Mayo Reconsidered

Woke up tired, but it's not Edie's fault -- for the third night in a row she slept through the night with out drama. Lifted weights while juggling Mil. Feeling the need to bike, I miss riding for hours outdoors.

TODAY'S COOKING:
Mayonnaise: As a Jew, I'm not a fan of mayo, but I wanted to have some sardines for lunch, and I didn't have most of the ingredients on hand to do exactly as Alton Brown does. The main supplementary ingredient to mash in with the sardines is avocado, a creamy fat. My mom used to make horrible tuna sandwiches, tuna mashed up with jarred mayo. In c-school, making mayo of different varieties was a lesson, and an important example of emulsification (which I still teach to my students.) Making mayo is easy.

Cheesecake Brownies: As we are invited to a Sabbath dinner in the 'hood with fellow parent friends, and excursioning out to Staten Island tomorrow to visit friends, thought these would be a good take-along. Used my standard go-to brownie recipe (but doubling salt, replacing extract with 3 scrapings)  but jazzed it up with a middle layer -- 16 oz of cream cheese beaten with 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 eggs and 2 vanilla bean scrapings. It's kinds Paula Deen-esque in it's crapitude, but it's fresh and industrial-BS-free.

Into the work bowl of the mixer, 1 egg, 1 yolk, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp mustard powder, 1 tsp white vinegar. Turn whisk on high, slowly drizzle in one cup of peanut oil, one cup of olive oil. In a few minutes, a big light yellow mound of fluffy mayo. It might have been a little brighter with more vinegar, or fresh lemon juice instead. I know jarred mayo in the fridge will last forever, not sure how long this will last, I guess as long as raw egg out of the shell will last....


AM SNACK: 8am, iced green tea


BREAKFAST: 10am, smoothie, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
Did a standard smoothie (banana, fresh grapes, frozen blueberries, mango, cherries & peach, Greek yogurt, organic dead milk, salt, vanilla, flax) but added a new ingredient I picked up with HVS while getting fresh brussels: spirulina. A dark green powder, it's some sort of ground up dried algae that's supposedly good for you in all sorts of ways. Years ago, I used to eat some puffed corn snack that was covered in the stuff which I enjoyed. I added a teaspoon to the smoothie and....it looked ugly, mottled, a grey-blue like there were too many different colors thrown in. Flavor-wise, it's actually very nice. A very subtle vegetal note that adds complexity. All the fruit's sweetness covers it's potential bitterness, leaving only a very quiet spinach-grass note.

LUNCH: 12:15pm, sardines & mayo on wholewheat toast, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
I liked this much more than I thought I would. Unlike my mom's sandwich, the whole wheat has some nutty flavor, the sardines are tastier than any tuna, and the mayo...fresh mayo tastes honest, jarred stuff is a little, ummm, jar-ry.


AFTERNOON SNACK: 5pm, slice of streetza, scraps of cheesecake brownie, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5
On the way home with Edie from the playroom, found myself uncomfortably hungry and got a slice. A few minutes later, at home I took the freshly baked brownies out of the freezer and portioned them, but with the delicacy and crumbliness, a lot went to "waste", a.k.a. into my mouf (and into a scrap container.)

DINNER: 6:45pm, a small piece of salmon, a small amount of wholewheat pasta salad, half a glass of wine, .5 bowl, hunger 3/5
Over for Sabbath dinner with friends, my appetite ruined by the sweets.


EVENING SNACK: 9:30pm, potato chips, small amount of brownie, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5