Please give a warm welcome to my buddy, Kate, who also happens to be an expert in portable desserts! Read on to find out more …

Will Stop for Cupcakes!

I was walking to work on Friday, and I stopped in my tracks when I saw this:

I texted Gina and Sarah with my sighting immediately! It was funny because last weekend (while eating “Imposter Mister Softee“), we were talking about all of these trucks that we have been finding around the city. There’s the Dessert Truck, the waffles truck, the Kustard King in Brooklyn Heights, the Treats Truck, and the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. Only in New York …

I said that I wanted to start a cupcake car, but now I’ll need to find a new market before quitting my day job because the cupcake position has already been filled!

The Cupcake Stop‘s Twitter feed told me they were parked in my work neighborhood until 5. I also discovered the Cupcake Truck in my Google search. Anyone want to take a field trip to New Haven, CT for their sweet potato pecan cupcakes!?!?

I decided that this would be a nice mid-afternoon snack to celebrate the end of the work week! As I stood behind an excited couple ordering a nice assortment, some woman (who must have been living under a rock) asked me what a red velvet cupcake was. I explained everything down to the creamcheese frosting and told her she had to try one!

It made my day when I saw that they offered miniature cupcakes for $1 each (regular size were $2.25). I love trying everything, so these were the perfect size for satisfaction minus the “over-expansion.” I opted for the red velvet and the oreo crumb minis.

I took them over to the “lounge-in-the-street area” around the corner. If you ask me, Times Square isn’t meant for lounging or frequenting, but I kind of like this seating area because it’s a bit quieter and good for watching tourists attempt to take pics of the Flatiron Building from across the street. Plus, I had a beautiful view of the Empire State Building.

Okay, back to the cupcakes. The red velvet was delicious. I think I may consider paying the extra $1.25 for a regular sized one next time!

Then, it was time for the oreo crumb.

It was good, but I wasn’t crazy about this one. The icing was too sweet for my liking, and I was disappointed that I didn’t get a mini oreo cookie on top because I had seen them on the photos on their website!

All in all, it was worth the trip out of the office! And I forgot to mention, these are baked fresh daily, and they give their leftovers to City Harvest. If Sarah were to try it, it would be a Tales of Expansion-Approved truck.

OK, Sarah again here, and I approve, I approve!! Thanks for your reconn, Kate! [And I’m actually pretty sure City Harvest has brought some of these cupcakes to the agency where I work!] I will be on the lookout for more reports of food-on-the-move from you 😀

As always, if any of you have a Tale of Expansion to share, I accept submissions at talesofexpansion@gmail.com.

What is your favorite food from a truck?

You probably don’t realize it yet, but that could be the most clever and witty title I’ve ever created. (Eye roll.)

Somehow, I did not get around to eating lunch until 2pm yesterday! Can you believe it??? No snack either. That crepe was a breakfast powerhouse!

Lunch was a repeat of yesterday’s farm salad, minus the tuna and pesto and plus leftover Indian food brown rice and some Sunkist roasted slivered almonds from the office bag.



And then, some trouble came along! I went out for a little walk with Jessica since I ate lunch at my desk while I worked, and we made some stops. I saw this lone bag of maduro chips in the bodega and accidentally bought it. (It was only 99 cents!)



I guess this is what happens when you suddenly have an income again. You start to buy 99 cent snacks from bodegas. Somebody stop me before I go too far!

Anyway, I shared the chips with the office, and Jessica shared her grapes with me:



Things grew significantly more worrisome when these appeared on the conference room table:



Seriously, whose idea was it to sit me right next to this effing table?!!!!!



I started with those two small pieces (one of each, of course), but you know it didn’t end there. I probably went back to the table five or six more times! Somewhere along the way, this happened:



Because I obviously had to slather the chocolate-drizzled banana crunch cake with peanut butter and make it into a sandwich.



I did manage to sneak some more green in before the day was through, however. One of the moms I visit came by the agency to pick up a diaper donation, and her four-year-old son brought me this beautiful gift he had hand-picked from the sidewalk right outside the building:

Sigh, what would we do without leaves?!

From there, I left work in the torrential rain because I had some very special dinner plans that require their own post. I will leave you with this hint!

Which played a bigger part in your day yesterday: greens or cake?

This morning, it was time for round 2 of the tapioca-ball-goop “chocolate without the chocolate” crepe!

I threw it together pretty quickly after the gym, thanks to all my prep work yesterday. Today’s filling was an apple cinnamon/cardamom ricotta/yogurt mix:

With coconut and homemade pb on top:

And chia-strawberry yogurt on the side, made with fresh CSA strawberries!

Now might also be a good time to follow through with Diana’s tag about where I blog. As you know, my roommate Tara moved out this weekend, so things are in a very temporary state of, errrr, transition?

Yup, that’s right, I’m blogging to you from a ratty old broken down sidewalk-found chair covered in an even more broken down sleeping bag for some cushion. And my computer is comfortably perched on a step ladder.

If that doesn’t scream luxury, I don’t know what does.

Do you compute in comfort?

Giveaways!

• Holey Donuts (OMG OMG go look at those pictures)
• Peanut Butter!
• Envirosax

Good luck!

The rest of yesterday involved lots of locally grown freshness. Lunch, of course, had to incorporate my CSA goodies!

I put together a salad in three layers: (1) fresh arugula and pea shoots; (2) mix of CSA radishes, garlic chives, asparagus, dill, and (non-CSA) cucumber, cherries, red wine vinegar, my mom’s herb-infused olive oil, and sea salt; and (3) thawed and re-seared tuna from this event ages ago, homemade parmesan, and freshly ground black pepper.

I had a pretty much identical salad for dinner (followed by my very last slice of healthy cheesecake with rhubarb sauce, fruit salad, and a Newman’s chocolate chocolate O).

The salad was delicious, but the highlight of lunch came on the side! I toasted the piece of naan I had left over from Indian food Friday night and spread it with homemade three-leaf pesto. To make the pesto, I mixed CSA radish leaves, CSA pea shoots, and homegrown basil:

And used an immersion-blender to “puree” the leaves with mom’s herby olive oil, south-of-the-border pistachios, CSA garlic chives, and homemade parmesan.

Mmmmm, pesto has to be one of my all-time favorite foods.

Dessert was just as blogworthy as — or perhaps more so than — the pesto because it nearly gave me a stroke from its tastiness. I pulled out a hunk of frozen coconut (from the ones Jessica gave me at work a couple weeks ago), slathered it with homemade peanut butter, and topped it with a chopped square of Newman’s Own Organics espresso dark chocolate:

Ooooooh, I could eat this allllll day long. (To be clear, I could not eat this exact piece all day long because it only took me about 30 seconds to devour, but I could eat about 80 of these all day long and be very happy.)

I’m so happy to have warm weather and all the freshness that comes with it. (I feel like it was just snowing yesterday! Soooo glad that’s over with.) All my summer CSA goodies are reminding me of how much I wish I lived right where they were grown. Have you ever lived (or would you ever live) on a farm?

I woke up this morning with a craving for pancakes. The craving was problematic for one main reason: I had a number of other already-opened starchy foods hanging around, and I did not want to add to the collection! Enter tapioca goop.

My fruity tapioca goop pudding from yesterday got mixed with an egg, baking soda baking powder, lucuma powder, and goji berries. (I did not measure anything.) I heated canola oil in an oven-safe frying pan and then poured in the batter. The whole pan went into a 425 degree oven for about 30 minutes.

Half became my breakfast crepe for the morning:

I stuffed it with fruit salad and a ricotta/yogurt/cardamom mix:

And topped it with peanut butter!

Oh my goodness, this little spur-of-the-moment crepe was soooooooo good. There was no chocolate in these, but they somehow tasted like the chocolate pancakes that my grandpa used to make for me when I was little. I promptly turned the rest of the batch of goop into several more crepes so I could keep being gourmet all week long 😀

I spent the morning being ridiculously productive, doing things like sipping on iced yerba mate with yesterday’s homemade ball-bits while completing three loads of laundry at the laundromat while talking to my mom hands-free on the phone for over an hour while completing the afore-mentioned baking project while getting some schoolwork out of the way. Phew!

There were other snacks during the morning. Some are not worth mentioning, but some definitely are! I have pieces of a cinnamon bun muffin in my freezer left from a City Harvest donation at work, so I took a little hunk out and smushed two super-ripe CSA strawberries between the layers:

These strawberries are so so so sweet! Who needs jam?

I also had a snack that needs no explanation and was absolutely perfect in its natural form:

Are there any foods that taste like other foods to you even though the actual ingredients are different (i.e. my “chocolate without the chocolate” pancake)? Does that question even make any sense? Sometimes I write/talk so much that I forget how to write/talk, and the things I am trying to say come out as gibberish!