The best grilled cheese I ever ate.

I originally intended to be up at 4am and out by 5am on the bike, but weather reports reported thunderstorms from 6am to noon. I woke at 8am to overcast but clear skies, but a good storm to run through briefly around 10am. During this lay-about time, I felt more and more rundown, leading me to think that hay fever is in effect. Also, Edie had been warm on the edge of fever since the night, and maybe staying home and helping out wouldn't be the worst idea.

I slept a good 10 hours, and I went to bed after a relatively small dinner around 8:30.

BREAKFAST: 8:30am, red velvet peanut butter pancakes, large glass of iced mint green tea, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
A heavy, satisfying breakfast. Left over batter from yesterday's peanut butter blowout.

LUNCH: 2:30pm, vegetarian Ethiopian food, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 6:45pm, grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized onions, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
On nice demi hippy bread, with left over caramelized onions and a good soft pawny cheese we picked up from a local cheese monger, cooked with good European butter in a cast iron grill pan with a sandwich weight. After eating the sandwiches, Betsy and I agreed that these were the best grilled cheese sandwiches we ever ate. In song with Edie clapping away, B took credit for the idea and I took credit for the cooking. Hopefully in a few years there will be three of us saying that was the best grilled cheese ever.

Peanut Butter Daze

MAP came over around 9:30 with a sh@t-ton of plain and flavored peanut butters and we cooked up 4 out of 5 recipes we wrote for a competition sponsered by a PB restaurant/product line who provided us with the freebies. Edie napped from 9:30 to 11:15, which was convenient, so we were able to finish a lot of the heavy lifting before Ediecakes started crawling all over the floor and needing to be fed.

Didn't eat a formal breakfast, but nibbled on everything we cooked after taking a round of sexxxy pictures of each. We set up an informal studio for the pics by the living room window, and while we were taking pics of the last item, the proscuitto and peanut sauce pizza, Edie crawled over and hogged the spotlight, reeeediculous!! The fact that this pic was not staged, but a curious little booger jumping up and going "HAAA!", my heart just went pitterpat.

AM SNACK: 7:30am, mint green iced tea
This recent batch uses a jasmine green tea (good) but is the sweetest yet (bad.) I added a cup of my homemade mint syrup, about what I usually add, and this time I upped the tea bags to 12 (instead of 8) -- the strength tastes right now, but the sweetness....hmmm, maybe the jasmine flavoring amplifies the sweetness? Gonna cut the syrup by half on the next batch.

AM SNACKING: 9:30-12:30, red velvet peanut butter pancakes, roast beef sandwich with peanut sauce, peanut butter vegetable sushi, peanut butter & prosciutto pizza, seltzer, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNORT: 2pm, glass of white wine
Informal playdate in Tompkins Square with A and MAP. I brought the wine.

DINNER: 6:30pm, pasta with homemade tomato sauce and caramelized onions, 1.75 bowl, hunger 4/5
In anticipation of a long bikeride tomorrow, carboloaded with pasta. My eating limits this to once a week, which makes me think how I used to eat pasta several times a week. I miss it a little, but really, once a week makes it more special. Unfortunately, I already had rice pasta with my students on Wednesday, so I can't truly say this was the ony pasta this week.

Salad day

Woke up too late to really focus, because I needed to get Edles to a 10am doc appointment to follow up on her ear infection -- alls well. Met E for lunch, went to Patsy's and had a pretty reasonable meal -- half of what they call a 'small' and half of what they call a "family size" salad.

Spent the afternoon shopping for some peanut-butter exploratory cooking with MAP tomorrow, laundry, and just Edling around. E2 came over for dinner, and I made something that took a little bit of effort. I caramelized 4 onions in chicken fat and used about half in the chard side dish, but am saving the other half to do something fun in -- when something takes 3 1/2 long, slow hours to cook, why not make some extra?

AM SNACK: 8:45am, mint iced green tea

LUNCH: 11:45am, half a medium pizza, a large portion of green salad, water, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 5:45pm, large green salad, multigrain tortilla chips, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 6:30, handful of mixed nuts

DINNER: 8pm, ocean perch fillet, red chard with onions, twice-baked potato, a little chocolate, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

EVENING SNACK: 10pm, cake, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

Splash! Gobble!

A busy day with a swim class in the morning with Edie (splash! smile! splash splash! giggle!), teaching a round of Asian food to the students in the afternoon (chop chop! stir fry sizzle! gobble gobble!) and then the evening at the restaurant to get myself oriented for this coming Tuesday, where I will be managing the ship once a week.

Not a good eating day, but glad to be a little sore from the work out the day before.

AM SNACK: 8:30am, iced mint green tea

LUNCHFAST: 11am, 2 grilled cheese sandwiches on demihippy bread, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 2:30pm, slice of cheesecake, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 6:30p, pork dumplings, scallion pancake, pad thai, chicken & brocolli with white jasmine rice, slice of cheesecake, seltzer, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

Nanny-up

An interesting day. Starting next Tuesday, I'll be working a 12 hour shift supervising the restaurant, so El came over to nanny -- a test day, so to speak. El has worked with B's family for ever, nannying many of B's cousins who are now in their 20s. So off I went to the movies -- my stomach was a bit nervous from leaving Edles alone with someone other than B, but as I rode my bike over to the theater, realized I needed to get something in.

I got home in the mid afternoon, and spent some time frying the latke mix I made yesterday, for a pot luck the food coop I'm involved in was holding.

I lifted weights in the morning -- I felt like I needed to do something, because the time I spent at the movies, I could have gotten a good bike ride in, but I was feeling too uneasy about Edles to really enjoy that. I changed up the routine, and by evening I started feeling sore in a whole new bunch of muscles, which is good.

AM SNACK: 9:30am, mint iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 11am, sushi, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Picked it up from a refrigerator case of an Asian market. Ick, too cold and some of the fish was just wrong. Sat lack a block in my stomach.

LUNCH: 3pm, a bunch of mini latkes, large green salad, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
As I was frying off 10 lbs of mix to make latkes, I realized I had to eat something other than the delicious fatty carb cakes to be reasonable, so I ate salad as I spend a good 90 minutes frying.

DINNER: 7:30-9pm, "friendship" bread, mini spinach pies, a few vegetable sticks, apple juice, seltzer, a few latkes, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Noshing at the food coop potluck. "Friendship" bread is really cake that uses a sourdough starter contributed from said friend....I got myself a starter, gonna funktify some myself in 10 days....

Back

Hello, everybody. Had a good weekend upstate in the Woodstock area. Highlights of my eating was Saturday night's dinner -- a whole bunch of little appetizers at the wedding reception. I find at many of these kinds of events, the appetizers are enough and then you eat a whole extra meal that is considered the formal dinner. I was on Edie duty, so after getting my dinner-sized portion of appetizers, it was time for me n' Edles to get to bed.

Sunday I road up and down the Hudson and ate not-totally-nutritious energy food, but it was a good time. Today, I found myself scrounging for food for lunch, settled on a bagel due to a lack of anything else in reach that was convenient to eat before getting out with Edie to go food shopping. On the way back grabbed a knish on Delancey, chose spinach as it's a littler greenery, no?

Dinner was some simple fish filets baked with old bay seasoning and butter, and brown rice cooked pilaf style with a whole mess of stuff thrown in to give it some funk -- vegetable stock, dried morels, coconut, chili powder. I also made some red chard but badly oversalted it to the point of not being edible, oh well.

BREAKFAST: 9am, organic chex with dead organic milk, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH: 12 noon, bagel with cream cheese, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5

LUNCH pt 2: 2:30pm, spinach knish, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5

DINNER: 6:30pm, baked sole & brown rice, large green salad, chocolate with peanut butter, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5