Monday is either free or over priced.

Just when you start to take free food for granted, you are met with an unexpected boon of exceptional free food that really makes you feel fortunate to work for an institution of higher learning, as if being in the top economic percentile of the world population simply by virtue of being an American with a job wasn't fortune enough. Kind of makes you feel like an ass hole for spending time on a Tuesday afternoon to write pithy drivel about the things you ate on a Monday instead of working in a soup kitchen in Sarajevo. Can't really make it to Sarajevo on my lunch break, though...

It was one of those mornings where I skip breakfast, partly because I frequently get bored with eating and wait for real inspiration to eat (often only to fall prey to something mediocre but easy and/or free) partly because I realize that, as an American, I'm in the top percentile world wide for fatasstedness, and I could probably stand to skip a few mornings of bacon and eggs.

I was afraid the meeting to approve our collective bargaining agreement with the university would run long, though, and I didn't want to run out of blood-sugar while the union reps explained exactly how they dumped probation-term health benefits and paid leave incoming employees for the sake of securing 6 weeks of personal use vacation a year for those employees who have worked as university staff for 30+ years. I want to remember all the details I can use to taunt future rookies, assuming that the university ever rescinds its hiring freeze, not that I'll ever be on staff for 30 years, so I bought a pack of Grandma's brand "homemade style" oatmeal raisin cookies from the cafeteria vending machine. This cost me a dollar.

They weren't terrible, but the oil they use leaves this waxy sheen across the inside of your mouth. It was very unpleasant and obviously the result of machine-assisted baking that would never occur if they were in fact made in someone's actual home. Thanks to the goodies provided by my local union post-voting, I was able to hold these vendy cookies up to what I thought might be fair competition, but even the oatmeal raisin cookies produced by the university's in-house catering service in ridiculous amounts far outperformed "Grandma's" in flavor as well as mouthfeel. I also put down a 1" cube of carrot cake petifour and two chocolate covered cream puffs. It's important to eat a balanced breakfast.

I thought after the cookie binge I ought to get a salad, but free food tempted me again. At least for lunch I ate what some might call a healthy meal. To my surprise and for reasons I am still uncertain of, I managed to avail myself of the tail end of some luncheon in the faculty cafe. Pecan roasted chicken, fingerling potatoes, very thin asparagus with roasted peppadews, three-color tortellini with marinara sauce and mixed field greens rounded out what was probably the most well-ballanced meal I've eaten all month. The chicken was surprisingly good considering I was eating well after the buffet was originally served. The potatoes didn't fare as well, but there was plenty of butter on hand. I would have been happy with that meal had I paid $12 for it, but it was free. That's really a lot of free. It's like when this really cute girl you like asks YOU out before you can ask her. Maybe not, but it was rad.

Then dinner sucked. I am perhaps being unfair given the delightful freegan feasts from earlier in the day, but Habana Outpost in Ft. Greene does not deliver the quality or quantity to justify their price tags. if a "Catfish Burito" is going to run me over $8, it better be plated with an actual side item and contain more than one piece of catfish tucked in all the rice and lettuce. Not that the catfish itself was bad, although the chicken in one of my companion's chicken burrito was pretty dry and uninteresting. The guac and chips was decent, but only about $4 of decent, not $6 of decent. The corn and cotija cheese that is a staple at the Habana Eco-Eatery family of restaurants was reasonable at $2 an ear for city prices, but still more expensive than the same item at Cafe Habana, two for $3.75. Also, for the tail end of June, the corn was not particularly succulent or vibrant. If you need a place for 10+ people to drink margaritas outside in Ft. Greene, this might be your joint. If you want to actually enjoy eating, maybe not.

Consolation desert: Vosges brand Mo's Bacon Bar, bacon crumbles and smoked salt in milk chocolate, not bad, although bacon dipped in chocolate is generally better fresh. Also, some kind of foreign sandwich cookie with vanilla icing and a cookie textured like a more delicate vanilla wafer but chocolate flavored. Yuppie impulse buying at The Greene Grape. I also got a pack of lamb merguez sausages, dried chantrelles and some duck hotdogs, to be featured in future bloggings.

Wednesday from trashy to healthy and back again.

Living with roommates puts an edge of uncertainty to stocking foodstuffs. My apartment operates under very lassez-faire rules in terms of what you can eat. Basically, if it's in the apartment, you can make use of it how you see fit. Before becoming roommates we were friends old and fast, so there's no bitterness over finishing a loaf of bread or snagging an ice cream sandwich. Occasionally, though, I find myself with ambitious culinary challenges when I forget to check if the gouda fell to a midnight snack attack or the left-over tuna casserole is not there to take to lunch tomorrow. It was in a convergence of these sorts of disappointments that "corn porklins" were born.

Without tortillas or bread in the house, I was forced to make some late-game compromises. I saw a box of Jiffy cornbread mix, thought of the taylor pork roll in the fridge and set about making some tricked out corn muffins. Pour the mix in a bowl, add an egg and 1/3 c. of...
Well, it should have been milk, but we were out of that too. I instead grabbed a carton of chicken stock out of the fridge, hoping it wouldn't be too savory for breakfast food. I also thought adding some mayonnaise to the mix might keep things moist and add a little more cohesion from the egg protein. I ladled out two big spoons of white goop into the mixing bowl before I realized I was shoveling out Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. While most people's venn diagrams of the two don't leave a lot of room around the edges, they are drastically different in terms of food chemistry. At this point, though, there was nothing to do but plow forward; mix in the pork roll, add a chunk of Oaxacan cheese and throw them in the oven while I made myself decent for work.

about 20 minutes at 400F later, these crispy golden badboys popped out. All accidents asside, they came out beautifully. They taste like corn dogs made into muffins with a stringy mozarella bonus in the middle. Deferring to my girlfriend's greater aptitude at whimsical names of things, the "corn porklins" were born. If I ever start that white trash bakery, these will be a staple item.


Maybe it was just the name "corn porklins," but I felt inspired to do my colon some good over lunch. That inspired my run to the Whole Foods salad bar. It's a lot easier to stomach grazing for lunch if you can sneak two types each of tuna salad and curried chicken along the side. The tuna salad with apples and nuts mixed in was unexpectedly fantastic. My hopes for "Chuck's tuna salad" fell disappointingly short. Perhaps I should have known. The chicken korma was worlds better than the vindaloo, but this was perhaps because the thicker korma sauce stood up better on it's own without rice to deliver more of the sauce.
As for the actual salad bit, I mixed a little of every type of green they had, and then added carrots, cucumbers, red onions and a light sprinkling of blue chese crumbs before adding "Korean Kimchi" and "Real Blue Cheese" dressings. The combination conjured memories of hot wings and my favorite Korean BBQ joint in Osaka. Perhaps not the healthiest salad, but still a very good dose of roughage.

Eating any kind of actual dinner got delayed by the bounty provided by my office. This celebration was for the departing Dean Diller who was headed to be Dean of Cardozo Law School. You could tell he was dearly loved here from the fantastic spread I shall here describe via haiku


chicken satay sticks
coconut and sauce, nice touch
solid but still plain


who doesn't just love
shrimp cocktail and cocktail sauce
you cannot go wrong




salmon, cream cheese, toast
quality ingredients
topped witha pickle


nondescript quiche thing
I prefer not to wonder
what lies within you


prosciutto, melon
you guys are so good apart
please, keep it that way


red tomato dome
releases green seed goo drops
when bitten into


red onions, cheese, meat
I don't know the specifics
but devoured six

deserts, to have one
is to say yes to them all
or at least a few











So my actual dinner wasn't until much later, and exhausted from laughing lustily at Featherweight and a stellar performance by Crush at the Magnet last night, the girl friend and I opted for more comfort food to push back the impending dreary weather. So it was that I had to throw away a white Haines t-shirt after trying to stir oversized beefaroni the way Italian chefs toss a risotto. I caught all the beef and the roni, but a pretty significant splatter of sauce Pollock-ed my shirt and even got a splat on my brown dress pants. The pants are worth cleaning, but the shirt had already suffered an erruption of kombucha tea, and so I applied a liberal coup de grace of mustardy hand print for good measure before casting it in the trash.

Tuesday is your favorite, really.

What better way to start the day than strawberry shortcake a la mode?
I woke up to a strange itching in my palms and soles of my feet. By the time I got to work, I was developing a rash on the insides of my elbows and wrists and the central features of my face had turned bright and puffy. I thought to myself, "If I'm going to suffer a mysterious allergic reaction before I even eat anything today, well, then I'm damn well going to pamper myself for breakfast."
In addition to the benadryl from Duane Reade that possibly saved my life, I also got a small tub of vanilla Hagen Daz Five. Five is a sub-brand of Hagen Daz that puts a very simple five ingredients together to provide for a very rewarding and honest flavor payoff. The vanilla was a great compliment to the strawberries and homemade shortcakes. Their mint¹ is, of itself, even better.
So I pandered to my inner six-year-old with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some short cake and some strawberries in brown sugar to take my mind off the swelling and itching and whatnots.
Lunch was just leftovers, more of the chicken noodle kugel I made last week in an attempt to help my girlfriend ward off a cold. Comfort food with ridiculously high concentrations of garlic will cure just about anything but bad breath and body odor.
Kugel can really sit on you, and I didn't want to eat right before my improv class show because I was getting a bit jittery, but the gf and I tried out the very creatively named Pad Thai on 8th ave between 29th and 30th Streets. Their fried spring rolls were not bad, but I wouldn't go out of my way to order them again. I did like their Pad Cei Ew, although they spelled it Pad See Yu, but I'm no expert on cramming Thai phonetics into the ill-equipped roman alphabet. Point of the story is, I like pad see yu/cei ew just about everywhere I've had it, and this was more of the same. I wouldn't mind the noodles being a little more sopping with the sauce, and the chicken could have been a bit less done, but the chinese broccoli/chinese kale/kai-lan was done to perfection, still very alive in texture and yet yielding some cellular structure to the absorption of the sauce. Wherever you eat your Thai food, try the pad sea yew.



¹ It comes off very bright and very rich at the same time, without any conceit of leaving in big chunks of leaf to provide a false sense of wholesome purity. It is wholesome, but refined, even to the point of removing showmanship or conceit.

Monday eats last week's leftovers then makes more leftovers for next week.

Strawberry shortcake is a classic part of American summertime and usually relegated to desert options, but homemade shortcakes without all the cream and syrup, make excellent morning starters. I had made the shortcakes for a BBQ on Sunday, and do to some crossed communications, so did two other guests. This afforded me the opportunity to fill one entire plate with various forms of strawberry shortcake, and also meant that I had plenty of shortcakes left when the smoke cleared.

Sharing a shortcake on the way to work will only get you so far into your day, however. It was more leftovers. There was a chicken breast, thigh, and leg from a chicken I'd roasted in a south western dry-rub, cornbread stuffing with sausage and roasted peppers, and a buttermilk spinach and corn succotash that came to me in a flash of inspiration as I was roasting the chicken last week. The method is worth repeating.

I started with about 2 tsp. of cumin seeds in hot canola oil, allowing them to sizzle and pop untill they started browning, then I threw in a box of frozen spinach and a box of frozen corn already thawed and drained. I also added 1/3 c. butter milk and some adobo seasoning with pepper. I let that simmer for a while so that the flavors could really get to know each other, and then I stirred in 2 tbsp of matzoh meal to soak up the moisture. I would highly recommend giving it a shot as a side to any south western or indian foods. It also kept and reheated extremely well as leftovers.

Despite having such a huge pile of leftovers for lunch, I set out to make a massive home-cooked meal for dinner as well. The cornbread stuffing made a return to round out a heaping plate of meat-n-taters fare.

It wasn't my best attempt at meatloaf, but it wasn't terrible. The worst of it was just the quality of the ground beef. I don't think I'll be using ground beef from Mi Bario Meatmarket again. There were a lot of small pieces of things that aren't exactly meat. It kind of breaks up the rhythm of blissed out shoveling when you have to pull chunks of cartelage out of your mouth. It was also kind of light on the loafiness, coming out more like an enormous sausageburger. I underestimated how much bread crumbs I had left in the kitchen, and didn't realize until too late that I had most of a cardboard can of matzoh meal left.

One fantastic triumph as a result of the greater meat to loaf proportions was that a tremendous amount of sausage fat rendered out of the loaf during cooking, and made a delectible confit bath for roasting red skinned potatoes and garlic in. Fat-tastic.
Continuing my experiments with frozen bricks of veggies, I made green beans with garlic in a dry vermouth bread sauce. I let garlic and olive oil over low heat for a long time as the meatloaf was roasting. Just as the garlic started to brown, I added a frozen brick of green beans, flipping frequently to get the frozen bits to melt. I added a shot or two of Dolan's dry vermouth and let it simmer as the spinach heated through. Add a pat of butter and matzoh meal to the pan juices till they resemble very wet gruel, and then stir everything together and allow about a minute for the bread sauce to lose a little water weight.

And that pretty much covers everything except the tuna kugel. It turns out I've been making kugels for years, but I've been mistakenly calling them "casseroles." Silly goy.

This was supposed to be tuna loaf, but again, not enough bread crumbs, so it ended up being much more delicate and creamy in texture. I made it in addition to the meatloaf so as to include my vegetarian roommate into the dinner feasting. It was actually quite fantastic and I found myself regretting the time and stomach space spent on the sub-par meatloaf. I couldn't be authoritatively explicit about what went into it now if you were willing to pay me substantially for rights to the recipe, but basically I mixed the following together, dusted the top with bread crumbs, and then laid pats of butter over the top: two cans of tuna, tablespoon of horseradish, half a cup of mayonaise, two eggs, 1/3 c. panko crumbs, fresh corn cut from the cob, vidalia onion, green pepper and Oaxacan cheese. Baked it at about 400F untill it was good and golden on the top.

I guess if that's recipe enough, I will gladly take your money.