Problems with Maws

Look into the deep dark maw of the pizza oven. It goes long, maybe 7 feet to the back of it, and the stone floor, walls and ceilings allow for no lights. At height times, it can fit 12 pies comfortably (and there are two ovens), but beyond the first row they are bathed in darkness. If a pie in the back looks lightly browned, you need to pull it immediately because it'll probably be very dark brown -- still good, but not a lot of time before it starts blackening, given a burnt bitter flavor.

ADDENDA:
Ate really poorly on Saturday, eating to emotions, then feeling crappy from eating crappy, reinforcing said emotions. By the evening, had insomnia for the first time in a while, which lead to grazing in the kitchen, avoiding all the healthier options on hand.

Early Monday morning, the filling I had put in early last week started killing me. As of noon Monday, I am scheduled for an emergency root canal at 2pm. Therefore, this blog will be dark for a few days.

SATURDAY:
BREAKFAST: 9:30am, 1 apple, 1 slice apple pie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5 The apple was very unsatisfying.

LUNCH: 12pm, small pizza with moz, pancetta, mushrooms, caramelized onions, parm, root beer, chocolate cake, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 4:45pm, meat tortellini in meat sauce, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 3/5

EVENING SNACK: 6:30, half a slice, black cherry & lemon soda, .75 bowl, hunger 2/5 Brought home some slices for B and ate with her though not very hungry.

EVENING BINGE: 11pm-2am, nibbles of chocolate chips, flax corn chips, .75 bowl, hunger 3/5

SUNDAY
BREAKFAST: 8:30am, good granola with good milk, 1 bowl, hunger 3/5

LUNCH: 2pm, bowl of butternut squash soup, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Slurped this down after a nice early afternoon nap.

PM NOSHING: 3-9pm, hors d'eurves including beef wraps, tuna tar tar, mushroom quiche, chicken on focaccia, pigs in blankets, 4 cup cakes, 2 Bellinis, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Weird eating slowly over a long period.

You will eat garbage, and enjoy it.

During prep, I cleaned, blanched, sauteed and chopped a whole mess of beet and carrot greens to be used in the vegetarian baked eggs dish for the weekend's brunch. These greens were picked up from the farmer's market...for free. Customers ask for these to be removed, because they don't know what to do with them. They are bitter but flavorful dark greens that if cooked properly, are like any spinach or mustard green but pack a bigger wallop of flavor. Hey, if we didn't serve it in the eggs, it would go in the trash. And they're organic and local....

The restaurant was a bit slow, and I was offered an early exit, but I stuck around and got to top a few pizzas in the slower later evening. Made a bunch of mistakes -- mostly, if you bring a wet sauce to the edge of the dough, it WILL stick to the peel. If the dough sits on the peel for more than a few minutes, it will absorb the dry flour you laid down and WILL stick. Indeed, a pizza became a calzone by mistake.

ADDENDA:
Spent the morning cooking butternut squash soup for a dinner party tomorrow evening. Roasted the squash, boiled carrots and white potato in vegetable stock, and sauteed onions with apple. Weird looking at sauteing apples and onion, but it all gets blended in soup.

BREAKFAST: 10am, good granola with good milk, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

AM SNACK: 11am, freshly made butternut squash soup, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
As I was tasting and adjusting, it got better and better. After salt, a little cayenne, butter and heavy cream, the sweetness of the sauteed apple really receded. So I put in a blob of molasses and....HOLY MOLEY!! I was immediately compelled to slurp up a bowl.

PM SNACK: 4pm, cold meat ball, cheesecake, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 8pm, 1 slice pizza, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 10:15pm, pizza with moz, roasted peppers, sausage, blackcherry and orange soda, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

Evil at the Supermarket

OK, are you "Extra Rich" or "Light"? Tallest midget? Shortest giant? Or are you ice milk with a whole lot of fillers, chemicals, and nasty sh@t that'll fool the tongue and make you fat anyway?

Had a filling replaced today, so I couldn't eat anything other than ice cream most of the day, and had to eat dinner with the left side of my mouth.

ADDENDA:
Went to another yoga class today, this time Bikram -- in a hot-ass room. Weird. Was dizzy and had to lie down for the final third of the class. Not sure if I like it or not yet.

BREAKFAST: 9am, good granola with good milk, .75 bowl, hunger 3/5

LUNCH: 2:30pm, pint of Haagen Daazz chocolate peanut butter ice cream, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

BIKRAM WATERING: 6-8pm, 2 quarts

DINNER: 8:30pm, half a large Ethiopian vegetarian plate with lots of injera, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

EVENING SNACK: 10:30pm, 1 small nutmeg 'chocopod'
I never thought that chocolate and nutmeg would be a good flavor combination, and now that I had a nutmeg-flavored piece of chocolate, I KNOW it's not a good combination. Blech.

Kraut Rock!

Today, I made raw kraut for the HVS with this recipe. It was pretty straightforward: chop up 5 pounds of cabbage (I used a mandolin), some optional veg (thinly sliced carrots), salt generously, and mix. Place into a plastic bucket, top with a plate and some weights to compress. Cover with a towel to keep out dust and ephemera. Wait 7 days, periodically checking and pressing it down. Not sure if I'm going to jar it yet -- boiling will stabilize it, but also kill the fermentation, which is supposedly the biggest health-aspect to this dish. Any one out there with advice/opinions on canning this kraut?

ADDENDA:
My back aches when I wake up, which I suppose is normal for a man my age. As I loosen up and wake up, it's pretty much gone in 15 minutes or so. However, this morning, my back and my wrists ached. The last time my wrists felt like this, I had hit a bad pothole on my bike and my wrists were forced to act as shock absorbers -- and they didn't hurt until the next day. I don't remember any dramatic potholes and yesterday's ride out to Coney. Could it be the crap food I've been eating lately? The weather? My mom had lots of issues with her wrists in her later years. I think I should get Ilsa's admonishments into my head and focus on eating a little better, particularly with the effect the restaurant is having on my diet. Today's yoga took my wrists out of their comfort zone, but I only found one or two positions newly out of reach, and they felt better after.

The yoga studio I attend is not afraid to aggressively push its agenda, which I appreciate. While they're not stealthily trying to turn you into a tree-huggin', whale-lovin' hippy, they are upfront about their views. Still, when today's instructor mentioned meat eaters who, "sexually manipulate people, then kill them to eat them," that made me giggle. The HVS had to explain to me that 'people' and animals are used interchangeably, and that the sexual manipulation was referring to breeding practices in industrial settings, not necessarily bestiality (though I assume the yoga peeps are against that too. As am I -- for the record).

BREAKFAST: 10am, 1 apple, .25 bowl, hunger 3/5

AM SNACK: 11:30am, flax-seed tortilla chips, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Don't want to be too hungry when going to yoga.

SNICKLE SNACK: 2:45pm, cup of kitcheri, big vegan Cesar salad, 3 small pieces of 'taco toast', water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
After-yoga vegan fiesta with the HVS. The studio's cafe has recently redid their menu, with the taco toast (black beans, tomato, avocado and chimichurri sauce on triangles of toasted whole wheat bread) being a new thing. Not particularly great, but not boring.

PM SNACK: 5:30pm, 3 freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Baked the remainder of the dough for when B got home, kept them in an extra 3 minutes, nice and crunchy.

DINNER: 7:30pm, fresh spinach pasta with shrimp, olive oil and garlic and parm, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Not bad for a meal where the two main ingredients were out of the freezer. Used some rocking rocambole garlic from the farmer's market.

Porny-Named Things at the Restaurant Supply Shop

I was in a restaurant supply store to kill some time between appointments, looking among all the devices and equipment I experienced at c-school -- damn, I would love a potato ricer to make proper purees. That tortilla press sure is inexpensive. Huh, those miniature tart pans sure are overpriced. But when I got to the "Tunnel of Bundt", I gasped -- if this ain't the root of food-porn, I don't know what is!

ADDENDA:

To tired to cook today. Ordered in dinner, tipped an extra buck.

BREAKFAST: 9:15am, brioche french toast with 2 slices of bacon, 2 small sugar donuts, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

Treated myself to Balthazar breakfast after an early morning doctor's app't. (Don't worry, everything is fine.) Have really liked this restaurant for a long time, but looking at the food from a culinary point of view, I was slightly underwhelmed. The donuts were good and fresh, but there was nothing special about them to justify the $2 for a small donut -- it's $2 at the donut plant for a similar size and style but 2x as good. The french toast was good, they went for a very light and pillowy thing, but for $14, I'd either want something more substantial or a 3rd piece. As Chef A ruefully said about a recent dining experience yesterday: "Good is the new Excellent."

LUNCH: 2:45pm, hot dog, fried potatoes, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
On the Coney Island boardwalk, under the cold sun with the HVS, after a nice strolling bike ride down from Manhattan.

PM WATERING: 6pm, quart of water

DINNER: 7pm, egg roll, shrimp toast, singapore mai fun, apple-cheese pie, 2 bowl, hunger 4/5

It ain't easy being over-cheesed...y.

An uneventful but pleasantly rolling Monday evening. There was only one delivery boy, so I ended up jumping in and doing 4 runs through the night.

During prep, I made the slice pies from start to finish for the first time. The restaurant's slices are large squares that are cut into 9 pieces. Eight hundred grams of dough are stretched across the well-seasoned steel pan, then sauced with a simple cooked stewed tomato sauce, doused with some olive oil and salt, then cooked in the oven for 18 minutes. It's then taken out and topped with shredded moz, then baked again for about 10 minutes until the cheese starts to brown.

The thing is, when you are applying the cheese to the partially cooked sauced crust, you need to go light, because when the cheese melts in spreads out horizontally. I laid on the cheese so it looked right, with a minimal amount of red sticking out, but once cooked, you had slices of pizza that were out of balance -- too much cheese, not enough sauce and bread. You live, you learn.

ADDENDA:
The scale said 223.8 this morning. I'm a little surprised I'm maintaining my weight, I feel like I may be eating too much, or maybe it's just that I'm eating crappily -- the cold weather is maing me want to pack in heavy, fatty, sugary stuff.

BREAKFAST: 11am, slice of apple cheese pie, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: Noon, a variety of things from WF's cold and hot bar, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Almost all vegetarian, mostly nasty. Zucchini latka tasted a bit like pooh, the falafel ball was laughably dry and crumbly, the seaweed salad was under seasoned, the potato samosa underspiced and the 'Chinese noodle salad' was just gooey.

PM SNACK: 5pm, 1 pizza slice, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 9:45pm, rigatoni with mushrooms, root beer, flourless chocolate cake, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

EVENING WATERING: 11:30pm, 1 quart