Sunday, bloody ModelMagic Sunday

I had slept Saturday with dreams of bacon and eggs and a lazy Sunday morning to enjoy them in. These dreams were shattered by a phone call way too early for people who had just gone to sleep at 3AM. It was my girlfriend's brother. He wanted to know if she wanted to go to the Crayola Factory in Easton, PA with him, his wife and her neice. I got invited by association and off we went without any bacon or eggs or even a cup of coffee to ride trains down to Hoboken before riding in a car for an hour and a half to the happiest place for crayons in all of Easton, PA.

My girlfriend was gracious enough to get me that cup of coffee with half and half and way more sugar than I asked for as well as an everything bagel with cream cheese and a blue berry donut. I love everything bagels, though I'm not particularly fond of the Dunkin' Donuts itteration. I hadn't had any sort of bagel in a while, though, so I was pretty happy to nosh through that one.

I also had a bite or two of my girlfriend's toasted biscuit with butter. I was a bit unsure of Dunkin' Donuts abilities to provide a quality biscuit but it was pretty passable. It was maybe a little more soft and crumbly than I prefer, almost a little underdone, but for some of you that may sound perfect.

The blueberry donut tasted oddly of lipstick. If you've never tasted lipstick, I recommend that you go to the local pharmacy or other cosmetics retailer, buy a tube of whatever color strikes you, then take it home, cut about a 1/8th inch slice off the end, pop it in your mouth and then chew. You will remember the taste of lipstick very vividly for a long time afterward, unless perhaps you die shortly afterward. This would likely be unrelated to you eating the lipstick, just a bit of poor luck.

Through out the course of the day, as we were riding with a 3 year-old, there were lots of plastic baggies full of pretzels and grapes being passed around. Of course, I took advantage of some of those. I also had a Nature Valley Peanut bar, which was not unlike peanut brittle with the addition of sunflower seeds and a much higher nut to brittle ratio.

Since mommy is very anti-fast food, we tried to eat at a local deli, but it was closed. There were not many open eateries apparent around the Crayola building, so we settled on a Subway. I had a meatball sub with provalone and green peppers on their garlic roll. I also had some raspberry iced "tea" from the fountain soda machine. I used to drink that stuff every chance I got in high school. I don't think it has changed much, so it must be me. It was just way to syrupy. I couldn't finish the medium cup, which was the smallest size they had. Kind of made me miss Japan.

I feel I should also note that I probably ingested some Crayola ModelMagic, their sculpting product. The material itself is a lot of fun to play with. It only comes in white, the idea being that you can then color it with markers. At one point i'd made a big Gene Simmons-esque tongue and colored it red and put it in my mouth for pictures. Later, I also made vampire fangs complete with bloodstains which I managed to mount over my own teeth, but mostly by smooshing the ModelMagic into the cracks between my teeth. I wasn't quite aware of this at the time, but upon removal, I realized that some of that stuff was going to stay in my teeth until my saliva slowly broke it down. Since flossing or constantly spitting for the next hour were not really viable options, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to admit to eating modeling "clay." Those of you who know me personally are not very surprised, I'm sure.

On my way home we stopped in Kearny, NJ where I picked up some more padinhas and Portuguese custard cups. I couldn't wait and ate half of one of the padinhas right away. The other half I later used as a bun for a tiny hamburger with the last of the beef from the day before.

This time I cooked the mushrooms and onions in the hamburger juices and opted for the last of the Monterrey Jack, some Miracle Whip and some horseradish. It was a little bomb of awesome. I had two of the custard cups for dessert. The whole thing, while a very small ammount of food, was intensely gratifying.

Saturday can has pikshurburger

So, I'm sorry, but Sunday just plum tuckered me out and I didn't write this till Monday. I think I remember all the things I ate, though, and I do have photographs so you have decided to forgive me. You are very kind.

The first thing I had was a piece of tofu in what I believe was a tomatillo sauce that my roommate had made with a lady friend the day before. It was pretty good and I was fixing to warm the rest up when I got a call from a friend who was in town for a conference. We were supposed to meet up for dinner but her plans had changed and I had to rush downtown to meet her for lunch instead.

I got to her hotel a little after t 2PM and she was trying to catch a bus at 3pm. I'd wanted to take her to the hamburger stand in Le Parker Meridien, but we didn't have time so I settled on Yip's, a little Chinese take-out buffet on 53rd St. between 5th Ave and the Avenue of the Americas. about $5 will get you your choice of two items and white or brown rice or lo mein. It's not authentic Chinese; it's authentic Chinese-American swill. For fast cheap lunch you can't do better in the neighborhood, especially considering relative quality and volume. Your $5 will fill you up.

We were in a hurry and they didn't have their spicy tofu, which is my favorite, so I just pointed at the two most appealing things in the limited weekend menu. These both happened to be "barbecue" items, a chicken and a shrimp, which would be more accurately described as "fried and smothered in annato candy sauce." I guess they drew my attention because they were red and shiny. They ended up being quite good for candied meat. I also had a Formula50 Vitamin Water and some of my friend's lo mein since she didn't think she could finish it all. I'm not a fatass, I just like to make other people happy.

We ate quick and dashed over to 7th Ave to catch her a downtown cab to the Port Authority bus terminal. For those of you that don't know the city, that's about ten blocks straigh south and one block to the west of where we were, 0.6 mi. by google.maps' reckoning. It would take too long for her to walk in time for the bus, but a taxi would take all of 4 minutes, if that. That is why what happened next is so infuriating.

We hailed a cab fairly quickly, and as my friend climbed in the back with all her luggage, I told the cab driver that she was going to the Port Authority bus terminal. I said goodbye and dove into the back for a quick hug and as I was about to turn to walk away, my friend started climbing back out of the cab with all of her stuff, saying that the cabby had said he "didn't have enough gas."

Enough gas to what? Let her off half a block from the 2nd closest gas station? He was already heading south anyway, and getting to the "closest" station would have taken enough looping around blocks that the net difference in distance was 3 blocks. If he couldnt drive more than 5 blocks without stopping, why did he pull over in the first place? I wish I spoke his native language so I could really let him know how I feel. My friend did not make her bus and had to wait another 2 hours. I also regret not taking down his plate numbers so that I could call dispatch and share with them what a knob this guy was.

But I'm getting off topic. You want to know what I ate next, right?

Well, I went home and made dinner for my girlfriend and myslef. We had bacon cheeseburgers with garlic-parmesean pasta and steamed asparagus and carrots.

My girlfriend wondered why I bothered to make pasta to go with a burger. Well, because I'd made way too much spaghetti for the tuna pasta and I had it in the fridge. It was easy enough to saute some diced garlic in olive oil and a little butter till it started to brown, then throw in some of the spaghetti and some black pepper, then turn off the heat and stir in enough parm to bind it together a little bit.

The burger was just the general ground beef available at my local grocer. I mixed in some Adobo, a little oregano, a sprinkling of brown sugar and a kiss of sesame oil. The burgers were cooked on a George Foreman grill and then I melted a little munster cheese over the top and served them on Kaiser rolls with slices of bacon. I also put some mushrooms and onions sauteed in the bacon fat to mine, although my girlfriend opted to forego that little touch of swillossimness.

The asparagus and carrots had marinated in a little Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, white vinegar and honey for about 2 hours. Then I steamed them breifly with a little water and the juice they had marinated in.

the end result looked a little something like this.

I did have a sip or two of the Power C VitaminWater, but it's not really my thing, so I stuck mainly to water with dinner.

Later that evening I had a shot of espresso over ice with half and half and a sprinkling of "sugar in the raw" and a few bites of an MnM cookie, sadly from a chain coffee shop, since a more mom'n'pop establishment was not visible from the streets near where I'd gone to see friends of my girlfriend perform at a Columbia frat house.

Not quite as obnoxious as some frat houses I've been to, and really not the same when one isn't drinking or trying to pick up 18-20 year-olds, but I hadn't been to a party that was broken up by campus police in a while, so that was mildly novel.

If you enjoy country, you can check out their music at http://www.myspace.com/secretcountry

Friday is always the last to know.

Thursday night I was talking to some friends about my blog and how totally rad it is. They had a question about how I make it so rad, and I thought maybe you'd like to hear the question and then be informed of my answer. If you want to hear the question, you should read or, in the case that you can't read or speak out loud or have fantasies about people reading to you, have some other passers by read the following out loud: "How do you remember everything you ate the day before? That must keep your brain sharp."

Well, it is good practice. Just like riding a bicycle, sometimes we get really bad at doing things that we don't do often. This often leads to you being ridiculed by friends and passers by. I recommend that you practice remembering things at least once a day. You can start by remembering to remember something tomorrow. If you forget, you should write it down and practice a lot.

Case in point, I forgot to mention that on Thursday night while waiting in line for the UCB show, I ate a banana and watched passers by pass me by. I failed to remember this when writing yesterday, so you didn't know that I ate that banana until just now. This is not only a good example of why we should practice remembering, but also illustrates how little trust I deserve from you the reader. Rest assured that my journalistic integrity is in tact, though, and upon remembering something I ate that I have not told you about, I will be sure to tell you the next time I post.

As for food I actually ate on Friday, well, I didn't eat much, since I spent most of my time playing Desktop Tower Defense. I was, in fact, up until 4AM playing but I hope that now my fever has broken and I should again be able to sleep without dreaming of being swarmed by green triangles with eyes. What I did eat could fit into one kind of long sentence, like this:

I consumed the following more or less in the order they are listed: a bacon egg and cheese sandwich from the cafeteria, a bottle of Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade, a cup of Green Mountain Sumatran Roast coffee with a packet of amaretto creamer and a packet of regular creamer, leftover swillsagna with sour cream on top, lots of water, a banana, one fried chicken thigh, a small roll and a bowl of rice with sesame oil, soy sauce, and Adobo.

But if I just wrote like that every day, I wouldn't be the most popular blog on the interwebs about the things that I ate yesterday. I can't let some passers by observe my eating habits and then scoop me on what I had for dessert. That would be very demoralizing.

That is precicely the kind of cheap trick I'm going to pull now, however, because I want a nap. Check in tomorrow for a full-color photo spread of dinner.

thursday's child is full of options

Sadly, as I write this, it is a relatively busy Friday, and I don't have much time to write because I have to play Desktop Tower Defense. Seriously, does anyone know of a good intervention program? I had dreams about hosing down little purple blobby things while automated rocket-launching turrets in the distance rained down dart-borne death. If my entry for tomorrow (Everything I ate Friday) is short it's because I opted for Desktop Tower Defense instead of food.

But before I ever played that accursed game, I made breakfast burritos for me and the girlfriend. See, I wasn't lying. I had two. She only ate one. She's small. Today's burritos were filled with scrambled egg, diced hot dog and green pepper, and some of that Monterrey Jack I've been whittling at for days.

I'm not a big MJ nut, but I prefer it to cheddar and the cheese options at my local are a little limited. I alternate between the jack and Munster if they have it.

Apparently, one of my roommates wasn't in a knife-y kind of mood, because it looked like someone in a big hurry for cheese snapped the brick in half instead of bothering to cut or shred it. I suppose I should be glad I didn't find bite marks.

I should also be glad my roommates weren't in a knife-y mood because that tends to lead to property damage and injury. We had a puppy calendar hanging in the kitchen by a steak knife that had been stabbed through the puppy of the month into the plaster of the wall. Tres adorable.

It also looks like someone housed the last 40% of the giant Sarris' peanut butter meltaway egg. I hope for the sake of their colon that didn't happen at the same time as the cheese gorge.

Do you love VitaminWater like I do? I drink it compulsively when I have it around. If you kept handing them to me, I'd probably keep drinking them till I was too full to technically fulfill the definition of "to drink." My main weakness is Focus, but I'm also a big fan of Energy, Charge, Formula 50 and this roibos-based tea I have only had once, but which has haunted me ever since.

It's also a telling indicator of the relative price index of different neighborhoods around town; in a deli on the Upper West Side, $3.25, in a bodega in El Barrio, $1.50. I wonder if most UWSies realize how much they're being price-gouged over a relatively small distance. 10 minutes on a bike can be more than a 200% price increase. Someone with more time than me should do a topographical map of Manhattan VitaminWater prices out of corner stores. I imagine, like so much else, there's a pretty steep difference around the 100th St. mark.

Oh yeah, so I drank one of the 20 oz. bottles of Focus.

So, today again there was free food at work. It's not like I'm complaining, but the memory of projectile vomiting Gatorade, bananas and toothpaste has kind of stuck with me, and so even though I tried to get down a ham and brie sandwich, it was slow going and I couldn't quite finish one of the half-hoagies. I also picked at the assorted olives and sides: an olive, a slice of cucumber, pita chips, 2 ravioli, about a tablespoon of tabbouleh and a slice of this roasted bread that isn’t exactly garlic bread, but isn’t exactly not garlic bread either.

The tabbouleh used some really sturdy greens and the texture put me way off, so I stuck to the sweet stuff after that. In no particular order I downed , 3 oatmeal raisin cookies, 2 choc covered biscotti, 1 caramel pecan bar, half a granola nut bar, a peppermint brownie, 1 green grape, 2 blackberries, a sugar cookie, a chocolate biscotti with some kind of nuts in it, half a medium-sized strawberry and about 463mL of Coke. That probably contributed to my sense of jitters as I sat and played Desktop Tower Defense in my office after work until about 9PM as I killed time before meeting friends for Cagematch at the UCB.

When I left for the show my back tire had gone flat. At first I thought some dickhead had let the air out of my tires, but then I found the puncture I’d gotten on the way to work. The debris was still in it, which is why the leak came so slow I didn’t notice it on the way in. I needed new tires anyway, but it was a bit of a pain to walk 36 blocks with my bike over my shoulder.

On the way I hit up the dollar slice pizza joint on 42nd and 9th Ave. That’s the possibly the cheapest food per square foot in the city, with a cheap donut shop around the corner and a Papaya Dog right next door. It wasn’t so cheap for me, though, because I gave the guy a $20 and he gave me change for a $10, which I didn’t notice until about an hour later. If I hadn’t been such a moron, it would have been a great $2 dinner. Their dough is very soft. It never gets a hard crust on it. I really love the crust end of their slice and eat it first.

I ate the slices stacked on top of each other and folded as I walked down 9th Ave. in the rain with my bike slung over my shoulder, arms reaching through the frame to stuff my face.

Hump Day!

I am one of those people that want's breakfast for breakfast. I might also want breakfast for lunch and dinner, but I don't eat dinner for breakfast. I'm not a cold pizza kind of guy. Even a nice steak with garlic mashed potatoes, caramelized leeks and a red wine reduction sauce with morels is just not going to cut it. I want my eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, biscuits, sausage gravy and maybe some pie. That's why I'm amazed that I've developed this particular breakfast habit.

You see, I love eating Jeno's frozen pizzas for breakfast. Today was a supreme pizza. I don't know who invented that pizza meme, but I can think of a few things I'd add to a pizza to make it a little more "supreme." For frozen pizzas, though, I think this is the pinnacle of evolution.

I love the texture of the thing. The crust gets the perfect crispiness to it when you bake it directly on the oven rack. All the pieces are cut small enough to lend to a nice mélange effect while still being big enough to come through as their own entities.

I don't want that DiGiorno stuff or anything that more closely approximates a good fresh pie. These little single-serving bliss-discs are a wonderful way to start your day. Even better, they're really cheap and I can throw them in the oven, go get dressed, brush my teeth, come back and voila, perfect for folding in half and eating on the walk to the train. Or wrap it up to go! It's the perfect food, any time.

I kinda feel like Ron Popeil, right now.

OK, breathing deep,

the feeling is passing.

I am a hollow reed.

I am a hollow reed.

After the Jeno's, I was in a mood for sugar, so I ate a Sarris' coconut egg, the single serving size, not the big, "feed a family of eight" kind of egg that I was carving up on Sunday. If you're puzzled why you don't see the Sarris' brand around, you probably don't live in western Pennsylvania. They are a great chocolatier very popular in the Greater Pittsburgh Area. Nothing too fancy, just honest quality. They pump out some fantastic chocolate pretzels and they make a mean cappuccino meltaway that is probably the fanciest thing in the joint. If you have a chance to sample either, don't hesitate, take two.

Hydration is very important. Especially when you ride a bike every day. I've been refilling my .5L water bottle about 3 times a day, and I still feel a little under-hydrated. In Japan I was drinking well over 2L a day in the summer. It just gets so nasty out. Today I've got a VitaminWater bottle in the mix too, so hopefully the less frequent the trips to the water fountain, the higher my water consumption. You know you care.

I spent the early afternoon munching on wasabi peas. You've probably seen these green globs of awesome at least once in your snacking adventures. The non-wasabi variety are very popular in Japan, but to find the wasabi variety could sometimes be difficult.

Japanese people in general don't eat very much spicy food. The extremes of their palate tend to run more to sour and bitter tastes. Even when eating sushi the wasabi is usually used sparingly as an additive to soy sauce or not at all. Of course, this is not always the case, Korean and Indian food are both very popular in Japan as well as an increasing number of spicy junk food and fast food items, but much like America, this is more the fare of teenaged boys than the general populace.

Then for lunch it was left over pork and beans with hot dogs. Last time I worked in this building I tried to pack interesting, fancy lunches so I didn't feel like such a shlub mixing in with the law school crowd. I have since realized that their diet is mainly cold pizza or boxed sushi, both of which I find atrocious, and that they'd probably be very happy to trade lunches for any given day of my swill parade.

Everyone in this building wants my pork and beans! Well, excepting maybe the guys in yarmulkes.

After lunch I had 4 cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches. That's the Keebler ones with the bright orange crackers that look kind of scary but are actually delicious. I saved the other 4 in the pack for later. 8 is just too much orange at one time. Seriously, they make cheezits look a bit pale.

All the onions from the pork and beans and the cheesy crackers prompted a Frisk breath mint after lunch. The blog title does say "Everything..." right.

At home I whipped up dinner for myself and my girlfriend who was coming over. I had a lot of hot dogs and two chicken leg/thigh sections, but my girl friend doesn't like these things. I figured I'd go with tuna. My girlfriend likes tuna.

I was inspired by this recipe I found from a random search of "tuna pasta recipes." http://www.grouprecipes.com/29264/red-bean-tuna-pasta.html

It seemed like a nice divergence from the standard tuna, mayo and green peas casserole I always hated as a child. I also diverged pretty heavily from this recipe, though.I was more in the mood for a European palate instead of her Asian flavors, though I did add a little sesame oil to the olive oil I used to sauté some garlic, onions, celery and carrots. Then I added a can of black beans, diced green pepper and a can of chunk light tuna in water. I seasoned the mixture with a lot of dried basil, some oregano, dill, cayenne and a little fresh ground black pepper and fennel seed and let that simmer on a low heat.

Next I added some lightly cooked spaghetti, a tablespoon of horseradish, a few dollops of MiracleWhip and some sour cream mixed with water (because I was out of milk). I stirred the whole thing up pretty thoroughly, then added some bread crumbs and parmesan cheese to the top, stirring it slightly into the mix, and let it bake in the oven as it cooled from 400F with the Frankenbiscuits.

Wait, you say, wtf are Frankenbiscuits?

Well, sometimes, I get these ideas. Sometimes I imagine that I can read the minds of people who read my blog. Sometimes I do things to food that maybe one should not do to food that one is actually planning to eat. Yesterday I got to thinking that I could mix the light, crumbly, crunchyexterioriness of biscuits with the sweet, moist, full-bodied satisfaction power of cornbread.

If there is one type of cooking where you really don't want to go off inventing things without knowing exactly what you're doing, it's baking. If you want to learn to cook by inspiration and see what difference basil will make to your beef stew, go for it. Buy a crock pot and rock out for a week keeping one recipe going and adding whatever strikes you till you eventually have to throw it out.

This will be good for your cooking in general. Baking, on the other hand, is a delicate balance of conflicting chemistries and tampering with this balance often leads to rocks that taste even worse than rocks you might find by the side of the road leading from a sewage treatment facility.

I would not be daunted by my lack of expertise, though, and to be fair I have made a lot of biscuits in my time, even if my other baked goods are often downright woeful. I started with half of this baking powder biscuits recipe: http://www.seedsofknowledge.com/biscuits.html

To which, in grand swill fashion, I added a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix.

Now technique here is very important. I made the biscuit half recipe up to the point that you added milk (although I added the sour cream/water mixture I mentioned earlier. I wouldn't drink it, but I’ve had great results cooking with it.) and I only added enough "milk" to get the dry ingredients to form lots of little flakes, just till the last of the powder is mixed up into something that isn't powder.

Directly over the soft biscuit flakes I dumped the contents of one box of Jiffy corn muffins, then I added two eggs, scrambled, evenly around the bowl and began to stir, adding more "milk" as necessary till I had a thick dough that was just a little on the sticky side but could be worked with my hands without coating them.

I folded this out a few times on a floured surface, and then rolled it out to about a half inch thick and cut it into squares which I then baked at 400F. I could have rolled them a little less thin, but otherwise they were a fantastic success. I will definitely make them again, and I recommend that you try it too, and then tell your friends you came up with it out of your imagination pants. They will think you are very creative and will ask to borrow your pants.

So after all that, I don't think the girlfriend particularly liked the pasta, though I thought it came out ok. I'll likely be eating it another two days for leftover lunches. We both ate about half a dozen Frankenbiscuits a piece, though. Those things were great. I ate most of them with margarine and honey.

I dont' really like margarine, but I like things that spread easy. You get butter frigid and it just doesn't spread easy. You leave it sit out till it gets nice and spready and it starts to get sloppy pretty quickly. In the New York summer that is on it's way the difference between spready and sloppy is pretty much non-existent.

The lesson I want my impressionable readers to come away with here is spready is good, sloppy is bad. I think we can all agree.

Tuesday has come and gone

Breakfast!
It was nice to be able to eat what you will soon realize is my most common breakfast, and not just because I am telling you so now. I eat egg and cheese burritos or an egg and cheese sandwich as many as five times a week depending on my mood, income and place of work. I would say my average is around 15 days a month, which is actually 6.93 burritos a week, factoring for the odd day when I only have one burrito instead of two. It's true. I even had a CMU graduate do my statistical analysis.

Today, er, yesterday, I mean, was a two burrito day. I threw some diced green pepper in the pan with butter on a low heat, then scrambled two eggs with a dash of Adobo and a shot of McIlhenny's Chipotle tabasco sauce and scrambled them until they just barely set. Then I heated two tortillas until soft on my square griddle, lay two slices of Monterray Jack cheese on each, topped it with eggs and rolled it up. Since I was about to hop on my bike, I had to wrap them up and take them to go.

Eating those for breakfast, though, it was very easy to wait until 2:15 for lunch. I did have a cup of the Flavia tea with 1 creamer, though. For better or worse, though, there were no mushroom flashbacks. It was noticeably less loamy, though, which may have accounted for the more traditional tea drinking experience. Though.

Lunch was leftovers, but oddly, not leftover from another meal, just simply left over from when I first made them for lunch last Friday. It was the pasta with olive oil, butter, basil and, yes, Adobo. For those of you playing the "Everything I Ate Yesterday" drinking game (and reading my mind as I type, naughty, naughty), I apologize for putting you two shots down before 10AM on a Wednesday.

I also had two slices of ham left from Easter. Sadly, this was the last of my Easter ham. Less sadly, my late lunch provided me the opportunity to watch the first 25 minutes of the UEFA Champions League match between Manchester United and AS Roma. I hate Rooney, mostly because I feel he shares some Neanderthal facial similarities to "President" George W. Bush, so I was all sorts of disappointed and culturally conflicted when I heard that Man U won 2-0 and that Rooney himself had scored. I bet they're related.

Dinner was great. I know maybe my mother wouldn't agree, but you and I know that there are lots and lots of vitamins in rainbow sherbert. I'd only meant it as a little snack to cool down after riding home, but I ended up scooping quite a bit into the bowl. Just to add a serving of grains, I also had one of the sugar-glazed donuts that we buy in six-packs for $1.19 at the local grocery. At those prices, you know they use only the finest ingredients.

Of course there was the flat ginger ale in the evening. And then, around 9PM I figured I should eat something aproximating traditional dinner before it got too late, so I made a wrap with Monterray Jack, peppercorn turkey breast, baby spinach a little brown mustard and some miracle whip.

I do apologize to my younger readership who really enjoyed how I "stuck it to the man" with my sherbert stunt. There is hope, kids. One day you will eat ice cream covered in Lucky Charms for dinner. You will eat nothing but pizza for weeks at a time. You will find a way to live off Mountain Dew, Doritos and Snickers free of the tyrany of your parents nutritional standards. That time is called college, and it is why you should study hard now. There is a light at the end of AP Calculus.

Monday, you magots. Move!

It was Monday. Weren’t you all excited to go back to work after a drab weekend? I sure was. I was eager to hop on my bike and knock out 5 miles in the drizzle before I even ate breakfast. When I ride, my tummy gets upset if I've eaten too recently, so that means I had to wait till I got to work to eat breakfast.

It was a humble breakfast, the last of the Trader Joe's Blueberry waffles with some margarine and honey made into a sandwich and rice that had been in the rice cooker all night and so was very soft and puffy with some butter, cinnamon and a little kiss of honey.

Thankfully, neither the sandwich nor the rice exploded as I rode to work. The rice was actually much better as it got cold. I found myself really enjoying the texture as the butter started to reset and the whole thing started to get more jiggly than squishy.

Both the breakfast items were small, though, and lunch was late in the day, so I ate half a KitKat bar around noon and saved the other half for desert after lunch.

Lunch was kind of depressing today. It was some Easter ham with this carrot and stuffing stuff my parents had made as a side for our big family Easter dinner. It was all very good on Easter, and even yesterday wasn't terrible, but the texture of the stuffing had definitely suffered and when I microwaved the dish enough for the stuffing to come back to life, the ham was a little overdone.

I also still had that spaghetti with the olive oil from last Friday. I took a bite and it still seemed good, but I figured the stuffing and ham would be enough, so that's still on the menu for today.

I get a lot of grief from my roommate for keeping food in the fridge too long, but at home growing up we seemed to keep leftovers for a long time. I guess my parent's kitchen is a little more aseptic than mine now.

After lunch I went and made a cup of Flavia's English breakfast tea on the fourth floor with a shot of CoffeeMate original creamer. I was walking back to my office when the smell of the tea just hit me and I stopped in my tracks and had a very strong flashback.

I was on my hands and knees crawling through underbrush on a wet spring afternoon in the hills of West Virginia foraging for mushrooms. There's such a taboo against eating wild mushrooms, but I've found a little education goes a long way. There are a lot of delightful things to eat in the woods, especially in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the spring and fall, and there's something very satisfying about finding them in the wild as opposed to on a shelf in WholeFoods.

I'm not sure why the tea caused the flashback to that moment, when tea was not involved at all, but it if you've ever had Flavia products you know that there is a lot of chemical juggling involved in taking what might start out as tea or coffee and processing it for storage in a little foil pouch and then "brewed" back to life in about 5 seconds.
I don't want to knock Flavia or the corporations who use them to dispense free coffee to myself and other employees, temporary and full-time. I have drank more than my fair share some days just trying to get through some mind-numbing drudgery after barely sleeping after being out all night in Brooklyn at some comedy event or other. The fact remains though that my cup of English breakfast "tea" was sending off a very loamy vapor.

Then there was dinner. This could have been a swillsday special too. Hot dogs cooked in a can of pork and beans and some oven fries on the side.
Pork and beans out of a can was one of the first things I ever started actively cooking instead of just reheating. In high school and college I used to try to add things to the sauce to chef up something more than the ketchup water that usually fills the gaps between the beans. Some ideas were better than others, but these days I stick to a little more ketchup, some mustard, preferably a nice brown, and about a tablespoon of brown sugar.

I thought my recent diet could use a little more vegetables, though, so I added a jalapeno, half a vidalia onion and a tablespoon of crushed garlic (lots of vitamin C in there, you know) and let that cook on a low heat till the onions started to clarify before adding the beans, ketchup, mustard, brown sugar and hot dogs.

Of course, the only way to eat a hot dog cooked in pork and beans is on a folded slice of white bread. sometimes i'm fancy and fold one corner to the other creating a very dynamic triangle-bun shape, but today it was the simple top to bottom fold. Symmetry is very important to mess control as well as presentation.

And wouldn't you know it, I had about 3 glasses of flat ginger ale. It grows on you. Try it.

Come back tomorrow for some exciting developments in breakfast!