Freeee (for 10 days)

May 21, 2009February 6, 201514 Comments

We all know I love free things! Now that my last class is over and I’m flying up 95 N on the Peter Pan, I feel freer than ever 🙂

In class, we did in fact have a little celebration. My professor is retiring, as of today, so she brought in coffee and lots of bagel-y goodness. Here’s napkin #1 with a “mini” everything bagel spread with whipped butter and two Italian cookies, including a slice of rainbow cookie perfection, in the background:

If you look very very closely in the background, you can see the bottom of the cup that holds my contribution to the event: Golden Star Sparkling White Jasmine Tea. I’ve zoomed in a bit in the picture on the right. I first sampled this tea at Whole Foods and got super excited about it. I don’t like champagne or wine, and I always feel like I should be at the kids’ table when I ask for sparkling cider at events. Sparkling tea has a much classier ring to it (not to mention that I love jasmine tea anyway). This tea is mostly non-alcholic (something like 0.5%), but it definitely has a more grown-up taste to it because it still goes through a fermentation process. And my class worked through the bottle I brought to share quite rapidly!

Napkin #2 had another half of an everything bagel with “1/3 less fat” cream cheese, plus some more Italian cookie crumbs.

And finally, napkin #3 had just a couple more cookies!

A few more cookies may or may not have found their way into my mouth after that, too. Whenever I see a platter of pretty colorful cookies (or pretty colorful anything, for that matter), I absolutely have to one of each. And fast — before they disappear! It’s a problem.

Anyway, like I said, I’m blogging from the bus and expect to make it to Providence just in time to join my mom and stepdad for a PawSox game! Can’t think of a better way to kick off the summer 🙂

Does the “prettiness” of foods, especially of desserts, affect your interest in eating them?

Tres leches, tres veces

May 20, 2009February 6, 201514 Comments

I’m speaking in Spanish again, so clearly I spent the day at a work event. And if I spent the day at a work event, you know that also means there was no shortage of food. The first order of business on the “mission retreat” agenda was lunch!

Here’s my plate:

I had half of a grilled chicken and avocado wrap:

Green salad:

And some pasta salad:

All delicious, obv. On the side, I had a cup (probably equal to about two cups) of tropical fruit salad (papaya, mango, pineapple, watermelon, strawberries, oranges, and grapes):

I had seconds of the green salad and seconds and thirds of the fruit salad 😛

After lunch, we did a lot of ice breakers (fun ones, believe it or not!), reviewed the history of the agency, listened to a panel discussion by clients we’ve helped, broke into small discussion and reflection groups … and then it was time for cake!!! (Of course.)

Here’s my first slice of the beautiful tres leches (not as milky as the one I had last night, though!) along with two of Dorothy’s homemade oatmeal cookies:

I supplemented with two jammy Pepperidge Farm cookies:

And then proceeded to have two more slices of cake, one of which was mostly frosting:

Since it was mostly frosting, it was ideal for dipping tortilla chips. I dipped quite a few, like so:

We ended the retreat with a conga line and a daisy exchange. When I got home, I carefully arranged my daisies in the spread-eagle bunny bowl:

Food aside, this “retreat” managed to get me even more excited about working where I do (as if I needed it). That’s usually the goal of most company retreats, but I think they rarely accomplish it so successfully!

On the way home, I stopped into Union Market for a sample handful of peanut butter-filled pretzels:

After all of this indulgence, I was thrilled when Vani invited me to join her and Arthur (her dog) for a walk in the park. We ended up walking for nearly two hours! She also gave me a pack of stale Fig Newman’s that she didn’t want to throw away because she realized after opening them that they weren’t vegan and thought they would make a good “expansion challenge.” I liked her suggestion of grinding them up to make a pie crust. Keep your eyes peeled because this may be coming soon to a blog near you 🙂

For “dinner,” I just threw together a quick yet wildly delicious snack of chips and salsas left from the restaurant last night with the rest of my humbecuemole and a string cheese stick that my mom donated a while back. I got it melty in the oven and then topped it with some plain yogurt:

I’m off to get some packing done now because I’m planning to head straight up to MA tomorrow after my class (the last of the semester, finally!). I’m looking forward to a few days of true summer relaxation because I always feel like I should be doing stuff when I’m here in NY. Do you need to leave town to relax?

Something new

May 19, 2009May 21, 201715 Comments

I woke up super late today (10:00!!) for the third morning in a row — I think my mind is finally recovering from racing all semester long! I’m not sure if this is a good thing, though, since it is going to need to resume racing faster than ever in June.

Because it was so late, I put together a different and very simple breakfast:

I sliced an apple in half, cored it, and baked it covered in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes:

The apple got transferred to a plate, and I filled its core with a tsp or so of Artisana almond butter (which, strangely, tasted sort of chemically to me, even though almonds are the only ingredient. Maybe it’s the rawness?) and then sprinkled unsweetened coconut and cinnamon over the top:

It was sooo yummy and did the trick to hold me over for the hour or so I needed until lunch.

Sadly, I’m out of greens (I ate them all yesterday!) and don’t want to buy more since I’m tentatively planning to go visit my parents in MA this Thursday night through Tuesday. I put together a fun snacky plate on a cutting board so I could transfer it to the couch with me for TV time (oh, this is the life!) post-photo.

The spread included carrot sticks with humbecuemole (2 tbsp my hummus, 1 tsp Country Bob’s BBQ, and 1/8 mashed avocado):

An Eggland’s Best peeled and hard-boiled egg, heated and topped with spray butter and freshly ground black pepper:

And a contribution from these new finds:

Last week, my roommate Tara alerted me to this new fruit called Peppadew that she had discovered in the course of researching catering options for a work event. I found it a little strange that this fruit is actually owned, but I still had to test it out regardless. For now, I think Peppadew is only available from the online store, though the Chop’t restaurants in NY have a salad with it.

Spicy and sweet (just like me, haaaaaaa):

They were both pretty tasty — kind of a pickle-y sweet pepper taste with more of an apricot texture. The spicy one had a yummy zing to it, but I wouldn’t call it hot-spicy. I got adventurous with a sweet peppadew and added it to my yogurt:

But it looked lonely with that hole, so I stuffed it with some Artisana cacao bliss 🙂

The yogurt also had lucuma powder, goji berries, 1/3 sliced banana, blackberries and BRM hulled hemp seeds:

Before this, I had never tried hemp seeds. I was pleasantly surprised. They had a toasty (probably because I toasted them in a dry pan first!) and nutty flavor that I loved. I hope I can get around to some baking experiments with them soon.

What is the latest produce item you’ve tried for the first time?

Missy’s got free bread on her hands! Go check it out 🙂

And Coconutgal has free Coconut Bliss ice cream, YUMMMMMM!

Do it myself?

May 16, 2009February 6, 201519 Comments

Lunch was going to be so easy to talk about … until I got carried away! I had both tahini and chickpeas on hand, and since I already made hummus yesterday, falafel was clearly in order for today!

I loosely used this recipe but of course changed almost everything. I soaked 1/4 cup dry chickpeas in two inches of water overnight. This morning, I drained the chickpeas and then immersion-blended them with the rest of the recipe ingredients. I was making a much smaller batch than what was in the recipe, so I eyeballed/tasted the measurements for everything else. I think I ended up using an overly high ratio of wet things to the chickpeas, so my batter was too wet. I soaked up the extra moisture with about 1/4 cup coarse blue cornmeal:

The resulting mix was still a bit wet, but significantly stickier.

Instead of frying, I decided to bake. I heated the oven to 350 and lined a cookie sheet with parchment. I divided the batter into six balls.

After about 20 minutes in the oven, the balls had flattened somewhat as I had expected they would due to the wet batter.

I let them cool enough to handle and then reformed them into balls, flipped them, and popped them in the oven for another 15 minutes.

And then, for extra measure, I put the falafel under the broiler (minus the parchment paper) for 5 minutes to get them sufficiently crisped.

For the tahini dressing, I mixed the rest of the baby Artisana jar of tahini (about 2 tsp) with 2 tbsp plain yogurt and sprinkles of coriander, cumin, cayenne, and garlic salt & pepper.

I had three of the falafel balls for lunch on a big bed of arugula and topped it with half of the tahini (I’m saving the other half for the other three balls).

They were perfectly crunchy (thanks to the cornmeal) and crisp on the outside and moist on the inside:

It was no Mamoun’s, of course, but it was close!

On the side, I had a mini arugula salad with a couple tbsp tuna humbangu (I was craving that as well) with a dollop of roasted red pepper hummus for color:

Together:

I needed chocolate after this meal, so I went for the other half of my UliMana raw hemp brownie from last night:

I don’t even think brownie is the right word for this. It’s like a solid, perfect, grainy block of dark dark chocolate fudge. Ahhhh. I need to do more research into raw “cooking” and find out how to make this for myself!

I had a few more snacks throughout the afternoon. The rest of my Newman’s spelt pretzels (about 3/4 serving) with 2 more tbsp hummus:

Yerba mate and a plummy gummy:

A raw macaroon:

A hard-boiled egg with pepper:

And a mug of soymilky Numi Emperor’s Puerh tea. Following the instructions on the bag, I brought “regal waters” to a boil and steeped for 3-5 minutes “to capture the full taste of this majestic tea.” Numi describes this black tea as bold and malty, and I certainly needed both of those this evening! I’m still dragging from my restless doggy night last night, and I’m heading out to a birthday party in a few — my goal is to last longer than an hour there. Hopefully, the tea helps. So far, it just tastes like regular black tea. Word is that the party will have food, too, so that’s why I kept my evening eating to a minimum.

What do you want to learn to make for yourself?

Humbangu

May 15, 2009February 6, 201517 Comments

Hummmmmm, what does that title mean?

Wellll, I’ve been wanting to try Bender’s humbecue sauce forEVER, and today seemed as good a time as any! Except, I didn’t have any hummus. What I did have, however, was a serving of collard greens and BBQ baked beans in the freezer from ages ago.

I also had a serving of cauliflower-mangu left, and that’s kind of the texture of hummus, right?

I had initally planned to immersion-blend everything, greens and all … but then one of the greens jumped into my mouth and tasted so good that the rest followed. So, I just blended the BBQ beans and the mangu.

Next, I broke out some fancy tuna in olive oil.

I’ve been noticing this Cole’s brand of tuna (and other fishies) in some gourmet grocery stores lately because the packaging is so pretty. I recently starting liking canned tuna, and I only discovered this from being fed foods that contained it. So I don’t think I’ve ever actually opened a can of tuna myself. Until today.

I was so impressed with the quality of the tuna in this can! It wasn’t mushy at all and was so tightly packed that it flaked apart almost like a piece of tuna steak:

Very promising. I dumped the can of tuna (minus the olive oil, which I drained into a baby Artisana jar for another time because tuna-infused olive oil might come in handy at some point!) into the humbangu sauce:

Since I combined three meals to make this tuna humbangu, I incorporated 1/3 of the total mix into my lunch. Here’s my finished salad on a bed of arugula with the mangu’s hammy bits, some blackberries, the last of the tostones, and a teeny dollop of plain yogurt for presentation’s sake:

It was so so so so tasty!

Eventually, I made my way to the gym for some bicycling (no running!) and arms. When I got home, I decided that I needed to remedy the no-hummus situation. I cooked a bunch of chickpeas from dry and combined about 1/2 cup of them with a piece of roasted red pepper, Italian seasoning, a whole garlic clove, coarse sea salt, and 1/2 a baby jar of Artisana tahini.

After immersion-blending, I fork-mashed another 1/2 cup of chickpeas to mix in because I like it a little bit rough:

To fuel myself through the ever-so-grueling hummus work, I pulled out the rest of the yerba mate that I brewed this morning and left in the fridge. It had gotten even greener!!

Does anyone know how that happened?? You can see how white it was when hot in the previous post, and making it cold completely converted it to this vivid sea foam color. I love it.

I also had the last 1/4 cup of chickpeas that didn’t fit in the hummus:

Anyway, I got around to dinner eventually and mixed about 2 tbsp of my fresh roasted red pepper hummus with a chopped hard-boiled egg (once again, thanks to Eggland’s best for doing the boiling and peeling for me!). I had my egg salad atop a bed of arugula (lots of mushy arugula salads today, right?) with 1/8 chopped avocado, sprinkles of paprika and black pepper, and a few crushed Newman’s spelt pretzels:

For dessert, I had a slice of healthy cheesecake alongside half an Ulimana raw chocolate hemp brownie and 1 tsp pineapple-coconut-ginger peanut butter.

Yes yes yes, absolutely holy-yum worthy! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Ulimana definitely knows its way around a raw dessert … or any dessert for that matter!

Do you do anything wild with hummus?

Tales of Expansion: Baby Butternut Edition

A Natural(ish) Parenting & Food Blog

Tag: lunch

Freeee (for 10 days)

Tres leches, tres veces

Something new

Do it myself?

Humbangu

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