Because I learn so well from past mistakes, I thought it would be a smart idea again to begin a kitchen project when I got home from class on Thursday at 10:15 pm. We had a department breakfast planned for Friday morning and, in typical fashion, I didn’t want to buy anything new or create any additional food, especially with the overabundance I’ve been experiencing this week! So, I got up to my old tricks …

The freezer collection:



(A batch of mom’s kitchen sink muffins on the left and a mountain of work/event overflow on the right, including corn muffins, berry muffins, zucchini muffins, and danishes)

The batter:



(1 banana, 2 eggs, 1 cup water, baking soda, baking powder … immersion-blended of course)

In went the muffin pieces:



I also added a hefty scoop of this Once Again peanut butter I won from An Apple a Day:



I have to say that I don’t love this peanut butter. I can actually taste the flax oil in it, but it was good for blending into batter.

Once everything was blended together, I gradually added water until the batter was pourable:



And then I poured 🙂

Onto a parchment lined baking sheet:



And into muffin tins:



I baked it all at 400 until a toothpick came out clean, 20-45 minutes. I ended up with halfway healthy pancakes and muffins:



Which made their way to the Friday morning department breakfast at work:



They soon vanished, as did everything else by the end of the day 😀

My breakfast of Pansy’s homemade white fish fritters, French bread from Belkis, Maria’s spicy eggs, mangu(!!) from Rosalie, and fruit salad with Cool Whip from Mildred:



Erik topped a muffin with maple syrup AND cool whip, and I was impressed with his enthusiastic food combining (he also put a babybel cheese in the bagel and microwaved it — so smart!):



(Deborah was also impressed, as communicated by her disembodied peace sign.)

Again, by the end of the day, nothing was left. Mostly because I sit next to the conference room table where everything was begging to be eaten.



I won’t lie. I dipped plantain chips right into the tub of cool whip.

I started a trend:



Then, I sopped up the remaining cool whip with bread:



Sigh. I don’t even really like Cool Whip, but something happens to my food discretion as the day gets closer to the end (especially when I only get 5.5 hours of sleep the night before due to behaving irrationally and baking all night). I just go craaaaazy …

Anyway, I’m so glad that I moved all of those old muffins out of my freezer because I had a treat waiting for me when I arrived home:

Goodies from Wife!! More on that later …

When you look at a muffin, what do you see? I see future kitchen adventures 🙂

… sort of.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to get into the week’s breakfasts. Poaching came back for an encore, and it joined a new friend: homemade green tea ice cream!

When I was at Pinkberry last weekend, I was so sad that they were no longer offering green tea frozen yogurt. I asked for green tea powder sprinkled on the top of my original, but it wasn’t the same. I stopped into a gourmet tea shop later that day and saw the teeniest jar of green tea powder on sale for $20. Ummmmmmmmm, no.

Enter Mr. Coffee. I dumped the contents of a handful of green teabags into my nut coffee bean grinder:

And then whirred and whirred and whirred until I got what I wanted:

My very own green tea powder!

I mixed it in with yogurt and a dab of honey (it was a little bitter straight):

And I did my freeze-for-20-stir-for-20-repeat method to froyo it. It began as a dessert with half of an UliMana brownie from Elisabeth and a sprig of homegrown basil:

With the famed urban garden in the background:

And it later made its way to breakfast (honey-free this time and hidden!) alongside a poached egg eaten over maple-date oatmeal with SOTBPPBDCS butter:

(With cherries and CSA blueberries of course)

I loooove how the SOTBPPBDCS butter melts, mmmmmmmmmmm.

Another morning, I had the green tea froyo with blueberries …

… accompanied by a coriander-sprinkled poached egg over the last 1/2 Arnold’s sandwich thin with more SOTB butter (and cherries!) …

Yay for bright yellow farm-fresh yolks!

Another’s morning’s worth:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I had to take that one to go because I was running late:

And one last day of it!

At first, I didn’t think the powder tasted much like green-tea-flavored foods, but it has really grown on me!!!! I love it love it love it and want to eat it every morning 😀

What do you like to do with tea (aside from drink it)?

P.S. I love it when my husband (Mister Softee) puts his foot down 😛

So I know I said Monday was the fun day around my office, but things just keep getting better and better 😀 I’ll get to some of the meals I’ve been making myself eventually, but I need to give the job credit for Tuesday and Wednesday first!

Tuesday began with six (one was hiding … in my mouth) more pieces of Goofy taffy from Jessica’s trip to Disney:

And an orange left from Monday’s meeting:

Tuesday is one of my crazy long class days, so I always pack lunch and dinner since I usually don’t get home until at least 10pm. But, the horror, I forgot to pack myself a dinner on Tuesday! Sound the alarm!

I needn’t have worried though. After snacking on a few kettle chips (umm, I thought I didn’t like potato chips?) with the ladies during lunch …

… and a few cherries that I found abandoned in the fridge (I don’t know who they belonged to, but they had been there since last week and were starting to wrinkle and NEEDED immediate rescue):

… Rosalie offered me her remaining chorizo taco, and Belkis gave me half of the salad that Mildred had donated to her! I threw in the carrots, CSA broccoli, and yogurt-mango chutney I’d brought as a snack and, voila, insta-dinner!

Taco con queso blanco:

Ensalada:

Of course, dinner is not complete without dessert. Lillian had given me the other half of her banana that morning.

I mashed it:

And added 1/4 of a banana walnut muffin and 1/2 mini cinnamon bun, both from Monday’s meeting:

Deconstructed (or constructed, depending on how you look at things):

And topped with office peanut butter and almonds:

Yessssssss, it was that good.

It turned out to be a good thing that I had not packed a dinner! Along with a peach and half of Emily’s package of m&ms in class — it’s a three-hour-class, and I have to get through it somehow! — my tum was satisfied 😀

Wednesday started out similarly with the last orange from Monday’s meeting:

Just before lunch, I went downstairs to speak with one of the therapists about arranging an evaluation. Nitza saw me sitting there waiting and called over, Sarah, my dear, listen! There’s a Fairway bag with smoked salmon and cream cheese and yogurt in the fridge down here. Please take it upstairs because I’m going on vacation and it’s going to go bad. Yes, ma’am! I brought it all upstairs and announced that it was in the fridge and available for everyone … but that I’d be taking anything left home at the end of the day to ensure proper management (no spoiling allowed!).

After my packed lunch, I had a few Mike & Ike’s from Rosalie:

I thought that was the end of the food story for the day. I don’t know why I thought that. I’ve been working here for ten months (ten months???), and that has never been the end of the food story …

But anyway, I had four moms with disconnected phones and decided to hit the streets around 2pm in search of them. I located everyone (yay!), got some updated contact info, took care of business, and was back in the office by 3:30 … only to find a plethora of baked goods strewn around my desk and the conference room table. I wondered aloud, What happened here? Jessica replied, I think it’s all from Advocacy. I think there’s more down there. Uh oh.

First, I helped myself to a sliver (x2) of apple pie:

As I rounded the corner to fill up my water bottle, Maria called after me, Sarita, did you get some food?? Clearly, there was more work to be done.

I headed down to the food pantry in Advocacy and loaded up. And that is how I came to arrive home with all of this:

(You may notice that the zucchini muffin — top center — is missing its lid. The zucchini muffin lid was a casualty of my stressful commute home. I left work 45 minutes early so that I could make it to my first dentist appointment in two years, which I scheduled as soon as my insurance became active, because I was pretty sure that I had been missing a filling for several months and was very worried it was going to become a root canal situation. Unfortunately, somebody pulled the emergency brake on the train in front of mine, causing my train to stop between stations for a prolonged period before finally being taken out of service … at which point I had to walk across town to get a different train. And then I had to inhale half of a zucchini muffin as soon as I successfully boarded said train. All of this subway drama meant that I was 20 minutes late for my 5:30 appointment at a dental office that closed at 6. I was sure the dentist would refuse to see me, but he did not! So now my teeth are cleaned and polished, my cavity is refilled, and I am out $200. Ummm, why did I wait until I had insurance to go to the dentist? I thought insurance was supposed to make you pay less?!)

Anyway, topless zucchini muffin aside, my loot included 3 Fage 2%, a giant “cowboy cookie” (it seems peanut buttery), 6 slices of frosted angel food cake, a zucchini muffin, a berry muffin, a maple buttercream-frosted yellow cupcake and a vanilla buttercream-frosted chocolate cupcake, Jessica’s leftover salad from lunch, snap peas, two mangoes, 5 bananas, a turkey wrap/barley salad/bean salad lunch combo, a mini meatloaf, and $17 worth of smoked salmon! Oh, and did I mention frosting?

And you’ll just have to tune in later to see how all of this went to use 😛

Do you ever arrive home at the end of the day (or at the end of a trip) with more than you brought in the beginning?

Mondays are hard, but they are made considerably more palatable by the usual beginning-of-the-week food explosion at work.

I love that conference room table 😀

That is the sight that greeted me when I walked into my 9:30 meeting on Monday morning. Rosalie and Nydia wanted our meeting to have a celebratory aspect, and I was happy to oblige by eating the decorations. I’d already had breakfast, but I figured I might as well have an early lunch part 1!

I had two giant bowls of fruit like this:

Plus the half apple that didn’t make it into my fruit bowl(s), topped with a babybel cheese:

And half of a heated banana walnut muffin with peanut butter:

The pb got all melty and gooey and stick-to-my-mouthy … and I wanted to have 30 more halves like this. But I did not listen to that craving because this was also on the conference room table:

Jessica came back from her Disneyworld vacation and brought the office a bag of Goofy taffy. And it was a health-conscious bag, believe it or not:

The bag claimed easy portion control, so I threw caution to the wind and had at least twice what you see here:

(With the Tinkerbell notepad that Jessica also brought back for me :-D)

Mildred saved the day from sugar temporarily when she gave me the rest of her lunch salad with chicken and avocado:

I added the CSA broccoli I had brought for a snack with some yogurt-mango chutney dressing:

Plus half of a mini cinnamon bun left from the morning meeting:

And that was lunch part 2.

When I got back from my afternoon visits, Deborah instantly handed me 1/4 of the chocolate mint cupcake she had gotten from the advocacy department downstairs:

Mmmmm, Deborah definitely knows how to select a cupcake.

When I opened my email, I saw that Pura had sent out an alert that there were still tons of excess donated goodies downstairs, so I ran down and took up a collection that included a cinnamon muffin, two cream cheese frosted carrot cupcakes, two slices of lemon-iced angel food cake, and a pb&j crumb square 😛

I ate some crumbs and packed the rest up for home, where I promptly chopped them all up into small pieces and added them to my freezer bag … and ate some more crumbs 😛

What is the hardest day of your week, and what makes it easier?

Sunday was another brilliantly pleasant last-chance-to-relax sort of day. (Notice how I’m moving slowly on the recaps here? I’m trying to pace myself so that I have some buffer when work piles up again!)

The project of the day was a variation of Gena’s raw zucchini alfredo since I loved it so much last time I made it.



I started by using a peeler to make carrot and CSA zucchini noodles.



Next, I used a knife to make CSA broccoli-stalk noodles and CSA bok-choy-stalk noodles:



I collected arugula and basil from my balcony garden and added those after a thorough chop.



Then, I figured I might as well throw in as much as I could, so I added CSA boy choy leaves, CSA snap peas, and CSA “braising greens” (which were tender enough to eat raw, incidentally), and sauteed CSA garlic scape. Can you tell I love my CSA?



I mixed my “noodles” with balsamic vinegar, toasted sesame oil, my mom’s herb-infused olive oil, coarse sea salt, lemon juice, and freshly ground coriander and transferred the bowl to the fridge for some marination time.

Meanwhile, I started on the cashew alfredo sauce … but since I had no cashews, I decided to give it a go with these jumbo brazil nuts from OhNuts!:



They were definitely jumbo!! Check out this comparison to a lowly sunflower seed:



I gave a cup of the nuts a coarse crush, covered them in water, and moved them to a fridge for a few hours to soak.

After the soak, I poured out most of the water (to save for later!) and kept about 1/3 cup in the bowl with the nuts to facilitate a heavy-duty immersion-blending session.

Once the nuts were pretty much processed, I started to add everything I could find: juice and pulp of 2 lime slices along with 1/4 cup spicy adobo sauce left from Rosalie and Rosey’s lunch last Thursday at work, 1 tsp date bliss, coarse sea salt, a few packets of soy sauce left from a roommate’s chinese food takeout, toasted sesame oil … is that it?



I blended and blended and blended some more, gradually adding about another cup of water until my sauce was smooth. I finger-licked my way through a few adjustments until everything tasted perfect. I was not sure how the brazil nuts would fare since they are less naturally sweet than the cashews, but this sauce tasted excellent!



In the midst of all the marinating and soaking time for my noodles and sauce, I kept myself busy enough with other things! I started the day with a bowl of my overnight mapley-date-flax oats:



I filled half the bowl with the oats topped with raisins and the other half with yogurt topped with CSA blueberries. I added a spoonful of date bliss and a sprinkle of cinnamon to the top:



For lunch, I sampled my way across the Slope from Union Market to Blue Apron Foods to the other Union Market and then made a quick pit-stop at home for half of a cucumber with hot mango chutney-yogurt dip:



(I know I already talked about how I love the hot hot spicy sweetness of this chutney, but I also need to mention that it has huge chunks of delicious mango in it, too. I’m going through this little jar so fast!)

I finally settled down with a light caramel frappucino at Starbucks (everything else was closed!) so that I could play email catchup:



Then I got home just in time to put the finishing touches on my dinner and settle in for my feast 😀



I guess my final dish is more like a salad than noodles since I added so much, but it’s still delicious!



The sesame and soy flavors really come through and make an excellent cold sauce, and there’s still the spicy heat from the adobo. I may have to plan a day where I just eat this for every meal!



There was dessert, too, but that will have to be the star of another day 😛

Do you say “noodle” or “pasta” or something else altogether? Do you use “noodle” to refer to anything aside from food? i.e. You’re such a noodle … or I spent the day just noodling around … or I love floating in the pool with a noodle …