Sooooo, I’m aware that I’m like 10 years behind on the blogging. Please forgive me. Between the school and the work and the boys and the need for mental health, spare blogging time is pretty elusive. Despite all of these other obligations, however, I am still eating more than enough, so please don’t worry about me or about my caloric intake 😛 (Unless you are Erin Gunn, in which case you can worry about my caloric intake and the diminishing likelihood that I will fit into the bridesmaid dress for your wedding. JOKE. sort of.)

While I am contemplating the most appropriate theme for this post, my computer is in the process of uploading 200+ photos. I think the best way to go is to do a rundown of work food first. Ummmmm, I’m not sure I can fit all of this in one post. Let’s see how we do, since iPhoto keeps quitting on me due to photo upload overload. Onto the food …

This seems like ancient history now, but many many many work lunches ago, Mildred presented me with some beautiful beet-and-potato salad and her famous arroz con gandules:

You know I’m not into potatoes, but I love beets, and they managed to camouflage the potatoes quite effectively. I had a little of each and saved the rest for future creations.

Deborah gave me a bite of her toasty english muffin with melted swiss cheese. Mmmmm, this tasted like being five years old.

Jessica had a birthday, and she brought in some of the best leftover cake ever. Can you recognize it???

Ta daaaaaaaaa!

Junior’s cheesecake, OMG. If you’re not from New York, you might not understand what the big deal is. So let me educate you. Junior’s has been the official home of the world’s. best. cheesecake. since it was founded in Brooklyn (love my borough!) in 1950. If you’re ever in the market to try authentic New York cheesecake, Junior’s is the place to go — there’s really no other option. Dear Jessica: Thank you for sharing!

There was another day when I walked into work and found this conference room table sight patiently waiting to taunt me:

There was a board meeting in the conference room right next to my desk, and I literally watched for approximately three hours as none of the board members touched these beautiful platters of cheese, crackers, and fruit. How could they just sit there and ignore the bounty in front of them?? At the end of the meeting, the untouched platters were offered up to the rest of us but, sadly, I had to skedaddle for class. Luckily, Jessica and Deborah saved me a little package for the next day:

And somewhere along the way, Lillian whipped out her all natural macaroons from the health food store:

Mmmm, these are just INSANELY delicious.

I had more than one 😛

Deborah shared her raspberries, and Jennifer shared her Brazil nuts:

These cream-filled sandwich cookies somehow made their way into my line of sight as well:

As did this piece of yuca, homemade by Deborah’s mom, and this caramel bulls-eye candy I found sitting on the conference room table (where else??):

And a banana that came my way from the food pantry via Jessica with office peanut butter, a Nature’s Path cranberry ginger granola bar from Belkis, and avena from Nydia:

As the weather has gotten colder the past few weeks, the ladies have all been enjoying freshly brewed coffee each morning. One day, they decided to enhance their coffee with these:

I managed to ignore them for an entire day … but day #2 came and I had no choice but to heat up a plain donut with my CSA pear and sugar cookie sleigh ride tea for a second breakfast 😀

Seriously, this was the perfect fall snack: warm pear and warm old-fashioned donut. I took my time with this platter.

(Or maybe I inhaled it.)

Lillian made a donation to Belkis’ candy jar:

Those little lollipops have been keeping me quite entertained! Especially the cotton candy and blue raspberry flavors. I love eating things that are blue!

I also do a lot of healthy snacking at work. (I had to throw that in there because my dad has been reading the blog and getting worried about my blood sugar levels). I had a lunchtime meeting with these goodies:

(In the background are Dunkin Donuts muffins left from a morning meeting of which I was a part and during which I ate little bits of each flavor — blueberry (DD makes the best blueberry muffins in the world!), coffee cake, pumpkin, and chocolate chip — to equal at least one full muffin.)

After all of the muffins, I decided to save my packed lunch for another day and loaded up on the produce from this meeting in an effort to give my body something useful to digest:

I also had some (ummmm, like three bowls) of this gorgeous chickpea salad that Inginia made:

And a couple pieces of fresh coconut straight from the juice bar, courtesy of Belkis:

And, on another day, I ate some edamame left from Lillian and Nydia’s lunch:

And there was one brilliant lunch when Deborah showed up at the tail end and whipped out this package with a very mischievous look on her face:

CRAB LEGS!!!!! She let me eat two 😀

OMG, and then there was another phenomenal cake adventure! I love looking through these pictures — it’s such an excellent way to skip down memory lane and relive the greatest food moments of September 2009. I was walking by Erik’s desk on my way to fill up the Brita pitcher when he reached for a neatly wrapped foil package and raised an eyebrow at me. I stopped in my tracks immediately as he revealed to me one of the most breathtaking visions of the year:

Homemade, just baked, just frosted red velvet cake! He had helped a mom asthma-proof her apartment, and she showed her gratitude by gifting him this little chunk of heaven.

I pretty much let the Brita pitcher tumble to the floor while Erik, Ray, and I enjoyed several silent moments of total cake ecstasy:

I needed to take another moment after that cake to quell my palpitating heart, so I took a field trip to one of our little conference rooms that had been freshly re-painted and admired Ibrahim’s skillful application of these sweet animal wall decals:

I actually can’t wait to have a meeting in there this week so that I can hang out with these new friends some more.

What were your greatest food hits for September?

Sometimes, Friday just turns into Saturday and you have an epic blog post on your hands.

I had very well-intentioned plans to check out a karate class in East Harlem after work last Friday. But when the buzz started to spread around that former Yankees centerfielder Bernie Williams would be a guest guitarist at Camaradas, some people (I’m not naming names or anything) decided Bernie would be a better use of my Friday evening. Ummm, neither Erik nor Jose (nor the mofongo de camarones) had anything to do with this decision:



Did someone say mofongo de camarones? Karate dreams all but forgotten, I definitely was not complaining when this steaming mound of mashed fried green plantain and shrimp landed in front of me:



Nor was I complaining when the empanadas de pollo arrived:



I didn’t even complain when the music started:



And Bernie Williams did, in fact, make his appearance:



I also did not complain when Jose and Erik got into a heated discussion about obscure old music that went completely over my head; instead I ordered a pint of sangria with extra fruit:



I continued to not complain when the bartender noticed I had eaten all my fruit and offered to refill the fruit and, in the process, refilled my pint of sangria for free. Just like last time, Best Service Ever.

I did not complain when a fellow Sarita dragged me onto the dance floor and valiantly but unsuccessfully tried to teach me salsa, nor did I complain when Erik dragged me onto the dance floor and led me and my wine-soaked-apple-filled belly on a spinning spree. And I definitely did not complain when the bartenders gave us access to their staff meal of peppery buttered fettuccine:



(I totally forgot about that part until this picture!! I just got so excited about that fettuccine all over again!)

Friday became Saturday, and I was given a morning off from preparing my own breakfast. Instead, I was presented with one of the most delicious bowls of oatmeal I have ever experienced:



Instant oats with honey, cinnamon, and whole milk. How is something so simple so delicious??

Back at my apartment, I found a package to beat all packages:



My good buddy Coco, who just came back from an awe-inspiring trip to Argentina, knew about my love for the South American sandwich cookies called alfajores … and sent me a care package full of several varieties along with a bunch of other Argentinian goodies:



I also swung by Kate’s on Saturday morning to collect my share of the CSA: spaghetti squash, cabbage, eggplant, mammoth peaches, peppers, giant radishes, green beans, frying peppers, salad greens, edamame, and pears:



After a perfect (and unpictured) picnic lunch of cream of broccoli soup and a beet wrap (with goat cheese and walnuts!) from Naidre’s, I threw together a light dinner of roasted eggplant (balsamic, evoo, sea salt, coriander) with Wildwood raspberry chipotle hummus:



I thought the hummus was good, but the raspberry flavor made it taste a little too much like frosting for the eggplant, so I swapped it out for some salsa.



I also roasted the radishes the same way because I thought they were parsnips. I realized my mistake when I tasted them, but the roasting plan still worked well. I was so surprised by the radish flavor when I bit in that I could not steady the camera with my shaking hands:



Later in the day on Saturday, I found myself in 200 Fifth (yet another very atypical spot for me) watching the Minnesota Twins win a surprisingly exciting baseball game. Olivia, I thought of you the whole time!



200 Fifth is right here in the Slope, but I’ve never been because I generally have no need to watch sports on TV. If I did watch sports, however, I would be at this place all the time. The setup is brilliant! The restaurant-bar is equipped with some sort of fancy satellite arrangement so that it can retrieve pretty much any game in the universe as long as it is being televised somewhere, even if you need to see a baseball came from an obscure midwestern town that is only on that town’s local access channel 😛 There are two or three TVs hanging at every booth so that each group can watch whatever game is necessary. In the end, we found out the Twins game was actually being televised on regular Fox and we could have watched from my apartment, but that was fine. I’m glad I got to experience the genius of 200 Fifth. And celery sticks dipped in blue cheese:



Plus one of my new goodies for dessert:



Mmmm, crunchy cookie layered with dulce de leche and covered in chocolate:



Definitely still not complaining.

Later in the night, I met Kate and Gina at the theater to see The Informant. The movie was ok, I think — I slept through the first hour of it and spent a good part of the second hour very confused as a result. We hit up The Chocolate Room after the show, and that woke me up much more effectively than the movie had!



While we perused the menu, we enjoyed our complementary spoonfuls of intense chocolate sorbet:



And the decor (of course):



The three of us split the hot fudge sundae with fresh mint chocolate chunk ice cream:



The Chocolate Room makes their mint chip ice cream with actual fresh mint leaves. It tasted like my mom’s garden — I loved it!

We also split the ice cream sandwich special: chocolate cookies with burnt orange ice cream in the middle:



Yummmmmmmmmmmm!

It was a brilliantly busy 24 hours … and then I remembered that the fall semester had begun and I had work to do. So hard to switch back into serious student mode! I need to put my hibernation hat back on stat, ugh. I love fall weather, but this season definitely represents the end of my two and a half carefree paper-free weeks. Homework anyone?

How do you feel about the start of fall?

As much as I love to cook for myself, I obviously enjoy tasting other people’s kitchen creations quite a bit! Last Thursday night, I walked down from my office to my friend Diana’s apartment so we could catch up and work on turning the contents of her fridge into a meal. Diana was well-stocked with salsa, grape tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese, and more:

She quickly set to work throwing together a sauce with the salsa, tomatoes, mushrooms, and black beans:

While I worked some cheddar cheese polenta magic:

Diana’s sauce went on top of a couple tilapia filets:

Which went into the oven for a bake and then a meaningful broil:

Once you go black … nothing beats the char 😛

We layered the fish on top of the polenta and added more sauce and salsa for extra flair. Diana and I know how to dine in style:

For dessert, we split a Peppermint Patty, quite possibly my favorite candy of all time (ok, second only to Cadbury Creme Eggs):

Thanks for sharing your kitchen, Diana!

Fast-forward to Friday at work. As you may recall, Friday is the farm delivery day at my office: the day that all of the local farm produce arrives for our food pantry. The Advocacy department has started arranging once per month cooking demonstrations with the in-season produce that is delivered because the food that grows here is often completely new to our clients. Friday’s lesson was on spaghetti squash:

The demonstrator showed how to bake and extract the “noodles” from the squash and then top it with home-enhanced marinara:

The families all sampled the finished produce, and so did Pura and I!

Seriously, how did I end up in an agency where I can play with babies, eat to my heart’s content, and practice Spanish until I am blue in the face? I am wayyyyyy too lucky 😀

Who has been cooking for you lately?

Right. So, like I said, produce and other healthy things have been on the agenda. I’ve gotten in my fill of CSA salads with sunflower seeds and coarse sea salt:



Farm fresh frying peppers with Wildwood probiotic Indian spice hummus:



Speaking of this hummus, by the way, I really liked the spicing … but the texture and overall taste just can’t compare to Sabra! Of course, the Wildwood has the benefit of being probiotic, but the probioticity also gave it a tangy yogurt-like essence. It was ok, but I’d rather just eat yogurt.

And speaking of yogurt, I ate some last week thanks to the free goods I scored at Race for the Cure:



I was excited for this strawberry shortcake flavor, but it tasted like regular old strawberry yogurt to me. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I’d rather have plain yogurt with some real strawberries in it!

Another sample from the free yogurt pile was this honey vanilla YoPlus digestive health. I threw a few blueberries on top and enjoyed my treat, but again, it was really nothing to write home about:

I also tried a brand brand new-to-me type of fruit: quenepa!

I saw these on the conference room table and thought they were grapes at first. I went in for a closer look of course:

Deborah and Lillian gave me a tutorial in how to eat it. First, you put the quenepa (skin and all) in your mouth and bite it gently to break the skin:



Then, you gently separate the skin from the flesh inside:



Once you have removed the skin, you pop the whole fruit in your mouth and suck. You can’t chew because there’s a pit inside to which the flesh is firmly attached; instead, you suck until you have gotten all of the fruit off the seed and then discard the seed:



I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t offend anyone with that somewhat raunchy description of how to eat a quenepa! Either way, the fruit is delicious. It tastes like candy and not like fruit. Again, I feel a strong need to move to Latin America where I can bask the the glory of naturally growing local candy fruits for the rest of my life 🙂

I also had many pears from the CSA:



The pears tasted like pears and not like candy, but that was fine with me because I love pears.

I also had some leftover miracle medley of food my mom sent back to Brooklyn with me last time I was visiting her in MA. She told me that this combo had turkey, white beans, kidney beans, baked beans, quinoa, zucchini, and too many other things to remember. It was delicious and tasted like home. I ate it in a number of different ways, one being on top of Jessica’s leftover salad from Wendy’s:



On another day, Rosey brought in fruit for the office. I helped myself 🙂



Then there was a day when a mom gave Jessica some corn on the cob. Jessica shared with me because she knew I would appreciate it:



Oh, and I almost forgot the other exciting healthy thing that I ate courtesy of my mom: dehydrated veggie chips with hummus.



My mom has gone nuts with her dehydrator and has taken to dehydrating every piece of produce she can find. My baggie had zucchini and yellow squash, sweet potato, butternut squash, red and green peppers, carrots, eggplant, and maybe more.



On Friday, I ate outside in the park with a CSA-tomato-and-balcony-arugula salad topped with sunflower seeds and dressed with balsamic vinegar and mom’s herb-infused olive oil:



So, sure there was junk. But in the end, I lived to tell the tale and eat produce 😀

What’s your produce tale this week?

Since I’ve been trying to avoid growing out of my already-purchased bridesmaid dress for Erin Gunn’s wedding, I’ve had to make a few cutbacks on my standard eat-everything-in-sight philosophy. By “a few,” I mean that there was one day when an open box of Chips Ahoy was sitting on the conference room table next to my desk, and I did not eat any.



One day.

There was another day when Deborah brought in a half dozen Dunkin’ Donuts and put them in that same fateful conference room table location.



I kept my wits about me and wrapped up a blueberry donut (my favorite DD kind!) to take home and store in my freezer until the weekend when a breakfast guest gave me an excuse to go all Brandi 😛

I broke out my last three CSA eggs of the week:



And collected all of my frozen rescued carbs (blueberry donut, restaurant sourdough bread left from a brunch bread basket):



And whipped up French toast extravaganza:



I didn’t have any syrup, so I served the feast with a little side of raspberry sorbet.

Seriously, that Brandi knew what she was doing when she got her donuts in on the French toasting action. This was delicious!



Another thing I haven’t eaten … yet:



Authentic Puerto Rican candy that Nydia brought back to the office from her trip home. It’s chilling in my freezer right now, waiting for a desperate moment the perfect moment.

In my final burst of willpower, I sidestepped the tray of cookies on my first night of Bank Street classes and instead filled up my empty lunch tupperware with the blueberry garnish:



After that amazing feat of fruit collection, however, my willpower took a bit of a hit. We had freshly baked French bread with Laughing Cow cheese in a meeting:

And Cathy came back from her trip to South Africa with a table (that same darn conference room table) full of duty free chocolates for the office:



I made more than one trip to the stash:



Actually, I made more than five trips to the stash, but let’s not dwell on that.



Really, what’s done is done.



I probably also ate these garlic knots left from Rosey’s lunch:



And these three (errrrrr 12) authentic Columbian candies:



And half of a chocolate-covered graham cracker (thanks, Lillian!):



And a sample of cheesecake from Union Market:



I took a brief break from the fake sugar to enjoy these grapes and strawberries that Katty brought in for Jessica’s birthday:



But I went right back to my old friend when Nydia and Lillian brought this masterpiece to the office to celebrate all of the September birthdays:



There was even a birthday candle, so I obviously had to get in on the cake action. It would have been rude not to.



Jessica, Rosalie, and Deborah were the lucky September babies who inspired the celebration:



I had to eat and run since it was my class day, so I had Rosalie shove a slice into a cup so I wouldn’t miss out. She didn’t think she could make the cake fit, but I assured her it would work, and it did!



Aaaaaaaand, there was more French bread:



How can I resist when the bread is literally still warm from the oven and filled with all of this melty butter???



On top of these forays into dress-tightening cuisine, Belkis refilled her candy jar with all manner of crazy lollipops:



I had to take a closer look by eating all of them.

So anyway, there were some things I didn’t eat, but there were mostly things I did eat! And now my tummy hurts just from reliving all of this. How about I try some produce????? Hmmmm, what a novel concept 😛 To be continued …

What kind of junk have you been eating lately?