One smal step for Noah, one giant step for Smoothie technology

Looking back at yesterday, the farmer's market was extra fun, with an awake and happy Edie charming all-comers as we walked through, but afterwards popping into Wholefoods was a bit of a stress, with Edie getting cranky and one hand on a cart that just wanted to veer left into every display. The advantages and disadvantages of food shopping with a baby writ large, with immediacy!

The ingredients on the Haagen Daaz "Vanilla Bean" ice cream is: cream, skim milk, sugar, egg yolks, ground vanilla beans, vanilla extract. (The HD plain vanilla is the same, minus the ground beans.) My vanilla ice cream, if it had a label, would be: organic cream, organic whole unhomogenized milk, organic egg yolks, organic sugar, vanilla bean seed scrapings. The Haagen Daaz, compared to my ice cream, has a weird fluffy fatty texture, and is soooo vanilla to the point of overwhelming any flavor of cream, which I guess is fine, since under the vanilla it tastes....cooked. My vanilla ice cream is more subtle, more clean tasting. And, I imagine, if I were to sell it by the pint, to make a profit would be $15/pint instead of HD's 5.

Edles n' I walked over the Manhattan Bridge to the restaurant. L has an idea he wants me to help him with -- open up a 2nd location.....in Williamsburg....in the RELIGIOUS section....and make the place glatt kosher.....this is definitely going to be a either a funny footnote anecdote or a chapter heading in my book....

BREAKFAST: 8am, smoothie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
On my harried run through Wholefoods yesterday, I picked up a bag of frozen mango chunks and a bag of frozen depitted cherries. Cherries because they are out of season, mango because they're hard to cut up and go bad before I use them up. In addition to fresh blueberries, banana, good yogurt, dead organic milk, a pinch of vanilla sugar and a pinch of sea salt, I finally added a few spoonfuls of freshly ground flax, now that I have a new spice grinder. I eliminated the ice cubes, as the frozen fruit served the same purpose, minus the dilution.

And wow, this was the best smoothie yet. Thick, sweet but balanced with tartness, and the fruit flavor just tasted...fruitier, due to lack of ice cubes.

LUNCH: 12 noon, 2 small slices texmex pizza, 8 oz sprite, glass of lemonade, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
L has a Tex Mex pizza on the menu as a special, but there are so many ingredients on it that he substituted a bunch of stuff on this pie -- red onion for scallion, cherry peppers for jalapenos, avocado slices for guacamole. The chili-fresh corn-cheddar cheese combo would have been enough, really, but the vinegary cherry peppers kinda blew everything else out of the water with it's overpowering flavor.

PM SNACK 3:30pm, apple, emmathaler cheese, 5 Milano cookies, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Green apple and raw milk cheese from the farmer's market, so good.PM

PM SNACK: 4:30pm, large green salad, small amount of vanilla ice cream, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Too hungry to wait for dinner, this was a semi-healthy stopgap.

DINNER: 7:30pm, chirashi sushi, fresh uni sushi, mini salad, edemame, 1 glass sake, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Met E on the UES to go to Candle Cafe, but there was a long wait for a table -- the Hungry Vegan Society must be multiplying and taking over that neighborhood or something. So we went up the street to a nice Japanese joint. They were offering a special -- fresh live sea urchin. So many Japanese sushi places in the city just make no effort, so I had to order this special -- I kinda hate sea urchin, because invariable it's funky, pasty and smells off. This sea urchin, which came presented on it's spiny black shell, was redolently fresh, smooth and creamy, tasting like the ocean, like caviar but more pleasant.