Multitalented

It’s Monday, in case you didn’t know.  Blah!  But at least this particular Monday is Chris’s birthday, which is exciting.  More so for him than for me, but I still get to go out to dinner.

On Saturday we had a karaoke party to celebrate:

The extremely talented Jaclyn made Chris pretty much the most amazing cake ever:

And we sang a lot:

Betsy was not particularly impressed with my talents:

This may not have been my best song, I’ll admit it.  She wasn’t looking at me like that during my rendition of “Like a Prayer,” though, I’ll tell you that.

Anyway.  Moving on to cooking, the focus of this blog.  Here is last night’s dinner:

It’s roasted vegetables and polenta.  This is roughly the recipe:

• 1/2 butternut squash
• 1 parsnip
• 1/4 of a red onion
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed up
• 4 cremini mushrooms
• 5 cherry tomatoes
• 4 – 5 sprigs of thyme
• 3 T walnuts
• 1 T olive oil
• 1/2 cup polenta (dry)

Cut the butternut squash, parsnip, mushrooms, onion and tomatoes into bite-sized peices and mix with two sprigs of thyme, the olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.  Roast at 475 for 20 – 30 minutes.  Make the polenta according to the package directions (I added a little soy milk to mine), adding the remaining thyme.  Toast the walnuts in a dry pan.  Top polenta with the vegetables and walnuts.

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Just call me The Blogger

I had a rather uneventful weekend, which was exciting because things have been a little too eventful for me lately.  A few highlights:

Possibly the last ice cream of the season (outdoors, obviously…it’s always ice cream weather inside the walls of my apartment):

After he took this picture, Chris carried on for about an hour about how “artsy” he is, and how perfect the lighting looks.  I kind of think it looks like I have man hands.

Anyway.  So that’s exciting. But even more exciting, if you can believe it, is this:

Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!  Food Network magazine!!  I have been waiting for this for nearly all of my 25 years.  My boss gave it to me on Friday and I almost kissed her.  I read the whole thing in about 15 minutes and now I know all the secrets of Iron Chef.  And I do mean all.  Although if anyone else has read this, please let me know because I would like to talk about how The Chairman forces everyone to call him The Chairman off the air, too.  I find that a little weird.

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Hello, Monday

Another Sunday night…blah!  That’s what I think about that.

Here’s the weekend eats:

On Friday, I didn’t get to post again because I ran out of time before I had to meet Chris for the movie.  But for lunch, I had some more of that Trader Joe’s vegan black bean soup mixed with some refried beans:

This is a random brand of beans, but obviously any kind would work.  The grocery store near my apartment has a bunch of stuff no one has ever heard of, but good luck finding standard grocery store things like ice cream and trash bags.  Not happening.  Anyway, here is my bowl of soup:

I used the whole can of soup and a couple spoonfuls of the beans.  And cheese. Obviously.

I brought a Z Bar to the movie, and then we went out to dinner to this old school Italian restaurant.  It was really good but I’m pretty sure my ravioli had at least four cups of cream sauce on it.  I had to do some scrapping action, but I eventually uncovered a little pasta.  Sorry, no pictures.

Moving on to Saturday.  Here is my lunch:

A leftover black bean burger that I made the other night, some grapes, cucumbers, and Sun Chips.  Good stuff.

I also picked up the infamous peanut butter cookie Larabar at Trader Joe’s, just to see what all the fuss was about:

Um.  I did not think this was very good – I actually didn’t even eat it.  It didn’t really taste like peanut butter to me.  I do admire the short ingredient list (peanuts, dates, salt) but I’d rather eat two tablespoons of straight up peanut butter and call it a day.  Maybe I’m just not a Larabar person, because I wasn’t a huge fan of the two other flavors I’ve had (cashew and chocolate mole, I think).  Are the fruit ones better?  Am I just a lost cause?

After dinner, I had some ice cream:

Which brings us to today, when I tried out this new soup for lunch:

It’s an Annie Chun’s Udon Soup Bowl with bok choy and shiitake mushrooms.  It was okay.  The noodles were good.  I added some more mushrooms, a chopped scallion, and some soy sauce, which helped.  But I wouldn’t buy it again.  Check this out:

Suspect

Hmm.  What do you think that is?  Do we want to know?  It was kind of scaly.  There were a lot of them.  It freaked me out.

Anyway, it also didn’t really fill me up, so a few hours later I was hungry again and I had some cereal with soy milk:

No seconds.  Small triumph.

But, um, some chocolate covered raisins:

More than I am showing here.  Probably another handful.

And that was my weekend, or the basics, anyway.

As for this week, we’re going to try a little something different.  I have a ton of work to do the next few days, and I don’t think I’m going to have time to blog my snacks.  And let’s be honest, you don’t need to see five days of Z bars, anyway.  So for the next week, I’m going to just blog dinner in the evenings.  I have some new things to make this week, and I made two new recipes last night and tonight that I’m going to write up and post tomorrow and Tuesday, because I won’t be home to cook or eat.

Actually, I may try to switch to this format permanently in the future, but we’ll see.  I’m open to comments about that. To be honest, I don’t really mindlessly snack anymore just because I’m home, so the blog has worked its magic!  Or, I learned some self control.  And that keeping chocolate covered pretzels in the house on a regular basis is a bad idea.  Probably, it was a combination of all three.

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Life changing

The biggest thing EVER happened this weekend – and yes, I do mean EVER, caps and italics.

Trader Joe’s opened its new location in Brooklyn.  This means that I no longer have to lug five million bags home from Union Square after battling a hundred people for $1.69 peanut butter and waiting in the longest line that ever existed outside of Disney World.

So, what I’m saying is, Trader Joe’s Brooklyn is a good thing.  It makes me happy.  And, because it is in Brooklyn, it is about a third larger than the Union Square location, and thus can stock more products.  We went a little crazy:

Generic Sun Chips

Chris did not fall for it.  They lacked the Harvest Cheddarness that he enjoys so much.  We will not be buying these again.

Chocolate Meringues

These, I’m telling you, taste like hot chocolate powder.  But in a good way.  I was a little freaked out at first, but now they are growing on me.

Chocolate-Covered Raisins

Yeah, we’ve had these before.  But things were flying into the cart so fast!  Don’t judge me.  At least we put back the brownie mix.

Figs

Yes.  I know.  You’ve seen these before too.  Chris put these in the cart for me.  Apparently he doesn’t fully understand the serious nature of my Fig Problem.

Anyway, so I ate a lot of that stuff over the weekend, among other things, of course.  I didn’t take a lot of pictures of actual food.  Here are a few.

Extra snack on Friday:

Z Bar With Peanut Butter

I’m getting into this caption thing.  It’s kind of awesome.

Dinner on Friday:

Lentil Soup and Mozzarella Toast

The soup is canned.  It’s an organic brand, I can’t remember which one.  It’s pretty good and very filling.  I couldn’t eat this whole bowl.

I also drank some wine and ate a few cheese and crackers while watching the debate.

On Saturday, we had bagels for breakfast, hit Trader Joe’s, ate all of the above, went out to dinner at my favorite wine bar, and then went out for a friend’s birthday, which lead to late night pizza:

I try not to do late night pizza too often, but Chris won the battle this time.  It wasn’t much of a battle.  Unfortunately, the only place we could find also happened to be a kabob house, which didn’t bode well for their pizza-making abilities:

A Harsh Critic

Yes, those are garlic knots.  They were really, really gross.  We didn’t eat them.  And, the sauce was cold!  What’s up with that?!

Yesterday, we did a bunch of random things that actually involved more pizza, and it was raining all day and really gross.  We had this for dinner:

Shrimp Goyza and Baked Tofu

And some ice cream:

And now I must get back to work, what with it being Monday and all.

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Here we go again

Sundays are so sad.  Particularly during football season.  Especially if you live with someone who owns no less than five terrible towels.

Anyway.  The eating.  I kicked off the weekend with this:

I am usually very good about reading labels, but perhaps I am slightly in denial about ice cream.  As I was cleaning out the rest of this carton, I started reading the ingredients and learned that it has partially hydrogenated palm oil, among other scary-sounding things like tapioca maltodextrin and annatto color and jistinxtofsidridgides.

No.  I made that last one up.  But still.

So I went on a little freezer mission – yes, we have multiple kinds of ice cream in our freezer, it’s kind of a problem – and found that the other ice cream bars that Chris is obsessed with are even worse.  And, my favorite ice cream sandwiches have high fructose corn syrup.

The world is an ugly, ugly place.  I had to ban these things from our house and Chris cried a little about his ice cream bars and then ate the remaining two.  For closure.

And then to cheer him up I thought I’d make the gnocchi we got at Fairway last weekend and it was absolutely disgusting.  The worst gnocchi I’ve ever had.  I’m not including the picture because I didn’t even eat it, I just ate the roasted vegetables I made to go with it instead.  I did take a picture of those but it turned out crazy bright, so I’m not posting it, either.

Saturday, we went grocery shopping bright and early and while we were out I had a smoothie from Starbucks for breakfast:

These are pretty good.  Very chocolatey.  A little too much so for 10:30 in the morning, maybe.

When we got home we made a brunch kind of deal with egg white, cheese and Boca sausage sandwiches and some roasted potatoes:

And then in the afternoon I had some cottage cheese:

It has raisins and a piece of a random granola bar that my mom gave me last weekend crumbled on it.

We went out for dinner and to a few bars for our friend’s birthday.  I was in rare form.  It was a long night and I should have paced myself a bit better, if you know what I mean.  So this morning I was not exactly in the eating mood.  More like the sleeping mood.  I had an English muffin for breakfast and then for lunch I made this awesome grilled cheese and tomato sandwich:

You can’t quite see the awesomeness, but it’s underneath the rather charred exterior.  I should have taken a few different angles, but let’s be honest – around here, we’re just lucky that the one I got isn’t blurry.

Later on I had this Z Bar from my post on the couch:

And then for dinner I had some tofu potstickers and a cut up cucumber:

And, that’s about it.  We bought some chocolate ice cream and I’ll probably have some in a little while.

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It will take you a year to read this

We went to WV for the weekend, because one of my friends was having a baby shower.  We have wised up on the whole traveling with a dog thing and so Chris picked up our dinner before we left the city to minimize the number of stops.  He went to Guy and Gallard and got me a grilled vegetable wrap:

It wasn’t quite as Holy as it appears in this picture.  A little too much olive oil.

I also had a Z Bar before I ate this because I thought I’d have to wait a lot longer to eat. Unfortunately, we hit a ton of tunnel traffic, which is why I was able to eat and drive at the same time.  Under normal circumstances, I can barely handle the driving.

When we finally got to my mom’s around 11, I set to work on this:

Can I tell you about the combination of Nutella and pretzels?  Because it just might be the best thing I’ve ever had.  And, not that Nutella is necessarily good for you, but they did stop using trans fat in it, which is a bit of a plus.

Saturday, my mom made French toast:

I’m not really a fan of it for sandwiches and stuff, but Ezekiel bread makes the best French toast ever. It’s so chewy.

It poured all day on Saturday, which kind of sucked because we wanted to take Jack swimming before the baby shower, but instead Chris had to stand in the rain and throw sticks for him for an hour.  I watched from the porch and shouted words of encouragement.  I think it was appreciated.

Then my mom made this awesome vegetable thing for lunch.  I’m not sure how to describe it but it had squash, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and that is goat cheese on top:

The baby shower food was mostly pork-related so Chris and I left midway and went to Subway for some veggie delites.  I had some cole slaw at the shower, though, and part of a piece of cake, and some chips. No pictures, sorry.

Then we went out and did some drinking which lead to this:

I am eating these in the backseat of a car in the Sheetz parking lot.  I don’t think I need to say any more about this.

Moving on.  I was not in my best form today, but I managed to polish off a nice pancake breakfast and score all of these vegetables before we left:

And the biggest canteloupe I’ve ever seen:

This is from my dad’s garden.  I am not even sure that I could eat this guy in one day, but we shall see I guess.

I also had part of another veggie delite in the car, but it was gross so I tossed it.

And then, a miracle occurred.  After we got home, I somehow managed to convince Chris – on the first Sunday of football season, no less – that we should take our rental car to the Fairway in Red Hook.  I’ve heard much about this magical place, but I’ve never been there, and let me tell you something – it was like Christmas.  Not only is the place the size of a department store, with every kind of food I could ever imagine, but there was a parking lot!  With carts!  Look at Chris in the parking lot:

Do you see that stuff around him?  That is space!

And look at this – we put our bags in the trunk of our car!

It was crazy.   Also, I feel the need to point out that we do usually bring reusable bags, but they were kind of forgotten in all the excitement.  Well, my excitement and Chris’s dread.

Here is everything we bought:

Some highlights:  Fresh whole wheat gnocchi, shrimp, tabbouli, whipped cottage cheese, soy sausage patties, garlic paste, tofu potstickers, peanut butter cup ice cream (!), red quinoa, and, um, organic ice cream cones.

Things got a little wild there toward the end.

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Randomness

See, what happens when I wait too long to post is I end up with a bunch of pictures and I can’t remember when the eating even occured.  Because of that, and also because I have approximately 546 emails to answer, I am just including things that I deem to be somewhat interesting.

Okay, Saturday.  What happened on Saturday?  It seems so long ago.  I believe that I attempted to go shopping.

Iced coffee:

Chris got another banana/chocolate Vivanno, and it was way better this time.  It was actually really good.  I wish I’d had one myself.  Instead, I ate this Balance bar:

Can I say something about this?  Yuck.  I did not like this thing AT ALL.  For some reason, protein bars like this taste like tin foil to me.  I don’t know what it is.  I ate this anyway, because I was starving and it cost an absurd amount of money.

And then I bought this skirt:

No.  I didn’t.  How ugly is this skirt though?!?  The picture doesn’t even do it justice, it had much more flare to it in real life.

Then I went out that night for a little while and had a couple beers.  And some Sun Chips when I got home:

The picture is blurry because, well, my vision was probably a bit blurry.  Chris wouldn’t make me a grilled cheese.  God bless him.

Sunday, we took Jack back to the park so he could swim some more because it was a beautiful day.  I brought this trail mix:

I just stuck a bunch of stuff in there…raisins, chocolate chips, some broken pretzels, cereal, and random nuts.  It was pretty good.

And a Skinny Cow:

Which brings me to yesterday.  A bunch of errands were run, involving pizza and a Mr. Softee.  The Mr. Softee season is rapidly coming to a close, so I have to get them while I can.  I didn’t take any pictures, sorry.

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Mondays are sad

The star of the show this weekend was my stuffy nose, followed closely by my sore throat and thus, ice cream.

On Friday, there was the Reese’s Klondike bar:

Saturday, a Mr. Soft Serve:

Not to be confused with a Mr. Softee, which is way, way better.  Not that I’m complaining.  Chris literally ran out of our apartment and down the street to catch the truck and get this for me.  He is nice.

And Sunday, a Skinny Cow cone:

I ate regular food too, don’t worry.  Here are the highlights:

On Saturday, we walked with Jack to Barnes & Noble, learned the hard way that hyper puppies and bookstores don’t mix, and then eased our stress by stopping in a park on the way home to eat bagels.  I had a whole wheat everything with scallion cream cheese:

For dinner, we went to Mary Ann’s, my favorite Mexican place ever.

Guacamole:

Shrimp burrito:

I usually get vegetable fajitas, but I wanted something cheesy.  I think this fit the bill.  Their shrimp burritos and enchiladas are really awesome. I also had a margarita, obviously.

Sunday iced coffee on the way to run some errands:

I talked Chris into getting a Vivianno, because I’ve been wanting to try it:

If you can believe it, this was Chris’s first Starbucks purchase ever. I thought that called for italics, mostly because I’ve spent roughly $4,000 there, and I’m only 25.

I bought a pineapple at Trader Joe’s, and consumed most of it within an hour of returning home:

I know I also had a Z Bar on the way home from the grocery store, but I don’t think I took a picture.  I’d venture to say that we know what they look like by now, am I right?

And then for dinner last night, I heroically pushed aside my illness and made eggplant roll-ups with goat cheese and mozzarella:

It’s basically just thinly sliced eggplant spread with goat cheese and some bread crumbs, rolled up, covered in marinara and mozzarella cheese, and baked in the oven for 25 minutes or so.  For the first time ever, I salted the eggplant to see if it really gets the bitterness out, as they say it does. I also took the liberty of salting Chris:

I figured if it works on eggplant, it might also work on boys.  Unfortunately, I didn’t notice a difference in either case.

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I’d say it was a pretty good weekend

We went to West Virginia for the weekend to visit my parents and let Jack pretend that he’s a country dog:

He thinks he’ll probably be ready for the Olympics in 2012.

Car snacks on the way there on Friday:

And then a Panera Bread salad:

Can you call something a salad if it consists mostly of bread and cheese?  I’m not so sure.  This was kind of gross.  I’m not used to fast food I guess.  It was probably the first time I’ve been through a drive thru in a good two or three years.  It was quickly followed by the second time – a stop at Dairy Queen for a peanut butter cup blizzard.  No picture, sorry, but it was awesome as usual.

The rest of the weekend, I’d say 90% of my snacking consisted of fruit. Some of it was in this form:

And other times it was in this form:

They were amazing.  Amazing.

As was this on the way home yesterday:

Chris surprised me with this at a gas station, because it’s my favorite candy bar.  It was rather romantic, but not nearly as romantic as Friday night, when he asked me to marry him.

Yikes!  I’m engaged.

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Weekend snacks

Sorry I never posted again on Friday, things got a little crazy.  And by crazy, I mean that I got really caught up in The Road and I ended up finishing it and then I couldn’t stop crying because it was so good and I think I may have scarred Jack for life with my sobs.  I highly recommend the book if you haven’t read it and you are fully stocked on tissues.

Anyway, I did eat some peaches:

And a few pretzels:

Saturday, we went to Angelika Film Center to see The Wackness, which was pretty good.  Angelika is a good place to see movies because there are very few screaming children there, and they also have a cafe with brownies and cookies and coffee.  I wasn’t really hungry but Chris bought some Raisinets and I had a couple handfuls.  This is the worst camera phone picture of all time, but I’m posting it anyway:

Then, we went to Trader Joe’s to do some grocery shopping and I was starving, so I tried this new bar:

It was okay.  A little too much of a funky fake protein taste for me. It was crazy filling though.

Sunday was the best day ever, weather wise. It was not humid at all.  We walked down to Brooklyn Flea, a little market they set up every Sunday in our neighborhood.  They have been doing it for months and we haven’t gone yet because we’re losers.  I’m glad we finally made it there because I got an awesome dress and a necklace and I only spent $40!  And really only $38 because I had to “borrow” $2 from Chris.

Before we left I had this Odwalla bar:

I love these, they are really good.

Then we went to the park to hang out and lay on a blanket, but this activity was cut short after Jack stepped on my face five times, tried to eat his leash, and scratched the hell out of Chris.  It was quite relaxing.

In the afternoon, I had a bowl of cereal:

This is notable because I did not go back for more.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had a bowl of cereal without going back for just a little bit more.  I’m marking August 3, 2008 on my calendar.

And then after dinner, a couple of squares of dark chocolate:

And there you have it.  Pure excitement, I know.

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