What did you eat today?
Breakfast: English muffin with cream cheese and strawberries
Lunch: Leftover pizza
Afternoon snack: Pack of trail mix. Coke zero
Dinner: Spaghetti with meatballs. Green salad
Dessert: Berries with Chamomile-honey whipped cream. (experiment).
Breakfast: Hot tea. Oatmeal with nibs and blueberries. Also some Easter candy
Morning Snack: Iced tea. More easter candy
Lunch: Ham, asparagus, scalloped potatoes, rolls. Orange cupcakes (flourarrangements experiment).
Afternoon snack: Lots of easter candy (sour jelly beans, especially). Diet coke
Dinner: Rice, beans, and frozen taquitos. Green salad
Breakfast: Doughnuts. Split a custard bomb with Tessa. Orange juice
Lunch: Sandwich of leftover chicken saltimbocca with cheddar cheese
Afternoon snack: Soft serve ice cream dipped in chocolate. Hello, 4th grade, I missed you. At Lake Anza. Shared with Tessa, and a lot of it dripped on my leg.
Dinner: A serious stroke of brilliance, though this experiment still needs some work. Chicken saltimbocca pizza. Caramelized an onion, with white wine and some lemon juice towards the end. Used that as the base of the pizza, then added the last of the leftover chicken, along with some prosciutto. Topped with grueyere cheese and sage. We ate it with a kale salad with a dressing of lemon juice, lemon zest, and olive oil. While we were eating, we decided that the kale salad was just what the pizza needed on top. Might experiment with this, or might add the kale before baking.
Dessert: Tessa and Suzanne made mint chocolate cupcakes with mint frosting. Awesome! I had two.
Breakfast: Granola, cranberry juice
Morning Snack: Iced tea
Lunch: Roast beef and blue cheese sandwich from Specialties
Afternoon snack: Candy, Coke Zero
Dinner: Pork tenderloin with Asian spice from Cook’s Illustrated
Dessert: Gingerbread strawberry cake. Very much an experiment, and not my favorite. Part of that might have been the “alien boogers” Eliza whipped up for April Fool’s Day.
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
Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice
Lunch: Roast-beef sandwich on salted caraway seed bun. I miss a whole lot of things about our old home in Friday Harbor. One of them is the “Roast Beef and Rocket” sandwich from The Market Chef. This was a perfect combination of flavors: thinly sliced rare roast beef, crisp arugula, a salty caraway-seed bun, and a tangy horseradish sauce. (It should be noted that the original version of this sandwich also includes some sort of olive tapenade… since I think olives are nasty, I always suffered the withering stares at the counter as I ordered it without). But here’s the rub: I can’t figure out the horseradish sauce. Suzanne surmised that it is probably sour cream and horseradish. I’ve tried it 3 times now, using prepared horseradish. The first time, it was bland, the second time I added more horseradish sauce, but that made it runny and gross. This time I set the horseradish on a paper towel to drain before adding. This got the texture right, but it was back to being bland. I’m thinking of looking for some sort of dried horseradish powder so I can just keep dumping it in until it has a real bite. Fortunately, I’m going back to Friday Harbor in a couple of weeks and can try out a couple “RBR-no olives” from the source.
Afternoon snack: Chocolate chip cookie from Bittersweet. After eating my poor imitation of the roast beef and rocket sandwich, I started thinking more about The Market Chef. The sandwiches are good and all, but the chocolate chip cookies are something else. They have just the right balance of crunchy outer skin with a chewy matrix holding the chips and an unusually bold caramel tinge that I love. I would often structure my day so that any errands I needed to do for work got done at cookie time. Bittersweet has pretty good cookies, to. As might be expected, their chocolate chips are out of this world, but their dough is inconsistent. Today was one of the good days; they were caramel-y and chewy, though the dough was thinner than the chips, which isn’t my preference. So, a distant second choice compared to my favorites 1,500 miles away, but still made for a great afternoon.
Dinner: Mac-n-cheese. Always a crowd pleaser.
Dessert: Jelly doughnut cake… Suzanne has been experimenting with this one based on pins like this. Pretty much nailed it:
Breakfast: custard filled chocolate donut. (All Star Donuts)
Lunch: turkey sandwich with hummus.
Mid-afternoon snack: experimental salted caramel chocolate cupcake (look for them on Flour Arrangements)
Dinner: Ordered pizza from Albany Pizza Company (the chicken was really good).