Remember all the cake I had on Friday?? It was delicious, but it also necessitated that Saturday take shape as a recovery day. Thank goodness my plans cooperated with that need 😀

I woke up at 8:30 and hydrated with a “mocktail” of home-brewed jasmine iced tea, coconut water, and a watermelon ice cube:

At 9:00, I met Emily at the subway to accompany her to hot yoga so she could experience the magic before she left town (noooo, Emily, don’t go to Buffalo!). We sweated out all of our impurities (suuuuuuuuure), and then I headed straight down to Kate’s apartment in Carroll Gardens so I could pick up my half of the CSA (more on that tomorrow), zipped back to my apartment in the Slope to process the produce and clean myself up, and jerkily made my way through the messy weekend subway system to the UES to meet up with Pamela for a delightful vegan linner at none other than Candle Cafe.

I ate at Candle’s fancy and somewhat stuffy big sister, Candle 79, a few weeks ago and was not entirely thrilled with the experience, so I was very excited to try the cafe since the menu and ambience seemed much more my style.

Pamela ordered the quesadilla, a whole wheat tortilla filled with bean puree, grilled vegetables, and soy cheese with daily salsa on the side:

I ate half of one of her wedges, and it was so so tasty! The onions inside were sweet, and the salsa was hot. I love sweet and spicy together!

To round out her quesadilla, Pamela also ordered the green life smoothie, a blend of kale, pineapple, banana, and orange juice:

Obviously, the smoothie was phenomenal as well.

I ordered the taco salad: chili beans, grilled seitan, chopped lettuce, tofu sour cream, soy cheese, and corn chips topped with toasted cumin vinaigrette, pico de gallo, and guacamole.

This salad was enormous and completely delicious! I ate every single bite (except for the four bites that Pamela swiped) and was so full when I finished. The mix of flavors in this dish was incredible, and I loved the generosity of the guacamole serving on top:

The complexity of seasonings and multiple ingredients in this dish set it apart from Candle 79. I enjoyed my food at Candle 79, but it didn’t fill me up, and I felt as though I could have prepared it myself. This salad more than filled me up, and I’m not sure I could replicate it without a specific recipe. I approved 🙂

Obviously, Pamela and I had to order dessert.

And we obviously had to order two desserts and split them 😀 😀

I was sad that Candle did not have the famous carrot cake when we were there, but our selections were still fantastic. We split the seasonal fruit crumb pie a la mode (with vanilla soy ice cream):

There were enormous hunks of peaches all throughout this pie, and it reminded me of a peach-blueberry crisp.

And the chocolate mousse pie with chocolate cookie crust:

This pie was amazingly rich yet light at the same time, mmmmmmm.

We left no crumbs unturned 😛

My original plan had been to head back to Brooklyn immediately after our linner, but I was sooooo full that I decided to walk with Pamela to where Gina was waiting and then tag along on their shopping expedition for a bit so that I could facilitate digestion! Central Park was looking quite photogenic on Saturday, so I couldn’t help taking some pictures as we walked by.

It’s amazing how having a camera at the ready makes me appreciate the beauty of something I’ve been walking by for nine years.

Have you taken second looks at anything — restaurants, foods, scenery, friendships, etc. — lately?

According to my camera, some exciting things happened in the world of my food last Thursday and Friday. I couldn’t bring myself to delete such pretty breakfasts and treats without first blogging about them!

I spent Thursday morning on the balcony with overnight yogurt + golean crunch, mango (free from work donation overflow!), peanut butter, and hemp seeds:

I didn’t even need to pack lunch because I had the Dominican chambre (made by Maria and Inginia) saved from Tuesday, and I enhanced it with a baby bell swiss cheese from Jessica and reject avocados from Rosey:

On the side, I had chips and salsa left from the nurses’ lunch on Tuesday and salad left from Rosalie’s lunch:

When I got home from class way too late on Thursday night, I had a super fun fun fun package waiting for me:

Elisabeth at Jogger’s Life sent me the most thoughtful care package ever to help me get through the rest of my grad school summer session.

I am beyond excited to make my own bubble tea with these exciting varieties and to fancy it up with green tea powder and lychee!

Thanks Elisabeth 😀

Friday morning’s breakfast consisted of half a toasted oatmeal-raisin bagel (courtesy of this work training) from the freezer bag topped with a poached CSA egg and more work donation mango:

I really am in love with these CSA eggs, but I can’t seem to eat them fast enough! I’ve got a three-week backlog. I need to pick up the egg pace.

Also in love with the cross-section:

Lunch at work was all stuff you’ve seen before … but the selection of goodies was new and exciting!

Rosey has been talking about a lady from her church who makes the best tres leches cake ever, and she finally brought some in to share with all of us! Rosey was not exaggerating about this cake. Look at how drenched in milk it is!

Siiiiiiiiiigh, this was amaaaaaazing.

Also on Friday, Pansy brought in some of her famous ambrosia along with gooseberries that she seasoned with cloves and nutmeg:

I had the ambrosia x2 and the gooseberries x7?

And there’s more, as usual. When I got back from my afternoon visit, this was waiting on my desk.

Half of the best red velvet cupcake ever from the bakery around the corner, courtesy of Nydia. I split this half with Deborah and considered it a Friday well spent 😀

How do you know when you’ve had a day well-spent?

Work was crazy this week — I almost couldn’t remember how to speak English when I got home on Friday because I had been speaking Spanish so much. Despite having to manage all sorts of emotional drama in my non-native language, however, I was able to take many snack breaks because, as you know, my agency does quite well with food.

I got the ball rolling this week when I couldn’t find coconut on Monday and ended up getting a pack of lemon “not sweet” plantain chips (couldn’t find the sweet ones — it wasn’t my day) instead to share with Jessica and Deborah:



Deborah played her part in curing the afternoon munchies by offering me some bites of her chicken burrito with salsa and guac:

My little afternoon snack sampler plate:

You know already how Tuesday went down. Wednesday, we took a bunch of our families on a trip to Lake Welch at Bear Mountain.

The families loved the chance to get out of the city and had tons of fun frolicking in the lake and on land:

They brought their own lunches, but we also brought along some afternoon snack supplies.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches:

And 10 million watermelons:

I ate the lunch I had packed (the leftovers I had been collecting all week!) and had half a sandwich and, ummm, probably half of a watermelon. I had to get to it before the flies did!



And Katty gave me a bunch of her chocolate-covered pretzels:



On the bus ride back to the agency, I broke into these maduros (finally, the sweet plantains!) that Jessica found and shared them with Beryl and some of the families:



When the plantains were gone, I immediately conked out for the duration of the trip back to work. Upon arrival at the agency, we realized that one of the leftover watermelons had broken in transit. I snapped right to attention and set out on a rescue mission, running the dripping watermelon into the advocacy kitchen while Deborah opened doors ahead of me, helpfully calling out, “Right this way, Baby!” Because, you know, I carried a watermelon.

Between the two kitchens at my agency, I managed to find enough takers so that the watermelon did not die in vain. I also ended up with a massive amount of watermelon in my emptied lunch tupperwares, hmmmmm …

When I got home Wednesday night, I immersion-blended the watermelon until it was liquid and poured it into ice cube trays to freeze. The watermelon ice cubes made an excellent addition to my jasmine iced tea:

And to my banana soft serve (with 1/2 a coconut, peanut butter, and a hazelnut chocolate ball):



Do you speak any languages that are not your own natively? And do you ever forget how to speak your own language? And what do you do with watermelons?

Somehow, another week has gone by! I don’t know how it happened, and I really can’t even remember what happened, but I know that the weekend is here. In fact, if I didn’t have so many pictures of food, I might think the week never happened at all. So you see, food photography does serve a purpose.

Apparently, this has been a colorful week in terms of my lunches. Can you guess why?



Yesssss, the CSA beets made their debut! I shredded the beets with CSA zucchini, CSA kohlrabi, and CSA garlic and mixed the whole thing with red wine vinegar, herb-infused olive oil, and coarse sea salt:



The beets took total charge of the salad of course. This takeover suited me perfectly, though, since I love beets. The salad worked wonders in my omelet (with a CSA egg of course):



I ate the omelet in my “garden” because I like to live in luxury like that:



And I only took about 10,000 pictures. I would have taken more but, you know, the colors were just so dull 😛



The beet salad also held up quite well underneath a morningstar black bean burger for lunches at work:



(Though you could throw a morningstar black bean burger on top of anything and have a pretty successful meal.)

A girl can’t live on beets alone, sadly, so some other items had to get involved. Gina had given me her free sample of chocolate chunk “weight management” shake mix a couple weeks ago (I did this with the vanilla sample), so I decided to put it to work.

I dumped the powder into a bowl (fyi, there were no chocolate chunks in this mix, despite the title!) and mixed it with a bit of yogurt to get a frosting consistency:



The frosting wouldn’t leave me alone all week and kept popping up in the most random places!

On top of a poached CSA egg on top of a grilled blueberry muffin from Wife:





On top of yogurt, cereal, and fruit:





Plus many un-pictured cameos via my finger 🙂 This still tastes fake and overly sweet, but the chocolate definitely beats out the vanilla!

Somewhere amidst all the shredding and weight management (haaaaaaaaaaa) this past week, I also had a midterm due for my family therapy class. Part of the midterm assignment was to create a genogram for three generations of my family, and part one of creating the genogram was to put together this map of my family. Can you figure it out?

Basically, my family’s genogram can be summed up in one sentence: Everyone got divorced and lived happily ever after 😀 Clarification: Everyone lived happily ever after until Sarah had to do this assignment and the divorces and remarriages made her life miserable for two days. Erin Gunn put it perfectly when she was here last weekend and said, “I take it you’re an advocate for divorce … until you have to show it in a genogram.”

Do you prefer to shred your body, your food, or your family? 😛

As is often the case around these parts, Tuesday began with cake.

Myrna’s birthday was last week, and she brought in leftovers from the weekend’s celebration. I grabbed a nice big slice and packed it up to take home nibbled on it all day long.

Actually, before the cake, Myrna was also responsible for my brillllllliant breakfast:

I was proofreading one of Myrna’s papers (she’s in social work school, too), and she knows that the way to my red pen is through my stomach, particularly when mangu is involved!

That mangu became breakfast and lunch. It probably should have been dinner, too, but there wasn’t any left by then 😛

Around the time that mangu part two was taking place, the nurses all gathered in the conference room right next to my desk for some sort of mystery feast. They closed the sliding glass doors (surely out of courtesy to those of us still working) which added even more to the exclusive and private mysterious aura.

Erik, aware of my compulsion to photograph food, held his plate up to the glass door so I could take a picture through the glass:

Thanks, Erik. I can almost taste it.

I needn’t have worried, though, because Tuesday turned out to be one of those days when food just kept rolling in. Pansy had saved a plate of food from the nurses’ mystery lunch (which turned out to be a birthday lunch in honor of Dorothy) for Rosalie. Rosalie, knowing how much I love to taste everything, saved some to give to me. Everyone is always looking out 😀

I gave the French fries to Beryl because, you know, potatoes.

At almost the same time, Nydia gave me her leftover chicken club salad from Wendy’s. I peeled and discarded the chicken breading and then pushed that salad to one side and inserted the birthday lunch leftovers into the other side.

I had a bite of the chicken (so crispy and delicious!) and those yellow noodles with sweet sausage and then gave the rest to Deborah and Myrna when they got hungry. Some salad was left, so I saved that for the next day’s lunch, of course!

Later in the afternoon, Nydia got a call from Inginia downstairs, announcing that she and Maria had made chambre, a Dominican stew with eeeeeeeverything in it. I ran down for a cup of it, but I saved that for another day, too, since I was too stuffed to eat more (and hell had also frozen over).

Despite the fullness, however, the angel food cake with fresh strawberry topping left from the nurse’s lunch had been taunting Jessica, Deborah, and me all afternoon because it was sitting right there in the conference room … but on the nurses’ side. We get scared to cross to the other half of the room sometimes because we don’t want to seem greedy or anything like that. When Erik walked by, however, we flagged him down. He’s a good eater and we share our department breakfasts with him sometimes, so we knew he would understand. After some minor bargaining, Erik went in for the kill:

And he came through a true hero 😀

Jessica was very happy:

And so were the rest of us!

Mmm, angel food cake with fresh berries is one of the best summer desserts (not as good as this one, though!).

Have you engaged in any food subterfuge this week? And who are your food heroes?