What did you eat today?
Breakfast: Hot tea
Morning Snack: Chocolate chip pancakes, Hot tea
Lunch: Turkey sandwich on croissant
Afternoon snack: Lots of chocolate chips and some cookie dough from Eliza’s science fair project. Coke zero
Dinner: Sous vide stuffed burgers. Corn on the cob.
Dessert: Eliza’s science fair cookies. Can we tell the difference between cookies made with and without vanilla. I sure could!
Breakfast: English muffin with cream cheese and jam. Plus salami
Lunch: Vermili with beef at Pho Ao Sen. Diet coke. Kind of a late lunch after the excitement of watching the firefighters deal with the abandoned house at the corner.
Dinner: Burgers stuffed with gorgonzola. Asparagus. Green salad
Dessert: Scotchmallow egg
Breakfast: Oatmeal with nibs and raspberries
Lunch: Popeye’s fried chicken (Suzanne was out of town). Biscuits. Mashed potatoes with gravy. Diet coke.
Afternoon snack: Coke zero
Dinner: Gorgonzola stuffed burgers with bacon and caramelized onions. Green beans
Dessert: Leftover oatmeal cookies
Location: Yosemite Valley, CA
Breakfast: Bacon. Biscuits. Hot cocoa.
Lunch: Peanut Butter and Jam sandwich. Buffalo Bleu Kettle chips. Grapes. In a tiny cave on the Glacier Point trail to keep the pouring rain from ruining the sandwich
Afternoon snack: More hot cocoa because we seriously earned it. Diet Pepsi. Chips and hummus.
Dinner: Burgers. It was raining too hard to cook them on the grill, so we cooked some more bacon, and then fried the burgers in bacon grease. Quite tasty. Also, potato packets, which cooked just fine in the fire.
Dessert: Chocolate birthday cake with whipped cream and strawberries. Also a s’more, which we’d been talking about all day while the cake was a secret.
location: Friday Harbor to Vancouver
Breakfast: toast with peanut butter
Morning Snack: hot cocoa at the Bean.
Lunch: split green salad and bacon burger at Rockfish grill in Anacortes. Pretty good burger, really. The girls liked the kids burgers as well.
Afternoon snack: Coke zero
Dinner: Split a ceasar salad and a Guinness steak and mushroom crock at Wolf & Hound. Great combination of flavors
Dessert: Split a chocolate lava cake and vanilla ice cream at Wolf & Hound
Breakfast: Hot tea
Lunch: Pita with roast beef and hummus
Dinner: Stuffed burgers, sous vide with grilled onions. Invented the stuffed half burger to fit the buns better.
Dessert: Chocolate brownies that Eliza made, plus hot cocoa to keep us warm while we waited for the fireworks
Breakfast: Granola, cranberry juice
Lunch: Barney’s burgers. My eyes were not bigger than my stomach, but bigger than good sense would dictate. A Western burger, which I failed to split, more than my share of curly fries, and a chocolate milk shake.
Afternoon snack: See above. Still feeling it.
Dinner: Vegetable platter, bread and cheese, salad
Dessert: Leftover chocolate raspberry bundt cake
Breakfast: Hot tea, french toast
Morning Snack: Iced tea
Lunch: Ham and hummus pita wrap with carrots and cucumber
Afternoon snack: Chocolate chips, coke zero
Dinner: Perhaps my best iteration yet of the blue cheese stuffed burgers. We used a different type of blue cheese, from Trader Joe’s, rather than from Costco, which have different melting strategies. But the best part was cooking them sous vide. This really works a treat for stuffed burgers. The patties are so thin, that on the grill, they distort the shape a lot and often leak cheese. In the sous vide at 136F, they were perfectly cooked. Add in a brioche bun from TJ’s, some corn on the cob, and oven baked potatoes and they were amazing.
Dessert: An experimental cherry pie. It was OK, but too much booze (kirsch) gave it a weird sour flavor.
Breakfast: Donuts from Rainbow donuts in Berkeley. This shop was pretty great: they had a good selection of interesting doughnuts… stuff like Oreo, Mint, M&M, alongside the classics. I have to say, though, that their custard filling was a little weak.
Morning Snack: Iced tea
Lunch: Turkey hummus pita wrap
Afternoon snack: Chocolate chip cookies and lemonade from the girls’ roving lemonade stand. There were a ton of garage sales, and they raised $50 to send to victims of the Nepal earthquake
Dinner: 2 cheeseburger meal from McDonald’s, just to bookend a day of healthy living. The girls had never eaten at Micky-D’s, and they read about Happy Meals in a book… mom was sick, it seemed a perfect opportunity. Frankly, they were underwhelmed. Tessa said the chicken nuggets tasted kind of fishy. Eliza said the burgers were better at Barney’s. Both were correct.
Dessert: Another chocolate chip cookie or two
Breakfast: Pancakes with syrup and applesauce
Morning Snack: Pancake sandwiches with penuche frosting and chocolate chips. This was a spur-of-the-moment decision as there were some leftover pancakes just sitting there at the same time Suzanne decided that a batch of frosting wasn’t properly spreadable and decided to make another. These were fantastic.
Lunch: Leftover pizza rolls
Afternoon snack: Hot cocoa. Coke zero.
Dinner: Burger stuffed with gorgonzolla, topped with saute’d onions and in a bun made from the pizza roll recipe. I tried something I’ve wanted to do for a while: cook the stuffed burgers sous vide. It was a successful experiment, but I should have charred them more at the end.
I also added some mozarella to try to bind the blue cheese, and that was wholly successful.
Dessert: The photo version of the banana blondies with penuche frosting for Flourarrangements