New Year's Dinner and Drinks

It's a stay-cation with Rihanna off MySpace, and some Jeff Bridges courtesy of the BPL dvd collection. Good stuff.

Pasture-raised organic sirloin steak tips, grilled to Medium (pink inside and hot, slightly beyond tepid and bloody). Spaghetti squash, fresh broccoli, garlic, herbes de provence. A fourth cup of turkey carrot bolognese. A half liter of Schneider Aventinus, a delicious German eisbock with a hearty alcohol content. Yummy.


Now for a mug of my own eggnog, featuring a fresh organic cage-free egg - sad I don't have easy access to free-range eggs - coconut milk, fresh grated nutmeg, ginger, vanilla...oh, and Knob Creek bourbon. YES.

Currently I have resolved to pursue a doctorate in biology. Aquiver with excitement, fear, hope. Hoping I can make prerequisites happen without too much financial impact on me. Oh god. (Edit: Just the 'nog talking. I can't do calculus or organic chemistry to save my life.)

Taza chocolate discs with guajillo chili. Fine, I'll accept the roughhewn granularity as historically interesting and oddly compelling. Maybe comparing it to beautifully conched and cocoa-buttered Porcelana is the wrong thing to do. Taza is its own kind of cacao product. Not a smooth-melting chocolate on the tongue, but something crunchy and tasty to chomp up, with a strong chocolate flavor. In fact, it's only got three ingredients. It's more chocolate than Domori chocolate, in a way. But still, only appropriate for certain moments in sore need of spice and that Taza-esque stone-ground granular crunch.

Sirloin Steak Tips and Eggs

So delicious. Cage-free, organic. Pasture-raised, grass-fed, organic. Sirloin being one - if not THE - most tender and lean cut of beef. Even leaner on a grass-fed cow. Grilled on an awesome grill pan (which probably adds toxins via the nonstick coating, but gah!) Whatever, I try:

“I argue for being conscious, but perfectionism is an enemy of progress.” - Michael Pollan, Newsweek November 2010

Plus organic carrots, zuke, garlic, and haricots verts. With a little walnut oil. AWESOME. Dab of salsa. Guatemalan coffee with almond milk, of course. With an optional chaser of antidepressant and vitamin D supplement.

Omelet Mastery

Cooking spray, a nonstick flat-bottomed wok, a spatula...sesame-oil infused collard green chiffonade, avocado, salsa...HOT DAMN. I am the Omelet Master here! It came out beautiful and perfect. Great breakie for a dark and stormy day, with a good cup of coffee.

Fast Food Nostalgia

For my Mom, it's a Whopper with everything, or a McD's vanilla soft-serve ice cream cone.

For me, it's the Hardee's Frisco Burger, and a Wendy's chocolate Frosty. Oh, and curly fries from somewhere. And I drank a lot of Pepsi around that time, too. Was I a chunker? Totally.

Now I would just like to mention that I can do one-legged body-weight squats to the floor. And? I can perform both pullups and chinups. And? I weigh 129 lbs. Thank you! I no longer eat Frisco Burgers and chocolate Frosties. But today I'm thinking about how they tasted. Fast food nostalgia is so...weirdly vivid. Fat must make a deep impression on the brain and taste-buds, jeez. Like eating those profiteroles as a five-year old...and deifying chocolate profiteroles with ice cream stuffing since then.

Not so with Mom's favorite: banana's flambé. Pass! I'd like to keep my fillings IN my teeth, thank you.

Honey Smacked

So I bought some bulk puffed wheat and puffed millet. I still love my Uncle Sam cereal, but I'm looking for something to keep breakfast new and exciting. So I bought the puffed grains, and the smell of the puffed wheat in my bowl reminded me of something...the smell of Honey Smacks cereal eaten as a kid. Voila, a tiny pot of acacia honey brought all the way from petite dejeuner in Paris.

I drizzled this lovely honey over my puffed wheat and poured on some milk, wondering if the end result would taste anything like Honey Smacks taste in my memory.

And you know what? They totally did, but better! Explosions of drizzled honey in my mouth, that toasty taste of the puffed wheat. Awesome. I've since added it to my internal Childhood Comfort Foods menu. Three ingredient comfort food is always a good thing to have as back-up for a bad day.

Bonne Vacances!

My first dinner in Paris with my love (who wined and dined me, and in some cases, beered me): entrecote medium (sirloin steak) topped with chimichurri sauce, served alongside perfectly crispy frites. Frisee salade as a starter. Table vin rouge. And chocolate profiteroles filled with vanilla ice cream for dessert (why did I forget to take a picture? WHY?)



Laduree, fine patisserie since le fin de siecle. Creator of the famous French macaron, a tiny sandwich cookie made of chewy nut meringue and usually filled with flavored ganache. I sampled dix macarons, saveurs assortiment. My favorite? The caramel avec fleur de sel. Also, fleur d'orange and fleur de rose were pretty spectacular. Next time, I'm getting something millefeuille-y, and something chocolat mousse-y. I did order fresh strawberries with champagne saboyan, though. Amaze! Fantastic. Insane. I died. My girlfriend is not into patisserie, so she was probably thinking about pretzels, or frites, while I was dying a sweet death.



Breakfast in bed, how many times? Quite a few. My favorite was mind-blowing crusty-outside, fluffy-inside multigrain baguette butts, perfectly tender scrambled eggs with pepper, pain au chocolat, croissants with butter and rhubarb jam, a two-cup pot of cafe americano accompanied by a tiny pot of milk, and fresh squeezed orange juice in a heavy tumbler.



Obligatory French food, remarkable for having been served and beautifully presented at 3am. Note the perfect fried egg, delicately broiled cheese and toast, hot crispy frites, and framboise kir. They do not screw around with food in France, even at 3 am in a corner bar. I was even more pleased to find a paper-thin slice of ham under the broiled cheese of my sandwich.



Salade Visconte: romaine and arugula ("rocket" or roquette), cucumber ribbons, chunks of parmesan, small delicious garden tomatoes, basil pesto, walnuts, poached chicken, kalamata olives. A perfect midnight snack, breakfast, or festive dejeuner.



"Avez-vous des escargots plus?" I enjoyed eating garlicky parsley snails way more than expected. Juicy, chewy, rich, buttery. Much like eating a substantial small mushroom stuffed with cheese and garlic. My girlfriend may have compared eating good escargot to eating a buttered region of female anatomy. JUST SAYING. I'm not arguing with her, either.

Catering Hyena Snags a Bagel!

A special weekend breakfast for cheap: free bagel cut into thin slices and toasted (one slice discarded to save calories), two large organic eggs, 1/2 cup corn and one small tomato = 400 calories, 14 grams of fat, 20 grams of protein!

Less if I had been really vigilant and used smaller pieces of the bagel. Meh.

Nest Egg

French-cut frozen green beans on the bottom, red lentils in tomato sauce in the center, and a foached egg on top. Bird in the Nest. Nest Egg. Not quite Toad In The Hole, though. The paleo-diet version of Toad In The Hole, maybe.

Fueling Up

Green beans (french-cut, of course), corn off the cob = my two favorite frozen vegetable options. Great emergency food, great stormy weather food, great quick lunch-in-a-box food with chicken or egg or tofu. Truly. Organic is better, but conventional will do in a (penny)pinch. Today I added a small organic tomato, four dice-sized blocks of frozen cilantro, and two foached eggs on top. A little oil to help my corn get crispy on the bottom of the pan, yum.

It's a cool, sunny, breezy day in the high 60's, low 70's. Perfect day to fill a hydration bladder, stuff some mini Clifs in my bra, and run the Emerald Necklace. It's one of the best things about Boston, in my opinion. I'm going to try to get from Jamaica Pond to Boston Common and back again. Between ten and twelve miles. Thus, fueling up with a large breakfast - eaten on top of Uncle Sam, soy milk, and blueberries at 1 am this morning. What can I say! Fueling UP.

My weekend has been fun, sociable, and relaxing, but I'm really missing my someone special. Thus, my rabid desire to eat chocolate and ice cream to make up for those missing romance endorphins, word. Yesterday, minty chocolate fudge ice cream in a cup. The day before that, a bar of dark chocolate with shredded orange peel - delicious! Today, maybe...some sort of Lindt bar after my run? I do love the Lindt chili. Lindt orange-almond will do as well. My sweet-tooth is so out of control, I was transfixed by this wallet in a fancy shop - it looks just like those candy buttons glued to sheets of wax paper.


Yes, the ice cream did mess my guts up, and did make me feel a bit queasy, but it was SO GOOD. Romance endorphins are easier on the waistline, though. And they have much more of an afterglow.

Upgraded my Camera Phone to the Palm Pre!

Amazing. Such a great phone (so far). Aside from dropped calls - but that could be AT&T, who knows. But what's exciting is a camera with more megapixels, and the ability to send them to my email easily and without the added distress of crashing my phone in the process. AWESOME.


So I'll take pictures again. Of food that I'm eating. Below, we have my Poor Person's Breakfast consisting of from-a-box drop biscuits with zucchini and tomato sauté, and a foached egg. Earl Grey tea with milk. The classy, Anglophilic poor person, I guess.


Let's recall what my Mom said about me: "Champagne taste on a beer budget." Why am I not a doctor or an engineer or something that actually requires brain power. I think it's low self-esteem, actually. BUT that's a different post, for a different blog. This post is about HOT frickin' BISCUITS.

A New Post?

Well, it turns out trying to eat like a personal trainer on a tight schedule results in not-so-pretty meals. And even the pretty ones aren't that novel; once you've seen one spinach-based grilled-chicken salad, you've seen them all.

But! This morning I'm having something quite attractive, I think. It's an egg/eggwhite omelet with curly kale, raw almonds, less than a teaspoon of canola oil (I made a big batch for several meals, with a total of 2 teaspoons of oil for cooking), plus a side of pinto beans with a glob of red ajvar on top.

Delicious. I love a good kale omelet, and the almonds really add some excellent crunch and flavor.

In Uncharacteristic Defense of Ground Poultry

Turkey, to be precise. Lean ground turkey, apparently "raised in humane conditions" if I am to trust the packaging. I have been mad for turkey zucchini loaf - or turkeyloaf - to which I add grated carrot, diced mushrooms, and heaps of chopped parsley. Delicious. And very portable for work. Easy to crumble a slice into rice and beans, or over quinoa with veggies.

So now I've decided to take the turkey even further. I want to increase my protein intake from both animal and vegetable sources; I still wish to be muscular and lean, in spite of my current interest in candy bars. O, futility! (But mini candy bar sizes are helpful for calorie control, and crispy bars are often lower in fat than solid bars.) This is what I tell myself.

Back to the turkey. Tonight I made turkey chili with three kinds of beans and fresh parsley, grated carrot, and...well, I forgot the stewed tomatoes, so I used a jar of mild salsa instead. AND IT WORKED. I took the suggestion from this online recipe for Mom's Chili Beans. I used dry beans bought in bulk, and I soaked those suckers and cooked them for a good while. Plus some garlic, my turkey, my lovely parsley. No chili powder - which I dislike - so I used cajun seasoning for color and slight flavor. And it's a pleasing, filling, high-protein low-fat final product. Also, pinto beans are amazing.

Need to figure out how to work in more veggies, though. Perhaps I can serve my chili over diced zucchini and mushrooms and brown rice. Hmm.

The only question left is, what is the side effective of excesssive turkey tryptophans? HA. My second cup of tea every day is preventing me from getting the afternoon sleepies, so I think I'm set.

I'm also trying high-intensity interval training (all kinds of ridiculous modified squats and lunges and pushups and planks in my living room), and am walking longer distances with Aster. Plus all this eating of high-protein low-fat food. Along with the candy. THE CANDY.

Omg, side planks and full planks are my new best friends. I can almost see myself with a flat stomach. Almost.

Candy Bar Crazy

So I'm reading a book called The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars. And it's great! Good journalism here, and the author was not lying about the "secret world" part. Confectionary espionage at every turn! Very exciting, as well as mouth-watering. I am getting a mini-history of many candy classics, like M&M's and the Milky Way, and also the KitKat.

Okay, so. I love crispy chocolate things. Nestle Crunch was one favorite when I was a kid. The other favorite was KitKat. I am sitting here with a mini KitKat chopped into chunks, in a tea cup by my keyboard. As I type, I lift the cup and sniff it, then put it down. The smell is sweet milky chocolate, and an addictive toasty caramelized sugar note. That comes from the wafers. Amazing. Feeling a little high off of it.

Here's a sample of what Cybele - proprietrix of CandyBlog - has to say about KitKat:

"Japan is known for cars, Japan is known for electronics. Japan is known for cute. Japan is also home to some of the best KitKats in the world (okay, and some of the worst, but this is the price of innovation and an example of the bell curve)."

For example, some of the Japanese KitKat flavors are red bean soup, yuzu citrus, vanilla bean, strawberry banana yogurt, white chocolate, bitter chocolate, and green tea.

I just tasted an American peanut butter KitKat a few days ago. (Reading the book is driving me wild. I have so far sampled a Snickers, a 100 Grand, a Babe Ruth, two varieties of KitKat, Lindt 85%, 3 bags of almond M&M's and a very compelling Milky Way.) Who knows what bars I will ingest before the book is finished. I am reading at a feverish pace to conclude this unusual mouthwatering-ness.

In short, books really can be dangerous. CandyBlog had an article about Venezulan Chuao chocolate laced with crunchy sea salt granules and Japanese panko flakes. OMFG. My next book will be about something inedible. Perhaps it will be The Pursuit of Perfection, by Rothman.

Turkey Meatball Madness

Normally not a fan of meatballs, but I do enjoy a very portable shape to my protein. Poached chicken slices have been my go-to up until this point. Now I have discovered baked turkey meatballs made with shredded veggies and breadcrumbs (for structural integrity - I found this out by not having any breadcrumbs the first time around). Recipes online abound, in many permutations. So far, my recipe involves diced crimini mushrooms, chopped parsley, garlic, and shredded zucchini/carrot. And an eggwhite - buying eggwhites in a carton for use in low cholesterol omelets has proved a very useful thing to have in the fridge. So yeah, these meatballs. I see that I could use coarsely chopped dry bread instead of pulverized bread crumbs, too. Very tasty and wickedly easy. Quick. Fun to squish up the mixture with my hands, too. I'm thrilled to have another easy, tasty, low-fat protein source. Gobble gobble.

Ketchup Couverture

What happens when you combine ketchup with unflavored cocoa-butter? Omg, ketchup-dipped cold fried chicken bonbons. I must try it. Even though I think ketchup is The Worst Condiment. Maybe I'll wait until they make mustard couverture.

Ketchup Couverture, which I discovered first on Neatorama.

Salad Orgasm 2010

Haven't eaten a salad in a long damn time. Fond of stews and poached things and potatoes and collards, I guess. Eggs. But a person needs some crisp greens and crunchy radishes/cucumbers/red cabbage, fo sho. I had a serious, serious craving. All this heavy winter food, I need a SALAD.

So I bought some stuff and made one: bib lettuce, baby spinach, fresh radishes, English cuke, red cabbage, red bell pepper. Homemade vinaigrette made of blood orange juice, maple syrup, mustard, basil, olive oil, garlic. Ate this delicious salad with some sourdough slices, and a zucchini/potato/garlic pattie made with egg and a little flour as a binder. Melted muenster on top of that. Griddled with Pam spray.

A. Mazing. Best meal I've eaten in a long time, and my jaws are actually tired from crunching up all that fresh crispy roughage. Salad dinner rocks.