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.