powder and coriander supported with cinnamon and mace.
Before tossing the spinach in, though, you should brown your paneer and your potatoes if you're using them, then reserving them to give the spinach some quality time in the pan with the oils all by themselves, to get real cozy and get a nice fry on. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, if you're having trouble tracking down actual Indian paneer, queso fresca makes a very good substitute. It may be cheaper than paneer, depending on your supermarket options, and it has the same sturdy texture that allows you to fry it in blocks for the saag.
Once the onions are browning for the chana and the spinach has started to break down from shredded leaves to green, buttery gravy, you're going to add your chickpeas to the chana and the potatoes and some onion cut into wedges into the saag. You're also going to want to add a tomato or two to each, depending on the size of your tomatoes and how much you really like tomatoes in the first place. If you don't want tomato skins floating around your curry, you can get the skins off very easily by setting the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute and then allowing them to cool. the skins will slide right off. I usually cut the tomatoes into wedges before adding them to either curry.
The longer you let the chana go on a low heat, the better. The whole cumin seeds and the chickpeas need time to really start to play well with others. With the saag you don't want to put your "paneer" in too soon as stirring the curry has a high potential to break the slices into crumbles. At the low-heat stage you may also want to finish with whole fat yogurt, buttermilk, or just a ton of butter. This time around I went with the later option supplemented with some whole milk I got when I finally worked up the motivation to get to the store. I also added a nice shot of my grandmother's spicy tomato soup, which, isn't really soup at all, more like a mason jar of culinary napalm.
Made a little rice in the rice cooker and we were all set to tear in to quality comfort food and a spread of red wines. Great dinner in November, bad idea in June. I may have to put a moratorium on cooking Indian food until October. I worked up as much of a sweat cooking dinner as I do riding my bike to work. Also, even the delightful rioja that highlighted the wine list was not the best hot weather choice of beverage. The rest of the summer, my kitchen's house wine is Haffenreffer's Private Stock. When company comes calling, wow them with the imported taste!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday in Little Guyana
The day started off rough. Staying up till dawn tends to put a fuzzy edge to when you wake up, maybe not technically in the morning anymore. I did get up before noon, though, and really needed some swill to push the poisons out. To that end, very little makes me happier than eggs, starch and lots of butter. I made two burritos, making sure to butter the tortillas before heating them in the griddle to get them brown and crispy. Inside was just eggs, no meats, no cheeses, but a wonderful blend of sage, tarragon and adobo. I threw more butter than I needed into the pan when I cooked them and took them off the heat just at that magic moment that the protein bonds start to consolidate their forces, but before that sad stage where their partnerships lead to stagnant bickering and in-fighting. They were wonderful, and then I passed out again.
When I came to again, I had to hurry off to meet a friend for a 5:20PM screening of "Happiness." This is not the 90's indie flick with Philip Seymour Hoffman doing nasty things to postcards. This was a newer Korean film about terminally ill patients at a health farm falling in love; much less disturbing than the earlier film, much more gut wrenchingly depressing. The gut wrenching was made all the more real by my stomach's very painful protests of the slice of pizza I'd snagged before leaving the apartment. Most weekends my roommate will order this terrible pizza delivery and go through the large pie over the course of several "meals." I'd had it before and I didn't like it then. I have no idea why he would choose to order this pizza repeatedly. There have to be better delivery options, even in El Barrio. I needed simple food fast, though so I decided to give it a shot. Bad idea. I had to run into the bathroom before the film and try to sort things out. Luckily it passed without much more fervor than your average demonic possession.
After the movie we went to Reservoir, a few blocks south of Union Square on University Pl. The food was decent, and in the $7-10 range for most of their entrees. The beer selection wasn't expansive but had a pretty broad selection of US/UK crowd-pleasers from Budwiser to Bass to Killian's to Magner's. I had the fish and chips sandwich. The waffle fries were great, and the fish itself was up to par, if not a bit small for the enormous roll it was served on. As it was a sandwich and in the absence of any cold mashed peas, I think "Fish Sandwich" would have been a more honest menu title than "Fish and Chips." If you put the chips on the sandwich with the cole slaw and the tartar sauce and a liberal squeeze of lemon, more to soften the roll than anything, you had yourself a pretty sturdy heaping of bar food.
I thought I'd be done eating for the day, but after an epic subway and bus adventure deep into Queens, I arrived at a club in Little Guyana for a friend's graduation party. I was not expecting food, but I got it anyway.
Here you can see the chicken wings and a piece of jerk chicken. I wasn't planning on eating at first, so I took this photo after most of it had been destroyed. The jerk chicken was fantastic, very spicy and the chicken was timed very well. The chicken wings were in some kind of wet sauce, not so much hot wings as stewed wings. They weren't bad, but they certainly weren't the main event. That title goes to:
Shark bites! No, not the chewy fruit snack of my childhood, these were "popper" sized cuts of shark, breaded and deep fried. You can see on the side the ketchup, lime and hot sauce provided as condiments. I really wish I'd been hungrier and not actively dancing, because I would have eaten a lot more of these little gems. You couldn't really call them "poppers," though, because, like so much other West Indies cooking, they like to leave the "bones" in. Aside from navigating the occasional chunk of cartilage, it was very easy to put these away. If you're not familiar with shark, these had a fishy edge similar to catfish but with a much more dense, juicy texture. They were an unexpected yet very welcome capstone to a day of culinary meandering.
When I came to again, I had to hurry off to meet a friend for a 5:20PM screening of "Happiness." This is not the 90's indie flick with Philip Seymour Hoffman doing nasty things to postcards. This was a newer Korean film about terminally ill patients at a health farm falling in love; much less disturbing than the earlier film, much more gut wrenchingly depressing. The gut wrenching was made all the more real by my stomach's very painful protests of the slice of pizza I'd snagged before leaving the apartment. Most weekends my roommate will order this terrible pizza delivery and go through the large pie over the course of several "meals." I'd had it before and I didn't like it then. I have no idea why he would choose to order this pizza repeatedly. There have to be better delivery options, even in El Barrio. I needed simple food fast, though so I decided to give it a shot. Bad idea. I had to run into the bathroom before the film and try to sort things out. Luckily it passed without much more fervor than your average demonic possession.
After the movie we went to Reservoir, a few blocks south of Union Square on University Pl. The food was decent, and in the $7-10 range for most of their entrees. The beer selection wasn't expansive but had a pretty broad selection of US/UK crowd-pleasers from Budwiser to Bass to Killian's to Magner's. I had the fish and chips sandwich. The waffle fries were great, and the fish itself was up to par, if not a bit small for the enormous roll it was served on. As it was a sandwich and in the absence of any cold mashed peas, I think "Fish Sandwich" would have been a more honest menu title than "Fish and Chips." If you put the chips on the sandwich with the cole slaw and the tartar sauce and a liberal squeeze of lemon, more to soften the roll than anything, you had yourself a pretty sturdy heaping of bar food.
I thought I'd be done eating for the day, but after an epic subway and bus adventure deep into Queens, I arrived at a club in Little Guyana for a friend's graduation party. I was not expecting food, but I got it anyway.
Here you can see the chicken wings and a piece of jerk chicken. I wasn't planning on eating at first, so I took this photo after most of it had been destroyed. The jerk chicken was fantastic, very spicy and the chicken was timed very well. The chicken wings were in some kind of wet sauce, not so much hot wings as stewed wings. They weren't bad, but they certainly weren't the main event. That title goes to:
Shark bites! No, not the chewy fruit snack of my childhood, these were "popper" sized cuts of shark, breaded and deep fried. You can see on the side the ketchup, lime and hot sauce provided as condiments. I really wish I'd been hungrier and not actively dancing, because I would have eaten a lot more of these little gems. You couldn't really call them "poppers," though, because, like so much other West Indies cooking, they like to leave the "bones" in. Aside from navigating the occasional chunk of cartilage, it was very easy to put these away. If you're not familiar with shark, these had a fishy edge similar to catfish but with a much more dense, juicy texture. They were an unexpected yet very welcome capstone to a day of culinary meandering.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Friday is forever.
Nothing is more rapacious, scandalous and swindling than a college dining commons, save possibly the black market kidney trade.
One banana and one yogurt cup, your standard yoplait mixed berry pre-mixed yogurt, not some froufrou parfait. How much should this cost? Well, it should come in under $2, even in Manhattan. Maybe being irate about spending $2.67 for a banana and some yogurt seems to be over-reacting to you. Well, i shall continue to be indignant, as the banana was price gouged up to almost 400% the street price. Going rate for bananas on the street is $0.25 per. You can get them cheaper by the pound at a grocer, but even in the Upper East Side this quarter standard seems to hold true. $1.69 for a yoplait yogurt cup, obnoxious, but only by about 200%. I think you feel my ire now too. Let's go protest the caf'.
Lunch was free because my mother gave it to me. Granted, this was about a month ago, so I really should factor in the cost of refrigeration over that month and the potential risk cost of hospital time for food poisoning from eating month-old cabbage rolls, but undaunted I dove into one of my favorite lunches of late, cabbage rolls and frozen French fries. When making the fries in a microwave soaking in the cabbage roll juice they reach this magical place somewhere between mashed potatoes and fresh carrots. It's enough to induce run-on sentences.
Later that evening I had a pity dog with a friend. This is your standard hot dog, here from Gray's Papaya in the Village, bought and given to someone out of pity. I was buying because she'd just been notified that the record label she was working for was terminating her position in order to open a new position with different qualifications she wasn't qualified for. She had hers with sauerkraut, I had the same but with mustard also. They were great and cost less than my breakfast.
And at the very end of a gigantic day, about to pass out from dragging myself home from a midnight screening of Tokyo Gore Police, I just couldn't resist the lure of my local Chuchifritos, all deep-fried, all the time. They were out of their papas relenas, so I opted for an empanada. The extra wide edges of fried dough on this joint's empanadas are perfect for the late night "i shouldn't be eating this" meal. They are also great for breakfast.
And if you are upset that I didn't have any pictures for today, you can sink your teeth into this:
One banana and one yogurt cup, your standard yoplait mixed berry pre-mixed yogurt, not some froufrou parfait. How much should this cost? Well, it should come in under $2, even in Manhattan. Maybe being irate about spending $2.67 for a banana and some yogurt seems to be over-reacting to you. Well, i shall continue to be indignant, as the banana was price gouged up to almost 400% the street price. Going rate for bananas on the street is $0.25 per. You can get them cheaper by the pound at a grocer, but even in the Upper East Side this quarter standard seems to hold true. $1.69 for a yoplait yogurt cup, obnoxious, but only by about 200%. I think you feel my ire now too. Let's go protest the caf'.
Lunch was free because my mother gave it to me. Granted, this was about a month ago, so I really should factor in the cost of refrigeration over that month and the potential risk cost of hospital time for food poisoning from eating month-old cabbage rolls, but undaunted I dove into one of my favorite lunches of late, cabbage rolls and frozen French fries. When making the fries in a microwave soaking in the cabbage roll juice they reach this magical place somewhere between mashed potatoes and fresh carrots. It's enough to induce run-on sentences.
Later that evening I had a pity dog with a friend. This is your standard hot dog, here from Gray's Papaya in the Village, bought and given to someone out of pity. I was buying because she'd just been notified that the record label she was working for was terminating her position in order to open a new position with different qualifications she wasn't qualified for. She had hers with sauerkraut, I had the same but with mustard also. They were great and cost less than my breakfast.
And at the very end of a gigantic day, about to pass out from dragging myself home from a midnight screening of Tokyo Gore Police, I just couldn't resist the lure of my local Chuchifritos, all deep-fried, all the time. They were out of their papas relenas, so I opted for an empanada. The extra wide edges of fried dough on this joint's empanadas are perfect for the late night "i shouldn't be eating this" meal. They are also great for breakfast.
And if you are upset that I didn't have any pictures for today, you can sink your teeth into this:
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday
I tried to set a goal for myself, to get these posts under 800 words a day. That's mostly because internet attention spans are deplorable. I don't expect for this to get syndicated, but at the same time, writing 3,000+ word entries are punishing, even just to write them
But, as a possible side effect, I just haven't been eating very much worth talking about for most of my caloric intake, and then basking in one great investment of energy a day.
This Thursday, for example, I had my Jeno's for breakfast, and a bag of pop corn for lunch. My officemate asked, when I brought the pop corn into the office, if that was all I was eating for lunch. "No." I said. I didn't think I was lying at the time, I just got lazy and filled up on pop corn. Around 4PM I had one of those ice cream sandwiches made from chocolate chip cookies with chocolate chips embedded in the ice cream around the edges. Very healthy, lots of calcium, and corn is a vegetable, right?
Ah, but the main event. I starved myself into creativity. There was another variation on the Korean salad and a great lentil soup that I made up as I went.
For the salad this time I played with the dressing elements. I used soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, sesame oil and mirin this time. As for dry spices, I kept it simple with chili powder and the sesame seeds. For greens I used romaine hearts and I added some red peppers on there mostly because i thought it would look good. I was right.
The lentil soup started out like your basic curry. In hot olive oil with a little butter I sautéed ginger paste, garlic, a dash of Grammy's Spicy Tomato Soup and spices, here chili powder, some cumin seed, a little mace and a very liberal dose of Adobo. I then added red skin potatoes and put a nice brown on one side. After flipping them and getting the other side started to brown, I added an onion, halved and then sliced.
I added a drizzle of sesame oil as the onions cooked, and once they started to take on a little brown themselves, I added the beans, juices and all, as well as a few sprigs from my lemon basil plant.
It was one of those dishes that feel like shoveling satisfaction into your gaping mouth.
This is one I'll be coming back to, but maybe not till the weather cools off a little.
But, as a possible side effect, I just haven't been eating very much worth talking about for most of my caloric intake, and then basking in one great investment of energy a day.
This Thursday, for example, I had my Jeno's for breakfast, and a bag of pop corn for lunch. My officemate asked, when I brought the pop corn into the office, if that was all I was eating for lunch. "No." I said. I didn't think I was lying at the time, I just got lazy and filled up on pop corn. Around 4PM I had one of those ice cream sandwiches made from chocolate chip cookies with chocolate chips embedded in the ice cream around the edges. Very healthy, lots of calcium, and corn is a vegetable, right?
Ah, but the main event. I starved myself into creativity. There was another variation on the Korean salad and a great lentil soup that I made up as I went.
For the salad this time I played with the dressing elements. I used soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, sesame oil and mirin this time. As for dry spices, I kept it simple with chili powder and the sesame seeds. For greens I used romaine hearts and I added some red peppers on there mostly because i thought it would look good. I was right.
The lentil soup started out like your basic curry. In hot olive oil with a little butter I sautéed ginger paste, garlic, a dash of Grammy's Spicy Tomato Soup and spices, here chili powder, some cumin seed, a little mace and a very liberal dose of Adobo. I then added red skin potatoes and put a nice brown on one side. After flipping them and getting the other side started to brown, I added an onion, halved and then sliced.
I added a drizzle of sesame oil as the onions cooked, and once they started to take on a little brown themselves, I added the beans, juices and all, as well as a few sprigs from my lemon basil plant.
It was one of those dishes that feel like shoveling satisfaction into your gaping mouth.
This is one I'll be coming back to, but maybe not till the weather cools off a little.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wednesday, the sleeper cell awakens.
Most of what I ate this Wednesday was just plain sad, if not downright disgusting. Jeno's pizza for breakfast, blueberry muffin from that massive chain coffee shop for lunch. Neither of which sparked much excitement in my life, so I imagine you've already clicked to the next blog and are reading about some mid-west soccer-mom's azaleas. For those of you still with me, though, you are going to get two excellent pieces of advice on eating out in Manhattan.
#1, Azuri Cafe,
51st St. between 9th Ave and 10th Ave. It's just a little falafel joint. They do the spread from shwarma to baba ganoush. I had a falafel sandwich, and it was so amazing, you're lucky I managed to stop and take the photo. Honestly, the best falafel I've ever had. The guy building the sandwiches stood in front of an array of 20 different sauces and condiments and with each pita, he appeared to be painting a very exacting portrait of the taste-scape he had in mind from a diverse and yet complimentary palate. There was no part of my sandwich where I felt like the main event was over and I was just cleaning up the plate. It was everything you'd ever wanted falafel to be with the addition of a subtle dance of extras you never knew you were missing. If you eat falafel and you are ever near there, you owe it to yourself to go. Icing on the cake, it was the first time in a while that I had excellent service in the city. The guys working there were happy to make you a kick-ass falafel sandwich and they wanted you to know they enjoyed your satisfaction as much as you did.
#2, Do not, DO NOT ever by the roasted redskin potatoes from SuperFresh's deli department.
They sucked so bad, I don't even mind typing out the phrase "sucked so bad." If the falafel re-instated my faith in food as a soul-nourishing necessity of life, then these potatoes would be the opposite. The rosemary came across like soap and the texture of the potatoes themselves were very distressing. The buffalo wings weren't as bad, and I could bring myself to eat those again if I were in a pinch for something to pour beer on top of.
That falafel made the whole day worth it, though. I'm just itching for another excuse to go back.
#1, Azuri Cafe,
51st St. between 9th Ave and 10th Ave. It's just a little falafel joint. They do the spread from shwarma to baba ganoush. I had a falafel sandwich, and it was so amazing, you're lucky I managed to stop and take the photo. Honestly, the best falafel I've ever had. The guy building the sandwiches stood in front of an array of 20 different sauces and condiments and with each pita, he appeared to be painting a very exacting portrait of the taste-scape he had in mind from a diverse and yet complimentary palate. There was no part of my sandwich where I felt like the main event was over and I was just cleaning up the plate. It was everything you'd ever wanted falafel to be with the addition of a subtle dance of extras you never knew you were missing. If you eat falafel and you are ever near there, you owe it to yourself to go. Icing on the cake, it was the first time in a while that I had excellent service in the city. The guys working there were happy to make you a kick-ass falafel sandwich and they wanted you to know they enjoyed your satisfaction as much as you did.
#2, Do not, DO NOT ever by the roasted redskin potatoes from SuperFresh's deli department.
They sucked so bad, I don't even mind typing out the phrase "sucked so bad." If the falafel re-instated my faith in food as a soul-nourishing necessity of life, then these potatoes would be the opposite. The rosemary came across like soap and the texture of the potatoes themselves were very distressing. The buffalo wings weren't as bad, and I could bring myself to eat those again if I were in a pinch for something to pour beer on top of.
That falafel made the whole day worth it, though. I'm just itching for another excuse to go back.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, there is not food enough to fill your void.
The Ice Cream Sandwich Challenge:
Some days before work, I try to throw an ice cream sandwich in my bag and then bike to work fast enough to eat it while it's still solid enough to peel the wrapper and eat it (as opposed to kind of drinking it). You can see that this attempt was not a great success.
Stress and depression are two very different emotions. I know this because my body has very different reactions to each. When I am stressed, my appetite is suppressed. When I am depressed, I eat to fill the empty aching of my soul. I know these reactions very well, but I'm not exactly sure where yesterday falls.
Breakfast would seem to indicate moderate depression, or possibly just my normal state of affairs. It was a two-burrito day. I spiced up the eggs with a little chorizo, a slice of bacon, some cubanelle peppers and monterrey jack cheese. The cubanelles went in just before the eggs, so they were still very crisp when I ate the burritos, They provided this wonderful texture and brightness, like spicy lettuce. Fantastic.
Then, for lunch, I made a series of progressive mistakes: a banana, Odwalla Bluberry B-Monster and a prepackaged pretzel-chip and hummus combo.
The banana wasn't that bad of an idea, the problem was really where I bought it from, the cafeteria. Overpriced fruit, slightly overpriced B-Monster, way over-priced hummus pack. I ended up with these choices by trying not to spend a lot of money and not really finding any of the easy cold options at the caf appealing.
I ended up spending $8.05 for only minimal soul satisfaction.
There was way too much hummus for the amount of pretzel chips I had. I had to scoop tremendous amounts of hummus onto each chip in order to get enough hummus into me to fulfill my caloric needs while still engaging in food in a way i found palatable. The hummus tasted fine, but the texture was so creamy and over-processed that it made me kind of queasy in large amounts. The B-Monster was a solid nutritional decision, at least, especially considering that b-vitamins are very helpful in dealing with both stress and depression. They also make your urine markedly yellow, which provides some small wonder at the chemical processes of the human body with every squirt.
Dinner was dismal. I didn't have time to cook, but there was nothing very easy and tempting in the apartment. I ate the rest of the tortilla chips in the fridge and still felt very empty. Rummaging through the freezer I found three frozen dim sum leek buns. They were wrapped in one of those sandwich bags that just fold over, no zip lock, and the bag had of course fell open, leaving the delicate rice dough to catch a nasty case of freezer burn. I don't know if I felt sorry for them or if they just resonated with some sense of flaw and ruin in my life, but I knew that the time to eat these buns had come.
As you can see in the photos, I have a very simple steaming set up. Actually, I should preface this section by saying that this is not the part of the blog where I explain some great kitchen secret that is going to take your own epicurean endeavors up a notch. No, this is more like me going to culinary confessional and attempting to expatiate the terrible sins I have committed against decent cookware and other kitchen accouterments.
My initial set up was three shot glasses, right-side-up,
in a small pan that's a little too wide for my 100 yen steamer basket.
The water boiled, none of the glass broke, but all of the steam poured out the edges instead of through the basket. Stupid physics. Stupid steam. I will bend you to my will, you gaseous devil!
So I refilled the water in the pot and then wrapped the whole thing in a kitchen towel to force the steam through the steaming basket.
This actually worked. I even thought to lower the heat on the pot to lower the chances of setting the towel on fire. Way to go, foresight! I managed this amazing feat of kitchen buffoonery and didn't loose a single piece of equipment or food to the fickle gods of the hearth. Calamity, my dark destiny, you will have to wait another day!
Despite this great triumph, though, a handful of 3-day-old tortilla chips and three dim sum leek buns do not a quality dinner make. That's all there was for Tuesday, though. Chalk it up to stress. At this rate, I might actually make my WiiFit weight loss goal. Shigeru Miyamoto thinks I'm overweight.
Some days before work, I try to throw an ice cream sandwich in my bag and then bike to work fast enough to eat it while it's still solid enough to peel the wrapper and eat it (as opposed to kind of drinking it). You can see that this attempt was not a great success.
Stress and depression are two very different emotions. I know this because my body has very different reactions to each. When I am stressed, my appetite is suppressed. When I am depressed, I eat to fill the empty aching of my soul. I know these reactions very well, but I'm not exactly sure where yesterday falls.
Breakfast would seem to indicate moderate depression, or possibly just my normal state of affairs. It was a two-burrito day. I spiced up the eggs with a little chorizo, a slice of bacon, some cubanelle peppers and monterrey jack cheese. The cubanelles went in just before the eggs, so they were still very crisp when I ate the burritos, They provided this wonderful texture and brightness, like spicy lettuce. Fantastic.
Then, for lunch, I made a series of progressive mistakes: a banana, Odwalla Bluberry B-Monster and a prepackaged pretzel-chip and hummus combo.
The banana wasn't that bad of an idea, the problem was really where I bought it from, the cafeteria. Overpriced fruit, slightly overpriced B-Monster, way over-priced hummus pack. I ended up with these choices by trying not to spend a lot of money and not really finding any of the easy cold options at the caf appealing.
I ended up spending $8.05 for only minimal soul satisfaction.
There was way too much hummus for the amount of pretzel chips I had. I had to scoop tremendous amounts of hummus onto each chip in order to get enough hummus into me to fulfill my caloric needs while still engaging in food in a way i found palatable. The hummus tasted fine, but the texture was so creamy and over-processed that it made me kind of queasy in large amounts. The B-Monster was a solid nutritional decision, at least, especially considering that b-vitamins are very helpful in dealing with both stress and depression. They also make your urine markedly yellow, which provides some small wonder at the chemical processes of the human body with every squirt.
Dinner was dismal. I didn't have time to cook, but there was nothing very easy and tempting in the apartment. I ate the rest of the tortilla chips in the fridge and still felt very empty. Rummaging through the freezer I found three frozen dim sum leek buns. They were wrapped in one of those sandwich bags that just fold over, no zip lock, and the bag had of course fell open, leaving the delicate rice dough to catch a nasty case of freezer burn. I don't know if I felt sorry for them or if they just resonated with some sense of flaw and ruin in my life, but I knew that the time to eat these buns had come.
As you can see in the photos, I have a very simple steaming set up. Actually, I should preface this section by saying that this is not the part of the blog where I explain some great kitchen secret that is going to take your own epicurean endeavors up a notch. No, this is more like me going to culinary confessional and attempting to expatiate the terrible sins I have committed against decent cookware and other kitchen accouterments.
My initial set up was three shot glasses, right-side-up,
in a small pan that's a little too wide for my 100 yen steamer basket.
The water boiled, none of the glass broke, but all of the steam poured out the edges instead of through the basket. Stupid physics. Stupid steam. I will bend you to my will, you gaseous devil!
So I refilled the water in the pot and then wrapped the whole thing in a kitchen towel to force the steam through the steaming basket.
This actually worked. I even thought to lower the heat on the pot to lower the chances of setting the towel on fire. Way to go, foresight! I managed this amazing feat of kitchen buffoonery and didn't loose a single piece of equipment or food to the fickle gods of the hearth. Calamity, my dark destiny, you will have to wait another day!
Despite this great triumph, though, a handful of 3-day-old tortilla chips and three dim sum leek buns do not a quality dinner make. That's all there was for Tuesday, though. Chalk it up to stress. At this rate, I might actually make my WiiFit weight loss goal. Shigeru Miyamoto thinks I'm overweight.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, not going to win a Webby Award.
Breakfast? Jeno's combination pizza and a raspberry Yoplait yogurt.
Lunch? Left over Thai curry from Friday. Massaman, maybe? I forget the name of it. Cashews, red skin potatoes and imitation vegetarian duck in a rosy orange curry sauce. The duck was possibly the best vegetarian meat substitute I've ever had. I'm not that familiar with meat-substitution beyond tofu and Morningstar Farms, but I think this was a version of wheat gluten that was pressed out in layers to mimic duck breast. The texture gave like meat between my teeth and had a very rich, earthy character to it that would fit most duck recipes well.
Dinner, a great heaping mess of garbage. I wasn't in the mood to cook. I was in the mood to lay on my floor and stare at the ceiling. From the depths of such ennui came a swill tour de force.
For starters, there was a bag of tortilla chips sitting in the fridge. Fresh tortilla chips from delivery Mexican my roommate had ordered on Sunday. They were nested in a greasy paper bag that had been torn open down the length of the bag, and then sort of crumpled into a ball back around the chips. Amazingly, they were still quite good, possibly even better than they were on Sunday.
Below those in the fridge was a tub of guacamole from the same delivery. After scraping the top 1/4" to the side, there was still a lot of good guac left. It's a very well-balanced guacamole The taste of the avocado was very prominent with a spice that built up over a few bites.
Then there was a can of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Ravioli. Overstuffed, not worth paying more than the regular stuffed ravioli. Don't buy into the overstuffed hype.
And just to keep up my nutritional values, there was a "The Hulk" popsicle from some superhero-color themed popsicle mix box. It was green and purple and the ugly color that comes from mixing green and purple fluids and then freezing them.
The three of us, roommates, all sat around the living room, eating "The Hulk" popsicles, talking about how grown up we were.
Lunch? Left over Thai curry from Friday. Massaman, maybe? I forget the name of it. Cashews, red skin potatoes and imitation vegetarian duck in a rosy orange curry sauce. The duck was possibly the best vegetarian meat substitute I've ever had. I'm not that familiar with meat-substitution beyond tofu and Morningstar Farms, but I think this was a version of wheat gluten that was pressed out in layers to mimic duck breast. The texture gave like meat between my teeth and had a very rich, earthy character to it that would fit most duck recipes well.
Dinner, a great heaping mess of garbage. I wasn't in the mood to cook. I was in the mood to lay on my floor and stare at the ceiling. From the depths of such ennui came a swill tour de force.
For starters, there was a bag of tortilla chips sitting in the fridge. Fresh tortilla chips from delivery Mexican my roommate had ordered on Sunday. They were nested in a greasy paper bag that had been torn open down the length of the bag, and then sort of crumpled into a ball back around the chips. Amazingly, they were still quite good, possibly even better than they were on Sunday.
Below those in the fridge was a tub of guacamole from the same delivery. After scraping the top 1/4" to the side, there was still a lot of good guac left. It's a very well-balanced guacamole The taste of the avocado was very prominent with a spice that built up over a few bites.
Then there was a can of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Ravioli. Overstuffed, not worth paying more than the regular stuffed ravioli. Don't buy into the overstuffed hype.
And just to keep up my nutritional values, there was a "The Hulk" popsicle from some superhero-color themed popsicle mix box. It was green and purple and the ugly color that comes from mixing green and purple fluids and then freezing them.
The three of us, roommates, all sat around the living room, eating "The Hulk" popsicles, talking about how grown up we were.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Thursday. Ok. Thursday.
Back to my old tricks again. Jeno's frozen pizzas were on sale for $0.97 per, so I just had to stock up. Thursday's breakfast was a combination pizza and two cookies (oatmeal raisin and chocolate mint) saved from Wednesday's free lunch.
I also had this odd jittery feeling like my heart was just a bit too fast. Funny, when I had a little coffee it went away. Maybe the rest of me just caught up.
Lunch was leftovers from dinner Monday night. Chorizo and black beans over Spanish rice with ancho chili powder. The chili powder was a lot spicier than I thought, so the rice ended up being spicier than the beans. It was an odd defiance of your standard expectation in those kinds of situations.
That evening, when I got home, I just wasn't hungry. My mind felt too full to put anything into my stomach. I had an ice cream sandwich around 8PM because I felt I should have some kind of calories, but that's all it ended up being, calories.
I had set a chicken breast to thaw in the fridge the day before, and I was leaving town for the weekend, so I felt I had to do something with it, but I didn't know what. I realized that I had coffee left over in my French press from that morning, though. I decided to make a coffee marinade.
Going in, I was pretty sure this was one of my worst food ideas ever. The coffee had been sitting out all day and I'd never tried anything like it before. I did a combination of a dry rub and then marinade to make sure the spices got into contact with the chicken first and the coffee was a supporting character. I massaged Adobo, chipotle, brown sugar, and ancho chili powder into the chicken breast, then worked a tiny amount of sesame oil over the rub before letting it marinate in the coffee. It got to soak for about three hours while I debated if I really wanted to eat or not, and what I might want to eat in particular.
I ended up making a variation of a Korean salad I'd had at a yakiniku (Korean BBQ in Japan) bar that I would frequent in Mikuni Ga Oka, about twenty minutes south of downtown Osaka. The owner's wife made it and I loved it so much I eventually got her to teach me the ingredients:Lettuce, cayenne pepper, sesame seeds, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar. She wouldn't divulge her ratios, though. I don't know if it was a matter of her not wanting to deal with translation, especially with ambiguous directions that she now does almost automatically without measuring, or if she really wanted to protect some secret of her recipe, but she left it up to me to refine my technique until I was happy with the end product.
I took some pretty drastic liberties with my salad here. It's not really fair to call it Korean. I don't really know what you would call it, but we're not going to use the "f-word" here so lets just skip classifying the cultural roots here and I'll tell you what it was made out of.
I started with a romaine heart and cut it into thin strips, about 1/2 inch wide. I then dusted the lettuce with crushed sesame seeds, chipotle powder, and a dash of ancho chili powder. The ancho chili powder had a fishy edge to it that didn't come out in the chicken later, but put an odd spin to the salad that I wasn't a big fan of, but my vegetarian roommate really enjoyed. I then hit the salad with the juice from 1 lime and a little less than a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt and mixed thoroughly.
The entire cooking process really helped me to get my head straight and I felt worlds better just for having cooked, let alone having eaten what was a very satisfying end result to the wanton indulgence of my creativity. I still had one more ice cream sandwich before bed, though.
Wednesday is for vegetarianism and more fun with crappy service.
Wednesday was inadvertently a vegetarian day. I had every intention of having a deli sandwich for lunch as I scavenged the leftovers of some faculty function, but sadly there was only roasted vegetable sandwiches and lox with cucumber sandwiches left. I took the lox and cucumber sandwich because I thought it was some sort of tomato/fresh garden thing. It's fair to say I didn't look very closely. If you were wondering if it was a good sandwich, it wasn't. The salmon was atrocious and I ended up spitting out the bite I tried to eat. In defense of the caterers' judgment, it had been sitting out all afternoon, so it wasn't exactly shower fresh.
The hummus and couscous salad were pretty good, but there wasn't much of that left. There was a potato salad that rivaled the day before's Indian food. (If you didn't read the post, it sucked.) The coleslaw was very good, especially considering the source was a giant catering kitchen. There was also caesar salad with actual anchovies on the salad. That was a nice step above, but made me think about how good the cold cut sandwiches might have been. I also had some thin slices of a thin baguette with mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and basil on them. Not a bad spread, though I do wish I wasted less plate space on that salmon atrocity.
Desert was a stack of 4 cookies, chocolate chip, chocolate with mint chocolate chips and two oatmeal raisin cookies. I also had a cup of fruit, which was the biggest portion size out of anything else I ate for lunch or breakfast. That's healthy, right? A nice blend of watermelon, pineapple, grapes, blueberries and raspberries ended lunch on a nice high note, despite the heavy thud of the salmon sandwich hitting the bottom of my otherwise empty trash can.
Did someone mention breakfast? It was a banana, a cup of Stonyfield Farms Cream on Top Vanilla and a handful of peanuts. It kept me from being irritable until 3PM when the scavenging started.
Dinner you say? Well fuck you too, New York Wraps. We ordered the Jerusalem (#46) and the Mediterranean (#48) wraps and an order of seasoned fries. They were both falafel based, mine was the Jerusalem, falafel, tomato, cucumber, lettuce and tahini. That's not important, though, because they bollocksed up my order. My friend got his #48, but I got the #45, "Zorba the Greek" aka "A lettuce salad with a belittlingly sparse sprinkling of things that weren't lettuce, like feta cheese, oil and vinegar dressing, or tomatoes."
When I called back to try to explain, I was quickly and thoroughly reminded about how much customer service sucks in Manhattan. I know Manhattan has a few exemplary ass holes out there that have probably made this guy's job a lot harder than it has to be, but it seems like restaurants adopt this super-aggressive customer service policy apparently aimed at making their customers feel stupid for having decided to give them business. I wasn't caustic at first, but the conversation ended with me saying "You know, it's not worth me arguing with you any more, I just won't ever order from your fucking store ever again. Thank you."
It's a shame the fries were so good.
On the bright side of things, the salad wrapped in a paper towel is probably better for me than the fried falafel would have been. Seeing as how I put down 4 1/2 pints of Guiness, Smithwicks and Magner's, cutting a few calories was an acceptable side-effect of what seems to be a regrettable trend in $7-15/person restaurants in Manhattan.
The hummus and couscous salad were pretty good, but there wasn't much of that left. There was a potato salad that rivaled the day before's Indian food. (If you didn't read the post, it sucked.) The coleslaw was very good, especially considering the source was a giant catering kitchen. There was also caesar salad with actual anchovies on the salad. That was a nice step above, but made me think about how good the cold cut sandwiches might have been. I also had some thin slices of a thin baguette with mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and basil on them. Not a bad spread, though I do wish I wasted less plate space on that salmon atrocity.
Desert was a stack of 4 cookies, chocolate chip, chocolate with mint chocolate chips and two oatmeal raisin cookies. I also had a cup of fruit, which was the biggest portion size out of anything else I ate for lunch or breakfast. That's healthy, right? A nice blend of watermelon, pineapple, grapes, blueberries and raspberries ended lunch on a nice high note, despite the heavy thud of the salmon sandwich hitting the bottom of my otherwise empty trash can.
Did someone mention breakfast? It was a banana, a cup of Stonyfield Farms Cream on Top Vanilla and a handful of peanuts. It kept me from being irritable until 3PM when the scavenging started.
Dinner you say? Well fuck you too, New York Wraps. We ordered the Jerusalem (#46) and the Mediterranean (#48) wraps and an order of seasoned fries. They were both falafel based, mine was the Jerusalem, falafel, tomato, cucumber, lettuce and tahini. That's not important, though, because they bollocksed up my order. My friend got his #48, but I got the #45, "Zorba the Greek" aka "A lettuce salad with a belittlingly sparse sprinkling of things that weren't lettuce, like feta cheese, oil and vinegar dressing, or tomatoes."
When I called back to try to explain, I was quickly and thoroughly reminded about how much customer service sucks in Manhattan. I know Manhattan has a few exemplary ass holes out there that have probably made this guy's job a lot harder than it has to be, but it seems like restaurants adopt this super-aggressive customer service policy apparently aimed at making their customers feel stupid for having decided to give them business. I wasn't caustic at first, but the conversation ended with me saying "You know, it's not worth me arguing with you any more, I just won't ever order from your fucking store ever again. Thank you."
It's a shame the fries were so good.
On the bright side of things, the salad wrapped in a paper towel is probably better for me than the fried falafel would have been. Seeing as how I put down 4 1/2 pints of Guiness, Smithwicks and Magner's, cutting a few calories was an acceptable side-effect of what seems to be a regrettable trend in $7-15/person restaurants in Manhattan.
This Tuesday was easy, and yet I am still late.
And lets not even talk about the weekend, which was good for food, but the details have been lost to the muddy sands in the river of time. Did you know today was International Butcher Your Metaphors Day? Now you do.
Tuesday is so easy to write about because I barely ate. I had a banana for breakfast, but that was all I really felt like eating. I had a lot on my mind, and it didn't make for a big appetite.
Not eating anything but a banana and a handful of peanuts a little later has a way of wearing on your insides, though. My frequent lunch friend suggested Indian and I thought maybe a good gorge would help assuage my tormented brainparts. Some how we didn't let the $12 price tag deter us from an all-you-can eat lunch. If I would have really thought about the gastro-intestinal consequences at the time, though, I would have opted for the ramen joint on the ground floor.
It wasn't great Indian, but I would not be deterred from eating more than I should. I skipped breakfast, sort of, so how bad could two platefuls of food and a bowl of desert with two pieces of naan really be?
Well, the food was bland, especially for Indian standards. Their samosas were pretty good and the cilantro chutney was also up to par. I'm not spending $12 for all-you-can-eat samosas, though. I want my channa masala, my saag paneer, something that says aloo in it, maybe a chicken curry or a lamb curry, and some biryani rice would be nice, but the standard white stuff is very welcome too and of course there should be a piece of tandoori chicken in the mix the way every Chinese buffet in America has to have something named after General Tso and usually featuring chicken. The thing is, they had all of these things, they were just very poor versions of each. The spice level was set for geriatric Japanese nun, you might compare it to the spiciness of milk, or perhaps a manila envelope. The tandoori chicken was decent, actually, although it's not really my favorite Indian food. Before I had their chicken curry, it might even have been my least favorite Indian chicken dish. The lamb curry, saag, chana and aloo curries were all about as exciting as a Newheart marathon. This is probably for the best, since it held me to only one rather modest return plate instead of an all out binge.
The rice pudding was above average, though not by much. If I had it to do all over again, I would have had 8 samosoas or so, with a little biryani rice with a modest portion of the chicken curry and a few bowls (they were very small) of the rice pudding, maybe a piece of naan. This still wouldn't have been worth $12, but would have mitigated a lot of my disappointment. I guess this is what I get for trying to externalize my satisfaction.
That afternoon proved fairly difficult to get through. My blood sugar spiked and fell and I almost went into a food coma, and I also felt uneasy and threw up a little bit in my mouth at one point. Yeah, I know you wanted to know. This is why this posting is so easy, though. I didn't eat anything else all day. there was just no room for it. I drank a bottle of B-Relaxed Vitamin water when I got home from work, but the other stresses in my life combined with the Indian overload to put me down for the night before 9PM even.
At least maybe only eating one meal for the day might help the slimming process along. Not really a good diet meal though...
Tuesday is so easy to write about because I barely ate. I had a banana for breakfast, but that was all I really felt like eating. I had a lot on my mind, and it didn't make for a big appetite.
Not eating anything but a banana and a handful of peanuts a little later has a way of wearing on your insides, though. My frequent lunch friend suggested Indian and I thought maybe a good gorge would help assuage my tormented brainparts. Some how we didn't let the $12 price tag deter us from an all-you-can eat lunch. If I would have really thought about the gastro-intestinal consequences at the time, though, I would have opted for the ramen joint on the ground floor.
It wasn't great Indian, but I would not be deterred from eating more than I should. I skipped breakfast, sort of, so how bad could two platefuls of food and a bowl of desert with two pieces of naan really be?
Well, the food was bland, especially for Indian standards. Their samosas were pretty good and the cilantro chutney was also up to par. I'm not spending $12 for all-you-can-eat samosas, though. I want my channa masala, my saag paneer, something that says aloo in it, maybe a chicken curry or a lamb curry, and some biryani rice would be nice, but the standard white stuff is very welcome too and of course there should be a piece of tandoori chicken in the mix the way every Chinese buffet in America has to have something named after General Tso and usually featuring chicken. The thing is, they had all of these things, they were just very poor versions of each. The spice level was set for geriatric Japanese nun, you might compare it to the spiciness of milk, or perhaps a manila envelope. The tandoori chicken was decent, actually, although it's not really my favorite Indian food. Before I had their chicken curry, it might even have been my least favorite Indian chicken dish. The lamb curry, saag, chana and aloo curries were all about as exciting as a Newheart marathon. This is probably for the best, since it held me to only one rather modest return plate instead of an all out binge.
The rice pudding was above average, though not by much. If I had it to do all over again, I would have had 8 samosoas or so, with a little biryani rice with a modest portion of the chicken curry and a few bowls (they were very small) of the rice pudding, maybe a piece of naan. This still wouldn't have been worth $12, but would have mitigated a lot of my disappointment. I guess this is what I get for trying to externalize my satisfaction.
That afternoon proved fairly difficult to get through. My blood sugar spiked and fell and I almost went into a food coma, and I also felt uneasy and threw up a little bit in my mouth at one point. Yeah, I know you wanted to know. This is why this posting is so easy, though. I didn't eat anything else all day. there was just no room for it. I drank a bottle of B-Relaxed Vitamin water when I got home from work, but the other stresses in my life combined with the Indian overload to put me down for the night before 9PM even.
At least maybe only eating one meal for the day might help the slimming process along. Not really a good diet meal though...
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Classics Wednesday.
Do I plan out my food for the day to fit some kind of theme as though there were an editorial board trying to push some zany new spin into my columns?
No. Not very often, anyway.
Today, things just happened to go that way. Sometimes I do plan a meal days or weeks in advance, but this was also not the case for Wednesday. I guess I was just in the mood for some comfort foods.
The breakfast comfort came from breakfast burritos. Two today, to help hold up the cup of coffee I expected to drink later in the morning. Two slices of bacon, two eggs worth of scrambly goodness, and two kinds of shredded cheese (jack and cheddar) wrapped in two tortillas. When you find something that works for you, just go with it.
For lunch I thought I'd mix up an old classic, but it turns out that it was a bad idea. Even though two foods might be great on their own, it doesn't mean the flavors necessarily blend well. For as much as you sometimes get great surprises of flavor matches that seem to thwart your intuition, often things that seem safe enough together turn oddly caustic or upsetting when actually eaten together. In this case it was cabbage rolls and morel-infused mashed potatoes.
I'd roasted some of the morels so that they'd dry out for use in soups and sauces later. Unfortunately they got a little more brown than is ideal, but it accented their nutty flavors very well. I dropped a few in the water that I boiled the potatoes in, and let the water cook off as I mashed the potatoes so that they preserved the character of the morels. They have a nutty character that might go really well with some pork chops or roasted squash drizzled in truffle oil. They don't really go with the sour tomato and cabbage juice of the cabbage rolls.
Something about having the dill and sauerkraut on my palate just made the potatoes seem out of place and the rich tones of the mushrooms were ever so slightly triggering my gag reflex and making a really unpleasant feeling in my stomach. I couldn't quite pinpoint the problem. The potatoes themselves tasted fine, but so much of them were saturated with the juices and sauce from the cabbage rolls, they weren't really worth eating. Such a shame for those morels to have gone to waste like that, but at least I have the knowledge now and can pass it on to you.
Thankfully, my lunch buddy for the day got a wrap from Burrito Box and didn't eat his chips, so I had fresh tortilla chips and salsa to round out my lunch after a third of it proved to be inedible.
For dinner I had a newer classic in my life, although it's been a classic Japanese food item for quite some time. Most westerners are not familiar with Japanese curry, which is similar to its Indian counterparts almost in texture only, although Japanese curries do tend to feature coriander. Japanese curries have more in common with a beef stew or a heavily spiced pork gravy than with Indian curry.
This picture shows the traditional plating method of rice to one side, curry to the other, with the pork cutlet balancing between. GoGo Curry on 38th St. between 7th and 8th Ave. doesn't plate their curry like this. They put the rice in a mound in the bottom of the bowl with the curry over the entire thing and then the katsu (fried pork cutlet) on top. This actually left less room for gravy and didn't allow for as much fine control of the rice-to-curry ratio as you were eating. GoGo Curry, please fix this.
The curry sauce itself was pretty good. I still crave the curry from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Japan, but as far as my options go in Manhattan this is definitely good curry and worth the trip, especially if you've never tried Japanese Curry before. Unlike CoCoIchi's, which I would eat as often as I eat breakfast burritos here in the states, will be back to GoGo Curry, but maybe only once a month.
Then, as if I hadn't eaten enough yet today, there was some late-night vittles for the heavily relaxing crowd that was hanging out at my apt. In order to help them stabilize after all their relaxing, I whipped up some bacon and scrambled eggs before everyone trotted off home. I didn't eat any of the bacon myself, and just enough of the eggs to gauge how well I did in making them. I didn't have time for home fries and no bread for toast, so I just fried some tortillas cut into triangles in the bacon fat. Remember, kids: DON'T WASTE BACON FAT!!!! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!!! Unless you are vegetarian or Jewish or Muslim, in which case I'd recommend just avoiding bacon altogether. You're better off not knowing.
Also, there was the quaint but disappointing final appearance of morels for a while. I went to make floured and fried morels, but when I opened the bag of fresh ones, only two had managed to escape the clutches of mold. Sadly, I had to throw the rest out, and having cut the two survivors in half, I managed to make four small, unattractive, utterly delectable appetizers to the breakfast-at-11 fried-food free-for-all.
Man, irresponsible use of hyphens is almost as fun as rampant run-on sentences.
No. Not very often, anyway.
Today, things just happened to go that way. Sometimes I do plan a meal days or weeks in advance, but this was also not the case for Wednesday. I guess I was just in the mood for some comfort foods.
The breakfast comfort came from breakfast burritos. Two today, to help hold up the cup of coffee I expected to drink later in the morning. Two slices of bacon, two eggs worth of scrambly goodness, and two kinds of shredded cheese (jack and cheddar) wrapped in two tortillas. When you find something that works for you, just go with it.
For lunch I thought I'd mix up an old classic, but it turns out that it was a bad idea. Even though two foods might be great on their own, it doesn't mean the flavors necessarily blend well. For as much as you sometimes get great surprises of flavor matches that seem to thwart your intuition, often things that seem safe enough together turn oddly caustic or upsetting when actually eaten together. In this case it was cabbage rolls and morel-infused mashed potatoes.
I'd roasted some of the morels so that they'd dry out for use in soups and sauces later. Unfortunately they got a little more brown than is ideal, but it accented their nutty flavors very well. I dropped a few in the water that I boiled the potatoes in, and let the water cook off as I mashed the potatoes so that they preserved the character of the morels. They have a nutty character that might go really well with some pork chops or roasted squash drizzled in truffle oil. They don't really go with the sour tomato and cabbage juice of the cabbage rolls.
Something about having the dill and sauerkraut on my palate just made the potatoes seem out of place and the rich tones of the mushrooms were ever so slightly triggering my gag reflex and making a really unpleasant feeling in my stomach. I couldn't quite pinpoint the problem. The potatoes themselves tasted fine, but so much of them were saturated with the juices and sauce from the cabbage rolls, they weren't really worth eating. Such a shame for those morels to have gone to waste like that, but at least I have the knowledge now and can pass it on to you.
Thankfully, my lunch buddy for the day got a wrap from Burrito Box and didn't eat his chips, so I had fresh tortilla chips and salsa to round out my lunch after a third of it proved to be inedible.
For dinner I had a newer classic in my life, although it's been a classic Japanese food item for quite some time. Most westerners are not familiar with Japanese curry, which is similar to its Indian counterparts almost in texture only, although Japanese curries do tend to feature coriander. Japanese curries have more in common with a beef stew or a heavily spiced pork gravy than with Indian curry.
This picture shows the traditional plating method of rice to one side, curry to the other, with the pork cutlet balancing between. GoGo Curry on 38th St. between 7th and 8th Ave. doesn't plate their curry like this. They put the rice in a mound in the bottom of the bowl with the curry over the entire thing and then the katsu (fried pork cutlet) on top. This actually left less room for gravy and didn't allow for as much fine control of the rice-to-curry ratio as you were eating. GoGo Curry, please fix this.The curry sauce itself was pretty good. I still crave the curry from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Japan, but as far as my options go in Manhattan this is definitely good curry and worth the trip, especially if you've never tried Japanese Curry before. Unlike CoCoIchi's, which I would eat as often as I eat breakfast burritos here in the states, will be back to GoGo Curry, but maybe only once a month.
Then, as if I hadn't eaten enough yet today, there was some late-night vittles for the heavily relaxing crowd that was hanging out at my apt. In order to help them stabilize after all their relaxing, I whipped up some bacon and scrambled eggs before everyone trotted off home. I didn't eat any of the bacon myself, and just enough of the eggs to gauge how well I did in making them. I didn't have time for home fries and no bread for toast, so I just fried some tortillas cut into triangles in the bacon fat. Remember, kids: DON'T WASTE BACON FAT!!!! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!!! Unless you are vegetarian or Jewish or Muslim, in which case I'd recommend just avoiding bacon altogether. You're better off not knowing.
Also, there was the quaint but disappointing final appearance of morels for a while. I went to make floured and fried morels, but when I opened the bag of fresh ones, only two had managed to escape the clutches of mold. Sadly, I had to throw the rest out, and having cut the two survivors in half, I managed to make four small, unattractive, utterly delectable appetizers to the breakfast-at-11 fried-food free-for-all.
Man, irresponsible use of hyphens is almost as fun as rampant run-on sentences.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Tuesday? Hot.
Most people who make yogurt for a living will tell you that yogurt is so good for you that you should eat it once or twice a day. This is because those people have a vested interest in increasing their market base. This doesn't mean they are wrong.I had a yogurt similar to the one pictured above as part of my breakfast. The other part was a sandwich of two Trader Joe's banana waffles with margarine and honey. Something about the gluten-free dough for the banana waffles is so dense and starchy, it hurts my tongue to eat them. These are still from that first box from April and there's still one left in the freezer, waiting for my next moment of extreme desperation for an easy breakfast, having forgotten or buried the shame of the last time.
When I opened the yogurt, I realized I had neither a spoon, nor the desire to get up and get one from the coffee room, so I tilted the cup back and drank the yogurt, very slowly, very very slowly. When the weight of the yogurt sticking to the edges of the cup was no longer enough to pull the yogurt down into my waiting mouth, I poured water into the cup, shook it vigorously like I was making a martini, and drank the resultant yogurt-foam-water.
Lunch was leftover morel pasta with a tomato and mozzarella sandwich from the moz and tomatoes I set to marinate on Monday night. The sandwich was great, but the pasta had frozen during it's stay over the weekend in my work fridge. I guess the temperature was set very low, but the freezing wasn't very good for the cream sauce, the pasta or the morels. Aside from texture issues, it still tasted basically the same. It was just a little disappointing compared to how great it was on Thursday night. The portion was also very light, even for my new attempt at revising my portion expectations, so I had to supplement my lunch with a few handfuls of roasted peanuts I've been keeping in my desk for just such an occasion.
Then for dinner was the glorious return of the chilled zucchini and tomato pasta from Monday night. This time the weather was just as hot, but the pasta was even colder. It helped the zucchini come across very bold and the whole sauce was very exuberant, thanks largely to the very sweet nature of my uncle's tomatoes.
I tried to keep it to a modest portion, but my tummy wanted things to play with, so I had another cup of yogurt (raspberry La Yogurt) to quiet it down. This was an excellent choice because it did not involve the stove at all. Sadly, after a few minutes my tummy was feeling rambunctious again and I had no more good cold food on hand. I broke down and turned on one burner from the stove for about 3 minutes. In that time I cooked a hot dog and warmed up a tortilla in the same pan to avoid having to do more dishes. I could have eaten them cold, but the last time I ate cold hot dog, I think I was decked out in underoos and oshkosh b'gosh overalls, so it's been a year or two.
Monday, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy. Every day, don't eat at Teriyaki Boy
Pretend there was no weekend because it's hard for me to write on the weekend. I have no established routine, and I'm usually way to busy hanging out with friends and/or getting over having just hung out with friends perhaps a little too thoroughly.
This weekend featured an afternoon in the Astoria Beer Garden as part of a friend's visit up from Baltimore, so yeah, lots of recovery needed.
But this is not "Everything I Drank Yesterday" and, actually, I leave a lot of the things I drink out of the picture, mostly because these posts are really long already and if something is going to go, it sure isn't going to be the run-on sentences.
Alright, fine, breakfast, sheesh. Yogurt, Yoplait vanilla yogurt, not the best yogurt I've ever had, but a nice way to start the morning. Last week my local grocer had a sale on various brands of yogurts and I got to thinking about just how different $2 worth of yogurt could be. During the sale, the Yoplait were 3 for $2, and the La Yogurt were 5 for $2. I compared the relative value of these with the high-water mark of Stonyfield Farms whole-milk cream-on-top, which come in at $1.19 per 6oz. single serving cup. For an everyday yogurt with breakfast, the La Yogurt is a much better value without being any notably better or worse than the Yoplait. The Stonyfield Farms is a marked improvement over both if you're the sort of person to splurge on yogurt. If you're not, you're probably wondering why you are still reading this blog.
Also up to bat for breakfast was a pepperoni roll and an oatmeal cream pie, both of which had been crushed by a week or more of floating in my bag. In the case of the pepperoni roll, this made the grease-soaked portions of the bread that much more prominent as the big puffy bread on top got compressed. The oatmeal cream pie went through this strange transformation and came out more like oatmeal taffy than anything that "cream" or "pie" might bring to mind. It must have gotten hot in my bag and the icing must have melted into the rest of the sandwich a bit. Looked like hell, tasted fine.
Lunch was served by a rather rude Teriyaki Boy cashier who was not Japanese. I don't want to disparage any cultures in particular, but if this was a bento chain in Japan, I would have been treated a lot better.
I ordered the teriyaki chicken and shrimp shu mai combo. The cashier told me the combo came with soda or miso soup. Seeing as it was well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I opted for soda. She took my money. I got change. Then I stepped aside to wait for my food and complimentary soda.
As she did with me, when indicating the free soda, she gestured to her left, my right, most directly to this line of bottled waters and teas sitting above the sushi cooler. These were obviously tepid, though, and none of them were soda. As one's eyes continued left, one saw the cooler full of these bottles and also cans of soda. I wasn't sure if she gave me the soda, or if I just took the soda. I tried to ask, but she was too busy with the line and didn't show any interest in taking my question, although other patrons in line did notice me trying to ask. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to the cooler and got a brand of green tea that I enjoyed in Japan. I took my food to a corner of the tiny box that is the restaurant and sat down to eat with a Korean friend of mine.
We were about half-way through our meal when I hear "Hey you! You get tea!"
"Huh? Yeah, out of the-"
"Tea not soda. You get tea."
"Oh, my bad. What's the difference."
"The tea is $2.50."
"No, I mean, how much more is the tea than the soda? Can I just pay the difference?"
"Soda is free. Tea is $2.50."
Perhaps in reading this you think I am being unfair about her mastery of the English language. I have spent a lot of time teaching English as a second language and making close friends with non-native speakers. This woman was just excessively rude. Beyond the business self-sabotage of gouging customers over a simple mistake, her tone of voice, as well as that of the manager that came forward, was highly combative. Just because I wear a button-down and a tie to work doesn't make me some rich asshole who doesn't care about an extra $2.50 added onto my lunch budget. My own tone became a bit combative, I'm sure. I debated walking out of the restaurant, leaving the rest of my lunch and the tea, but I didn't feel like starting a big ordeal, deciding instead to pay my $2.50 rather unceremoniously and then bad mouth them on my blog.
I know New Yorker's can be ass holes, and I know white guys in ties can be really big ass holes, but the treatment I got as a customer was completely uncalled for. I wasn't being hostile. If they had said "I'm sorry for the understanding, but you did open the tea. I apologize but I can't ring up the tea with a discount. You do need to pay for the tea." I would have been in a much better mood about it, and would be a lot more likely to eat there again. Some time around the manager insisting that the soda was "free" and could not be deducted from the cost of the tea, both my friend and I, and likely several other patrons, decided not to return to this place of business again.
I know my review of the food may seem unfairly tarnished in light of my mood so allow me to simply equate it to mall food court "Japanese" food to give a slightly more objective frame of reference. At over $7 for the lunch combo, and at almost $10 dollars after this tea debacle, the lunch was a big disappointment for me. The service certainly did not remind me of the bento chains I know and love from Japan. That neither the cashier nor the manager seemed to have any interest in my feelings as a customer, and that deducting the cost of a soda from my purchase of the tea was an absolutely unreasonable request on my part, speak volumes against the character of the Teriyaki Boy chain, or at least the branch on 9th Ave between 57th and 58th Streets.
OK, I'm over it. I'll just have to make my own bento from now on. I've been looking for an excuse to try to make some tsukemono anyway. I just hope my roommates can stand the smell.
For dinner I made one of those dishes I make that I don't have a name for except for cobbling together a bunch of other food names into some unworkable lump that really doesn't give a good indication of what it is I actually made. This was a vegetarian provincial gazpacho pasta casserole. Your mouth probably isn't watering yet.
I took about 7 cloves of garlic, cut them into 1/8" thick slices and fried them in olive oil on a medium heat until they started to brown. Then I added two medium sized (about 7") zucchini, partially peeled, quartered lengthwise and then cut into chunks about 1/2" thick. I let the zucchini sautée with the garlic, dusting it with a little Adobo seasoning, and turned up the heat a bit to promote browning as I diced two of my Uncle's very large beefsteak tomatoes.
After I added the tomatoes, I seasoned the sauce with dried dill, oregano, sage, white and black pepper and a touch of cinnamon. I let the sauce simmer until the tomatoes and zucchini started to break down a bit. Then I added plain bread crumbs just until any loose moisture seemed to be soaked up.
While that was going on I made some bucatini, a hollow pasta just big enough for spaghetti to wear as a jacket. When that was done, I gave it a good rinse in cold water so that I could toss it with my hands, and so it would stop steaming, since the humidity was already over 60%. When it was just warm, I mixed in two tablespoons of butter and some black pepper. I layed the bucatini on top of the sauce and set the whole pan of it to chill in the fridge.
I also set alternating slices of another one of my uncle's tomatoes and a ball of fresh mozzarella to marinate in some balsamic vinegar.
Once the pasta was nice and cold, I cut a wedge out of the pan and flipped it out onto a plate so that the sauce was on top. I cut about 6" off an Italian baguette and made a sandwich with the marinated tomato and moz and "Voilla!" 20 minutes of actual cooking time for a great summer dinner. I'm sure you could eat it hot, but it was extremely unpleasant already. Just taking my new fan out of it's box had me dripping with sweat. This was great cold and really took the edge off the heat as well as being a very hearty vegetarian dinner.
Alright, I'm starting to sound like Rachel Ray again. I'm gonna go do a few more hours of aversion therapy. Try that pasta dish, srsly, it has a flavor.
This weekend featured an afternoon in the Astoria Beer Garden as part of a friend's visit up from Baltimore, so yeah, lots of recovery needed.
But this is not "Everything I Drank Yesterday" and, actually, I leave a lot of the things I drink out of the picture, mostly because these posts are really long already and if something is going to go, it sure isn't going to be the run-on sentences.
Alright, fine, breakfast, sheesh. Yogurt, Yoplait vanilla yogurt, not the best yogurt I've ever had, but a nice way to start the morning. Last week my local grocer had a sale on various brands of yogurts and I got to thinking about just how different $2 worth of yogurt could be. During the sale, the Yoplait were 3 for $2, and the La Yogurt were 5 for $2. I compared the relative value of these with the high-water mark of Stonyfield Farms whole-milk cream-on-top, which come in at $1.19 per 6oz. single serving cup. For an everyday yogurt with breakfast, the La Yogurt is a much better value without being any notably better or worse than the Yoplait. The Stonyfield Farms is a marked improvement over both if you're the sort of person to splurge on yogurt. If you're not, you're probably wondering why you are still reading this blog.
Also up to bat for breakfast was a pepperoni roll and an oatmeal cream pie, both of which had been crushed by a week or more of floating in my bag. In the case of the pepperoni roll, this made the grease-soaked portions of the bread that much more prominent as the big puffy bread on top got compressed. The oatmeal cream pie went through this strange transformation and came out more like oatmeal taffy than anything that "cream" or "pie" might bring to mind. It must have gotten hot in my bag and the icing must have melted into the rest of the sandwich a bit. Looked like hell, tasted fine.
Lunch was served by a rather rude Teriyaki Boy cashier who was not Japanese. I don't want to disparage any cultures in particular, but if this was a bento chain in Japan, I would have been treated a lot better.
I ordered the teriyaki chicken and shrimp shu mai combo. The cashier told me the combo came with soda or miso soup. Seeing as it was well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I opted for soda. She took my money. I got change. Then I stepped aside to wait for my food and complimentary soda.
As she did with me, when indicating the free soda, she gestured to her left, my right, most directly to this line of bottled waters and teas sitting above the sushi cooler. These were obviously tepid, though, and none of them were soda. As one's eyes continued left, one saw the cooler full of these bottles and also cans of soda. I wasn't sure if she gave me the soda, or if I just took the soda. I tried to ask, but she was too busy with the line and didn't show any interest in taking my question, although other patrons in line did notice me trying to ask. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to the cooler and got a brand of green tea that I enjoyed in Japan. I took my food to a corner of the tiny box that is the restaurant and sat down to eat with a Korean friend of mine.
We were about half-way through our meal when I hear "Hey you! You get tea!"
"Huh? Yeah, out of the-"
"Tea not soda. You get tea."
"Oh, my bad. What's the difference."
"The tea is $2.50."
"No, I mean, how much more is the tea than the soda? Can I just pay the difference?"
"Soda is free. Tea is $2.50."
Perhaps in reading this you think I am being unfair about her mastery of the English language. I have spent a lot of time teaching English as a second language and making close friends with non-native speakers. This woman was just excessively rude. Beyond the business self-sabotage of gouging customers over a simple mistake, her tone of voice, as well as that of the manager that came forward, was highly combative. Just because I wear a button-down and a tie to work doesn't make me some rich asshole who doesn't care about an extra $2.50 added onto my lunch budget. My own tone became a bit combative, I'm sure. I debated walking out of the restaurant, leaving the rest of my lunch and the tea, but I didn't feel like starting a big ordeal, deciding instead to pay my $2.50 rather unceremoniously and then bad mouth them on my blog.
I know New Yorker's can be ass holes, and I know white guys in ties can be really big ass holes, but the treatment I got as a customer was completely uncalled for. I wasn't being hostile. If they had said "I'm sorry for the understanding, but you did open the tea. I apologize but I can't ring up the tea with a discount. You do need to pay for the tea." I would have been in a much better mood about it, and would be a lot more likely to eat there again. Some time around the manager insisting that the soda was "free" and could not be deducted from the cost of the tea, both my friend and I, and likely several other patrons, decided not to return to this place of business again.
I know my review of the food may seem unfairly tarnished in light of my mood so allow me to simply equate it to mall food court "Japanese" food to give a slightly more objective frame of reference. At over $7 for the lunch combo, and at almost $10 dollars after this tea debacle, the lunch was a big disappointment for me. The service certainly did not remind me of the bento chains I know and love from Japan. That neither the cashier nor the manager seemed to have any interest in my feelings as a customer, and that deducting the cost of a soda from my purchase of the tea was an absolutely unreasonable request on my part, speak volumes against the character of the Teriyaki Boy chain, or at least the branch on 9th Ave between 57th and 58th Streets.
OK, I'm over it. I'll just have to make my own bento from now on. I've been looking for an excuse to try to make some tsukemono anyway. I just hope my roommates can stand the smell.
For dinner I made one of those dishes I make that I don't have a name for except for cobbling together a bunch of other food names into some unworkable lump that really doesn't give a good indication of what it is I actually made. This was a vegetarian provincial gazpacho pasta casserole. Your mouth probably isn't watering yet.
I took about 7 cloves of garlic, cut them into 1/8" thick slices and fried them in olive oil on a medium heat until they started to brown. Then I added two medium sized (about 7") zucchini, partially peeled, quartered lengthwise and then cut into chunks about 1/2" thick. I let the zucchini sautée with the garlic, dusting it with a little Adobo seasoning, and turned up the heat a bit to promote browning as I diced two of my Uncle's very large beefsteak tomatoes.
After I added the tomatoes, I seasoned the sauce with dried dill, oregano, sage, white and black pepper and a touch of cinnamon. I let the sauce simmer until the tomatoes and zucchini started to break down a bit. Then I added plain bread crumbs just until any loose moisture seemed to be soaked up.
While that was going on I made some bucatini, a hollow pasta just big enough for spaghetti to wear as a jacket. When that was done, I gave it a good rinse in cold water so that I could toss it with my hands, and so it would stop steaming, since the humidity was already over 60%. When it was just warm, I mixed in two tablespoons of butter and some black pepper. I layed the bucatini on top of the sauce and set the whole pan of it to chill in the fridge.
I also set alternating slices of another one of my uncle's tomatoes and a ball of fresh mozzarella to marinate in some balsamic vinegar.
Once the pasta was nice and cold, I cut a wedge out of the pan and flipped it out onto a plate so that the sauce was on top. I cut about 6" off an Italian baguette and made a sandwich with the marinated tomato and moz and "Voilla!" 20 minutes of actual cooking time for a great summer dinner. I'm sure you could eat it hot, but it was extremely unpleasant already. Just taking my new fan out of it's box had me dripping with sweat. This was great cold and really took the edge off the heat as well as being a very hearty vegetarian dinner.
Alright, I'm starting to sound like Rachel Ray again. I'm gonna go do a few more hours of aversion therapy. Try that pasta dish, srsly, it has a flavor.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Thursday? Free food? It sure does feel good to be back.
This job rules. This is the kind of temping assignment other temps will shiv you for in the temp repository and wear your face as a mask in a ruthless bid for power.
I had a feeling it was going to be a free food day today. It was, after all, Thursday, named after Thurstarski, Norse god of fertility and tax write-offs. My contracted employer being a Jesuit institution, it, of course, upholds these time-honored Pagan practices.
All the same I have some pride in being able to provide for myself, and free food for us serfs doesn't kick in till the nobility have their fill, which means waiting till 2 or 3 for lunch. Free coffee + late lunch = cranky serfs, so I packed a few things for the slow crawl to 3pm that you could kind of call breakfast. Over the course of the morning I had a cup of vanilla yogurt, two pepperoni rolls, and some peanuts. Eaten periodically over the morning this kept me going. I didn't have time to mess around in the kitchen and make any kind of impressive breakfast and there was still some of my heavy dinner right before bed on Wednesday knocking around in my system.
Free lunch was a little upscale yesterday as it was some sort of sponsors meeting. Still sandwiches and salad, but nicer than the spread I was used to. I had half an herbed chicken breast sandwich with roasted red peppers and some caesar salad. You could actually taste the anchovies in the caesar dressing and it was all quality cuts of romaine lettuce. The chicken breast was not particularly inspired, but it was actual breast fillet, not over-preserved slices of lunch meat.
There were cookies, but not like the cookie parades of Thursdays gone by. The dessert selection was actually a little depressing, considering the apparent attempt to impress. I had an oatmeal raisin cookie and half of some white-chocolate-chip-in-chocolate-cookie-lookin-kind-of-cookie. It wasn't bad, I just only wanted half.
I also ate quite a bit of pineapple, several strawberries and a blackberry. Fruits are good for you and take on a nice sparkle when you soak them in ginger ale.
In addition to the soda and water, there were two bottles each of chardonnay and pinot noir. I don't remember the vineyard; it wasn't anything I recognized from Trader Joe's wine selection, anyway. I only had a splash of the pinot noir because reds tend to give me migraines. I had a glass of the chardonnay because it was there and it was already after 3 on a kind of slow Thursday afternoon. Both of them were palatable, but I am fairly deficient in describing wines beyond "ugh, bad!" or "WOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm rather plastered." I think often the people that write those wine descriptions just make them up, anyway. "Tones of apple and mahogony with an edge of cut grass and whisps of the dreams tulips have in April." Complete B.S.
And then dinner, well, let's just say that dinner left me hung over for work on Friday. Well, let's say a little more so that my mother doesn't think all I had for dinner was two 22oz. bottles of Private Stock and a Budwiser pounder. I also had one modest black bean and chorizo burrito, well, more of a soft taco, anyway. Beer has lots of calories so I didn't need to eat so much food, right? I think I also had a handful of "Hint of Lime" tortilla chips and some salsa.
Lots of vitamins in salsa, there is.
There is, however, little wonder as to why I woke up with quite a headache on Friday.
I had a feeling it was going to be a free food day today. It was, after all, Thursday, named after Thurstarski, Norse god of fertility and tax write-offs. My contracted employer being a Jesuit institution, it, of course, upholds these time-honored Pagan practices.
All the same I have some pride in being able to provide for myself, and free food for us serfs doesn't kick in till the nobility have their fill, which means waiting till 2 or 3 for lunch. Free coffee + late lunch = cranky serfs, so I packed a few things for the slow crawl to 3pm that you could kind of call breakfast. Over the course of the morning I had a cup of vanilla yogurt, two pepperoni rolls, and some peanuts. Eaten periodically over the morning this kept me going. I didn't have time to mess around in the kitchen and make any kind of impressive breakfast and there was still some of my heavy dinner right before bed on Wednesday knocking around in my system.
Free lunch was a little upscale yesterday as it was some sort of sponsors meeting. Still sandwiches and salad, but nicer than the spread I was used to. I had half an herbed chicken breast sandwich with roasted red peppers and some caesar salad. You could actually taste the anchovies in the caesar dressing and it was all quality cuts of romaine lettuce. The chicken breast was not particularly inspired, but it was actual breast fillet, not over-preserved slices of lunch meat.
There were cookies, but not like the cookie parades of Thursdays gone by. The dessert selection was actually a little depressing, considering the apparent attempt to impress. I had an oatmeal raisin cookie and half of some white-chocolate-chip-in-chocolate-cookie-lookin-kind-of-cookie. It wasn't bad, I just only wanted half.
I also ate quite a bit of pineapple, several strawberries and a blackberry. Fruits are good for you and take on a nice sparkle when you soak them in ginger ale.
In addition to the soda and water, there were two bottles each of chardonnay and pinot noir. I don't remember the vineyard; it wasn't anything I recognized from Trader Joe's wine selection, anyway. I only had a splash of the pinot noir because reds tend to give me migraines. I had a glass of the chardonnay because it was there and it was already after 3 on a kind of slow Thursday afternoon. Both of them were palatable, but I am fairly deficient in describing wines beyond "ugh, bad!" or "WOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm rather plastered." I think often the people that write those wine descriptions just make them up, anyway. "Tones of apple and mahogony with an edge of cut grass and whisps of the dreams tulips have in April." Complete B.S.
And then dinner, well, let's just say that dinner left me hung over for work on Friday. Well, let's say a little more so that my mother doesn't think all I had for dinner was two 22oz. bottles of Private Stock and a Budwiser pounder. I also had one modest black bean and chorizo burrito, well, more of a soft taco, anyway. Beer has lots of calories so I didn't need to eat so much food, right? I think I also had a handful of "Hint of Lime" tortilla chips and some salsa.
Lots of vitamins in salsa, there is.
There is, however, little wonder as to why I woke up with quite a headache on Friday.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
The yesterday that was Wednesday, the fourth day of June.
Reading this, you might think I'm a chubbywubkins. Well, I am, kind of. I'm fat for a Japanese guy. I'm about 20 lbs. heavier than I was in Japan, actually. I think that has a lot to do with portion sizing. It's disheartening to see how quickly I fell back into the gluttonous American meal-metering after developing much healthier habits in Japan.
So without being too blunt about it, I'm gonna try to rein in the gorge machine. To that end, the morning's breakfast burritos lost the "s" at the end, and dropped down to just one slice of bacon. If you cut the bacon into pieces and fry everything in the grease, you get a pretty thorough penetration of baconosity. I'm going to fry everything in the grease anyway, mottainai yo, don't waste shit, but this cuts the baconborne fat by half on average.
I also stuffed the whole egg mess into one tortilla. I am not advocating that anti-carb garbage, but it does significantly reduce the cost and carbon footprint per breakfast. Packaging can change our world, waistline and bottom line.
Why do I sound like Rachel Ray? Needs me an MRI or a Haffenreffer or something.
The great thing about breakfast was also the great thing about dinner and probably about lunch on Thursday. Morels. I came back from West PA with quite a haul. As I was frying the bacon, I threw in some of the smaller ones, cut into rings and a thin spear of asparagus cut into lil' slices. I would have liked to have had a more buttery, subtle cheese, but all I had to work with was a pre-shredded Monterrey jack and cheddar mix. I used it sparingly so as not to bury the subtle nutty edges of the morels. This was just to whet my morel appetite, though. I would be digging into them in earnest that evening.
But first, a reasonable lunch. The benefit of the pepperoni rolls made from sandwich roll dough is that they develop a large cavity inside and give very easily for further stuffing. I had two pepperoni rolls stuffed with lettuce, red onion and a hefty wedge of one of Uncle Jack's tomatoes, dusted with some Adobo seasoning. The tomatoes are huge, though, and after stuffing the pepperoni rolls, I still had 2/3rds of the half I had cut for the purpose. I ate the rest of the half as a side, and that was a full lunch. The other half had a different fate decided not by myself, but by my vegetarian roommate before dinner.
And it was a great dinner. I started with a recipe for fettuccine with asparagus and morels in cream sauce. Not a bad recipe, but I had to dance around the chicken stock. I wanted to use fresh morels, but that wouldn't provide me with water infused with the morel flavor to use as the extra fluid in the recipe. Instead, I boiled the fettuccine in just a little more water than was needed to cover, about 4 cups, and added a few of the dried morels, about 5, a tsp of Adobo seasoning, half a very small onion and about a Tbsp. of garlic juice from the jar of pre-diced garlic in the back of the fridge. After reserving the fettuccine, I used this "stock" for the extra fluid in the sauce.
The results were thoroughly satisfying and completely vegetarian. Who needs that pesky chicken stock anyway? I'm just supposed to keep the stuff laying around on the off chance that some wacky recipe requires it? Are they going to provide me with some convenient means of storage for this presumably ubiquitous kitchen need?
Damn the man!
Reduce your carbon foot print!
Boycott Rachel Ray!
I also had a slice of 3-cheese Texas toast.
So without being too blunt about it, I'm gonna try to rein in the gorge machine. To that end, the morning's breakfast burritos lost the "s" at the end, and dropped down to just one slice of bacon. If you cut the bacon into pieces and fry everything in the grease, you get a pretty thorough penetration of baconosity. I'm going to fry everything in the grease anyway, mottainai yo, don't waste shit, but this cuts the baconborne fat by half on average.
I also stuffed the whole egg mess into one tortilla. I am not advocating that anti-carb garbage, but it does significantly reduce the cost and carbon footprint per breakfast. Packaging can change our world, waistline and bottom line.
Why do I sound like Rachel Ray? Needs me an MRI or a Haffenreffer or something.
The great thing about breakfast was also the great thing about dinner and probably about lunch on Thursday. Morels. I came back from West PA with quite a haul. As I was frying the bacon, I threw in some of the smaller ones, cut into rings and a thin spear of asparagus cut into lil' slices. I would have liked to have had a more buttery, subtle cheese, but all I had to work with was a pre-shredded Monterrey jack and cheddar mix. I used it sparingly so as not to bury the subtle nutty edges of the morels. This was just to whet my morel appetite, though. I would be digging into them in earnest that evening.
But first, a reasonable lunch. The benefit of the pepperoni rolls made from sandwich roll dough is that they develop a large cavity inside and give very easily for further stuffing. I had two pepperoni rolls stuffed with lettuce, red onion and a hefty wedge of one of Uncle Jack's tomatoes, dusted with some Adobo seasoning. The tomatoes are huge, though, and after stuffing the pepperoni rolls, I still had 2/3rds of the half I had cut for the purpose. I ate the rest of the half as a side, and that was a full lunch. The other half had a different fate decided not by myself, but by my vegetarian roommate before dinner.
And it was a great dinner. I started with a recipe for fettuccine with asparagus and morels in cream sauce. Not a bad recipe, but I had to dance around the chicken stock. I wanted to use fresh morels, but that wouldn't provide me with water infused with the morel flavor to use as the extra fluid in the recipe. Instead, I boiled the fettuccine in just a little more water than was needed to cover, about 4 cups, and added a few of the dried morels, about 5, a tsp of Adobo seasoning, half a very small onion and about a Tbsp. of garlic juice from the jar of pre-diced garlic in the back of the fridge. After reserving the fettuccine, I used this "stock" for the extra fluid in the sauce.
The results were thoroughly satisfying and completely vegetarian. Who needs that pesky chicken stock anyway? I'm just supposed to keep the stuff laying around on the off chance that some wacky recipe requires it? Are they going to provide me with some convenient means of storage for this presumably ubiquitous kitchen need?
Damn the man!
Reduce your carbon foot print!
Boycott Rachel Ray!
I also had a slice of 3-cheese Texas toast.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Special Bargainnaisseur Recommendation
Haffenreffer's Private Stock Malt Liquor.
Seriously. So affordable. So drinkable. It has liberated me from the Budwiser-induced cheap-beer doldrums. The events upon which I stumbled into this bodega gem are rather auspicious as well, moving this delightful quaff from simple bargain boozing into what is likely to be a life-long love affair.
This all started the second week of May, during the blog's dark period. I was in a friend's final project for her playwriting program at Columbia University and I was playing an adaptation of Falstaff as the imaginary friend of a not-so young anymore Hank Cinq interested in trading up for a better model of imaginary friend, sniveling, flax-nosed, ungrateful, malmsy jackanape.
Having only a week to prepare this production and being a bit out of practice with the intricacies of building a character's physicality, I decided to seek pharmacological help in developing the persona of an inveterate drunkard. Perusing the selection at my local bodega, I of course gravitated towards the malt liquor, just to take away any pretense of legitimacy to the affair. I wanted a troubled, desperate drunk full of self-importance and airs of grandeur, self-aware of the charade of life and dedicated to easing the dolor and tension of or mortal contrivances with bombastic investment in our baser instincts. Where amongst the bottom-dollar brews was the shining star, Sir John's quality quaff of choice? Old English, too obvious an appeal to the Bard and I never really took to the stuff. St. Ides? Of all the things Sir John might do to a sorority girl hell-bent on self-destructive debauchery, championing her inebriatory proclivities is not on that list, not on the short list of things he'd do while not actively bedding said bacchannette anyway.
Thus it was that, tempted by imperial green glass and regal gold foil label proudly proclaiming distinction in script and heraldic seal, I brought home two 24 oz. bottles of Haffenreffer Private Stock Malt Liquor and a fifth of White Horse whiskey just to rinse away any hope of a pleasant, respectable drunk.
That was all a little too much booze for one man on a Wednesday night, though. I had expected the roommates to lend a liver to the cause, but neither were interested in getting shitcanned. Drinking alone never seemed to deter Falstaff, though, so undaunted by my lack of confederates, I plowed on through one of the Private Stocks and more of the White Horse than I really should have before ceding that Everyday Shooter does not mix well with advanced inebriation unless your goal is to explore several shades of futility and despair. Fortunately this did work to inform my character's emotional climax.
It wasn't till after the production had run it's course, later into the following week, that one of my roommates offhandedly declared how surprisingly good the Private Stock was. I had left one in the fridge and gone to Philly for the weekend. We're very open about the nature of booze in the apartment, which is highly volatile and prone to spontaneous potation, regardless of how it came into our happy home. There in that moment was our realization of the thing before us, some sublime new convergence of potability, price and punch.
Ever since that day, it's been my bodega buzz of choice. The 24oz. bottles are the perfect size for the weeknight wind-down and two will get you pretty much as drunk as you want to be depending on your pacing. At $1.50 per, there's really no contest. But really, how does it taste? Up front it's about as unassuming as a beverage that tries to be like beer but fails to legally qualify can really claim to be. It stands far above Colt 45 and Old English 800, and is worlds better than any hoposhu the Nipponese put out. I'm thankfully not too familiar with any other near-beers of the world, but I defy my readership to find a better pretender to the throne than good old Haffy. There's a piquant bite as it rushes back that adds a refreshing quality to the belches that sizable quaffing is bound to stimulate. Even as it starts to warm up, it's still well better than many actual beers in a similar price range.
But why the whole story about the play and all that bs Shakespearean vocabulary conflation? Well, as I humbly sought to fact-check my spelling of this grand beverage, I stumbled upon the history of this most humbly blessid of inebriants. Originally brewed in Boston, MA by one Rudolph Haffenreffer, Sr., the brand was eventually bought by and is currently distributed by none other than Falstaff Brewing. Yessiree, John. Seems like the spirit of the merry mirthmaker reached through the aether to guide my quest to know him better. I would say that my mind processed the word "Falstaff" on the label in an extremely sneaky subversion of my illusory intuition, but the label never carries the word "Falstaff," instead billing Narragansett Brewing Co., the current brew house, as the place of origin.
Ok, maybe not the eeriest of convergences. It's no soviet radioactive monster mystery, but it gave me pause this afternoon. Theater tends to put one in a superstitious frame of mind, though.
Long to short: Drink Private Stock. It's good for you. Kind of.
The Haffenreffer to Falstaff Story
Reviews of Private Stock
So happy to oblige you, mr. colon.
Breakfast yesterday, perhaps not so impressive, but personally rewarding just because of the rarity of this food item in my life, two pepperoni rolls. If you're not familiar with pepperoni rolls, the name is pretty self-explanatory. It's bread wrapped around pepperoni and then baked. There are lots of versions of this around the world, or at least around the parts of the world where pepperoni and bread are common enough. My favorite iteration were the pepperoni rolls from a now defunct supermarket chain in my home town that used pepperoni cut into sticks about 3/8" wide and 3' long with a dough that featured corn flour, making for a sweet, crumbly roll that became very crispy on the bottom as the pepperoni oils released into the baking pan.
The best my hometown currently has to offer is about 5 slices of pepperoni cut in sturdy slices from a roll that is about 3" across wrapped up in a swirl of dough that might otherwise end up as a hot dog bun or sandwich roll. The roll is entirely closed so all of the pepperoni juices stay in the roll and saturate the surrounding bread, but the bread itself isn't very interesting. Still, two of them provided a solid enough breakfast without pushing my insides too far after yesterday's strange dyspepsia.
Lunch was another dietary rarity of note that I only get when I go back to my home town, cabbage rolls. I have a stronger emotional attachment to these rolls than the ones I ate for breakfast because this is my soul food. My mother makes these Eastern European specialties when I manage to beg her enough. They are no small feat, since they require hours of preparation, so we usually make them by the dozens, usually for big family events, but this time they were mainly for me to take several Tupperware containers full of them back to Manhattan. (Run-on running gag, how would I explain myself without you?)
The cabbage rolls were done when I got home Friday night, but there was no shortage of food all weekend and it was my goal to not gain 5 lbs. while home for the weekend. As you may have guessed by my choice of blogspiration, my family's main form of recreation, communication, consolation, celebration and affirmation is food. We are not a thin family, but not as hefty as you might think. Through the family breakfasts, 50th birthday parties, Stanley Cup Finals noshing, more family breakfasts and Sunday night grill-fests I didn't get a chance to dive into my cabbage roll stockpile until lunch today.
I threw a few frozen french fries on top of two cabbage rolls with a healthy dollop of the excess cabbage, sauerkraut, dill and tomato juice that they are roasted in. I like to eat the cabbage rolls with mashed potatoes, but I didn't really have time to make mashed potatoes before work. They were uncooked, standard-cut seasoned fries. I nuked them for a minute before microwaving the whole thing for about 3 minutes with occasional stirring, and in all the simmering in juices and whatnots they came out pretty close to mashed potatoes anyway. They were a great lunch, anyway. I have about 18 more where those came from and I am looking forward to making a big pile of mashed potatoes and tucking in to some serious Slovak sustenance some supper soon.
But not in this posting. Dinner was a Thai curry done up from scratch. My local grocer doesn't have Thai curry paste readily available and I haven't made it a priority to pick any up as I wander the city's myriad fooderies so last night I broke out the food processor and set to work.
I didn't have a recipe on hand, but I was adapting my Indian curry starter to the occasion. I'd read up on Thai curries one afternoon about four years ago, so I wouldn't take this as authoritative, but the results were highly edible so you can take this basic outline as a springboard for your own exploration.
The best my hometown currently has to offer is about 5 slices of pepperoni cut in sturdy slices from a roll that is about 3" across wrapped up in a swirl of dough that might otherwise end up as a hot dog bun or sandwich roll. The roll is entirely closed so all of the pepperoni juices stay in the roll and saturate the surrounding bread, but the bread itself isn't very interesting. Still, two of them provided a solid enough breakfast without pushing my insides too far after yesterday's strange dyspepsia.
Lunch was another dietary rarity of note that I only get when I go back to my home town, cabbage rolls. I have a stronger emotional attachment to these rolls than the ones I ate for breakfast because this is my soul food. My mother makes these Eastern European specialties when I manage to beg her enough. They are no small feat, since they require hours of preparation, so we usually make them by the dozens, usually for big family events, but this time they were mainly for me to take several Tupperware containers full of them back to Manhattan. (Run-on running gag, how would I explain myself without you?)
The cabbage rolls were done when I got home Friday night, but there was no shortage of food all weekend and it was my goal to not gain 5 lbs. while home for the weekend. As you may have guessed by my choice of blogspiration, my family's main form of recreation, communication, consolation, celebration and affirmation is food. We are not a thin family, but not as hefty as you might think. Through the family breakfasts, 50th birthday parties, Stanley Cup Finals noshing, more family breakfasts and Sunday night grill-fests I didn't get a chance to dive into my cabbage roll stockpile until lunch today.
I threw a few frozen french fries on top of two cabbage rolls with a healthy dollop of the excess cabbage, sauerkraut, dill and tomato juice that they are roasted in. I like to eat the cabbage rolls with mashed potatoes, but I didn't really have time to make mashed potatoes before work. They were uncooked, standard-cut seasoned fries. I nuked them for a minute before microwaving the whole thing for about 3 minutes with occasional stirring, and in all the simmering in juices and whatnots they came out pretty close to mashed potatoes anyway. They were a great lunch, anyway. I have about 18 more where those came from and I am looking forward to making a big pile of mashed potatoes and tucking in to some serious Slovak sustenance some supper soon.
But not in this posting. Dinner was a Thai curry done up from scratch. My local grocer doesn't have Thai curry paste readily available and I haven't made it a priority to pick any up as I wander the city's myriad fooderies so last night I broke out the food processor and set to work.
I didn't have a recipe on hand, but I was adapting my Indian curry starter to the occasion. I'd read up on Thai curries one afternoon about four years ago, so I wouldn't take this as authoritative, but the results were highly edible so you can take this basic outline as a springboard for your own exploration.
I started with 7 cloves of garlic, a 2"x1" piece of ginger, as much of my lemon basil plant as I could cut back in good conscience (two stems about 3" long and the resulting leaves, admittedly not that much) and two tablespoons of the spicy tomato soup from my uncle's greenhouse operation. This initial paste could have benefited from more ginger, more basil, and some lemongrass or kaffir lime leaves, if I would have had any on hand. The food processor also makes a very chunky paste. Real scratch enthusiasts will encourage you to grind the ingredients together, but I just didn't have the audacious ambition to pour an hour of my life into my mortar and pestle.
Toss the paste into a pan with a little oil. I used olive oil with a kiss of sesame oil because that was what was easiest to reach out of my pantry. I fried cubed potatoes in the paste until they started to brown, then I added some carrots and onions till the onions started to soften and I doused the whole thing off with two cans of coconut milk.
I transfered about a cup of this mixture to a small pot on the side, added a cup of water and used this to stew a chicken leg/thigh. The separate cooking method was out of deference to my roommate's vegetarianism. The curry didn't really need meat but the chicken had been in the freezer for quite some time and was in need of being eaten. It was just begging for it. I obliged.
As the main curry was getting on, I added a cubanelle pepper and about 20 whole basil leaves, also begging to be eaten before their prime was lost to the entropy of the produce drawer. The stems to the basil I added to the pot with the chicken. Then I added about two teaspoons of chili powder and a similar amount of dried ginger to compensate for the lack of ginger in the initial paste. Then I finished the curry with a dash of Adobo seasoning and the juice of one lime, tossing the juiced lime rinds into the chicken's pot. All of this stewed a bit as we waited for the rice cooker to finish it's job. I started the jasmine rice a bit late. Then I spent about half an hour on the phone with an old friend from home before pulling the chicken meat and devouring a big bowl of spicy, creamy, tart curryliciousness.
As an epilogue, the vegetarian roommate never did come back for dinner. I can only infer that he came home as his door was firmly shut when I woke up this morning. He must have been out late, getting drunk, chasing tail. Ah, cosplay, how you do lead manboys to ruin.
That's probably not as true as either of us want it to be, but why do we have roommates if not to fictionalize their lives for our own amusement?
Toss the paste into a pan with a little oil. I used olive oil with a kiss of sesame oil because that was what was easiest to reach out of my pantry. I fried cubed potatoes in the paste until they started to brown, then I added some carrots and onions till the onions started to soften and I doused the whole thing off with two cans of coconut milk.
I transfered about a cup of this mixture to a small pot on the side, added a cup of water and used this to stew a chicken leg/thigh. The separate cooking method was out of deference to my roommate's vegetarianism. The curry didn't really need meat but the chicken had been in the freezer for quite some time and was in need of being eaten. It was just begging for it. I obliged.
As the main curry was getting on, I added a cubanelle pepper and about 20 whole basil leaves, also begging to be eaten before their prime was lost to the entropy of the produce drawer. The stems to the basil I added to the pot with the chicken. Then I added about two teaspoons of chili powder and a similar amount of dried ginger to compensate for the lack of ginger in the initial paste. Then I finished the curry with a dash of Adobo seasoning and the juice of one lime, tossing the juiced lime rinds into the chicken's pot. All of this stewed a bit as we waited for the rice cooker to finish it's job. I started the jasmine rice a bit late. Then I spent about half an hour on the phone with an old friend from home before pulling the chicken meat and devouring a big bowl of spicy, creamy, tart curryliciousness.
As an epilogue, the vegetarian roommate never did come back for dinner. I can only infer that he came home as his door was firmly shut when I woke up this morning. He must have been out late, getting drunk, chasing tail. Ah, cosplay, how you do lead manboys to ruin.
That's probably not as true as either of us want it to be, but why do we have roommates if not to fictionalize their lives for our own amusement?
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Monday on the road, in gastric distress.
I don't want to blame it on Sheetz, but that was the last thing I ate that felt normal yesterday.
I had a Meltz with sausage, egg, American cheese, ketchup an black pepper. I describe it with such exacting ordered detail because that's how I ordered it. If you've never ordered from the Sheetz MTO touchscreen menus, you're missing out on the opportunity to order a hot dog with cheddar cheese, chili, baked beans, onions, mustard, sauerkraut, pickles, banana peppers and bacon without ever having to face the looks of horror, disgust and envy that placing such orders out loud tends to elicit from cashiers and passers by. In such dire moments of swill abuse no one will know your shame besides yourself and the shlave in the back who will wrap your colon's worst night mare in an nondescript opaque wrapper and hand it to the cashier to scan and never question.
It being 8am, not 3am, and me being about to drive across four states with my girlfriend, not about to make a very poor decision under the influence of the drunk hungries, I avoided my usual Sheetz fare in favor of something a little more like breakfast.
That brings us to Meltz, which should be called Shmeltz, in keeping with Schmuffinz, Schmagelz, Shmiscuitz and the Shmonster. Unfortunately, Sheetz appears to have some standards of self-respect, albeit piteously low standards that only seem to make earlier corn-ball marketing schemes seem that much more desperate.
And while you may have some vague inkling what a Schmuffin is, just from the name, what, pray tell, is a (Sh)Melt? It's a sandwich on a fat pretzel that is twisted in such a way as to create a bun without any holes, think kaiser roll, but made from pretzel dough. This is actually a pretty good idea, and if the pretzel buns were toasted instead of microwaved they might actually verge on great. As is, they become very chewy as they cool, forcing you to eat too fast or risk ejecting the sausage and ketchup out the back of the sandwich as you try to grind through it's tough, shiny hide. Add to this a hash brown so greasy that it dripped grease through the little hash brown baggie into the well below the emergency brake and you've got yourself quite a wholesome little breakfast for the road.
At the time of eating, there was no indication that I was ill. About three and a half hours and a bottle of Energy VitaminWater later, though I found myself having a hard time getting down a pepperoni roll. By rights it should have been lunch time, but my stomach just felt so off. After I finished the pepperoni roll, I couldn't eat anything else and I kept burping what tasted like cheerios soaking in milk left out in the sun for a few hours.
If you were wondering, this was not pleasant and it persisted for hours. My hunger didn't return till after 9pm, and even then all I had was one piece of 3-cheese texas toast. I brought so much great food back with me from my hometown and all I could manage to eat was a toasted piece of freezer-swill.
I hope my next entry proves more substantial or I'll have to start planning a book tour with Jared of Subway commercial fame. "I had a Shmagel and I never ate again!"
I had a Meltz with sausage, egg, American cheese, ketchup an black pepper. I describe it with such exacting ordered detail because that's how I ordered it. If you've never ordered from the Sheetz MTO touchscreen menus, you're missing out on the opportunity to order a hot dog with cheddar cheese, chili, baked beans, onions, mustard, sauerkraut, pickles, banana peppers and bacon without ever having to face the looks of horror, disgust and envy that placing such orders out loud tends to elicit from cashiers and passers by. In such dire moments of swill abuse no one will know your shame besides yourself and the shlave in the back who will wrap your colon's worst night mare in an nondescript opaque wrapper and hand it to the cashier to scan and never question.
It being 8am, not 3am, and me being about to drive across four states with my girlfriend, not about to make a very poor decision under the influence of the drunk hungries, I avoided my usual Sheetz fare in favor of something a little more like breakfast.
That brings us to Meltz, which should be called Shmeltz, in keeping with Schmuffinz, Schmagelz, Shmiscuitz and the Shmonster. Unfortunately, Sheetz appears to have some standards of self-respect, albeit piteously low standards that only seem to make earlier corn-ball marketing schemes seem that much more desperate.
And while you may have some vague inkling what a Schmuffin is, just from the name, what, pray tell, is a (Sh)Melt? It's a sandwich on a fat pretzel that is twisted in such a way as to create a bun without any holes, think kaiser roll, but made from pretzel dough. This is actually a pretty good idea, and if the pretzel buns were toasted instead of microwaved they might actually verge on great. As is, they become very chewy as they cool, forcing you to eat too fast or risk ejecting the sausage and ketchup out the back of the sandwich as you try to grind through it's tough, shiny hide. Add to this a hash brown so greasy that it dripped grease through the little hash brown baggie into the well below the emergency brake and you've got yourself quite a wholesome little breakfast for the road.
At the time of eating, there was no indication that I was ill. About three and a half hours and a bottle of Energy VitaminWater later, though I found myself having a hard time getting down a pepperoni roll. By rights it should have been lunch time, but my stomach just felt so off. After I finished the pepperoni roll, I couldn't eat anything else and I kept burping what tasted like cheerios soaking in milk left out in the sun for a few hours.
If you were wondering, this was not pleasant and it persisted for hours. My hunger didn't return till after 9pm, and even then all I had was one piece of 3-cheese texas toast. I brought so much great food back with me from my hometown and all I could manage to eat was a toasted piece of freezer-swill.
I hope my next entry proves more substantial or I'll have to start planning a book tour with Jared of Subway commercial fame. "I had a Shmagel and I never ate again!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
