Tuesday, April 29, 2008
What's going on?
I didn't mean to black out on you guys, but the job that provided me with all my much-appreciated writing time has ended. This has thrown my writing life into a bit of a shambles, but rest assured, the days that have passed will be covered. They happen to be quite full of food which makes making up for not having written them all the harder. Soon enough you will know what I have been eating since last Thursday.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Addendum to Thursday
A brief description of the Indian food I weaseled out of explaining:
My roommate and I decided that stuffing ourselves with swill, drinking beer and ganking some n00bs on Halo3 would be a great way to celebrate my Japan check finally coming in. To this end, we collectively ordered a great deal food from our favorite, more-or-less local, Indian delivery joint.
Up first were a few samosas. We get the vegetarian samosas because it makes the vegetarian roommate happy and because they're just plain better than the chicken ones. The delivery joint was nice enough to give us two cups of each of the chutneys, so there was no need to be shy while slathering the deep-fried dumplings with spicy green cilantro goodness or heaping up the very odorous and spicy onions in the mysterious red sauce.
For those of you not familiar with Indian food, I am deeply sorry. I would recommend doing an internet search for the closest Indian restaurant and then going there right away. Ideally you will find a buffet and be free to explore things you will not know the name of nor be able to explain their deliciousness to your other sheltered friends. If you cannot find a buffet, order vegetable pakora, vegetable samosas, several naan, chana masala, saag paneer, lamb vindaloo, chicken korma, some basmati rice and a lassi to drink plus gulab jamon for desert. You may want to take the forementioned sheltered friends because that is enough food for 5 or 6 people. Go on, git. It's ok, I'll wait.
During your recent epic dinner experience, you probably noticed the three sauces they brought to your table. There was a brown one, a red one and a green one. The brown one that tastes like rasins is tamarind chutney. This used to be my favorite condoment in the world for about 4 months in college. I am now over it, but occaisional use on naan or pakora is still very rewarding. The red one is very obviously onion chutney. It is sometimes the spiciest of the three, although the green cilantro chutney can be very spicy, and sometimes there is a white coconut chutney that can be deceptively spicy to our Western sensibilites where white things are usually bland like white bread, milk and Al Gore.
As for our actual order, we had: vegetable pakora, a mix of vegetables battered and fried in oddly-shaped lumps, perfect for chutney abuse; naan, a soft, fluffy yogurt-based bread that is traditionally used like an eddible shovel while consuming curries; chapathi, another indian bread similar to naan but unleavened so it makes for a denser yet more pliable shovel; papadam, sort of like a giant tortilla chip made from chick pea flour; poori, yet another Indian bread, this one deep-fried (Imagine a chalupa shell inflated like a balloon into this eddible football/frisbee hybrid sport food. I apologize if your imagination just broke.); chana masala, chickpeas with onion, tomato and a lot of cumin; keema kurma, ground lamb in a creamy almond sauce; chicken vindaloo, a very spicy curry with an amazingly convoluted cultural history that you can learn about here; and some chick pea soup that comes complimentary every time we order from this restaurant which happens to be quite good but which I don't know the name of because I never actually order it.
I don't know if that counts as a run-on sentence, per se, but I'm gonna leave it there. It was a great dinner.
My roommate and I decided that stuffing ourselves with swill, drinking beer and ganking some n00bs on Halo3 would be a great way to celebrate my Japan check finally coming in. To this end, we collectively ordered a great deal food from our favorite, more-or-less local, Indian delivery joint.
Up first were a few samosas. We get the vegetarian samosas because it makes the vegetarian roommate happy and because they're just plain better than the chicken ones. The delivery joint was nice enough to give us two cups of each of the chutneys, so there was no need to be shy while slathering the deep-fried dumplings with spicy green cilantro goodness or heaping up the very odorous and spicy onions in the mysterious red sauce.
For those of you not familiar with Indian food, I am deeply sorry. I would recommend doing an internet search for the closest Indian restaurant and then going there right away. Ideally you will find a buffet and be free to explore things you will not know the name of nor be able to explain their deliciousness to your other sheltered friends. If you cannot find a buffet, order vegetable pakora, vegetable samosas, several naan, chana masala, saag paneer, lamb vindaloo, chicken korma, some basmati rice and a lassi to drink plus gulab jamon for desert. You may want to take the forementioned sheltered friends because that is enough food for 5 or 6 people. Go on, git. It's ok, I'll wait.
During your recent epic dinner experience, you probably noticed the three sauces they brought to your table. There was a brown one, a red one and a green one. The brown one that tastes like rasins is tamarind chutney. This used to be my favorite condoment in the world for about 4 months in college. I am now over it, but occaisional use on naan or pakora is still very rewarding. The red one is very obviously onion chutney. It is sometimes the spiciest of the three, although the green cilantro chutney can be very spicy, and sometimes there is a white coconut chutney that can be deceptively spicy to our Western sensibilites where white things are usually bland like white bread, milk and Al Gore.
As for our actual order, we had: vegetable pakora, a mix of vegetables battered and fried in oddly-shaped lumps, perfect for chutney abuse; naan, a soft, fluffy yogurt-based bread that is traditionally used like an eddible shovel while consuming curries; chapathi, another indian bread similar to naan but unleavened so it makes for a denser yet more pliable shovel; papadam, sort of like a giant tortilla chip made from chick pea flour; poori, yet another Indian bread, this one deep-fried (Imagine a chalupa shell inflated like a balloon into this eddible football/frisbee hybrid sport food. I apologize if your imagination just broke.); chana masala, chickpeas with onion, tomato and a lot of cumin; keema kurma, ground lamb in a creamy almond sauce; chicken vindaloo, a very spicy curry with an amazingly convoluted cultural history that you can learn about here; and some chick pea soup that comes complimentary every time we order from this restaurant which happens to be quite good but which I don't know the name of because I never actually order it.
I don't know if that counts as a run-on sentence, per se, but I'm gonna leave it there. It was a great dinner.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Thursday in the great outdoors
I didn't eat breakfast this morning due to prolonged exposure to snuggles, so my coffee, Flavia espresso roast with the French vanilla creamers, hit an empty stomach. As a reslult, by the time lunch rolled around I felt VERY HUNGRY.
That just made finally eating those tuna wraps from Tuesday that much better. Having lunch in the park also put a nice sparkle on what would otherwise have been pretty average lunch fare. Not too bad considering they sat in the fridge for two days. I also had half a bag of potato chips before I got bored of them and stuffed them back in my bag.
The real highlight of lunch was desert. I decided to splurge after lunch and hit up one of the Central Park ice cream carts. I had a strawberry crunch bar and my partner in park lunch had a mango fruit bar. The strawberry crunch bar gave me some serious flashbacks to middle school, the last time I ate strawberry crunch bars on a regular basis.
Dinner came in stages, or more like waves. First, there was the lonely scallop trying to get along with two shrimp in a sad little plastic bag in my fridge. I didn't want them to sit there any longer, so together with some leftover refried beans, they combined powers to form a seafood burrito.
Then i ate a lot of Indian food. the end.
That just made finally eating those tuna wraps from Tuesday that much better. Having lunch in the park also put a nice sparkle on what would otherwise have been pretty average lunch fare. Not too bad considering they sat in the fridge for two days. I also had half a bag of potato chips before I got bored of them and stuffed them back in my bag.
The real highlight of lunch was desert. I decided to splurge after lunch and hit up one of the Central Park ice cream carts. I had a strawberry crunch bar and my partner in park lunch had a mango fruit bar. The strawberry crunch bar gave me some serious flashbacks to middle school, the last time I ate strawberry crunch bars on a regular basis.
Dinner came in stages, or more like waves. First, there was the lonely scallop trying to get along with two shrimp in a sad little plastic bag in my fridge. I didn't want them to sit there any longer, so together with some leftover refried beans, they combined powers to form a seafood burrito.
Then i ate a lot of Indian food. the end.
The Wednesday after
I've been so productive writing that I've felt kind of lazy in the mornings, hence another Jeno's frozen pizza for breakfast. Today's selection was sausage.
The one problem with Jeno's pizzas is that 1 in 10 of the ones I get from my local grocer don't have much cheese at all. My usual fix for this is shaking a liberal amount of parmesean cheese onto the top. You should be careful to leave space at the edges, though, because the parmesean has a high spread factor when it melts.
Wednesday was Administrative Assistant Appreciation Day or something like that. It used to be Secretary's Day, but we don't use that word any more because it's too kinky. It's much harder to fantasize about an "administrative assistant," unless, of course, you have a fetish for asonance or words with lots of sylables.
My workplace being such a delightful place, the faculty all donated towards a special brunch for the admin asst dept. I'm going to do my best at remembering all of the stuff I ate, but I really just gorged on what may well be my last cookie parade for a while. Sadly this assignment ends on Friday and I doubt any other assignment will provide me with such a bountiful supply of cookies.
There was a really good rye bread. I cut a thick slice, spread on some spicy brown mustard and layered some great pastrami on top. It was the sort of great you get with a simple confluence of quality ingredients.
I passed on the bagels and lox because I'd just listened to an NPR report about global fishing practices and environmental and food safety experts pretty much decry farmed salmon as one of the most terrible fish a human could consume. Since there wasn't much chance of it being free-range Alaskan, I thought it best just to pass.
I ate 3 of these delightful mini cinamon rolls with cream cheese on one of them, about 7 ginger snaps, a "black and white" cookie (a soft sugar cookie with black chocolate icing and white orange icing), some butter cookie, an amoretti and a bagel with a slice of summer sausage. I feel like there were more cookies and pastries involved, but I don't remember the details. The whole thing was in the faculty lounge, too, so I had a Green Mountain Sumatran roast for my morning coffee.
It was enough food that I didn't eat lunch, although I did take the bag of ginger snaps with me and snack on them the rest of the day.
Dinner was another bit of simplistic glory: BST sandwiches, bacon, spinach and tomato. On wheat toast I spread a little Miracle whip, layed out a nice bed of baby spinach, some sliced vine-ripened tomatoes, bacon and cheese. The girlfriend opted for munster. I tried the longhorn cheddar because it had more bite up front and would stand out more against the bacon. I'm sure the munster with it's creamy tones and late bite finish was just as good.
Never one to let bacon be the only thing I fry in my bacon fat, I cut a potato as thin as I could manage and made some bistro fries, or whatever less pretentious name you might want to call them. I seasoned these with a little salt and pepper.
The whole thing danced very nicely around a bottle of Yeungling lager. The donut I had for desert didn't go so well with the beer, though. It was a bad donut to begin with, $1.69 for an 8-pack of glazed donuts was a risky wager from the start, but I think there's a good reason why most people have their donuts with coffee or tea, and not beer.
Don't try this at home kids.
The one problem with Jeno's pizzas is that 1 in 10 of the ones I get from my local grocer don't have much cheese at all. My usual fix for this is shaking a liberal amount of parmesean cheese onto the top. You should be careful to leave space at the edges, though, because the parmesean has a high spread factor when it melts.
Wednesday was Administrative Assistant Appreciation Day or something like that. It used to be Secretary's Day, but we don't use that word any more because it's too kinky. It's much harder to fantasize about an "administrative assistant," unless, of course, you have a fetish for asonance or words with lots of sylables.
My workplace being such a delightful place, the faculty all donated towards a special brunch for the admin asst dept. I'm going to do my best at remembering all of the stuff I ate, but I really just gorged on what may well be my last cookie parade for a while. Sadly this assignment ends on Friday and I doubt any other assignment will provide me with such a bountiful supply of cookies.
There was a really good rye bread. I cut a thick slice, spread on some spicy brown mustard and layered some great pastrami on top. It was the sort of great you get with a simple confluence of quality ingredients.
I passed on the bagels and lox because I'd just listened to an NPR report about global fishing practices and environmental and food safety experts pretty much decry farmed salmon as one of the most terrible fish a human could consume. Since there wasn't much chance of it being free-range Alaskan, I thought it best just to pass.
I ate 3 of these delightful mini cinamon rolls with cream cheese on one of them, about 7 ginger snaps, a "black and white" cookie (a soft sugar cookie with black chocolate icing and white orange icing), some butter cookie, an amoretti and a bagel with a slice of summer sausage. I feel like there were more cookies and pastries involved, but I don't remember the details. The whole thing was in the faculty lounge, too, so I had a Green Mountain Sumatran roast for my morning coffee.
It was enough food that I didn't eat lunch, although I did take the bag of ginger snaps with me and snack on them the rest of the day.
Dinner was another bit of simplistic glory: BST sandwiches, bacon, spinach and tomato. On wheat toast I spread a little Miracle whip, layed out a nice bed of baby spinach, some sliced vine-ripened tomatoes, bacon and cheese. The girlfriend opted for munster. I tried the longhorn cheddar because it had more bite up front and would stand out more against the bacon. I'm sure the munster with it's creamy tones and late bite finish was just as good.
Never one to let bacon be the only thing I fry in my bacon fat, I cut a potato as thin as I could manage and made some bistro fries, or whatever less pretentious name you might want to call them. I seasoned these with a little salt and pepper.
The whole thing danced very nicely around a bottle of Yeungling lager. The donut I had for desert didn't go so well with the beer, though. It was a bad donut to begin with, $1.69 for an 8-pack of glazed donuts was a risky wager from the start, but I think there's a good reason why most people have their donuts with coffee or tea, and not beer.
Don't try this at home kids.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A Tuesday without cookies
Sad though it may be, there was no cookie parade this Tuesday. It seems as though the whole world is in disarray. I haven't been particularly hungry and my circadian rhythms are still messed up. This, to me, is apparently my whole world.
I woke up this morning a little before 6AM and I wasn't sleepy at all. There wasn't even any point to laying in bed and trying to go back to sleep. I wanted to get up and be productive. It was a disturbing feeling. I shot right to the kitchen to throw a Jeno's combination
Breakfast was a combination Jeno's pizza and a pair of Nutty Bars. I opted for easy breakfast to take some time on lunch. I made a nice tuna salad with carrots, celery, miracle whip and ground horseradish. Even if you're not a fan of the heavy horseradish burn, just a dash in anything you use canned tuna in brightens up the dish and mitigates the "fish from a can" funk. I made three tuna wraps with the tuna salad, munster cheese and the dregs of the TJ Spring Salad Mix.
I didn't eat them, though. In fact, they're still in the fridge in this office. Sometime after coffee (Green Mountain's Sumatran) one of the other administrative assistants came down with a bagged lunch from some event upstairs. It was, funily enough, a tuna sandwich, partnered with an apple and a bag of potato chips. I had half of the sandwich, but it was the high-grade light tuna that still kind of looks like fish and is really dry. I'm more of a "chunk light in water" kind of guy. I used a whole packet of Helman's mayo on just half of the sandwich and added the other half to my growing tuna collection in the fridge.
The apple was also a bit of an odd coincidence since I'd just been chastised over the weekend by a concerned reader about the lack of fruit in my diet outside of the berries that mix into the cookie parade. He said, "Apples bla bla good for you bla bla dietary fiber by volume bla bla bla," or something. I can tell you the bean burritos really provided all the fiber my colon needed, but I thought it would be wasteful not to eat the apple. Mottai nai yo! It was a golden delicious and I actually really enjoyed it. Never once did I think of dipping it in caramel or sauteing it in butter and cinnamon. It was very filling too so I suppose my friend was right with the "bla bla fiber bla" bit.
Besides all the water I have to drink because of riding my bike in this glorious weather. There wasn't too much else to the day. When I got home, I wasn't very hungry. It must have been a magic apple. Yep, probably a magic apple.
Sometime around 9PM I figured I should eat just in case I was hungry, so I had a bowl of spicy ramen that was actually labeled "udong noodle soup" in the "English" on the package. I suppose the noodles were a little thicker than your standard ramen, but they definitely weren't udon noodles. They were from China, though, and my understanding of kanji in Chinese usage is not so hot that I know what they were actually intended to be if not "ramen."
They were a nice step above Maruchan. They had the packet of dried sea weed, corn starch puffs and pepper flakes that most U.S. distributers don't bother to add. The packet was labeled "frying soup base" for some reason that I couldn't discern. It was nice and spicy and went very well with issues 4-10 of All-Star Superman and a Yeungling. It's nice to see Grant growing up a bit
I woke up this morning a little before 6AM and I wasn't sleepy at all. There wasn't even any point to laying in bed and trying to go back to sleep. I wanted to get up and be productive. It was a disturbing feeling. I shot right to the kitchen to throw a Jeno's combination
Breakfast was a combination Jeno's pizza and a pair of Nutty Bars. I opted for easy breakfast to take some time on lunch. I made a nice tuna salad with carrots, celery, miracle whip and ground horseradish. Even if you're not a fan of the heavy horseradish burn, just a dash in anything you use canned tuna in brightens up the dish and mitigates the "fish from a can" funk. I made three tuna wraps with the tuna salad, munster cheese and the dregs of the TJ Spring Salad Mix.
I didn't eat them, though. In fact, they're still in the fridge in this office. Sometime after coffee (Green Mountain's Sumatran) one of the other administrative assistants came down with a bagged lunch from some event upstairs. It was, funily enough, a tuna sandwich, partnered with an apple and a bag of potato chips. I had half of the sandwich, but it was the high-grade light tuna that still kind of looks like fish and is really dry. I'm more of a "chunk light in water" kind of guy. I used a whole packet of Helman's mayo on just half of the sandwich and added the other half to my growing tuna collection in the fridge.
The apple was also a bit of an odd coincidence since I'd just been chastised over the weekend by a concerned reader about the lack of fruit in my diet outside of the berries that mix into the cookie parade. He said, "Apples bla bla good for you bla bla dietary fiber by volume bla bla bla," or something. I can tell you the bean burritos really provided all the fiber my colon needed, but I thought it would be wasteful not to eat the apple. Mottai nai yo! It was a golden delicious and I actually really enjoyed it. Never once did I think of dipping it in caramel or sauteing it in butter and cinnamon. It was very filling too so I suppose my friend was right with the "bla bla fiber bla" bit.
Besides all the water I have to drink because of riding my bike in this glorious weather. There wasn't too much else to the day. When I got home, I wasn't very hungry. It must have been a magic apple. Yep, probably a magic apple.
Sometime around 9PM I figured I should eat just in case I was hungry, so I had a bowl of spicy ramen that was actually labeled "udong noodle soup" in the "English" on the package. I suppose the noodles were a little thicker than your standard ramen, but they definitely weren't udon noodles. They were from China, though, and my understanding of kanji in Chinese usage is not so hot that I know what they were actually intended to be if not "ramen."
They were a nice step above Maruchan. They had the packet of dried sea weed, corn starch puffs and pepper flakes that most U.S. distributers don't bother to add. The packet was labeled "frying soup base" for some reason that I couldn't discern. It was nice and spicy and went very well with issues 4-10 of All-Star Superman and a Yeungling. It's nice to see Grant growing up a bit
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Monday goes back to the grind.
Let's see, where to start? Usually it's breakfast. Today it takes a little bit of lawyering and etymology to really see what's going on here.
I had a slice of banana bread with margarine as "before-bike-snack." Now, technically I have here "broken my fast" of some 8+ hours, but I haven't had any substantial kind of nourishment yet, and would eat a more substantial "breakfast" in about 30 minutes, so was this my breakfast? I think that this maybe falls into the hobbit hierarchy of meals somewhere, but I'm not so well versed in the difference between first and second breakfast. Perhaps my readership can enlighten me as to the subtleties involved.
After riding to work I had a banana waffle sandwich with peanut butter, margarine and syrup. I made sure to really put the waffles through the figurative wringer. Here the figurative wringer is a litteral toaster, but "through the toaster" is not such a compelling idiom. I wrung the waffles through my toaster twice at a high setting and the pale side actually started to brown a little.
One good thing about this resiliency to burning is that you never really get that desicated, empty feeling that you might get with other frozen waffles when you toast them so much that even the membrane between the ridges begins to brown. Some people might like their waffles like this. Some people also like flacid bacon. You will not find me anywhere near that venn diagram.
Then I had my coffee, of course. It was the Flavia French roast with two French vanilla Coffeemate creamers, nothing special, nothing terrible I haven't already bemoaned in previous entries.
Lunch was a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I couldn't resist the temptation of just throwing it in my bag and not take the time to make myself lunch before leaving for work in the morning. I did bother to spread margarine on two pieces of wheat bread. If you were unaware, this is the official side item of Chef Boyardee's asssorted fare. Failure to comply with these regulations may warrant UN sanctions depending on the degree and necessity of deviance.
Over the course of the afternoon I started eating a tootsie pop. This was due largely to the fact that I was given a tootsie pop by one of the professors here. I'm not a big fan of candy, and tootsie pops are pretty near the bottom of my "comprehensive ranking of world candy according to my own personal preference." I didn't want to be impolite, though, so I took it and thanked him for it. Later, because I had it, I decided to give tootsie pops another shot. It was red raspberry and the candy itself was pretty good. By the end of work I hadn't even gotten to the point where the candy shell wears thin and you can start to taste the chocolate fudgewax inside. I thought it might prove dangerous to ride my bike and eat a lollipop at the same time, and I had pushed my sugar tollerance well beyond it's usual bounds, so I wrapped it back up and set it neatly on my desk in case I wanted it later, which I still don't.
When I got home I had a celery stick with peanut butter for first dinner, and then bean burritos for second dinner with crispy tortilla and salsa as a transitional course.
I have a bit of an addiction to Taco Bell bean burritos. When finances allow, I often have them add sour cream, nacho cheese and/or guacamole. There is something so appealing about all of that goey satisfaction barely reined in by a tortilla that is quickly becoming less sturdy as it soaks up goo from the inside. It's quite possibly one of the most perfect swill delivery systems known to man. If only they still had the chilitos and I could add a squirt of that chilimeat paste, a slice of bacon, and maybe a squirt of the baja sauce to the mix...
But Taco Bell won't cater to my dreams like I would like, and so I must take matters into my own hands. Buying a can of Taco Bell brand refried beans costs about the same than a bean burrito, and usually ends up making about 5-6 burritos for me. The one thing I cannot buy nor find or make a comparable substitute for is their red sauce. I can make lots of other sauces that might test better to most audiences, but it's just not quite the same. I can buy crapy yellow cheese. I can get all kinds of onions. I just cannot get their red sauce.
I compensate by making the beans themselves more interesting. Yesterday I started with a Tbsp. each of olive oil and butter in a frying pan on low heat. Then I added about 3 cloves of garlic and let it cook until it started to soften. Then I added diced onion(1/2 a small one), green pepper (1/3 a big one), red pepper(1/3 a medium one) and jalapeno (1/2 a pretty average one). I let the juices release a little bit into the oil, then I added the can of refried beans, a dash of bourbon and a few Tbsp of water.
The water just helps you actually stir the refried beans, but you don't want to over-do it or you'll lose some of the complexity of the vegetables when you have to cook down the water before it's a good thickness for serving. It doesn't take much bourbon, maybe a teaspoon. Sometimes I use tequila. It just adds a nice warm edge to the beans. If I had a kitschy restaurant, these would probably be called "Borracho Bean Burritos," although they don't really have enough booze to get you drunk. I had three burritos and a Yeungling and put the rest of the beans away in a filing cabinet, I mean my refridgerator.
The burritos were topped off with a little of the TJ's Spring greens mix, which just had to be used up ASAP before it all turned to swamp slime, some diced tomatoes, a dash or three of McIlhenny's chipotle tabasco sauce and a mix of munster and longhorn cheeses. Letting the garlic and the jalapenos cook in the oil before adding the beans really lets their flavors permeate the whole thing with a very sturdy broad palate to which the onions and peppers lend a bright sweetness. If only I'd had some sour cream on hand, they would have been just about perfect, save for the guacamole, bacon, nacho cheese and chilito measte (meat+paste, Ed.) , of course.
Later, for desert I had a Little Debbie's Nutty Bar. Actually, I had two bars, since they come in a twin pack, and who eats just one of those things anyway? They're so light and crispy, there's really not much to them anyway. More than adding calories to my evening, what they did accomplish is instilling in me a desire to drink a tall, cold glass of milk.
For as much as I cook with (and occaisionally chug) heavy cream, I almost never drink milk. I used to have problems with dairy products. I couldn't live without cheese, but cheeses never bothered me the way straight milk does. Even when I don't get stomach cramps, my body just makes so much mucus that the metabolic aftermath is a sufficient deterent to dunking cookies or eating much cold cereal for breakfast. This thirst for milk has not abated yet though, and it appears as if more drastic action is necessary.
Maybe I'm turning into a were-cow. I do enjoy salads a lot more than I used to...
I had a slice of banana bread with margarine as "before-bike-snack." Now, technically I have here "broken my fast" of some 8+ hours, but I haven't had any substantial kind of nourishment yet, and would eat a more substantial "breakfast" in about 30 minutes, so was this my breakfast? I think that this maybe falls into the hobbit hierarchy of meals somewhere, but I'm not so well versed in the difference between first and second breakfast. Perhaps my readership can enlighten me as to the subtleties involved.
After riding to work I had a banana waffle sandwich with peanut butter, margarine and syrup. I made sure to really put the waffles through the figurative wringer. Here the figurative wringer is a litteral toaster, but "through the toaster" is not such a compelling idiom. I wrung the waffles through my toaster twice at a high setting and the pale side actually started to brown a little.
One good thing about this resiliency to burning is that you never really get that desicated, empty feeling that you might get with other frozen waffles when you toast them so much that even the membrane between the ridges begins to brown. Some people might like their waffles like this. Some people also like flacid bacon. You will not find me anywhere near that venn diagram.
Then I had my coffee, of course. It was the Flavia French roast with two French vanilla Coffeemate creamers, nothing special, nothing terrible I haven't already bemoaned in previous entries.
Lunch was a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I couldn't resist the temptation of just throwing it in my bag and not take the time to make myself lunch before leaving for work in the morning. I did bother to spread margarine on two pieces of wheat bread. If you were unaware, this is the official side item of Chef Boyardee's asssorted fare. Failure to comply with these regulations may warrant UN sanctions depending on the degree and necessity of deviance.
Over the course of the afternoon I started eating a tootsie pop. This was due largely to the fact that I was given a tootsie pop by one of the professors here. I'm not a big fan of candy, and tootsie pops are pretty near the bottom of my "comprehensive ranking of world candy according to my own personal preference." I didn't want to be impolite, though, so I took it and thanked him for it. Later, because I had it, I decided to give tootsie pops another shot. It was red raspberry and the candy itself was pretty good. By the end of work I hadn't even gotten to the point where the candy shell wears thin and you can start to taste the chocolate fudgewax inside. I thought it might prove dangerous to ride my bike and eat a lollipop at the same time, and I had pushed my sugar tollerance well beyond it's usual bounds, so I wrapped it back up and set it neatly on my desk in case I wanted it later, which I still don't.
When I got home I had a celery stick with peanut butter for first dinner, and then bean burritos for second dinner with crispy tortilla and salsa as a transitional course.
I have a bit of an addiction to Taco Bell bean burritos. When finances allow, I often have them add sour cream, nacho cheese and/or guacamole. There is something so appealing about all of that goey satisfaction barely reined in by a tortilla that is quickly becoming less sturdy as it soaks up goo from the inside. It's quite possibly one of the most perfect swill delivery systems known to man. If only they still had the chilitos and I could add a squirt of that chilimeat paste, a slice of bacon, and maybe a squirt of the baja sauce to the mix...
But Taco Bell won't cater to my dreams like I would like, and so I must take matters into my own hands. Buying a can of Taco Bell brand refried beans costs about the same than a bean burrito, and usually ends up making about 5-6 burritos for me. The one thing I cannot buy nor find or make a comparable substitute for is their red sauce. I can make lots of other sauces that might test better to most audiences, but it's just not quite the same. I can buy crapy yellow cheese. I can get all kinds of onions. I just cannot get their red sauce.
I compensate by making the beans themselves more interesting. Yesterday I started with a Tbsp. each of olive oil and butter in a frying pan on low heat. Then I added about 3 cloves of garlic and let it cook until it started to soften. Then I added diced onion(1/2 a small one), green pepper (1/3 a big one), red pepper(1/3 a medium one) and jalapeno (1/2 a pretty average one). I let the juices release a little bit into the oil, then I added the can of refried beans, a dash of bourbon and a few Tbsp of water.
The water just helps you actually stir the refried beans, but you don't want to over-do it or you'll lose some of the complexity of the vegetables when you have to cook down the water before it's a good thickness for serving. It doesn't take much bourbon, maybe a teaspoon. Sometimes I use tequila. It just adds a nice warm edge to the beans. If I had a kitschy restaurant, these would probably be called "Borracho Bean Burritos," although they don't really have enough booze to get you drunk. I had three burritos and a Yeungling and put the rest of the beans away in a filing cabinet, I mean my refridgerator.
The burritos were topped off with a little of the TJ's Spring greens mix, which just had to be used up ASAP before it all turned to swamp slime, some diced tomatoes, a dash or three of McIlhenny's chipotle tabasco sauce and a mix of munster and longhorn cheeses. Letting the garlic and the jalapenos cook in the oil before adding the beans really lets their flavors permeate the whole thing with a very sturdy broad palate to which the onions and peppers lend a bright sweetness. If only I'd had some sour cream on hand, they would have been just about perfect, save for the guacamole, bacon, nacho cheese and chilito measte (meat+paste, Ed.) , of course.
Later, for desert I had a Little Debbie's Nutty Bar. Actually, I had two bars, since they come in a twin pack, and who eats just one of those things anyway? They're so light and crispy, there's really not much to them anyway. More than adding calories to my evening, what they did accomplish is instilling in me a desire to drink a tall, cold glass of milk.
For as much as I cook with (and occaisionally chug) heavy cream, I almost never drink milk. I used to have problems with dairy products. I couldn't live without cheese, but cheeses never bothered me the way straight milk does. Even when I don't get stomach cramps, my body just makes so much mucus that the metabolic aftermath is a sufficient deterent to dunking cookies or eating much cold cereal for breakfast. This thirst for milk has not abated yet though, and it appears as if more drastic action is necessary.
Maybe I'm turning into a were-cow. I do enjoy salads a lot more than I used to...
Monday, April 21, 2008
Sunday was all over the place.
For starters there was a B-Relaxed Vitamin water on the train ride down to Jersey. Then when I finally got there I had a padinha with some butter and a handful of these coconut and cocoa cookies that my girlfriend's mother had made. They were a little overwhelmingly sweet but otherwise really good. Japan has just pushed my chocolate preferences way towards the bitter end of the spectrum. Eating milk chocolate for me is how I imagine an 18th century farm hand might feel if you gave him a glass of skim milk. Ah, imagining...
Breakfast was just a quick snack, really. We had bigger plans for the day. There is a park near my girlfriend's house that has cherry trees along a winding river bank so we set out for a nice hanami picnic.
"Hanami" litterally means "seeing flowers" in Japanese and is a very popular excuse for early barbecues and getting drunk in large groups of your co-workers in public spaces. As the cherry blossom trees start to bloom, everyone starts talking incessantly about hanami plans and the plane fares skyrocket. It is an amazing time of year, though, and visiting Himeji Castle during "sakura" (cherry blossom) season is still one of my most vivid memories of Japan.
This year, the girlfriend and I set out to pay tribute to the Japanese style of celbrating western holidays while observing this Japanese tradition in New Jersey. We bought a box of thighs and biscuits with some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side from Popeye's and had ourselves a fried chicken picnic under the cherry blossoms.
In Japan, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, thanks to some kink in the cultural appropriation system, there is a huge spike in the consumption of fried chicken. KFC's take orders weeks before hand and some locations may not be open for anything but picking up pre-orders. Convenience stores open tables in front of their stores selling fried chicken to lines of customers so that bewildered foreigners can still find their way back to the beer cooler and instant ramen aisle without being walled in by the throngs of people eager to buy fried chicken.
I believe this is due in part to turkey being very expensive and not very popular in Japan. Most Japanese people I discussed the issue with had never had turkey before. I imagine this is due to a confluence of the difficulties of importing meat and the relative lack of iconic hype that turkey has in comparison to fried chicken. Fried chicken has an infamy in the Japanese image of American cuisine rivaled only by the mighty cheeseburger.
So, in the absence of a bento box and affordable sake worth drinking, we remisappropriated (Ed. sorry, I try but...) fried chicken as the official food of celebrating Japanese holidays in America. It was great, and made all the more awesome by my girlfriend's habit of peeling the thick layer of skin off the chicken thighs. I took these discarded sheets of awesome, loaded them with mashed potatoes and made these sort of comfort food cannolis. For those of you worried about my cardiovascular health, I also put in over 60 miles on my bike this weekend, so a little gorging on gratuitous amounts of fried chicken skin isn't going to be too detrimental to the big picture, I hope.
After all that awesome, I really wasn't in a mood to cook much of a dinner when I got home, but I did really want to try the dim sum items I'd gotten in Chinatown this week, so I busted out the wicker dim sum steamer cage and steamed a pork bun, a leek bun and some pork and black mushroom gyoza. The pork bun was the Chinese split-top variety stuffed with the sweet barbecue pork. These are a favorite of mine and for frozen pork buns that come in a six-pack for $1.50 they were surprisingly passable.
The leek buns were much better, though. There was a much broader complexity to the flavors at work and they were actually a lot juicier and more succulent than the pork buns. My roommate and I both ate them with liberal amounts of this Chinese chili oil I found that has peanuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and walnuts soaking in the oil along with the dried chili flakes. It's not very spicy but has a lot of flavors going on that lend complexity to the oil itself while also providing for lots of different pockets of flavor as different chunks of nut pass over your pallet. If you don't find "chunks of nut" to be an appealing description of food stuffs, this is not an appropriate condiment for you.
Later in the evening I had a slice of left-over pizza which I reheated in the oven as I preheated the oven for banana bread. I followed the following recipe using 4 bananas: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php The banana bread came out very soft, almost too soft as I couldn't really cut it into slices. It could have used a little more salt, to my tastes, as well, but would have worked wonderfully as muffins instead of bread, since the texture lent so well to tearing and not slicing. I had a nice thick slice of the banana bread while it was still warm slathered in margarine as a bed time snack.
And not to back track after that nice Norman Rockwell moment, but I thought I should take a minute to illustrate how my food preparation compulsion plays out with the fairly inoccuous act of eating leftover pizza. Most people, I am led to believe, will simply take the cold pizza and begin eating it while it still holds the chill of the fridge, if they bothered to refridgerate it at all. Many people even claim to enjoy that cold, coagulated cheese and grease texture as a nice breakfast treat. I am not one of these people. While I understand expedience and can eat pizza cold when forced, I don't see how you could honestly prefer it to it's reheated form.
I took the pizza and threw it on a sheet of foil, then sprinkled dried oregano, red pepper, dill and Adobo seasoning on it before allowing it to reheat in the oven as it pre-heated to 350F. My banana bread didn't taste like pizza and my pizza didn't taste like cold butt. Everybody wins. No, it's not just the temperature, it's really more texture. If I had to microwave it, I would have just eaten something else.
And yeah, if it's a plain cheese pie, it's definitely going to get doctored up. At least I'm past my "corriander and tumeric on everything" phase and my "truffle oil and allspice on everything" phase. You should also consider yourself lucky if I never made you food during my "thai fish sauce and/or amaretto extract on everything" phase. I have no idea what I was thinking. Sometimes that stuff pans out, though, like vanilla and sage or honey and cilantro. So parents, when your son mixes every spice in the cabinet with vinegar and water, then freezes it for a week, then tries to convince you to eat it and give him feedback, be supportive. He's not autistic, just ambitious.
Breakfast was just a quick snack, really. We had bigger plans for the day. There is a park near my girlfriend's house that has cherry trees along a winding river bank so we set out for a nice hanami picnic.
"Hanami" litterally means "seeing flowers" in Japanese and is a very popular excuse for early barbecues and getting drunk in large groups of your co-workers in public spaces. As the cherry blossom trees start to bloom, everyone starts talking incessantly about hanami plans and the plane fares skyrocket. It is an amazing time of year, though, and visiting Himeji Castle during "sakura" (cherry blossom) season is still one of my most vivid memories of Japan.
This year, the girlfriend and I set out to pay tribute to the Japanese style of celbrating western holidays while observing this Japanese tradition in New Jersey. We bought a box of thighs and biscuits with some mashed potatoes and gravy on the side from Popeye's and had ourselves a fried chicken picnic under the cherry blossoms.
In Japan, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, thanks to some kink in the cultural appropriation system, there is a huge spike in the consumption of fried chicken. KFC's take orders weeks before hand and some locations may not be open for anything but picking up pre-orders. Convenience stores open tables in front of their stores selling fried chicken to lines of customers so that bewildered foreigners can still find their way back to the beer cooler and instant ramen aisle without being walled in by the throngs of people eager to buy fried chicken.
I believe this is due in part to turkey being very expensive and not very popular in Japan. Most Japanese people I discussed the issue with had never had turkey before. I imagine this is due to a confluence of the difficulties of importing meat and the relative lack of iconic hype that turkey has in comparison to fried chicken. Fried chicken has an infamy in the Japanese image of American cuisine rivaled only by the mighty cheeseburger.
So, in the absence of a bento box and affordable sake worth drinking, we remisappropriated (Ed. sorry, I try but...) fried chicken as the official food of celebrating Japanese holidays in America. It was great, and made all the more awesome by my girlfriend's habit of peeling the thick layer of skin off the chicken thighs. I took these discarded sheets of awesome, loaded them with mashed potatoes and made these sort of comfort food cannolis. For those of you worried about my cardiovascular health, I also put in over 60 miles on my bike this weekend, so a little gorging on gratuitous amounts of fried chicken skin isn't going to be too detrimental to the big picture, I hope.
After all that awesome, I really wasn't in a mood to cook much of a dinner when I got home, but I did really want to try the dim sum items I'd gotten in Chinatown this week, so I busted out the wicker dim sum steamer cage and steamed a pork bun, a leek bun and some pork and black mushroom gyoza. The pork bun was the Chinese split-top variety stuffed with the sweet barbecue pork. These are a favorite of mine and for frozen pork buns that come in a six-pack for $1.50 they were surprisingly passable.
The leek buns were much better, though. There was a much broader complexity to the flavors at work and they were actually a lot juicier and more succulent than the pork buns. My roommate and I both ate them with liberal amounts of this Chinese chili oil I found that has peanuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and walnuts soaking in the oil along with the dried chili flakes. It's not very spicy but has a lot of flavors going on that lend complexity to the oil itself while also providing for lots of different pockets of flavor as different chunks of nut pass over your pallet. If you don't find "chunks of nut" to be an appealing description of food stuffs, this is not an appropriate condiment for you.
Later in the evening I had a slice of left-over pizza which I reheated in the oven as I preheated the oven for banana bread. I followed the following recipe using 4 bananas: http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php The banana bread came out very soft, almost too soft as I couldn't really cut it into slices. It could have used a little more salt, to my tastes, as well, but would have worked wonderfully as muffins instead of bread, since the texture lent so well to tearing and not slicing. I had a nice thick slice of the banana bread while it was still warm slathered in margarine as a bed time snack.
And not to back track after that nice Norman Rockwell moment, but I thought I should take a minute to illustrate how my food preparation compulsion plays out with the fairly inoccuous act of eating leftover pizza. Most people, I am led to believe, will simply take the cold pizza and begin eating it while it still holds the chill of the fridge, if they bothered to refridgerate it at all. Many people even claim to enjoy that cold, coagulated cheese and grease texture as a nice breakfast treat. I am not one of these people. While I understand expedience and can eat pizza cold when forced, I don't see how you could honestly prefer it to it's reheated form.
I took the pizza and threw it on a sheet of foil, then sprinkled dried oregano, red pepper, dill and Adobo seasoning on it before allowing it to reheat in the oven as it pre-heated to 350F. My banana bread didn't taste like pizza and my pizza didn't taste like cold butt. Everybody wins. No, it's not just the temperature, it's really more texture. If I had to microwave it, I would have just eaten something else.
And yeah, if it's a plain cheese pie, it's definitely going to get doctored up. At least I'm past my "corriander and tumeric on everything" phase and my "truffle oil and allspice on everything" phase. You should also consider yourself lucky if I never made you food during my "thai fish sauce and/or amaretto extract on everything" phase. I have no idea what I was thinking. Sometimes that stuff pans out, though, like vanilla and sage or honey and cilantro. So parents, when your son mixes every spice in the cabinet with vinegar and water, then freezes it for a week, then tries to convince you to eat it and give him feedback, be supportive. He's not autistic, just ambitious.
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