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.