With all of the indulgence going around this week (and every week), I am thrilled that my CSA is now in full swing and provides (almost) everything I need to balance all the sugar with lots of green.

This week’s salad consists of a 100% CSA base with mesclun, pea shoots, and spinach. Each day, I pack a bunch of those leaves in a giant container and then pack a “dressing” separately for last-minute addition so that I can sidestep the wilt. The dressing for my CSA salad this week consists of CSA garlic scapes (sauteed in olive oil), CSA cilantro, CSA-inspired three-leaf pesto, CSA spinach stems, frozen corn niblets, chopped dried apricot, red wine vinegar, olive oil, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper.

Thanks to my coworkers, I’ve been able to use my CSA salad all week long as a base for addition enhancements! For Monday’s parents’ group, Inginia and I ordered roast chicken, yellow rice, and beans. I added some of the rice and chicken to turn my glowing green salad into a well-balanced protein powerhouse 🙂

Mmmmmmmmmmm.

On Tuesday, my salad came back again with some of the leftover chicken from Monday and a couple of spoonfuls of Myrna’s homemade rice, beans, and meat (hiding in the top left):

The salad has continued to serve me well all week long. Thank goodness for greens!

Of course, every lunch needs a dessert, so I’ve re-invited an old favorite into my life: pumpkin yogurt (equal parts of each) with chopped apples, loads of cinnamon, and hemp seeds:

Sigh, it feels so purifying to do a post all about healthy food. I really do love to eat this way — it just gets impossible for me when cake and authentic multi-cultural delicacies lie in wait around every corner!

What is one food you will never ever ever turn down?

So, I got home from class at 10:30 on Tuesday night (my bedtime is 9pm, mind you) and decided it would be super smart (sarcasm) to embark on a kitchen project right then. I raided my stores of shelf-stable items and came up with the following. Can you guess where this is headed?



Motivation for the insanity? Lucia’s surprise potluck baby shower was scheduled at my office for 3pm on Wednesday, and I had signed up to bring cookies. (Yes, we had another baby shower! ‘Tis the season …) I could have just grabbed a package of cookies and called it a night, but that would have been too easy. Instead, I tried to come up with delicious items I had hanging around my apartment that I certainly did not need to be eating all by myself. The project evolved as I worked, but I started with a package of Newman’s Own Organics honey wheat pretzels (and I sooo nibbled my share during prep because I am powerless when it comes to salty-sweet!), Peeps, and this bar of Russian chocolate from Olga:



(I definitely nibbled on the bar as I worked, too. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.)

Plan #1 was chocolate-covered pretzels. Plan #2, in honor of the anti-chocolate crowd at work, was marshmallow-covered pretzels. Melting ensued (oven-based since, once again, I have no microwave):

I added a dash of soymilk to the chocolate to aid in dipability but, aside from that, I did not doctor my dippers whatsoever.

I placed the pretzels on parchment paper and let them relax in the fridge overnight. In the morning, the Peep pretzels were still impossibly sticky, so I had this brilliant idea to mix them in a bowl with the rest of the pretzel pieces and a bag of Skittles to minimize stickyness.

I sort just ended up with a giant glob of pretzel-marshmallow-skittle deliciousness. I was very confident in the taste, but I was not as confident in the eat-ability. How could I serve a giant pretzel-marshmallow-skittle glob as a dessert for 30 people?! I was running late, so I stuffed everything into a tupperware: chocolate-covered pretzels on one side, pretzel-marshmallow-skittle glob on the other side, and Newman’s chocolate Os in a ring around the outside.

I kept brainstorming throughout the whole subway ride to work (a lot of brainstorming since my commute is an hour and 15 minutes) and started to think about plan #3: turning the glob into pretzel bars. When I got to work, I went to the kitchen and used the bottom of a glass to smush everything down as aggressively as I could. I cut the contents of the tupperware into squares and put it in the fridge in the hopes that it would firm up.

Just before the shower, I went to check progress. The marshmallow pretzel-pieces stuck together pretty well, but the chocolate covered pretzel pieces and cookies were a crumbly mess. At that last-minute, make-or-break moment, plan #4 came into being: pretzel salad.

I poured the crumbly chocolate cookie and pretzel mess into the bottom of a bowl and broke the pretzel-marshmallow-skittle globs into smaller clumps to use as a colorful garnish:

I threw a spoon in the bowl and my “salad” joined the impressive line-up.

Also on the crunch-time snack-preparation brigade were Inginia and Danilda, who were hard at work in the kitchen on some serious guacamole (because guacamole is critical!) right up until the very last second:



In addition to pretzel salad and guacamole, the lineup included corn chips, fruit platters, veggie platters, salsa and other dips, [nurse] Sarah’s oatmeal chocolate chip cookies …

Tortellini salad with tomatoes and pine nuts, rice and beans, quiche, more chips, fruits and cheeses …

Custard fruit tart!!!!! (my favorite)

Plus more! Before we could eat the food, however, we had to surprise Lucia!

(And I think she was actually surprised! As Pura was leading her into the room, Lucia asked, “Whose party are you taking me to?”)

The crowd:



And then, it was onto the food! Here’s my plate #1 with tons of (buried) green salad, tortellini salad, jalapeno cheese cube, pineapple, fruit tart, Pansy’s ambrosia (!!!), roast chicken, the afore-mentioned guacamole, and two blue corn tortilla chips:



And plate #2 with more salad, some rice, pineapple, and more ambrosia topped with pretzel salad:



(I may have also had thirds and fourths of ambrosia …)

Inevitably, my favorite time of day rolled around: cake time! How adorable is the cake decor?

Awww, sugar baby sleeping …

This cake was actually made by one of the women who volunteers for our agency, and it’s a Dominican-style pound cake with guava-berry filling and sugar-and-egg white frosting (that tasted exactly like a marshmallow).

And my mountain of a piece:

Phew, nothing like a 3:30 dinner to get you excited for the last hour of the work day! I was so stuffed after all of this that I couldn’t even contemplate going to my hot yoga class even though I had packed and lugged all of my yoga gear with me that morning. My belly was sticking out so far at that point that I wasn’t even sure I had it in me to touch my toes! Plus, I had a weird sore throat/congestion thing going on all day and thought I might be better served by sufficient sleep and prep for my looooooooooong Thursday. I think I might need to start finding a way to eat just for the moment and not for the rest of the week every time I see food …

OK, two questions: (1) Craziest thing you’ve seen that was labeled as “salad”? and (2) Best cake decorations you’ve ever encountered personally (as in, not by watching Ace of Cakes on Food Network!)?

Featured food finds: Monday and Tuesday

The week started out slowly in terms of food finds, but it has quickly picked up steam. I have a hunch that today will be even more rife with contributions, so I’m getting these down before I end up with a novel!

Monday morning, Lillian offered me this biscuit to go along with my tea. I don’t know what it is about these biscuits — they’re so plain yet soooo addicting.



I also tried out one of my free Soyjoy bars from the health event last weekend:

I can see why the people at the event only let me take two of their sample bars (I still snuck a third) — they didn’t want me to know how un-amazing they were! I had asked if I could take one of each of the five flavors, and the lady turned me down. You’d think Soyjoy would want to give away as much as possible with all the soy controversy going around, but I guess she did not study marketing. Although, if she had given me one of each, I would have been able to say with confidence that every single flavor was lousy. So maybe she wanted to keep the lousy-ness a secret.

Anyway, the bar wasn’t gross or inedible by any means. It was just dry and kind of eh. I’ll eat them as I need them, but I’m not in a rush!

Tuesday morning, I went to a two-hour training downtown about deafness/hearing concerns. I had a suspicion that pastries might be present due to the breakfast timing, so I brought along a paper bag and a bunch of napkins just in case. I was right!

I packed up a bunch of bagels and assorted pastries for my freezer, and I contented myself with tea, the lone strawberry garnish, and a mini cranberry-orange muffin:

Oh, right … and a mini bran muffin, too 😛

Also on Tuesday, Myrna brought in a bunch of purple-pink frosted tres leches cake from a birthday party her daughter attended over the weekend. Here’s my pile!

Salty-sweet trail mix from Rosey later in the afternoon:

And a free fro-yo sample with Tate’s Bakeshop oatmeal-cranberry cookies from Butterfield Market on the way to class 😀

The end!

What has fallen into your lap this week?

It’s shaping up to be another highlights-style blog week around here. Summer classes move at the speed of light — I already have to be working on final papers and projects, ack!

This week’s featured breakfast started here:

I had frozen the rest of last week’s CSA strawberries on Friday, so I pulled those out of the freezer and let them simmer in a covered pan with about 1/2 cup of water. I added 2 tbsp ground flax, boiled a few minutes longer, and then added 1/2 cup BRM Scottish Oatmeal. Before this, I was under the impression that Scottish oatmeal and Irish (steel-cut) oatmeal were the same (and I’m sure my Scotch–Irish ancestors are rolling in their graves right now). But, if you look closely, you can see that the Scottish oatmeal is not as uniformly chopped as steel-cut.

In my opinion, more texture = more fun, so I was thrilled with the textural variety of these! I didn’t really cook the oats — I just mixed them into the hot strawberry-flax mix and added more things like plain yogurt, chia seeds, and goji berries. The resulting pudding the next morning was thick and creamy and chewy, just as I had hoped!

I layered the strawberry-oat-seed pudding with plain pumpkin for a parfait effect:

I topped the parfait with a sample packet of Fitnutz Butter, the “regular” variety this time. I still prefer PB2 (well, I really prefer real peanut butter, but we’re talking about powders here!), but the creamy texture of the Fitnutz did lend itself well to the parfait setup.

(I also tried the Fitnutz Pro with “added essential fatty acids.” The ingredients list (peanut powder, sugar, salt) is the same, but somehow it struck me as having more of a sesame flavor. And I still prefer PB2!) 

I topped the reconstituted peanut butter with unsweetened coconut and a chopped square of Newman’s espresso dark chocolate (sooooooo good!). And if you look closely, you can see my homemade balls in the background!

 

I used soymilky Numi emperor’s puerh black tea to go along with the tapioca. I prefer my bubble tea iced, so I brewed a big pot of the tea on Sunday and have just been storing it in the fridge so that it’s ready to go when the balls start calling!

What is your favorite powdered product (food or non-food)?

P.S. Remember my French toast challenge? True to her word, Brandi went ahead and French-toasted her donuts! Go check out the heart-hammering results 😀

For Sunday morning brunch, Rachel, Jaime, and I went to Dizzy’s, a Park Slope brunch institution.

Dizzy’s is located a mere five blocks from my apartment, yet I’ve somehow managed to avoid eating there for the four years that I’ve been living in this neighborhood!



Rachel and Jaime wanted to get on the road so they could get home to MA before it got too late, so I suggested Dizzy’s because I knew it opened at 9am. (Most Sunday brunches around here don’t start until much later.)

I knew we had made the right choice when this basket made its way to our table!

We had two blueberry mini-muffins, one apricot mini-muffin, a biscuit, and strawberry butter. For the most part, I have no need for butter in my life. I could have eaten this strawberry butter by the spoonful, though! It was amaaaaaaaaazing.

Rachel ordered this beautiful giant bowl of fruit, yogurt, and honey. (It came with granola, too, but she ordered extra fruit and yogurt in place of it.) It’s so refreshing to find a restaurant that realizes “fruit salad” needs to consist of more than cantaloupe and honeydew! This salad had strawberries, blueberries, kiwi, pineapple, mango, banana, and pears:

Jaime ordered the amaretto French toast topped with pecans:

I had a bite and it was the most decadent-tasting thing ever … but I did not taste any amaretto?

Normally, I am all about sweet breakfasts, but I needed something salty after being out so late the night before!

I crafted my own mix-and-match breakfast because I was having a hard time deciding between huevos rancheros and the omelet special with red pepper, spinach, parsley, and feta. I decided to combine the best of each!

I ordered the omelet special made with egg whites and asked for guacamole on the side 😀 The omelet also came with super hearty whole grain seedy bread that was probably baked fresh (and the strawberry butter was a match made in heaven for it, fyi):

Ooooh that was so good. You may not normally think to combine feta and guac, but every time I do it, I remember what an excellent pair they make!

In place of the home fries (if you recall, I loathe potatoes), I asked for some of that fresh and fruity salad:

The verdict: we loooooooooved Dizzy’s! It’s a little too pricey for every weekend, though. The only brunch option is fixed price: $12.95 for the bread basket, entree, juice, and unlimited coffee/tea and $14.95 if you want to include alcoholic beverages. With all my special requests, my non-alcoholic breakfast came to $14.95, not including tax and tip. Could have been worse, though! If you have the money, the food is definitely worth the price.

What role does butter play in your life? Does flavor matter? (And I’m not talking about all-fruit butters like apple butter or pumpkin butter here!)