Doze

One of those days. Woke up tired, had full intentions of going out to yoga and fell asleep minutes before getting ready, then ditched a social thing with some of B's friends so I could doze in and out all day on the couch. Fell asleep around 8pm and slept deeply, with interruptions of Edie crying and B mothering.

BREAKFAST: 9am, toasted bagel with creamcheese, sable & red onion, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

AM SNACK: 11am, cupcake, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 2pm, large green salad, Stouffer's french bread pizzas, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 4pm, cupcake, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 6:30pm, pasta with string beans in butter & wine sauce, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

Unmuffed

Attempted to make bacon-brownies by topping freshly baked brownies and topping it with bacon powder, but my bacon powdered failed, ending in a bacon-fat slurry that would not of been good eats on top of a brownie. I do have a large amount of cooked bacon in the freezer, awaiting it's use in a bacon-biscuit situation.

BREAKFAST: 9am, smoothie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Banana was pretty ripe, smoothie much better.

PM SNACK: 1pm, fistful of brownies, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Freshly baked, cutting them up, filled up 2 containers and had an odd fistful left over that made a run for it and scrammed down my throat.

PM SNORT: 2pm, bud light, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
The only beer available at the playdate. Tastes like an ale mixed with seltzer. People really like this as "beer"?

PM SNACK: 5pm, large green salad, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Met the veg challenge for the day, finally.

PM SNACK: 5:30pm, cupcake, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
B came home with a box of cupcakes, so of course I had to snarf one. Really didn't need it.

DINNER: 7:30pm, onoin bahji, vegetable samosa, tandori prawns, lamb saag, chicken biriyani, naan, rice, 1 beer, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Dinner out with E, D & P. Ate lightly.

EVENING SNORT: 9pm, 1 fruity cocktail, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

Muffed again

Edie had an uproarious evening, and took her to the doc this morning just to make sure everything was copacetic (it is, just a bad night due to nothing ominous). Still the stress got us out and about early, with no time to eat. By the time I got off the subway, felt a bit ill in the "gotta eat NOW" way. The pastries from the cart looked very unappealing, so just ate one.

BREAKFAST 1: 9:15am, street donut, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Felt a bit strung out and nauseous from not having had anything to eat.

BREAKFAST 2: 11:30am, fresh garlic bagel with cream cheese, sable and red onion, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Just back from all the shopping, the bagel could not be fresher.

PM SNACK: 1:30pm, small amount of espresso-hot chocolate
Met M for hot chocolate at City Bakery, where they have a special flavor every day this month. It was shockingly bad, with gritty coffee grinds suspended in it. Good thing we only got 2 oz shots.

LUNCH: 4pm, pork burrito, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Wandering downtown, waiting for 5pm to meet up with B, realized I was hungry. On 4th Ave right below 14th, there is a new California-style burrito joint that is shockingly much better than all other burrito options in NYC right now. The tortilla, cheese, beans, rice, salsa and guac were all spot on. The only thing I wasn't 100% about was the pulled pork -- next time definitely gonna get the vegetarian.

DINNER: 7pm, baked potato with butter, ice cream, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Even though I got a lot of veg and salad ingredients today, no energy to deal with it. Nuked a potato and finished my home made ice cream.

Muffed

Totally muffed the challenge today, between being out most of the day, a fancy dinner out in the evening, and being low on groceries at home. Will rectify tomorrow, and maybe even get in my first exercise of the week. Then again, I pedalled up to and back from West 53rd street, I guess by snickle standards that was exercise (about 60 minutes on the bike)

BREAKFAST: 8:15am, good yogurt with honey, vanilla, cashews, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 12 noon, turkey & ham sandwich, Manhattan Special, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
At the resto, freshly baked bread, mustard, apple slices, all the veg out of the salad station.

PM SNACK: 4:15pm, slice of streetza, butterfly cookie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 4:45pm, dark chocolate corn flake clusters, hunger 4/5
A little bite with B, I brought her home some Jaques Torres.

DINNER: 9pm, tart flambe, small piece of duck breast, small piece of sweet breads, Alsatian sausage with kraut, chocolate tart, 1 beer, water, couple pieces of bread, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Dinner at the Modern with E, for restaurant week. Pretty groovy, very tasty, beautiful presentations.

It's nuts

Woke up after 12 hours sleep to a cranky wife and a happy baby. Fneh. Just barely squeaked by on the challenge. Can't take my day off until Sunday, when I'm travelling and it'll be very inconvenient to aim for three cups of nutritionally relevant vegetable matter....

BREAKFAST: 8:15am, toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese, diet Gatorade, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
I read that Gatorade was abandoning corn-syrup in favor of cane sugar due to public pressure, so when I was in the supermarket I was curious to pick some up, but instead found their new "G2" low-calorie brand. When I was cycling, I quite enjoyed this stuff, but for all intents and purposes it's soda, and a very easy way to take in way too many calories. This new product still has sugar as it's main sweetener, but low on it's ingredients list it also has an artificial sweetener. It has 2/5 the calories of the normal stuff, and to my palate I couldn't taste a difference, which surprised me.

A low-calorie sports drink, it's nuts. But it'll get me through until me n' Edie can get on a bike.

AM SNACK: 10:45am, pop chips, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 12:30, lentil & red bean curry over yesterday's rice and chard n' onions, diet gatorade, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
I had this sachet of shelf-stable lentil curry from Trader Joes that I thought might be a nice change up from fish sticks. The "curry" kinda tasted like the tomato sauce that comes in a can of Spagetti-o's and really clashed with the vinegary goodness of the rice. So after eating about 1/3 of it, I did the rare thing of tossing the rest out -- the bad curry just ruined the rest of the food.

PM SNACK: 2:15pm, 3 chocolate meringue cookies, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Good cookies from the playgroup leader.

PM SNACK: 6pm, momma style salad, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 9pm, roti canai, singapore chow mei fun, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Ordered in from a Malaysian place, the noodles were nothing like I ever had from a Chinese take out.

Bamalama Rice

Blarg. HVS is ranting about a month-long snickle-challenge, involving three cups of veg a day (no big deal, I was doing that already this past week), exercise for 20 minutes at least twice a week (I wish this was easier, as I'm locked down with an Edie too young to be attached to a bike and crappy cold weather, but I think I may break out my weights out of the clost), weigh in at the beginning and end of the month (233.4 this morning, bleah, that's my fatso weight), and permission to take a day off from the challenge once a week.

HVS, it's winter in the North East, so much good stuff is not in season and the imported stuff doesn't taste as good! Waaaah! I guess I'll muddle through.

I fell asleep around 7 this evening -- I was up until 3 in the morning the night before on a babka-high. Which is all fine and good, except when you have a baby and it leaves your partner responsible for the child all night. I'm sorry, B!

BREAKFAST: 8:45am, smoothie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
This smoothie was incredibly thick, almost too thick, and oddly unsweet. After having a near perfect smoothie only a few days ago to go to this begs the question: what was different. I'm fairly certain the key to a top notch smoothie is a half-black, over-ripe mushy banana. That's what went in then, while today I used a stiff, partially green banana that definitely added an ice-cream like thickness to the proceedings, but flavor-wise was totally flat.

LUNCH: 12:45pm, 2 fish sticks, chard with caramelized onion, white rice, water, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Very satisfying American-style lunch. The fish sticks from WF were all-organic, made with whole fillet of cod. The amazing thing is the fish actually tasted fishy, something you usually don't get in a product like that, and not greasy at all. I made some white sushi rice in the rice cooker, crumbled up some dried morrels, used chicken stock, a little salt, a little olive oil and a shot of rice wine vinegar that made all the difference -- the vinegar made the rice just jump up and shout, "BAMALAMA!" Though next time I go shopping, gonna get brown sushi rice.

PM SNACK: 4:30pm, momma-style salad, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
Hunks of carrot, cucumber, red pepper and red onion, lightly salted and dipped in homemade babaganoush. About 2 cups of vegetable matter.

DINNER: 6pm, Stouffer's Frenchbread pizzas, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5
I bought my usual 'deluxe' (pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, peppers) but also picked up a "grilled vegetable" version for B (zucchini, onion, peppers). I noticed that the later had about 1/3 less fat, and took 5 minutes longer to cook. B only ate one, so I ate one of each, and the difference was startling. The meat toppings gave a certain spiciness, sure, but the fat made ALL the difference. The deluxe crust was crispy/tender and pretty much makes this product amazing, while the grilled vegetable crust was dry, a little saw-dusty and crumbled when you bit into it.

My most ornate Linner ever

We were supposed to go out with a few peeps to breakfast, but the bitter cold had everyone cancel. Which was fine, I spent the morning shopping for groceries, and after making a challenge-friendly breakfast, got into cooking up a storm for a mid-afternoon dinner with friends.

BREAKFAST: 11:15am, zucchini pancake, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
Added egg this time, cooked with a little safflower oil in cast iron. Good, but not great, still was best the first time with HVS. Tasted the slight egginess of the pancake, kinda freaked me out a little but still enjoyed it.

LINNER: 3:30pm, arancini, shrimp & herb ravioli with tomato pesto, red chard with caramelized onion, 1 chocolate ravioli, chocolate babka, water, seltzer, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Spent three hours getting this meal together. First thing, got the onions on in some chicken fat to caramelize slowly over 2 hours. Made pasta dough, two kinds of filling -- B won't eat shrimp, so I made a cheese feeling made of ricotta, cream cheese, chopped spinach, parm, nutmeg, salt, pepper). The shrimp ravioli followed this recipe. While the dough rested, made the shrimp filling, then cleaned and destemed the chard. Rolled out the dough through the pasta machine, assembled and cut the raviolis by hand for a more rustic, large feel. Got the chard in boiling water for 3 minutes, then drained and tossed with the sweet, soft brown onions and a handful of diced kalamata olives. Got some peanut oil on the fire with thermometer to heat up to deep fry temp. Got some simple syrup on to poach the chocolate ravioli. Diced herbs to use in sauce. Roasted some oiled cherry tomatoes under the broiler until they burst, while softening shallots in olive oil. Tossed shallots, tomatoes and herbs together and cooked to release the tomato's liquid and make something thick n' saucy. Close to 3 when Y & her boyfriend were to come, set frying the arancini. Old mushroom risotto that's been living in the freezer for a while, scooped a small ball, dipped in flour, dipped in an egg/milk wash, then dipped in whole wheat bread crumbs, then into the deep fryer until dark golden. During service, just had to get the ravioli in boiling water, everything else was pretty much done. And at the end, the babka was from the freezer, already defrosted in the fridge and just nuked for a minute to be totally ready to serve.

Food was good, but not great. The ravioli need more salt in the filling, and the pasta was a bit too stiff for my taste. The chard was a little too oily. The arancini were good, the babka was great. A lot of fun, though I generated a hella-lot of dirty dishes which my wife & dishwasher B made hash of pretty efficiently.