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.

Thursday staggers towards the good ol' days.

Look, I"m gonna level with you. I'm in the middle of playing a lot of Soul Calibur 2 a la the Gamecube via our Wii. I'm in between rounds of team battle, and at the moment my roommates are clicking away as their sprites swing sharp objects at each other. I'm up to bat in a second, but I just thought I'd take the time to tell you about what I ate yesterday.
If you guessed that I had oatmeal for breakfast, you were right. If you guessed that I stewed a diced apple into a double version of the oatmeal recipe from Tuesday, well that's not guessing, that's stalking, and quite frankly, I'm, well, oddly flattered. All the same, please stop.
I just ran the boys for three rounds, and now I'm spent and it's cold in here so I'm shivering as I type. I could really use a nice bowl of soup like the Italian lentil soup I had for lunch on Thursday. I kept soaking pieces of a multigrain roll in there and then fishing them out all soggy with warm tomato goop.
And then there was the Japanese curry for dinner, also goopy, all coriander and pork fat blended into one of the most delightful, honest, satisfying food stuffs I have found. I added carrots, onions, potatoes, chicken and cabbage to this one, and then had it over rice like someone might have someone else over something in an experience they hopefully both find thoroughly enjoyable. Ok, I have no idea if my curry enjoyed being eaten, but it's a great image, just roll with it.

Wednesday sort of got used to moderation.

The day started off with all good intentions of beginning a new day in my healthy lifestyle. What better way to start a heart-safe diet than with a bowl of oatmeal? 1 cup of oats, a dash of salt, a touch of vanilla, a tablespoon and a half of dark brown sugar and half a tablespoon of butter stewed in 1 3/4 cup of water. It was a very moderate amount of sugar and butter, I promise, and it came out very well. I might up the salt just a bit and perhaps more vanilla, but the end result was a very good bowl of oatmeal. Alright, cardiac success! I'm safe eating a square or two of organic chocolate, right? 86% cacao! nomnomnom.

My first lunch happened around noon, and it was at least modest in proportion if not fairly creamy. The night before I'd stopped into a new bakery in my neighborhood, just to check it out, and the owner was working the counter and was so welcoming that I had a hard time not buying anything, although the quiches leered at me like jilted lovers and layers of pastry seductively parted revealing lascivious peaks of icing. I saw a simple enough pastry on a bed of greens labeled "Chicken Pot Pie $3" and I went for it, figuring at least it was dinner-like, and there WAS a bed of lettuce on the bottom.

In my desperation to get away from the languorous eclairs pouting their sugary promises at me, I didn't stop to wonder why someone would put chicken pot pie on a bed of lettuce. When I got the pot pie home, I couldn't bring myself to eat it for dinner. I had a piece of the lettuce bedding and then put it in the fridge. In the morning, packing for work, though, I thought it would make for a reasonable lunch.

Well it wasn't much of a pie, although there was plenty of chicken. The sauce was more starchy than fatty, even, so I convinced myself it really wasn't that bad for me. For $3 I have to say the portion was a little on the modest side, especially considering that the only pastry involved was a few layers of filo dough over the top. It was on a bed of lettuce because where I assumed in the bakery there was more dough going under the chicken filling, there was nothing. This was particularly disappointing as, for my personal pot pie proclivities, I love the crust along the inside of the pie pan that tries to bake, but just stews in the juices inside making for this saturated pasty mess you have to dig out of the corners of the disposable aluminum pan that cradles most of the single-serving frozen incarnations of this classic.

What was there was very competently done, but I found myself still hungry and finally, by 3pm I could not hold out any longer. While waiting for Duane Reade to fill my prescription for an acid blocker (which i'm not even sure is a good idea) I wandered into a slightly upscale grocery and ended up getting one of their sushi boxes.

Funny, that while waiting for prescription antacids, I end up buying the mixed spicy rolls: spicy salmon, spicy tuna and spicy shrimp. They really weren't that spicy, though. Neither were they very good, but for one brief second, walking back to Duane Reade with just the noise of traffic in my ears, looking down at my take-out sushi with my peripheral vision full of concrete and cars, I felt like I was back in Shinsaibashi. Sadly the feeling passed quickly, largely because even the convenience store sushi in Japan isn't this far off it's peak. Also very sadly, at $6 for the box it's fairly reasonable for sushi in the US, only about twice as much as the same grade of sushi in Japan, as opposed to three times as much, which seems to be about standard in the city. Stil, a far cry better than the sushi in SoHo.

Then, for dinner, I swear on my colon, I ate a salad. It was the asian chicken salad from Vynl. I know that there was more chicken than all the collected plant matter in the salad, but the chopped salad just sounded terrible, and the next healthiest salad was the greek, which I figured would be too rich. Besides being hard to actually get onto my fork, the asian chicken salad was pretty good. It's candy salad, covered in wontons, dressing and chicken, but there was some actual lettuce in there. Just like you should not come off of antidepressants suddenly, also one should not just start eating real salads. Your colon needs time to properly...

Oh who am I kidding? I could have ordered the chopped salad, but what I really wanted was the buttermilk fried chicken. Asian chicken salad was a compromise, but as much processed sugar as was in the dressing, I might have been better off with the meatloaf, and at least I wouldn't have this latent anxiety over not eating what I want to eat. As it was, I still had a minor swelling of the chest pains as dinner drew to a close. Maybe I ate too fast or I was laughing too hard, but I feel like I might as well have ordered a steak. I mean, I can imagine eating healthier and enjoying it, but everytime I look at my options I can't seem to find the right foods.

Thursday, I want to enjoy what I eat!

Tuesday I was forced to admit my own mortality.

I have here chronicled many abuses of the stomach over the past months. I have reported both the glorious and the grotesque in garrulous gastronomical detail. I have tried to champion simple, sturdy foods, primarily those sporting lots of butter and heavy cream. The past two weeks have been full to bursting, as has your humble author, with all manner of culinary delight that I had hoped to share with you in thoroughly photo-documented detail. Those photos are still coming, but a grey cloud hangs over my memory of their heart-warming delight.

This might have more immediately to do with what I ate Monday night, rather than the two weeks prior, but my body has none the less made it fairly clear that a change is in order.

Yesterday morning, as I finished my daily hygiene routine, I was struck with a pang of pain in the center of my chest that soon developed into a dull, squeezing pain across the breadth of my chest. I laid down a minute, relaxed, and the pain subsided. I took stock of my internal signs and didn't seem to see any reason not to go to work, although I was quite a bit freaked out.

Later that morning, around 10:30 or so, the chest pains return and are more severe and prolonged. I am very worried at this point and manage to get myself to a cardiologist, who can find no fault with my EKG readings. She's not sure what's wrong, but many tests have been ordered and I was given a stern talking-to in regards to my lifestyle. In addition to my cardiologist, many of my friends and family who are familiar with the way I eat have also chimed in about what I should or should not be doing. It's made me a bit paranoid about what i should be doing about my possible heart condition or severe gastric distress that possibly led to the chest pains which at least were not a possible heart attack.

I left the cardiologist's office and stumbled past halal carts and fast food joints at a loss for ways to satisfy my heart and my stomach at the same time. In a daze at the possibility that the way I eat might lead to my untimely death, I stumbled through the Whole Foods salad bar, filling a small paper carton with spoonfuls of various grains and legumes and whatnots. I remember getting some of their quinoa salad with toasted almonds and dried blueberries, i love that stuff, then there was their orzo, some tortellini in a pesto, the thai peanut noodles, some chick peas, some black bean salad...
Looking back, it probably wasn't the healthiest of lunches. A lot of the things I ate were saturated with oils and/or cream. I was not off to a great start.

For dinner I was beside myself trying to figure out something I'd like to eat that wouldn't kill me. I snacked on a handful of goldfish crackers as I contemplated what I could make from the groceries of my former life. At the behest of a concerned friend I ate an apple, that was better than I expected it to be. I forgot that I like apples. then there was a piece of Dark German Wheat toast with a little natural peanut butter. I know the peanut butter has a lot of fat and sugar in it, but this was "organic" (shoot me now) and I didn't use very much of it. I just couldn't eat dry toast. I went to bed still quite a bit hungry, but at least there was hope for tomorro.

Sunday Exodus

This past Sunday was spent fleeing the burning wreckage of my undergraduate theater company's 15th anniversary reunion. As I was the getaway driver, I was careful not to marinate my liver too thoroughly the night before. I woke up a lot less hung-over than I did on Saturday, but that didn't make Sheetz breakfast any less appropriate.
Smonster. How grotesque. How abusive. Two pillows of eggstuff, two sausage patties, two helpings of cheese, smooshed into one biscuit. I take mine with ketchup. They put your stomach where it needs to be to soak up unwanted juices and then slough the whole pile away on little greasy ice skates. I also had a chicken biscuit and a hash brown for good measure.

That swillpile held me up for the better part of the day. I didn't eat again till dinner, when I had the great fortune to have one of my oldest friends and his boyfriend over for dinner. Dinner was a bed of langostino risotto nestling a bread bowl of mushroom-potato soup.

The soup was very vegetarian and made from scratch. I'd made the soup stock last week and had some set asside for this particular soup. There were criminis, portabellas and black forrest mushrooms in the mix along with potatoes to lend weight to the broth. The breadbowl soaked most of the moisture out of the soup though, leaving it more of a herbed mushroom puree that was nonetheless very satisfying with our cold winter winds wipping around the windows. We finished the soup with a healthy splash of madeira to help ward off the chill.
The risotto was designed more to provide rich, long-lasting insulation rather than an immediate injection of boozy warmth. Though I did use a little barley sochu (a light Japanese grain alcohol) in the earlier stages of cooking the rice, the key feature here was the creamy finish layered with more floral herbs to match the langostinos' own natural perfumes.
Both dishes sported a fairly complex set of aromas while still qualifying as hearty winter fare. The supple curves of the langostino, simmered in the vegetable stock infused with dried chantrelles, danced lithely around a bright melody of taragon and oregano supported by the warm tones of creamy carrots and shallots. The soup was much more trim in terms of texture, owing much of it's character to the delicate flesh of stewed mushroom caps, but boasted an aroma like a deeply stained plank of walnut, woody and dark revealing layers with careful inspection. The black forrest mushrooms alone give off the most seductive musk that I pause everytime I use a few just to breathe in the soul of them as it insinuates it's way out of their plastic bag.
Both dishes, being balanced in and of themselves, still complimented each other very well. All they might have wanted for was a little bit of salt. A dash or two of adobo seasoning and there was no room left for desert, except, of course, for finishing the bottle of madeira.

Wednesday, i like you. I really, really like you.

From the most humble beginnings can come the most thorough satisfaction. When we're talking about vanilla yogurt and Kashi 7 whole grain nuggets, that thorough satisfaction is similar to the satisfaction one gets from crawling through a rugby scrum.
With this rocky start (as in I ate a bowl of gravel and cream) I laid a foundation for some deep satiation.

Lunch was leftovers plus. I'd made a chicken stir-fry the night before with this chili paste I'd bought in Chinatown sometime in the spring. I marinated deboned, chopped chicken thighs in this paste along with sesame oil and lime juice. After sauteing the chicken lightly, I reserved it and sauteed onion and carrot slices on a very low heat until they started to soften, progressively adding red peppers, white wine, snow peas and then reintroducing the chicken. You know a dish's flavors are in the right proportion when even the soft lilt and squeaky edge of sponginess from snow peas and chicken subjected to microwaving still manage to drive your fork back to the bowl almost as soon as it unloads. I supplemented the leftovers with a quinoa salad with dried blueberries and toasted almonds and a Thai noodle salad with cashew and asparagus from the Whole Foods ready foods bar. If you're eating in at Whole Foods and you just take moderate portions in the re-usable bowls, the prices are very reasonable. I think both my side portions of about half a cup each were only $2.50 or so. Both were very good and provided just enough compliment to the leftovers that it didn't feel like a rehash at all.

Admittedly, though, most of the satisfaction from lunch probably came from all that chicken fat in the thighs. Nothing cuts through a windy November afternoon like warm chicken fat drizzling through your intestines.

I would say dinner was equally simple, but I guess most people don't consider quinoa simple. They also maybe wouldn't find a toasted turkey, apple and brie sandwich to be simple either, so yeah, equally as simple, just as satisfying. The only details missing from the above description are the mustard and the whole wheat bread we spread it on, "we" being this girl I really, really like. One caveat from a mistake we made: although you don't need to use butter to toast a sandwich if you have nice enough pans, you do have to use a very low heat. It takes a while for the brie to start to melt and the turkey and mustard to get their mojo on, and you don't want to scorch the bread before they're ready to go. I scorched the bread a little bit. All the same, the combination of brie and turkey next to the bread on either side, warming, starting to open their flavors, and the apples still crisp in the middle playing with the bite of the mustard all came together to build a sandwich I feel ought to be considered a classic if it isn't already on your short list by now. Even the over-toasted bread provided it's own layer to the harmonious melange.

A handful of the right ingredients in the right places, even though somewhere while making it you make a mistake or two, when the mix is right, simple satisfies.

almost two months...

Last Updated on August 25, 2008
I am such a putz. But now, by incessant demand, I shall resume my quest to exhaustively chronicle my eats, from the inane to the insane.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Caloric intake for the day started with a Jeno's frozen pizza, which I had heated up the night before, eaten three bites out of, and then wrapped up in a ziploc sandwich bag. I had every intention of reheating it in our office's toaster oven, but when the time came to start feeding the genius machine, I just couldn't hold out for the toaster oven's slow-loving touch. I had that gibbus moon of sausage, pepperoni, "cheese," sauce and starch cold, soggy and folded in half. It was a terrible thing I did in the name of food, and I loved every bite of it.
Then came an amazingly decadent surprise. A co-worker brought in some indulgently decadent baked goods to share with the office. They were mini-loaves of ginger cake with a honey and cream cheese icing and sliced candied ginger on top. She'd gone for apple sauce instead of oil for the ginger cake which made them very dense and moist. Even for my butter-mad palate, the icing more than made up for any oil that might have been missing from the cake and the candied ginger was surpirsingly moist as well, making for a warm, creamy hug of a breakfast-ender.
Lunch time was time for leftovers, although with soup, really, the left-overs can be the main event. The soup du jour was actually the soup du last Thursday, an Italian wedding soup I made in the burgeoning throes of romance. Emotional context infused the layers of this eclectic take on the traditional Italian layers. The soup started with an onion, celery and green and red pepper "trinity" that soon folded around garlic, chantrelles, zucchini, and red, white and blue potatoes. The whole mess stewed in a blend of beef and chicken stock and then we finished the soup with green beans, frozen meat balls and whole wheat rotini. A little cheating in the name of expediency here and there, but the results were grandly satisfying, even days later.
I also snuck a piece or two of WholeFoods' brown rice salmon roll and a few bites of barley soup from my lunch partner, because, honestly, why else do you eat with other people if not to steal their food?
Then, as so often happens at my office, just when you get back from lunch, you are informed of a room full of leftovers from some faculty luncheon or another, and you make your way dutifully down to bond with your fellow scavengers. I had a grilled chicken wrap with roasted vegetables inside. The veggies were mushy, the chicken was, bite to bite, possibly very dry and uninviting, and yet somehow I ate all of it. I also availed myself of some tortelini antipasta and some macaroni salad, not to mention a handful of cookies, of course. The antipasta was good, but already very picked over when I got there so there wasn't much actual tortelini left in the bowl. The macaroni salad was tolerable, though cloying. Mayonaise dressings with a lot of sugar in them can be downright unsettling. The caterer would have done a lot better to cut back on the goop and add more fresh veggies to compete with the syrupy oversaturation of eggs, oil and geuh.
Free samples! In the ridiculously long line at Trader Joe's, thankfully accompanied by the most pleasant company I could think of, we threw back some jerk chicken. Mine was gone in two bites, seconds after we picked up our little pleated paper cups, prompting my companion to comment on the disparity between our portions. Not one to take credit for chivalry unintended, I didn't so much pass on the lion's share as I wolfed down the sizable portion I took for myself. As much as I can remember tasting it, it was pretty darn good.
Dinner, when it finally came, was an old stand-by come back to visit: Pork Gyoza, fried, then steamed, then fried again. I prepared a dipping bowl of ponzu (soy sauce and vinegar flavored with yuzu, a citrus similar to grapefruit) and chili oil, that about a dozen of the wrinkly little bags of awesome, fried a crispy brown on one side, slid through on their way into my welcoming gob. What iconic perfection. I managed to hold myself off at a dozen by suplementing the dinner with a large crisp corn tortilla as I was cooking and then a flour tortilla, fried and then smeared with goat cheese and wildflower honey as a desert. As awesome as you might think that desert might be, I have to admit that I did not have actual butter on hand in my kitchen (oh, the horror) and had to instead fry the tortilla smeared in SmartBalance. Geuh. Still, it wasn't a bad finish and there was no mistake in my stomach that caloric intake had reached a fitting end for the day.
It was time to wash it all down with several tall glasses of water and start thinking about breakfast...