CHEESE ON TOAST!!

ADDENDA:
When ever my godson Elijah has his picture taken, he shouts "CHEESE ON TOAST!", not quite sure why, I guess an adult had him say it once in hopes of making him smile. I guess he may think it's what makes the camera click. Anyway, as an experimental bite before brunch out, I toasted some superhippy bread and melted some cheese on it in the micro, came out pretty damn tasty. Not as tasty (or heavy) as buttery grilled cheese, but definitely a breakfast food I can ad to my menu.

Some insomnia from a crazy sleep day yesterday, but woke up with an appetite and a clearer head. Swung by the farmer's market, bought a jar of bread & butter pickles from Rick's Picks - a nice condiment for boca burgers. For $8 for a small jar, they better be special ($11 on line!!) The $9 I pay for the superhippy bread confirmed the adage, you get what you pay for. Makes me think I should cook up something cool in my kitchen and sell it at farmer's markets. Power bars? Pancake mix? Homemade ice cream? Hmmmm... maybe when I do the management course at culinary, I'll figure out a business plan to rock out at the farmer's market with some kitchen delights...

BREAKFAST #1: 10:15am, 500mg vitamin C, small piece of toasted superhippy bread with melted raw milk cheese, .25 bowl, hunger 3/5

BREAKFAST #2: 11:15am, 1 large pancake, sausage patty, home fries, water, 1.5 bowls, hunger 3/5
Brunch on 12th St. with B & my cousin. I received three huge puffy wholewheat & cornmeal pancakes, ate one of them. They were dry, tough, surprisingly tasteless and totally inferior to my own pancakes in just about every way. I ordered the sausage because the menu said it was made there - it looked homemade, but tasted industrial, with way too much salt.

PM SNACK: 3pm, fuji apple, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Just bought a bunch of apples, had to eat the one that's been sitting out for a week...still crisp! Yum!

PM SNACK: 5pm, 4 pieces fresh hot wholewheat organic shortbread, 1 scoop homemade chocolate soy ice cream, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Made shortbread with Betsy, to bring to a big Easter dinner tomorrow at a goyish friend's family tomorrow. I mixed wholewheat pastry flour with wholewheat all-purpose for a better chunky consistency last time. Gonna try bread flour next time.

DINNER #1: 7pm, 4 small potato pancakes, apple compote, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Made potato pancakes from dinnerfest frozen mix, still pretty damn good despite some purplish colors on the top. Tried to cook up a couple of chunks of pork loin that was in the freezer, but it smelled funky so I chucked it. Not enough food....

DINNER #2: 8:15pm, fresh pasta with tomato sauce and grated cheese, cup of almond icecream, 1.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Left over fresh pasta from dinnerfest was great, I let the pasta dry for 10 minutes before I cut it into noodles, and when it unfroze in boiling water it all come apart nicely, not one ugly ball.

EVENING SNACK: 10:30pm, 2 pieces of shortbread with chocolate chips on top, .25 bowls, hunger 3/5
Sugar cravings. Funny how eating more sugar creates cravings for more sugar...

Sick Day

ADDENDA:
Woke up at 10:30, good sleep but physically drained and a remarkable lack of appetite. Slowly came back in the afternoon, hopefully this won't be an extended illness.

Slowly but surely reviewing the contents of this blog, applying labels to each entry (see the list to the lower right.) About a third of the way through, surprised how high sugar cravings are. Where did those cravings go? Am I indulging too much? Perhaps another week's desert fast is in order....

AM DRUGGING: 11am, 500mg vitamin C, pint water

PM SNACK: 2:30pm, homemade powerbar, .25 bowl, hunger 2/5

LUNCH: 3:30pm, 6 potato perogies, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
Back of the freezer, wacked these in the microwave. Tasted like....all the stale flavors of a freezer. Pasta should be boiled in salted water, but looking at the nutritional info on the package, it already has an obscene amount of salt.

DINNER: 7pm, garlic shrimp with black beans and yellow rice, small cup of almond ice cream, 24 k\oz water, 3.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Well, my appetite is back, if not my energy. Ordered this dish before, but this time it didn't taste quite right.....the yellow rice was too salty, the shrimp's sauce a bit too astringent.

Emilabar

ADDENDA:
Made these yesterday afternoon, adjusting a recipe that was passed on by Ilsa. I replaced the dried fruits with chopped almonds, organic brown rice crispies, shredded dried apples and dark chocolate chips, and added a shot of almond extract. It's ok, but could be a lot better. The three eggs in the recipe make it overly spongy, I'd like it denser. The rice crispies lost their crispness, not sure how to overcome that. The dried apple bits are too large, gotta chop them finer. The recipe calls for peanut butter, that's a nice note, should up the amount, goes well with the almond extract. Maybe experiment with other extracts on the next batch. Regardless, this should be a good bike-food this season...

I've eaten Cliffbars on the bike for the last 8 or 9 years, I could see a refined recipe taking over. Hmmm, what should I name them? Dude named his bar after his father, Cliff. Emilbars? Emilabar? Emilobar? Sounds a little bit like one of those meal-replacement bricks....

Got home around 5pm, feeling much more tired from the casual ride than I should, so I skipped yoga. Spent some time going through the earlier portions of this blog, tagging things to make them searchable. Noticed I got into my yogurt habit around the time I did a week-long desert-fast, wonder how that's related.

BREAKFAST: 9:30am, boca burger on toasted sprouted wheat with ketchup and red onion, water, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

AM SNACK: 10am, half a homemade powerbar, hunger 4/5

AM DRUGGING: 11:30am, 500mg Vitamin C
Got a headache, feeling tired and achy. Got 6 hours, disturbed several times by Betsy's repeated alarm. Inner ear a little achy, may be an infection starting.

PM SNACK: 12:30pm, 2 brownies, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Quick snack before a casual bike ride. Needed to finish them.

LUNCH: 3:30pm, sausage and veg pizza, half a small cup of rich hot chocolate, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Took B's cuz and a few of her friends on a bike tour of the tip of Manhattan, then over to Brooklyn Heights with a stop at Grimaldi's. Took a quick walk over to Jacques Torres. Really nice.

PM SNACK: 8pm, 3 halves of small chocolate bunnies, .25 bowls, hunger 2/5
Snacked on a few bits from Jacques Torres with my B. One was white, one was milk and the third dark. Nice contrast, underlines that dark is the yummiest.

DINNER: 9pm, baby carrots with a little ranch, 1 homemade power bar, .75 bowls, hunger 3/5

EVENING SNACK: 1am, small superhippy bread cheese sandwich, .25 bowl, hunger 3/5
To help get to sleep.

Food Crime Then & Now: Iceberg Lettuce & Sausage Sticks

ADDENDA:
During the course of the day, I sat down to read my hand-written journal from my cross-country bike trek. I wrote down pretty much everything I ate, the good, the bad, especially the ugly, and a lot of thoughts about my parents, whose passings were still very fresh in my mind. Only once, the two subjects crossed. From my Marshfield, Missouri entry:

Heard a piece on the radio about some local hospital improving their food, choked me up, reminded me of the time my mom was hospitalized, her food, sharing pizza & Chinese food with her, bringing her chocolate. God I miss her.

Mom's hospital food was bland and gross, and my mom had no appetite due to the chemo. Still, she would eat bites of the pizza, Chinese & chocolate not because she was hungry, but because it was comforting and it was shared with her son.

The full weight of my mother losing her facilities came to bear due to her bearings in her kitchen. When she started her first course of treatment, they eventually sent her home, and every few days would make her way back to the hospital. I got a call from her one evening at work, a little panicked because she could not remember how to turn off the oven. I immediately left work and rushed to her apartment. When I got there, the oven was off - she had mistaken the clock time on the panel as a temperature. The next day I moved in with her and started making arrangements for home health aides during the day.

My mom was never a good cook, and it was almost a relief that during the time I lived with her, I got to prepare breakfast and dinner (I'd set aside easy stuff to prepare for the aide). I remember one dinner, I was making dried pasta and jarred sauce, and made a simple green salad with most of the stuff I grew up on - carrots, cucumbers, green pepper, celery, onion - and romaine instead of iceberg. I stopped eating iceberg lettuce years before because it tastes like nothing and is nutritionally void. When I served the salad, my mom asked where the iceberg was. I sighed like I was a snotty teenager again, told her this was much healthier, not to mention tastier, and it was HER generation who screwed up our eating habits by making silly stuff like that the standard.

Instead of getting into a raucous (and fun) argument with me about intergenerational food warfare and my silly teenage-like snottiness, she meekly said, "but I like it." I immediately felt horrendously guilty - I knew subconsciously she was dying and these were most likely her last meals (they were), but on the surface I was hoping to introduce her to new things, to things that reflected my way of thinking and seeing things. Suffice to say, for the next month till the end her house saw nothing but iceberg lettuce. I can't eat the stuff today without feeling a little guilty and sad.

Speaking of guilt, sadness, and nutritional corruptness of a generation, today's peeps certainly aren't guilt-free. Some of us have gotten a lot worse than just iceberg lettuce. I think I ranted about this product early on in this blog, but it's worth repeating. This morning I went to my local Pathmark to pick up bulky sundries like cat litter and toilet paper. I used to shop for my main groceries here before Whole Foods and Fresh Direct started up. After picking up my list, I wandered around a few aisles, where I would find the things that in the past I'd be there to buy. Industrial cereals, yick, diet soda, blech, frozen White Castles, ewww. I seriously considered buying something snackable from the freezer case, and I was also keep an open mind about alternative breakfast foods. Of course, the chocolate chip pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick came into my view and stunned me with all the power that it stunned me with months and months ago.

Really, any adult who bought this for their kid should be charged with child abuse. Looking through the freezer case, looking at fat and salt-heavy snacks called "Anytimepertizers", Jesus fuck, are we insane? I understand freedom of choice, but if economic activities that are arguably victimless like drug use and prostitution are illegal, shouldn't there be a class of "food crime"? (Personally, I think prostitution and all drugs should be legal and regulated, and so should so-called 'value-added' food products, but that's a rant for a different kind of blog....)

BREAKFAST: 10am, organic cheerios with good milk, banana, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 1:30pm, homemade mac n' cheese, homemade vanilla ice cream, homemade brownie, homemade seltzer, 3 bowls, hunger 4/5
Boy, I'm stuffed. Three relatively unhealthy foods easily available in large quantities at Pathmark - mac n' cheese, brownies and ice cream, all made from scratch, all simply delicious, even if frozen and in the fridge for a week.

DINNER: 8pm, assorted shared appetizers including beef bone marrow on toast with wine reduction, 1 boiled whole shrimp with touch of cream sauce, artisanel french fries, country pate, misc. vegetables in vinaigrette, saucon sec, mushroom ravioli, chocolate bread pudding, 1 glass wine, herbal tea, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Intense meal at Blue Ribbon bakery in honor of Katya's birthday, with B and 3 others. Read a lot about marrow, seen it on TV, felt like I had it before but upon eating it realized, ahhh, actually, I never ate this before. Presented in a cut shank of bone, the inner marrow is fatty and gelatinous, a cross between warm bacon fat and good butter, really rich and tasty and a bit overpowering if not spread thinly enough. Really tasty, awesomely non-vegetarian looking - when you look at it, you know exactly what your eating, unprocessed and unmediated - you're scooping goo out of the bone, near the joint, straight up. Ain't a burger made up of 20 different cows, ain't mystery meat.

Fat Bastard No More

ADDENDA:
Went to see Bad Manners last night, an early 80s 2-Tone era British ska band whose leader was renowned as an extremely fat guy. Doug Trendle, a.k.a. Buster Bloodvessel, a.k.a. Fattie, a.k.a. Fat Bastard has many songs in his catalog celebrating being fat, over eating and over drinking. In the late 90s, he sponsored a hotel called Fatty Towers that catered exclusively to obese people - big beds, huge meals, an expectation of little physical exertion....

....So I was pretty surprised when Buster came out on stage looking like a slip of his former self. Hoping he did it through diet, though a google search says otherwise, kinda disappointing. Still gave a great high-energy show, just like he did in his corpulence a decade ago. Of course now he's in his late 40s instead of late 30s. Didn't play a single song I didn't know, most of which I was already intimate with when I was 15. When I was 15, I was about as skinny as Fatty is now. Now I'm more towards the old Fatty size of things. Never thought I'd be fatter than Buster Bloodvessel. Oh, how times have changed!

BREAKFAST: 10:30pm, homemade pancakes and bacon, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Woke up late after a good night's sleep, hungrier than usual. Haven't made myself this yummy breakfast in recent memory, really hit the spot. Used the last 5 strips of bacon, I know it was excessive, but sooooo yummy.....if it was the crappy salty industrial kind, probably couldn't of gotten through 2 of them.

LUNCH: 4:30pm, grilled tempe with kasha & marinaed hijiki, cup of spicy lentil soup, water, 1.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Lunch with the HVS at the yoga studio, after another session of back-bending. Surprised how this vegan food tasted so good - reminded me a bit of Angelika's, whose food all kinda tastes like dirt. Unlike 99% of non-fine dining establishments, the portion size was a lot more reasonable than the usual buckets of food we've come to expect.

DINNER: 8pm, shoyu ramen with extra pork, 6 pork dumplings, half a portion of edemame, a small portion of Yana's noodles, a piece of vegan cheese cake topped with brownies, water, 4 bowls, hunger 4/5
A bowl of ramen soup is a large thing, easily fitting more than 2 bowls of food in it. Didn't eat enough all day. Afterwords, we walked to Atlas for desert, which does a zillion different kind of vegan sweets.

Weighty Matters

ADDENDA:
A little sore in the arms from hauling Erikka's lifetime of possessions. Rushed out the door this morning a little after 9 for an interview, but not before stepping on the scale - 230 even. That's the first time in budged by more than a pound or two from 235 in in years. I suspect it's just water weight that I haven't gained back from Saturday's ride.

While at WF today, tempted to buy apples but they all seemed vaguely mushy to the touch. Bought brown rice crispies and chocolate morsels to make my own powerbars this week. If I'm gonna burn large amounts of calories on the bike, I guess that's an opportunity to up nutritional value, too. Still haven't found a good replacement for Gatorade...

BREAKFAST: 8:15am, 1 apple, .25 bowl, hunger 3/5
Not enough, still thinking about a new breakfast regime.

LUNCH: 12:30pm, pork chop, brown rice pilaf, large spinach salad, seltzer, 3 bowls, hunger 4/5
Sauteed the pork without marinating it to see how it would be, still good but not as flavorful or tender. Brown rice pilaf left over from dinnerfest was alright, and made a big new baby spinach salad with carrots, cuces, and this time slivers of red onion, dressed with oo&v and some freshly roasted crumbled cashews.

PM SNACK: 4pm, boca burger on sprouted whole wheat with hot sauce, .5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Hungry, desiring sweets, drank some water but didn't stop the hunger. Kinda want to have a sweets-free day.

DINNER: 6pm, chana masala, daal, half a naan, small amount of white rice, 1 potato samosa, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Very mediocre Indian food, been on the hot tray too long. Nice to be out with B, though.

EVENING SNACK: 10pm, wholewheat pretzel with good peanutbutter, large handful of shelled pistachios, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Really hungry, desiring sweets. Almost ate ice cream, almost ate some mac n' cheese, but I was trying to eat the minimum to stop me craving.

A Moving Experience

ADDENDA:
Spent most of the day driving a large truck and lugging boxes and furniture, helping my good friend Erikka move house. A little sore from yesterday, in a good way, kinda want to get on the bike again as soon as possible and do a 50. And really want to take another back-bending class this week too.

BREAKFAST: 8:15am, apple, .25 bowls, hunger 3/5
Gotta rethink my breakfasts, cut back on the dairy for a while.

AM SNACK: 10am, 2 donuts, .75 bowls, hunger 4/5
Donuts were supplied to the troops to keep them going up and down the combined 5 flights between the two apartments.

PM SNACK: noon, 1 quart gatorade, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Again, quarts were supplied to the troops to keep energy up. Reading the label, surprised that the bottle was indeed 4 servings, but a total of 200 calories. A quart of soda would of been close to twice that.

LUNCH: 3pm, 2 slices of streetza with mushrooms, 1.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Third time, vittles for the troops.

DINNER: 7pm, bowl of baby carrots & cucumber with hummus, small slice of lasagna, brownie & small cup of vanilla ice cream, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Damn, that lasagna was easily the tastiest thing I made over Dinnerfest, save maybe the pork medallions.