Off on a pretty good roll from Friday, I set out on an early morning (11:30AM) grocery run down to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square. I took my bike and dropped it off at a nearby bike shop to have the rear tire replaced while I shopped. I love Trader Joe’s. Everything is so cheap, but still good quality. Even the wine is cheap and they carry Pacific Rim Riesling, a favorite of mine, for about $7 a bottle, cheaper than buying a bottle of Miller Light in some bars in this town.
Their free sample was some Oat’n’Honey kind of cereal. It wasn’t bad, but it was just the shot of it and I didn’t bother to put any milk on it, just tossed it down.
The bike ride back was magnificent. The weather was gorgeous and I hadn’t had a good ride in over a week, so it felt like being able to walk again. You don’t realize how slow walking is till you ride a bike on a regular basis. It’s like ascending to a minor tier of divinity. Even on only a shot of cereal at 2PM I felt absolutely great.
The dinner menu was big, so I didn’t want to eat too much during the day, but I did have an egg roll and three vegetarian dumplings from a new Chinese delivery joint in the area. I also had a handful of “chili peanuts” that one of the roommates got while out shopping for fruit to make booze smoothies. The chili peanuts were saturated with the same kind of vinegar powder that they use to make salt and vinegar chips, but these were way stronger. It was not an experience I enjoyed, because it wasn’t spicy as much as it was just uncomfortable. There were also a handful of potato chips tossed into the afternoon mix as I prepped for dinner.
And I haven’t rescinded my boozeban entirely, but I did have a few drinks in the afternoon and evening. It started with the booze smoothies as we made desert and set it aside to stand. Then there were a few bottles of white wine passed around. I was too busy cooking to notice what they all were, but I did notice a green monkey on one of the corks, if that means anything to you wine aficionados out there.
“So what was this dinner that was the only thing you really ate all day and yet alluded to being so great in the title of this posting?” Well, dear reader, it went a little something like this.
First course was a simple greens salad idea I’d been tossing around. I took a French Baguette and sliced off two 3/8” slices per plate of salad, then toasted them lightly so that the brown just started to encroach from the edges into the center. Then I laid the toast as a bed and set mixed greens on top. I was using Trader Joe’s “Spring Mix” which features arugula, various baby greens and the odd leaf of radicchio. Then I cut a small, flat hole in a tube of goat cheese and used it like a pastry gun to drop a few curls of goat cheese on each salad. Next was a drizzling of Balsamic vinegar and olive oil followed by a dusting of fresh ground black pepper and toasted almond flour.
The next course, and all the following courses, were stolen from an issue of Gourmet magazine. I believe it was March 2008. It has been my bathroom reading for a while and I’ve been looking for an excuse to make some of the recipes for a while, so when a friend from Philadelphia said she was coming to visit I thought I would go ahead and give said recipes a toss with the inevitable variations and that come when you hand me a written recipe thereby giving me an excuse for an unwieldy run-on sentence.
So after salad came seared scallops and shrimp finished in a beure-blanc sauce with shallots. This was very cheap and easy compared to how fancy it sounds and how good it was. The seafood was Trader Joe’s frozen goods, so I didn’t even have to clean them. After thawing, I patted them dry, then seasoned the scallops with a little salt and pepper. Then I seared the scallops at a medium high heat in two batches. Next came the shrimp.
After searing and reserving the seafood I added two cloves of diced shallots to the pan, and as they clarified I added a cup of the Pacific Rim Riesling to the pan to deglaze. Then I added the juices that had rendered out of the scallops onto their plate back into the pan and melted 7 Tbsp. of butter into the pan at a medium heat in 1Tbsp pats, about 3 at a time until just melted. I plated them as two scallops with a shrimp curled on top between them, all covered with the sauce.
The main course was an Alsatian coq au vin variation that used Riesling instead of a red wine. I bought a halal chicken because they are much cheaper than the Purdue cyborg chickens available at my local grocer and seem to be a much better quality of chicken too. It was a bit difficult to explain the way I wanted to have the chicken cut, though. I made a sketch and showed it to the butcher, and he got pretty close to a French style. The thighs and legs were cut at a slightly odd angle that made the legs big, but the thighs a strange shape, and the breasts were not so much halved crosswise as two-third/one-thirded crosswise, but it all fit in my everyday pan, so no worries.
The chicken was also prepped with a simple salt and pepper dusting, then browned in butter and olive oil and reserved. Then I added diced shallots and green onions to the pan and afterward deglazed with Riesling similar to the scallops. Then I added a half a cup of heavy cream before reintroducing the chicken and it’s juices, then adding some mushrooms and asparagus, covering the pan, and then putting it in a 350F oven for 20 min. while I made the aforedescribed sea food dish. At the same time, in water spiked with a little chicken broth, salt and Riesling, I stewed some potato, carrots and whole green onion bulbs with about 2 inches of stem. The chicken was plated with the vegetables to the side and covered with the cream sauce from the chicken.
Then we had to back off eating for a while, so we had a wine course while I plated the desert and let it heat a bit in the oven. Desert was a crepe cake. This entails piling crepes with layers of whipped cream in between. We don’t have a mixer, so a good stiff whipped cream was sort of out of the question, so I made a raspberry-vanilla yogurt sauce that was a brilliant shade of pink to go between the layers. We set it to stand in the fridge so that the yogurt didn’t run too much, and then I plated it in pie slices drizzled in condensed milk and dusted with the rest of the toasted almond flour and some dried, rubbed sage before throwing it in the oven till the condensed milk on the plate started to steep the almond flour into a picturesque blonde cream color and the sage started to give off a little extra aroma.
The whole thing was very well received although I wasn’t that happy with some of my plating, as usual, and the timing for serving several courses to my friends while still being sociable and eating myself. I would have liked to have served the scallops a little quicker after being seared. Although the flavor and texture were there, they would have really exploded across the palate if I hadn’t had to mess with some of the salad preparation while cooking them. I had my friend help me with the desert, but my kitchen really doesn’t leave room for someone else to work at the same time, so the rest of the courses became a juggling trial. For first runs of all the recipes, though, I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s the best meal I’ve made so far this year, anyway.
Later that evening we decided to go out for a bit of dancing. I had a cup of coffee and a Energy VitaminWater on the way down to Astor Place on the 6. Then we went to Rififi’s and had a round of PBR, and then a round of Bass Ale while gradually deciding that the DJ sucked. We got home just in time to watch “30 Days of Night” with my roommates, after which I decided to watch “Lelo & Stitch” as a bit of a mental sorbet course.
It was great to have a few beers after three weeks of dry living. I should have definitely stayed off the coffee, though, because I was up until 5AM trying to wind down. Watching a 6-year-old vampire get her head chopped off with an ax probably didn’t help, either.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sowwy!
Posting over the weekend got a little out of whack thanks to some internet difficulties. The posts for the weekend should be up by Monday evening. Sorry, guys.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Friday stands for ossim.
Friday is always a good day to really push for indulgence. In the case that you over-do it, you have two days to get over it before necessity rears its ugly head, and if you manage to engage fully yet responsibly, you get a good rev on your engine before firing on all cylinders on Saturday. This week, I went for the later.
To fuel the big push into the weekend, I revisited the awesome sandwich that started my work week. Unfortunately, I was out of the padinhas so I had to turn up the ossim knob with the contents. I started with the bacon in the pan just like Monday, but threw in some diced garlic, then some onions, mushrooms and asparagus, adding the eggs just as the onions started to soften. The garlic started to brown a little from being in the pan with just the bacon as it was crisping, emboldening it to a front row player in the mélange. I went with Munster cheese and wrapped the mess into two flour tortillas.
Then I had my daily banana on the walk to work as the burritos cured in my bag, radiating heat through to my lower back as I watched the darkened walls of the 2 flicker by.
I thought I’d try walking through that same tent tunnel and see if my iPod would enhance my breakfast experience yet again. I did get a nice picture of the scene, but the music was a little muddled: Andrew Bird’s “I” into Kanye West’s “Home” which did pump me up for the morning anyway.
Then I thought I’d take advantage of the Green Mountain coffee machine in the lounge on the 1st floor. Today I went for their Sumatran blend with just the regular half and half. It was really putting a beautiful sheen on Friday morning and by 10:30 I thought I’d done enough work to put me close to lunch.
We were still very far from lunch, though. First I had to get through one of the more awkward experiences in temping, the department planning meeting with the department you’ll only be a part of for the next two weeks. It factored into my blournalism, though, because I had a small carton of apple juice. It was packed in one of the short milk-cartons that I most readily associate with a field trip to the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History when I was in 2nd grade. I remember a brown paper bag with a peanut butter and jelly and a small carton of orange juice only partially reconstituted from concentrate and still more like humming bird food than juice. I have such a vivid memory of the way the paper of the carton played into the “flavor” of the “juice.” The two are inseparable facets of that singular potent recall.
When lunch finally did come it was not very impressive, but very comforting. I had Chef Boyardee’s beef ravioli and two slices of white bread with butter. There’s not a lot of room to get poetic with Chef Boyardee products, but I hadn’t had a can of ravioli in months and it felt really good to dig into one of my favorite foods of yore. Perhaps the Kanye song this morning was my iPod’s attempt at foreshadowing.
I’d already had dinner planned for a few days. I was just waiting for a night when I had the time to mess around in the kitchen. I sautéed a link of sweet Italian sausage that I'd taken out of the skin. Once it had rendered some juices into the pan, I reserved it and started browning some bacon and garlic. A lot of people decry the browning of garlic, but I love it. Sure, there are some recipes where you want to avoid it, but this was not that time. Don't be afraid to brown your garlic, children!
After the bacon and garlic were both pretty thoroughly crispy I added some veggies. I went for asparagus, mushrooms, celery and onions. Then I dumped the leftover rice porridge from a few days ago over the vegetables, added some water, dill, sage, black pepper and oregano, gave it a good thorough stirring and let it simmer till the water reduced. Then I added some ricotta cheese, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese and Adobo seasoning.
Once the mixture started to bind, I scooped it out into bowls for my roommate and I. He added a liberal shot of hot sauce to his and was very happy with the result. I opted for more Adobo seasoning. A little extra butter would have been nice too, but not really the healthiest option in a dish that already had copious amounts of olive oil, sausage grease and bacon fat in it. It was one of those meals that demands you devour it. Each spoonful just urges you to shovel another one in so that you can gorge on it. I will definitely make it again, and if this were one of those trendy recipe sites, I'd call this my "Provincial Fried Rice."
This isn't about cute names and stars out of five, though. This is about me writing about all the things I ate the day before because if I don't do it, then who will? Neither am I popular enough to have stalkers watching me eat nor can I afford a ghost writer to recount these tails for you with extra professional flourish. It's just me, for some reason dedicated to recounting the inane in great detail on a daily basis. Enjoy.
To fuel the big push into the weekend, I revisited the awesome sandwich that started my work week. Unfortunately, I was out of the padinhas so I had to turn up the ossim knob with the contents. I started with the bacon in the pan just like Monday, but threw in some diced garlic, then some onions, mushrooms and asparagus, adding the eggs just as the onions started to soften. The garlic started to brown a little from being in the pan with just the bacon as it was crisping, emboldening it to a front row player in the mélange. I went with Munster cheese and wrapped the mess into two flour tortillas.
Then I had my daily banana on the walk to work as the burritos cured in my bag, radiating heat through to my lower back as I watched the darkened walls of the 2 flicker by.
I thought I’d try walking through that same tent tunnel and see if my iPod would enhance my breakfast experience yet again. I did get a nice picture of the scene, but the music was a little muddled: Andrew Bird’s “I” into Kanye West’s “Home” which did pump me up for the morning anyway.
Then I thought I’d take advantage of the Green Mountain coffee machine in the lounge on the 1st floor. Today I went for their Sumatran blend with just the regular half and half. It was really putting a beautiful sheen on Friday morning and by 10:30 I thought I’d done enough work to put me close to lunch.
We were still very far from lunch, though. First I had to get through one of the more awkward experiences in temping, the department planning meeting with the department you’ll only be a part of for the next two weeks. It factored into my blournalism, though, because I had a small carton of apple juice. It was packed in one of the short milk-cartons that I most readily associate with a field trip to the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History when I was in 2nd grade. I remember a brown paper bag with a peanut butter and jelly and a small carton of orange juice only partially reconstituted from concentrate and still more like humming bird food than juice. I have such a vivid memory of the way the paper of the carton played into the “flavor” of the “juice.” The two are inseparable facets of that singular potent recall.
When lunch finally did come it was not very impressive, but very comforting. I had Chef Boyardee’s beef ravioli and two slices of white bread with butter. There’s not a lot of room to get poetic with Chef Boyardee products, but I hadn’t had a can of ravioli in months and it felt really good to dig into one of my favorite foods of yore. Perhaps the Kanye song this morning was my iPod’s attempt at foreshadowing.
I’d already had dinner planned for a few days. I was just waiting for a night when I had the time to mess around in the kitchen. I sautéed a link of sweet Italian sausage that I'd taken out of the skin. Once it had rendered some juices into the pan, I reserved it and started browning some bacon and garlic. A lot of people decry the browning of garlic, but I love it. Sure, there are some recipes where you want to avoid it, but this was not that time. Don't be afraid to brown your garlic, children!
After the bacon and garlic were both pretty thoroughly crispy I added some veggies. I went for asparagus, mushrooms, celery and onions. Then I dumped the leftover rice porridge from a few days ago over the vegetables, added some water, dill, sage, black pepper and oregano, gave it a good thorough stirring and let it simmer till the water reduced. Then I added some ricotta cheese, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese and Adobo seasoning.
Once the mixture started to bind, I scooped it out into bowls for my roommate and I. He added a liberal shot of hot sauce to his and was very happy with the result. I opted for more Adobo seasoning. A little extra butter would have been nice too, but not really the healthiest option in a dish that already had copious amounts of olive oil, sausage grease and bacon fat in it. It was one of those meals that demands you devour it. Each spoonful just urges you to shovel another one in so that you can gorge on it. I will definitely make it again, and if this were one of those trendy recipe sites, I'd call this my "Provincial Fried Rice."
This isn't about cute names and stars out of five, though. This is about me writing about all the things I ate the day before because if I don't do it, then who will? Neither am I popular enough to have stalkers watching me eat nor can I afford a ghost writer to recount these tails for you with extra professional flourish. It's just me, for some reason dedicated to recounting the inane in great detail on a daily basis. Enjoy.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Mokuyoubi wa kirei deshita
Breakfast was, was...
well, shit. I forget what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it was bound to happen sometime. I know I had a banana. That's for sure. I had a piece of toast too. Was that really all?
Anyway, I definitely had a banana and a piece of toast. Breakfast was mostly inconsequential anyway. What really mattered today was lunch.
Lunch was glorious. It was too nice not to sprint out of the building and across Central park to meet a friend for lunch out on a bench. Among the highlights of passers by were a most adorable little jack russel terrier and a small child, maybe about 5 years old, taging along behind his mother carrying a giant stick. My friend and I both complemented him on his stick and he seemed to hold it a little higher, emboldened, as his mother just shook her head.
As for actual food, I started with a wrap i'd made with swiss cheese, roast beef and the peppered turkey breast. I spread a little brown mustard in there, then I added a carrot, cut in to sticks. I started doing that with the tuna and hummus wraps I made because the texture of the mushy food inside the wrap was a little off-putting, especially as the mush looses moisture to the tortilla causing it to take on a saggy, skin-like consistency. The carrots provide a nice bone-like crunch that is no less disconcerting but much more entertaining.
Then my friend and I had a nice walk around central park, taking picutres of his tie and eating the "Giant Peach Cookies" my Japanese friend brought me as a present from Atlanta where she'd spent the weekend before coming to Manhattan. Though the fictional peaches used to make the cookies may have indeed been "giant," these cookies were in fact bite-sized. I am thoroughly baffled by the apparently subconscious, nearly magical ability of the Japanese to find ways to break the English language. I aspire to cause equivalent delight in Japanese people as I (mostly unintentionally) mangle their language that defies my attempts at cognation (the process of forming cognates? Ed.) and translitteration.
Our nice meander as we discussed modern art and transformer porn left us at the southeast corner of the park, and left me with a nice jaunt back to work with a PBJ and some water to punctuate the nice girls who deigned to wear clothes in the blistering 70F weather and the other people who decided to wear a jacket while walking their dogs or a few other people's dogs just in case the sunshine was a big scam. Spring time in Central Park, folks. Just like the movies.
After that delightful dining adventure, I was all too happy to have a tame, low-investment dinner. Celery and peanut butter as an appetizer and a baked potato covered in chili for a main course, by which I don't mean a broken, steaming spud laden with beef seasoned with chili powder and some dregs of what might have been peppers and onions, but rather a bowl of my roommate's left-over chili that I like even better than my own chili and which is actually fairly balanced nutritional fare sporting a plethora of different legumes and vegetables (things like carrots and chickpeas that are probably going to have chili purists up in arms) which I microwaved and into which I quite unceremoniously plopped a whole baked potato and then proceded to shovel into my person with a spoon. Whew, glad I got my run-on quota out of the way.
I recommend my readers try this, but I also recommend that you only half-fill a large bowl rather than filling a normal bowl so as to allow for displacement as you dig at the baked potato. I get a certain ammount of glee at the presentation-hack involved in the big unsightly rock in the middle of an overlarge bowl surrounded by an unsightly mess of red bits leaving greasy tomato stains around the edges of some nice white porcelain. Anybody want to help fund my restaurant ideas?
well, shit. I forget what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it was bound to happen sometime. I know I had a banana. That's for sure. I had a piece of toast too. Was that really all?
Anyway, I definitely had a banana and a piece of toast. Breakfast was mostly inconsequential anyway. What really mattered today was lunch.
Lunch was glorious. It was too nice not to sprint out of the building and across Central park to meet a friend for lunch out on a bench. Among the highlights of passers by were a most adorable little jack russel terrier and a small child, maybe about 5 years old, taging along behind his mother carrying a giant stick. My friend and I both complemented him on his stick and he seemed to hold it a little higher, emboldened, as his mother just shook her head.
As for actual food, I started with a wrap i'd made with swiss cheese, roast beef and the peppered turkey breast. I spread a little brown mustard in there, then I added a carrot, cut in to sticks. I started doing that with the tuna and hummus wraps I made because the texture of the mushy food inside the wrap was a little off-putting, especially as the mush looses moisture to the tortilla causing it to take on a saggy, skin-like consistency. The carrots provide a nice bone-like crunch that is no less disconcerting but much more entertaining.
Then my friend and I had a nice walk around central park, taking picutres of his tie and eating the "Giant Peach Cookies" my Japanese friend brought me as a present from Atlanta where she'd spent the weekend before coming to Manhattan. Though the fictional peaches used to make the cookies may have indeed been "giant," these cookies were in fact bite-sized. I am thoroughly baffled by the apparently subconscious, nearly magical ability of the Japanese to find ways to break the English language. I aspire to cause equivalent delight in Japanese people as I (mostly unintentionally) mangle their language that defies my attempts at cognation (the process of forming cognates? Ed.) and translitteration.
Our nice meander as we discussed modern art and transformer porn left us at the southeast corner of the park, and left me with a nice jaunt back to work with a PBJ and some water to punctuate the nice girls who deigned to wear clothes in the blistering 70F weather and the other people who decided to wear a jacket while walking their dogs or a few other people's dogs just in case the sunshine was a big scam. Spring time in Central Park, folks. Just like the movies.
After that delightful dining adventure, I was all too happy to have a tame, low-investment dinner. Celery and peanut butter as an appetizer and a baked potato covered in chili for a main course, by which I don't mean a broken, steaming spud laden with beef seasoned with chili powder and some dregs of what might have been peppers and onions, but rather a bowl of my roommate's left-over chili that I like even better than my own chili and which is actually fairly balanced nutritional fare sporting a plethora of different legumes and vegetables (things like carrots and chickpeas that are probably going to have chili purists up in arms) which I microwaved and into which I quite unceremoniously plopped a whole baked potato and then proceded to shovel into my person with a spoon. Whew, glad I got my run-on quota out of the way.
I recommend my readers try this, but I also recommend that you only half-fill a large bowl rather than filling a normal bowl so as to allow for displacement as you dig at the baked potato. I get a certain ammount of glee at the presentation-hack involved in the big unsightly rock in the middle of an overlarge bowl surrounded by an unsightly mess of red bits leaving greasy tomato stains around the edges of some nice white porcelain. Anybody want to help fund my restaurant ideas?
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday seems to be a favorite with the stomach flu virus.
Ah Spring. Spring makes me do crazy things like stay up late playing Xplorers C&K as I battle the kind of insomnia that kept me up many nights as a teenager reading Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L'Engle. I do something to keep from just lying there, staring at my ceiling, waiting for the sleep truck to hit me. The problem with doing something you actively enjoy just before bed is that more often than not you are only delaying the time your brain takes to just let everything settle.
That is why I was running just a little bit late yesterday and had to rush out the door without really having enough time to make a propper breakfast. I had to opt for the "oops, I'm gonna be late" version of my breakfast burritos, which is wrapping a hot dog in a tortilla, microwaving it for 30 seconds and then eating that and a banana while walking to the subway.
Then, at work I drank the last of the free coke I'd saved in a VitaminWater bottle and another bottle of Poland Spring.
Lunch was leftovers of the black bean and tuna pasta and a cup of Earl Grey tea. It was pretty filling for my small portion size. I feel like this is my worst post ever so far, and that takes some doing. Maybe I need to restart my coffee habit.
My girlfriend was really sick today, the way that I was sick when I started this thing only worse. She left work almost as soon as she got there and came to see me to get the key for my apartment so that she could go lay down. When I got off work I went to take care of her. As a vote of solidarity I made us a dinner we could both get down.
I made a very simple chicken stock with a chicken leg I had in the freezer and a little salt, removing all the foam and as much fat as I could manage from the top. Then I added two cups of rice and kept it wet enough to be a little soupy. Then I added some carrots and reserved chicken meat and let them cook in until the carrots were soft.
While I was cooking I had to indulge one of my better habits. I'm infatuated with celery and peanut butter. I don't know when it happened, but if I have both in the house, I eat at least a stalk a day slathered in crunchy peanut butter. I'm exceptionally fond of opening fresh jars of peanut butter when I can use the celery directly as an edible utensil for peanut butter retrieval.
The girl friend and I had our rice porridge and a piece of toast each. I hit mine with a little Adobo seasoning. I was a little worried the porridge would be too complex for my girlfriend's sick tummy, but she finished hers about twice as fast as I ate mine. I guess not eating anything all day will do that to you.
I won't get into the gruesome details here to spare my girlfriend having to read about her sickness after the fact, but she was still ill this morning. I guess I'm not such a good nurse after all. I'm gonna try to pull a Peter Pan to make up for it. If you're reading this, please send some good mojo out to my girlfriend so she gets better soon.
"I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies!"
That is why I was running just a little bit late yesterday and had to rush out the door without really having enough time to make a propper breakfast. I had to opt for the "oops, I'm gonna be late" version of my breakfast burritos, which is wrapping a hot dog in a tortilla, microwaving it for 30 seconds and then eating that and a banana while walking to the subway.
Then, at work I drank the last of the free coke I'd saved in a VitaminWater bottle and another bottle of Poland Spring.
Lunch was leftovers of the black bean and tuna pasta and a cup of Earl Grey tea. It was pretty filling for my small portion size. I feel like this is my worst post ever so far, and that takes some doing. Maybe I need to restart my coffee habit.
My girlfriend was really sick today, the way that I was sick when I started this thing only worse. She left work almost as soon as she got there and came to see me to get the key for my apartment so that she could go lay down. When I got off work I went to take care of her. As a vote of solidarity I made us a dinner we could both get down.
I made a very simple chicken stock with a chicken leg I had in the freezer and a little salt, removing all the foam and as much fat as I could manage from the top. Then I added two cups of rice and kept it wet enough to be a little soupy. Then I added some carrots and reserved chicken meat and let them cook in until the carrots were soft.
While I was cooking I had to indulge one of my better habits. I'm infatuated with celery and peanut butter. I don't know when it happened, but if I have both in the house, I eat at least a stalk a day slathered in crunchy peanut butter. I'm exceptionally fond of opening fresh jars of peanut butter when I can use the celery directly as an edible utensil for peanut butter retrieval.
The girl friend and I had our rice porridge and a piece of toast each. I hit mine with a little Adobo seasoning. I was a little worried the porridge would be too complex for my girlfriend's sick tummy, but she finished hers about twice as fast as I ate mine. I guess not eating anything all day will do that to you.
I won't get into the gruesome details here to spare my girlfriend having to read about her sickness after the fact, but she was still ill this morning. I guess I'm not such a good nurse after all. I'm gonna try to pull a Peter Pan to make up for it. If you're reading this, please send some good mojo out to my girlfriend so she gets better soon.
"I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies!"
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Tuesday is not today. (unless it's a later Tuesday than the one described here)
According to my quiz, at least two of my readers are liars. I already figured that, though, because the internets are full of liars. At only 30% liars, it appears that my readership is above the interweb moral average. Good job, folks.
I know you know I don't like non-breakfast foods for breakfast, but there is one more exception to the bacon and/or eggs and/or cereal rule and that is:
Gyoza!
You may know them as pot stickers, but these dumplings, preferably filled with pork and some incidental vegetables, are really great for breakfast. I started doing it, much like the pizzas because they were cheap and easy to make in the morning, while still being warm food that packs a nice greasy punch.
I like to buy the frozen ones in as big of a bulk packaging as will fit in my freezer. When I cook them, I heat a little sesame oil in a frying pan, then I arrange the frozen gyoza into the pan so that the flat side is on the bottom and the little ridge points up. You don't want to brown them yet. You have to pour enough water in the pan so that 1/8 to 1/4 inch is standing in the bottom of the pan. Throw a lid over them and let them steam till the noodle becomes translucent, then remove the lid and let the water cook off. You can then let them brown (just on the bottom, you don't need to flip them or anything) to your desired crispiness.
I usually eat mine with chili oil and a mixture of soy sauce, a little brown sugar, and vinegar. You can buy different variations of the soy sauce/vinegar mixture in most Asian grocers. It will probably have a picture of dumplings on the bottle.
Yesterday I ate 8 gyoza for breakfast. They weren't very big, though so I got hungry well before lunch and ate a chocolate bunny head as a snack, as illustrated bellow.
The rest of my lunch is what I've come to think of as my weekly cookie parade. This week's participating cookies/sweets were: a blueberry danish, an apple and walnut danish, a peppermint creme brownie, a cappuccino brownie, two chocolate covered biscotti, a chocolate biscotti with some kind of nuts in it (I still don't know!), about 4 square inches of jam bars, two strawberry halves (not from the same strawberry), and two blackberries.
I know you know I don't like non-breakfast foods for breakfast, but there is one more exception to the bacon and/or eggs and/or cereal rule and that is:
Gyoza!
You may know them as pot stickers, but these dumplings, preferably filled with pork and some incidental vegetables, are really great for breakfast. I started doing it, much like the pizzas because they were cheap and easy to make in the morning, while still being warm food that packs a nice greasy punch.
I like to buy the frozen ones in as big of a bulk packaging as will fit in my freezer. When I cook them, I heat a little sesame oil in a frying pan, then I arrange the frozen gyoza into the pan so that the flat side is on the bottom and the little ridge points up. You don't want to brown them yet. You have to pour enough water in the pan so that 1/8 to 1/4 inch is standing in the bottom of the pan. Throw a lid over them and let them steam till the noodle becomes translucent, then remove the lid and let the water cook off. You can then let them brown (just on the bottom, you don't need to flip them or anything) to your desired crispiness.
I usually eat mine with chili oil and a mixture of soy sauce, a little brown sugar, and vinegar. You can buy different variations of the soy sauce/vinegar mixture in most Asian grocers. It will probably have a picture of dumplings on the bottle.
Yesterday I ate 8 gyoza for breakfast. They weren't very big, though so I got hungry well before lunch and ate a chocolate bunny head as a snack, as illustrated bellow.
As you may have noticed, I had a lot of sugar this Tuesday. In addition to the chocolate bunny head was cola, which I should not be drinking but am drinking regularly because it is regularly free. It's better for my heart than coffee, but a lot worse for my teeth and gastro-intestinal tract. In an attempt to improve, I had gingerale with lunch and it wasn't even flat.
The Surgeon General approved portion of my lunch was two sandwich halves, a tuna salad to which I added cucumber slices and a little mayo(Honestly, Mom, just a little.) and an Italian cold cuts hoagie from which I removed the pickled, roasted red pepper and added a thick layer of salad greens and red onions. The Italian meat in question was pancetta and
an indeterminate variation of salami. Both sandwiches were quite good, although the bread on the Italian hoagie got all soggy where the red peppers were. Note to my readers who work in the design kitchens of Whole Foods, please keep the peppers to the side during delivery.
The rest of my lunch is what I've come to think of as my weekly cookie parade. This week's participating cookies/sweets were: a blueberry danish, an apple and walnut danish, a peppermint creme brownie, a cappuccino brownie, two chocolate covered biscotti, a chocolate biscotti with some kind of nuts in it (I still don't know!), about 4 square inches of jam bars, two strawberry halves (not from the same strawberry), and two blackberries.
Since I eat lunch at 2PM and I met my Japanese friend immediately after work for a quick dinner before she was off to see Hairspray, I really wasn't hungry at all, but I figured I should take her somewhere interesting as it would be her last real meal in NYC, for a while anyway, and I wanted an excuse for a really long run-on sentence.
We went to The Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien Hotel. The burgers are great and priced to fit their Midtown environs. I was now trailing two Japanese girls as my friend had picked up another friend during her Japanese-speaking tour of Manhattan that afternoon. The ordering process is a bit intense as the place is always packed and always has a line. The only place I've seen with less patience at the counter are the blights of the Philadelphia cheesesteak community, Pat's and Geno's.
We managed to get everybody the burger they wanted without too much drama, though, and soon enough I was tucking into a medium cheese burger with the works, pickles, onions, letuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard and mayo. I also got a bag of fries for the group. Even if you're not two Japanese girls and a guy who just finished a cookie parade two hours ago, one bag of fries is enough to share between 2.4 average Americans.
That's when Brett Favre walked in and I thought "Damn, that guy looks a lot like Brett Favre." Nobody else in the Joint seemed to notice, though, so I thought maybe I was halucinating. I pointed him out to the Japanese girls, but they, of course, had no idea who he was and so could not weigh in on wether it was really him or not. I didn't want to harrass the guy at dinner though, so I let it drop. We finished our burgers and then left.
We waited in the lobby for phone calls to be made and toilets to be used before heading out onto the street. There I saw a herd of beefy, college-aged guys yelling "Yo, Brett! Come on, let's go Brett!" At that point I was 87% sure it was Brett Favre after all. I sent the two Japanese girls back into the lobby where Brett had just rounded a corner to get their compulsory "Japanese tourist with random famous person they don't know but a friend pointed out" photo.
Brett came around the corner first, and then quickly entered a large shiny vehicle and lurched down 57th Street. My Japanese friends came around second looking rather disappointed. Perhaps I should have coached them better on how to pronounce his name, but they were rejected. I didn't see the rejection, and so I can't really remark on Mr. Favre's personality, but seeing as how my last quiz is over, I'm going to throw this one over to the polls.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday was made of 100% post consumer material
The right way to start a Monday is with bacon and eggs. I threw in some mushrooms and asparagus and a padinha for awesomeness. Chop two slices of bacon and fry them in a pan. When the little bacon nibbles get crispy, throw in two mushrooms, diced. When the mushrooms start to soften, add a stick of asparagus, sliced into thick coins. As the asparagus brightens, pour two eggs, scrambled into the pan, reduce the heat to a medium low and flip the curding eggs until just barely set. Throw that mess on a sliced padinha with some munster cheese and wrap it in clingwrap until you get out of the subway near work. Then you will have approximated my breakfast from yesterday.
I couldn't wait till I got to work to eat it. I'd been thinking about making this sandwich since the night before. So, as I walked through the Lincoln Center's courtyard, I unwrapped the sandwich and dug in. As I started to eat, Ennio Morricone's "Theme from 'A Fistful of Dollars'" came on my iPod, and I turned around the corner of the New York City Ballet's building into this long, white, tent-like tunnel. I don't know exactly why they had installed this temporary structure, but the rhythm of the poles and the breaks in the tent material and the soundtrack all conspired to make my sandwich feel very important. It was the best breakfast I'd eaten since Easter.
Then, I skipped lunch so that I could get out of work early and meet a visiting friend from Japan with enough time for dinner before I had to work for a show down in SoHo. I did finish off a bag of wasabi peas in the afternoon, though, which was about 12 peas, which is not very much food really. I also decided to drink some cola to keep my sugar up. I barely took a sip or two, though because I don't really like cola, it was just free from some event at work.
My friend and I ended up going to Lombardi's for dinner, which is a pretty good pie, if not overpriced, but for someone's first slice of New York pizza I wanted some place with a little atmosphere and Lombardi's is pretty much a NYC landmark. She being Japanese, she wanted anchovies on the pizza. I managed a 50/50 split of anchovies and their meatballs as a bit of cultural exchange. I did have a slice of the anchovy half and while I expected it to be abusively fishy, I wasn't prepared for how abusively salty the anchovies were. My Japanese friend, of course loved it. I can see why people like it, but I was absolutely overwhelmed. Of course I often actively seek out levels of garlic that most other people find toxic, so I can't really pass judgement on those who love briny fish on what would otherwise be a pretty good pizza. On the whole, though, I really like their pizza, and would really, really like their pizza at about half the price.
Then, before working as a projectionist at an event in SoHo, my Japanese friend and I had an espresso and a coffee respectively at the bar where the event was to be held. I was trying to keep off the booze while still being a gracious and welcoming host in the best Japanese tradition. After the show finished, though, they gave me two free drink tickets and I felt it a shame to go to waste, so I used them to introduce my Japanese friend to a grand American tradition, PBR. Then I tried to explain to her in my rusty Japanese what a hipster was. I think she understood the basics, but I never did manage to explain the supposed ironic cool of drinking shitty beer.
After the PBR we floated to the nearby La Linea, because I'd read reviews and wanted to check it out. It had a great relaxed hip-hop vibe and the decor was very loungy. It looked like a great bar that just happened to be empty because it was Monday. I wasn't planning on ending my detox, but I figured that having a friend visit from the other side of the planet was a lame time to be off the sauce entirely, so we had a drink each, for a total of $18. To add insult to injury, the sign said that happy hour had ended about 10 minutes before we got there, and before we were half-way done with our drinks, the bartender came over and told us that happy hour was back on again for the night, everything half-priced. I don't know how fair it is for me to badmouth a bar that re-opens it's happy hour, but it left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth that I didn't want to waste my $9 Jack and Ginger on washing away.
But, as you will see tomorrow, I'm right back off the sauce and on to actually eating 3 meals a day. Hopefully less arduous work will leave more time for me to tell you about why Brett Favre is kind of a dick.
I couldn't wait till I got to work to eat it. I'd been thinking about making this sandwich since the night before. So, as I walked through the Lincoln Center's courtyard, I unwrapped the sandwich and dug in. As I started to eat, Ennio Morricone's "Theme from 'A Fistful of Dollars'" came on my iPod, and I turned around the corner of the New York City Ballet's building into this long, white, tent-like tunnel. I don't know exactly why they had installed this temporary structure, but the rhythm of the poles and the breaks in the tent material and the soundtrack all conspired to make my sandwich feel very important. It was the best breakfast I'd eaten since Easter.
Then, I skipped lunch so that I could get out of work early and meet a visiting friend from Japan with enough time for dinner before I had to work for a show down in SoHo. I did finish off a bag of wasabi peas in the afternoon, though, which was about 12 peas, which is not very much food really. I also decided to drink some cola to keep my sugar up. I barely took a sip or two, though because I don't really like cola, it was just free from some event at work.
My friend and I ended up going to Lombardi's for dinner, which is a pretty good pie, if not overpriced, but for someone's first slice of New York pizza I wanted some place with a little atmosphere and Lombardi's is pretty much a NYC landmark. She being Japanese, she wanted anchovies on the pizza. I managed a 50/50 split of anchovies and their meatballs as a bit of cultural exchange. I did have a slice of the anchovy half and while I expected it to be abusively fishy, I wasn't prepared for how abusively salty the anchovies were. My Japanese friend, of course loved it. I can see why people like it, but I was absolutely overwhelmed. Of course I often actively seek out levels of garlic that most other people find toxic, so I can't really pass judgement on those who love briny fish on what would otherwise be a pretty good pizza. On the whole, though, I really like their pizza, and would really, really like their pizza at about half the price.
Then, before working as a projectionist at an event in SoHo, my Japanese friend and I had an espresso and a coffee respectively at the bar where the event was to be held. I was trying to keep off the booze while still being a gracious and welcoming host in the best Japanese tradition. After the show finished, though, they gave me two free drink tickets and I felt it a shame to go to waste, so I used them to introduce my Japanese friend to a grand American tradition, PBR. Then I tried to explain to her in my rusty Japanese what a hipster was. I think she understood the basics, but I never did manage to explain the supposed ironic cool of drinking shitty beer.
After the PBR we floated to the nearby La Linea, because I'd read reviews and wanted to check it out. It had a great relaxed hip-hop vibe and the decor was very loungy. It looked like a great bar that just happened to be empty because it was Monday. I wasn't planning on ending my detox, but I figured that having a friend visit from the other side of the planet was a lame time to be off the sauce entirely, so we had a drink each, for a total of $18. To add insult to injury, the sign said that happy hour had ended about 10 minutes before we got there, and before we were half-way done with our drinks, the bartender came over and told us that happy hour was back on again for the night, everything half-priced. I don't know how fair it is for me to badmouth a bar that re-opens it's happy hour, but it left a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth that I didn't want to waste my $9 Jack and Ginger on washing away.
But, as you will see tomorrow, I'm right back off the sauce and on to actually eating 3 meals a day. Hopefully less arduous work will leave more time for me to tell you about why Brett Favre is kind of a dick.
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