As you read this, I’m probably getting trampled to death in the madness of the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks. (Grrr, I hope they move the fireworks back to the East River for next year. The Hudson is SO inconvenient!)

Picking up where I left off yesterday, I’ve been sitting on [not literally] this packet of scariness ever since the health event two weeks ago:

So, I’m obviously not trying to manage my weight (have you seen the kinds of things I eat every day?!), and even if I were, I sure as heck would not want to manage it with a shake … let alone a shake composed almost entirely of chemicals. Note how the first ingredient is entitled “carb blend.” Yummmmm!

However, I am physically incapable of throwing away something nutritious (even when the nutrition is this questionable), so I needed to figure out an alternate arrangement. I dumped the powder into a bowl.

I stuck my finger in for a lick, and it was wayyyyyyy sweet. But it smelled like vanilla cake mix, and that’s something I can handle. I mixed the powder with about 3 cups of plain yogurt, 1/4 cup goji berries, 1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut, and 1/4 cup chia seeds. I let it all marinate and thicken together in the fridge for a few hours.

In the meantime, I got dinner underway with the star of my meal: chayote.

I’ve only had chayote as part of a pile of steamed veggies before — never on its own and never raw. But, once I cut into it, I realized how pleasant the chayote’s texture is raw (maybe even better than cooked!), kind of a cross between cucumber and apple with a good, watery crunch to it. I scooped out (and ate) a little well in one half and filled it with a mix of mashed avocado and salsa.

Over a bed of mystery rice:

And back to the weight management powder trainwreck, I froyo-ed about 1/2 cup of the mix and then immersion-blended to cream it up a bit.

This was actually quite good! I am grudgingly a fan of weight-management-shake ice cream 😛

I topped it with SOTBPPBDCS butter and a chopped square of Newman’s Own Organics dark chocolate:

Mmmmmmmmmm …

What is/was your fireworks plan? And have you seen anything horrifying on a food label lately?

Happy 4th! So far, my weekend has been full of four important things: balls, dates, pits, and nuts. Ummmmmmmmmm, let me explain.

I’m LOVING this weekend, and here’s why:

Last night, I actually got to go just sit in Hanco’s with my laptop and some balls. My apartment was clean all the way down to the bathtub. I had absolutely no homework. I had opened, sorted, and filed all my mail from the past month. And I had been productive in the kitchen in terms of processing a bunch of foods that have been piling up!

First order of business was to do something with these random dried Asian dates that my mom gave me last time I visited MA. I’m not sure about the story behind these dates or what their official name is, but I know they are ridiculously sweet (almost too sweet, and that’s saying a lot coming from my mouth fingers) in a very maple-y sense.

I remembered from working with them to make this rhubarb pie that the flesh was difficult to separate from the pits, so I let them soak for a couple of hours to try to loosen things up. After the soak, I set to work on chopping and chopping and chopping. I ended up with a bowl of flesh and a bowl of fleshy pits. (That sounds SO appetizing.)

First, I addressed the flesh by immersion-blending it to within an inch of its life.

This “date” paste bore a striking resemblance to Artisana‘s line of Bliss spreads/butters (aka crack), so I decided to get some bliss of my own going! Into the bowl went a bunch of unsweetened shredded coconut from Let’s Do Organic along with coconut oil and coconut butter from Artisana.

I also added coarse sea salt (like I said, these dates are just too sweet on their own!) and some South of the Border pistachio-peanut–dark-chocolate-strawberry butter. Oh, did I forget to mention that I made SOTB pistachio-peanut-dark-chocolate-strawberry butter?

I used my Mr. Coffee bean grinder to get everything to the paste-stage for the butter. Not wanting to destroy a third kitchen appliance in the name of nut butter, I finished it off with the immersion blender until it got creamy. This is such an effective method … as long as my immersion blender does not die on me, too!

So, back to the date bliss, I added a couple tbsp of SOTBPPSCS butter and immersion-blended some more. (Seriously, I will do more than cry if this immersion blender breaks!) The blissful result:

Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I can’t wait to use this on everything.

Meanwhile, remember the fleshy [date] pits? I threw them in a pot with a boiling mix of soymilk and water in the hopes that the flesh would just melt off. No luck:

I gave it a few hours of simmering while I did productive things around the apartment, and then I just gave up and scooped out the fleshy pits, leaving the super-sweetened soymilk and water in the pot. I stirred in a few tbsp of ground flax, removed from heat, and poured the mixture into a bowl to chill. But it did not firm up quite enough due to the high ratio of liquid to flax:

So I added 3/4 cup oats for a little soak and came out with a nice, thick muesli-esque base:

Mmmmm, it actually tastes like maple brown sugar oatmeal because of the super maple-y essence of these dates! It appears that eating overnight flax-date oats has just joined the agenda for the weekend 😀

What are your four things for the 4th?

There were so many things to celebrate on Thursday! It all began when Deborah gave me 1/4 of her banana walnut muffin upon arriving at the office:

(Well, it all really began with my savory oats before I left home, but you know that already.)

For the appetizer course, Catherine brought over a box of tostones with garlic that had come with her Chinese food (yes, Chinese food with tostones … leave it to East Harlem) to share with Belkis. Belkis is an angel (you can tell from her glow below) and shared it with all of us.

Belkis continued in her angelic ways when she let us each taste some of the fish that she had caught all by herself!

Along with half of her salad!

I promptly dumped the rest of my chicken/tomatillo/rice mix on top because I’m a mixer 😀

Dessert was s-p-e-c-i-a-l because Lillian had picked up a couple of custard fruit tarts for Nydia and herself, and Nydia shared half of her tart with me:

Custard fruit tarts are my favorite dessert of all time!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Oh, I almost forgot. I had another dessert of avena (the blended dominican oatmeal) leftover from Nydia’s breakfast:

Plus, Myrna and I staged a coup for dessert #3 when we noticed cupcakes languishing on the 5th floor conference room table:

I had 1/4 of my cupcake and split the rest between Deborah and Jennifer.

And thennnnnnnnn, it was time for the monthly “informal staff gathering” in the lobby. As always, the spread was astounding due to Trish’s impeccable organization skills: wraps and carrot cake donated by City Harvest, homemade salad, roast chicken and onions from Fine Foods, watermelon and cake from the grocery next door, and cheese and crackers:

The carrot cake pieces on toothpicks were my favorite. I bet the 4th of July cake was delicious, too, but I had to run to class before it was opened!

Here’s my plate with lots of salad (it had avocado, yay!), chicken, watermelon, and a carrot cake:

(I definitely had more carrot cake and some cheese and crackers before Julia and I scooted out to head down to Hunter.)

My group and I met to tie up some loose ends before we had to present. Madeline offered some gum but then stopped mid-give and said, “Sarah, don’t you want to take a picture of this?” I was happy to oblige:

And Jennifer shared some of her trail mix, complete with dried papaya chunks and yogurt-covered raisins:

During the presentation, I ate these tropical skittles from Emily, slyly (or maybe not so slyly) arranged on top of my presentation notes:

(Plus approximately 20 more skittles after the presentation.)

And then Lisa, Emily, Stacy, Daria, and I went for a drink to celebrate the end of Summer Session [1]:

Can’t wait for Summer Session 2 to start on Tuesday. Vodka and seltzer please?

Thanks.

How do you plan to celebrate this weekend?

Here’s a rundown of the foods I found at work in the first half of this week that helped power me through the papers, presentations, employment challenges, and wayyyy too many food babies.

Lunch in Monday’s parents’ group with Inginia:

The salad was a mix of my CSA salad and Inginia’s organic salad (hers had apples in it, mmm!):

We only had a budget of $4 for the group this week, so Inginia and I put together the two small salads we’d brought, and she gathered some things from the food pantry and whipped up this deeelicious macaroni with lots of spices, tomato sauce, and salami:

The moms (and I!) ate it allllllll up 😀

For dessert, we had tinned mandarins. This made me giggle (Gina and Kate, you’ll understand!) because at the Food Film Festival, we actually watched a short film about mandarins in cans and how the slices are so perfectly extracted from their outer membranes. If you’ve ever tried to do this with a fresh mandarin, you’ll know you end up with a huge mess. We found out that the secret to the perfectly peeled tinned mandarin is …

… a lye bath that burns off/digests the membranes! YUM.

I also did this more times this past week than I’d like to remember:

(Fork dipped in office chunky peanut butter and then dipped in office bag of slivered almonds, mmmmmmmmm.)

On Tuesday (the day we ate outside with the statue), Pura let me in on the tip that Lucia (the one who had the baby shower) had brought in leftover jello from her family shower the weekend before. Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking, who gives a beeeeep about jello? But, this was not just any jello! Lucia’s husband made this jello from scratch (perhaps using a recipe similar to this one?) in the colors of her shower: pink and yellow.

Plus candy (times 27?) from Belkis’ candy jar:

You can’t really go wrong with peanuts and sugar 🙂

Deborah and I shared a Quaker peanut butter granola bar from Jessica:

(Hi Deborah!)

And then Eric bit the bullet and opened up this crazy mystery snack that had been sitting on the conference room table all day:

I started with three — they tasted like cinnamon sugar donuts that had gotten hard as rocks:

But I kind of liked them. So I had another one and dipped it in office peanut butter:

And then I said what the heck, and I just ate the whole bag:

At lunch, Nydia supplemented the chicken/tomatillo/rice I’d packed with half of her chicken and avocado salad:



I followed it up with this random granola bar that somebody left at my desk when I was on vacation in May:



(I love how my desk receives anonymous food drops :-D)

In class Tuesday night, I had my CSA salad, supplemented with office almonds and the leftover bits of Deborah’s salad from lunch (including a few bites of chicken):



Y mas gelatina!

And finally, on Wednesday, Mildred’s daughter Adriana spent the day in the office with us since she’s on vacation from school. Mid-afternoon, she came around and handed out none other than …

… melty ice cream sandwiches!!!

So, in conclusion (or not really in conclusion since I haven’t even gotten to Thursday’s goodies yet), no sleep + school stress makes Sarah mindlessly eat more sugar than normal (if that was even possible). What happens to your appetite when you are sleep-deprived?

Before I get to talking about this week’s school-stress-induced junk-fest, I feel the need to take you through round 2 of healthy things I made and ate. The green-power continued with this week’s spin on CSA salad enhanced, once again, by my CSA bok choy blossom centerpiece:

(The flowers are edible, but I thought they looked prettier on the table than in my tummy.)

The salad had a base of CSA mesclun and CSA spinach, and the topping of the week consisted of a sauteed mix of spinach stems, kale, bok choy, and garlic scapes (all CSA); mom’s herb-infused olive oil; dried cranberries; CSA snap peas; red wine vinegar; cooking sherry; coarse sea salt; freshly ground black pepper; and freshly grated homemade parmesan:

In the center, I added a teeny bite of the lasagna I rescued during work-fridge cleanout last week and some leaves of homegrown basil courtesy of my fire escape garden:

Plus a few carefully selected arugula leaves from the fire escape garden:

Sigh, such a satisfying salad, the product of sweat and tears that were not my own 😛 …

My other feat of scrumptiousness (there are so many that it’s hard to keep track) looked like this:

Who loves farm-fresh CSA strawberries? I do, I do!

The yogurt part was actually a peanut butter-yogurt-chia mix. Tara left behind about 1/4 jar of Jif peanut butter when she moved. I don’t go for the Jif on its own so much, but it was tasty tasty mixed with yogurt! I added chia seeds for their thickening powers, and the concoction lasted me a good three days.

This time, I added dried apricots to the berries:

(Do you see my strategic positioning of the bowl in the center of the tablecloth design?)

If you are topping-identification-challenged, those white bits are unsweetened shredded coconut:

There was a night that I mixed the pb-yogurt-chia with cocoa powder and a smidge of honey and froyo-ed it (freeze for 20-stir-freeze for 20-stir), topped it with a spoonful of real vanilla ice cream, and sprinkled chocolate chips, dried cranberries, and cinnamon:

Just as I can stare at avocado all day, I can stare at chocolate all day:

Here are those circles-of-decreasing size again. Such a recurring theme around here!

Oh, another thing. (I know … this is way too much for one post. But I have so much to say still!) I’ve also been enjoying my iced white peony tea all week, thanks to this excellent straining spoon that I found on the street a couple months ago. (It also comes in handy for extracting poached eggs from boiling water.) Step 1 = Pour:

Step 2 = Remove spoon:

Speaking of things I found on the street, these joined the collection the other day:

And the last thing (I promise?)! When the pb-chia-yogurt ran out, I had to think fast. I blended a sweet potato with yogurt, spices, and vanilla; froyo-ed it, and topped it with a square of Newman’s Own espresso dark chocolate (I also followed it with like 4 more squares of the chocolate with the reasoning that the espresso would help me stay awake to finish my paper, and then I went right to bed.) and a packet of Fitnutz Pro:

I am lucky there are so many reasons to say YUM in my life.

Classily arranged on my cinder block, errrrrrrr, table …

The rain brigade says bye byeeeeeeeeee …

Did you make anything this week? I made the tent‘s cinder blocks serve as a photography table …