Betsy is a 10

ADDENDA:
Ten brownies, that is! When I got home last night, my freshly baked tray of mediocre brownies were demolished. She blames a "friend" who "came over", but we know the truth.

MORNING SNACK: 8am, 2 brownies, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Woke up to go the farmers market. No milk for cereal. Needed a kick in the pants. After sleeping all I want the past few weeks, it was a good vibe to force myself up and hop on the bike to the market.

BREAKFAST: 10am, organic raisin bran with good milk, 1 bowl hunger 4/5
Tried a new cereal, not diggin' it.

AM SNACK: 11am, 2 brownies,seltzer, .25 bowls hunger 3/5
Cranky, waiting to start the day while Betsy does her thing.

LUNCH: 1:15pm, BLT on rye with mustard & mayo, pickle & slaw, small handful of fries, water, 1.5 bowls, hunger 3/5
Lunch at a diner with B & her aunt and uncle. The old school perception of a portion of bacon is 2, maybe 3 slices. I counted at least 6 on the sandwich.

PM SNACK: 3pm, a small handful of crackers, cheese, dip, .25 bowls, hunger 3/5
At an art gallery.

DINNER: 6pm, baby carrots, cucumber slices and some red pepper spears with sea salt, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Fell asleep at 7pm, didn't get around to eating more!

Bakin' Brownies!

ADDENDA:
While I was up late last night, thought about the ridiculous cookies I ate last night - there is a strong sense memory associated - I used to love them as a kid, used to scarf entire (large) boxes of them in one sitting in college. They just tastes like home. They also taste weirdly inauthentic, a certain shmudgy quality to it's base flavor that just doesn't taste right. Reading the label, there is about 25 ingredients, 15 of which I wouldn't of dreamt of using if I was making them myself.

So I found some simple recipes for brownies, which I happen to have all the ingredients in the house...later today, my first crack at brownies - my mom used to make them from a mix, but according to the recipe, looks ridiculously simple...

That calzone from last night looks freakishly large this morning, though it went down easy. I made a slightly smaller one for B, which she finished without too much struggle either. I needed to use the big plates, and still it hung off the sides. I should of made 4 calzones instead of 2, and saved one 1 two as left overs...

BREAKFAST: 10:30am, good yogurt with honey, vanilla, raw cashews, 1 bowl, hunger 3/5

LUNCH: 1:30pm, homemade cheese ravioli dressed with olive oil, grated cheese, salt & pepper, quart of tap water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Lesson learned - add salt to the water for pasta, do not sprinkle it on after, as it'll be nasty. The pasta itself, even after freezing overnight, was absolutely fantastic - these toothsome pillows of fluffy clean-tasting spinachy cheese were a little overwhelmed by the oil and salt I through over the top. Got a big bag left in the freezer to romance B with later this weekend, though...will top it right then!

PM SNACK: 2:15pm, homemade brownies, .5 bowls, hunger 3/5
Surprisingly disappointing. A little bit more cakelike than I like, too sweet, not chocolatey enough, and slightly gritty because I forgot to disolve the sugar in the butter before beating in the dry ingredients. Still, I'm sure B will tear through the pan in a blink of an eye...

DINNER #1: 7:15pm, fried battered fish sandwich on brioche bun, french fries, pickle, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Not the meal I was hoping to share with Ilsa for the first time, but we (and a bunch of other friends) waited for 45 minutes at a weird Japanese business man lunch place but was just too crowdd.

DINNER #2: 11:30pm, 2 octopus balls, spicy pork & kimchee, 2 pieces asparagus wrapped in bacon, 2 chicken "meet" balls, small dish of surprisingly bitter green tea ice cream, 2 glasses saki, 1 bowl, hunger 3/5
Some of us went back after the show to the weird sake bar, and got seated after half an hour. We weren't that hungry, so avoided the more esoteric things on the menu I was previously looking forward to (fried gizzards, spagetti with ketchup) We were served some sea urchin that was oddly brown which I avoided.

This food over all was kinda gross, with strong sauces and smokey cooking methods to cover the fact that the ingredients were cheap cuts of meat and 2nd-rate staples. But, alas, it was dirt cheap and the saki was strong.

EVENING SNACK: 2:15am, 1 brownie, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

Bowl Me Over

ADDENDA:
Had my bi-weekly with Ilsa last night. Of late our consultations have swung more towards my employment situation and more general matters, and now it's swinging back more on to our original topics at hand - mah big fat ass!

She pulls out a bowl. It is a ceramic 6.75" wide, 2" deep round bowl that holds about 2.5 cups of liquid when filled to the brim. This bowl is my new measure of portion. For now, I just need to be aware of how many bowls I'm eating a day.

My first thought was how many slices of pizza I could fold into the bowl. The second was, "Wow, that would hold a whole lotta bacon!" At home, I will eat out of it or measure from it, when I'm out at a less-fancy place, I may bring it at the risk of looking totally insane, but out with friends or nicer places, I'll just guestimate how many bowls I'm eating. Last night at the Turkish restaurant me and B ate at, I busted out the bowl and eye-balled the meal against the bowl. It's safe to say I ate 2 full bowls of food, though if there was an appetizer and dessert and drink, it probably would of added a bowl and a half.

This blog was originally a temporary tool to be used with Ilsa, but the thinking it's made me do has me continuing. However, I think this bowl is a tool which will help me with my thinking, but will not be a permanent fixture in my dining habits. Though if it is, maybe I should draw face on it, and attach legs and arms!

BREAKFAST: 10:15am, Noah's decadent Oatmeal (pictured above), 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
To inaugurate the bowl, I made organic slow-cooking oatmeal with whole unhomogenized milk (2 to 1 with water), grass fed butter, sea salt, unrefined cane sugar, vanilla and cinnamon. I used 1 cup of oats to 1.75 cups of liquid, which according to the cannister is two servings. As you can see in the picture, it filled the bowl but was not an obscene serving.

LUNCH: 2:15pm, homemade chirashi with tuna, 24 oz still water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Went shopping properly at WF today. Picked up a piece of tuna steak, and already had all the ingredients at home to make sushi rice. After washing the California sushi rice several times, put it in the cooker. I then cooked the rice dressing, which is rice vinegar, sugar, salt and mirin (a clear brewed flavored soy product) Plopped the cooked rice in a big wooden bowl, but an electric fan over it (instead of the traditional fanning by hand) and cut the dressing into it slowly, trying to keep the rice from becoming wet.

I took the tune and cut strips against the grain. The rice was a bit too wet, so rather than attempt sushi-style, I plopped the rice into the bowl and laid the fish on top, chirashi-style. I reconstituted some wasabi powder (really, horseradish) for a little punch in the corner of the bowl.

I wouldn't say this was very good. First and foremost, the fish was not fresh at all. Secondly, I overdressed the rice and it tasted REALLY tangy and strong. I used organic unrefined sugar, which gave a dingy tint to the white rice. The rice was a bit too sticky and wet, and I didn't let it cool enough. I've read about how sushi chefs will spend years just cooking the rice before moving on to cutting fish, which takes another few years, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

Still, making it myself was a little bit eye-openning. That vinegar/salt/sugar mix that flavors the rice really cuts nicely against the flavor of raw fish. When the fish is fresh and the rice done properly, it's really subtle - what was good about mine is all the parts were yelling so loudly, making how they fit together apparent (and apparent how out of wack they were in my creation!)

DINNER: 7:15pm, homemade mushroom cheese calzone, extra tomato sauce, water, 12 entemann's chocolate chip cookies, 3 bowls, hunger 4/5
I find the process of making ravioli is extremely wasteful, when the shapes are cut out of the form, a lot of excess dough goes into the trash. I did have extra filling that I couldn't bare to trash, but it wasn't enough for another batch of dough. Then it hit me - real calzones! The filling (ricotta, bufalla moz, parm, spinach, parsley, garlic, nutmeg, salt and pepper, egg) is perfect for a real calzone, not the stuffed pizza I played with before.

Bought a small box of cookies, felt a craving. It LOOKS like a single-serving box, as it's 1/4 the size of a normal Entenmann's box, but according to the label, a serving is 3 cookies. B had 2 cookies, but that still left me with 12, a full 4 servings! How the hell is 3 tiny cookies a serving?

PM SNACK: 12:30, 1 whole wheat pretzel with good peanut butter, hunger 4/5 Insomnia kept me up till 3, B thinks it was the cookies but I think it was more emotional.

Kosher Kashews

BREAKFAST: 10am, good yogurt with honey and vanilla, hunger 3/5
Turns out my raw cashews were kosher!

PM SNACK: 1:15pm, boca burger on sprouted whole wheat bread with ketchup, hunger 4/5
Boca burgers are weirdly tasty. 98% of them are made up of soy flour and wheat gluten. Still, they taste grilled even when microwaved, yet there are no weird liquid smoke ingredients or anything like that.

This was a freezer-fishing product, funny, a year ago it would of been a frozen pizza or a frozen buritto.

PM SNACK: 2:30pm, slice from the local, hunger 4/5
Unpleasantly salty tasting. It wasn't more salty than usual, just didn't pick up on it before.

PM TEA: 5:15pm, half a cup of crappy lipton, no sugar

DINNER: 8:30pm, donner kebab with rice pilaf and roasted potatoes, onion salad, babaganoush and hummus, water, hunger 4/5

Tots of Fury

ADDENDA:
My sister-in-law and her 4 tots of fury are coming to spend the day and sleep over. I see kosher food in my future...

BREAKFAST: 10:45am, organic cheerios with good milk, hunger 3/5
Got a solid 9 hours of sleep.

LUNCH: 1pm, one peanut butter sandwich on the whitest kosher rye bread ever, water, hunger 4/5
Their mother, Rebecca, went to the local kosher market and served up yogurts, bananas and creamcheese on 'Jewish Rye', which had no seeds, no tang and was kinda like an oval white bread. I toasted a couple of pieces and put my own good peanut butter on it.

I took them to the American Museum of Natural History, which my own mother would take me and my brother to regularly - though she'd say, "OK, meet back in an hour!" and we'd all seperate and wander around by ourselves. I see now what a luxury that must of been for a mom with two tots, an hour of quiet alone in the museum. Between the schools being out and the four kids pulling in four different directions, what a headache!

We came in through the subway entrance on the lower level, and the first thing to confront us was not a dinosaur or a mammoth, but the cafeteria. I remember eating their on a school trip as a child, and thinking even then how crappy the food was!

After a couple hours in the museum, we took the kids into Central Park to run up and down the big rocks (another thing our mom would indulge us in - I see now it's an effective tool to run our batteries down!) I found myself starving - one peanut butter sandwich not a lunch make. I was tempted to buy a pretzel or something from a vendor, but I felt awkward buying something for myself that I couldn't share with the four children I was with.

DINNER: 5:45pm, horrible kosher pastrami sandwich, lots of pickles and slaw, 1 chocolate chip cookie, 1 bite of overly sweet chocolate cake, hunger 4.5/5
We went to the local kosher deli in my neighborhood, which happens to be named "Noah's Ark". I've only been their a small handful of times, the majority with my parents when my brother has been in town. The only two that stand out was a few days afte my father died, my mom, my aunt and my brother went there. A few months after my mother died, I was their to meet a few collegues of hers who run many of the Jewish social services in the area, so they could express how highly they thought of her over pickles and rye.

I must say the food is quite horrible. The pastrami was thin, dry and shockingly flavorless - and very pink, meaning health-destroying nitrates were added for no reason other than color. Three of the 4 kids got 'kids meal', which I were shocked to find were medium-sized adult portions - I would of been happy with the amount of food on the plate. One kid got a turkey sandwich, which was almost the exact same size of my own sandwich - WTF?!

Presidential Pancakes

BREAKFAST: 11am, 4 pancakes, 7 strips of bacon, 1/2 GuS soda, hunger 4/5
Slept well after initial insomnia, dreams were less crazed and stressed than the last few nights. I made a batch of pancake mix from scratch, then made pancakes, using up left-over heavy whipping cream and folding in some whipped egg whites. Oh boy, the extra dairy fat giving unctuous density balances by the airy eggwhites made for an over the top pancake (whose mix was 100% white whole wheat which gives a pleasantly strong wheat flavor and unrefined organic can sugar, which gives a subtle caramel richness without being too loudly sweet). I fried up farmer's market non-nitrate bacon, which now thinking about it, could probably eaten 1/2 the amount and still would of been happy.

After, had half a meyer-lemon soda, very tasty and not too sweet. Probably could of skipped that for a pint of water.

LUNCH: 2:15pm, string hopper kotta with prawn curry, various fried appetizer thingies, water, hunger 3/5
Sri Lanken food on Staten Island with some old friends and their new baby. Kind of like Indian food with a slight African twist. String hopper kotta was bits of rice vermicelli in an onion/garlic/tomato dry sauce, really yummy and spicy.

I grew up on Staten Island, and it was heartening to see an area I knew very well as a kid having a little bit of culture, something I instinctively missed but didn't quite know it yet then.

DINNER: 9pm, boca burger on whole wheat sprouted toast, small amount of baby carrots with ranch, chocolate babka.
I finished the babka, ate too much of it, but it is very much a comfort food. Had no problem falling asleep soon after midnight.