Nut safety (and a winner!!)

April 13, 2009February 6, 201516 Comments

First things first. It’s time to announce the winner of the Everybody’s Nuts Pistachi-YES giveaway! Random.org has made its selection from the 93 entries (including comments, link-backs, and emails from non-bloggers), and the winner is #78:

Amie: The nut recall makes me sad because then nuts get a bad name.

Amie, I will be emailing you soon to arrange for delivery of some safe and disease-free nuts 😛

Onto the food!

As I was sipping my sugar cookie sleigh ride tea at 9:23 am this morning, I noticed one of the nurses set a promising foil-wrapped platter down on the other end of the conference room table, along with a pile of plates and knives. This could only mean one thing: cake. I didn’t want to seem too eager, so I whispered across to Rosey that there was cake in the conference room, and she hopped right up and headed down to get the ball rolling. And it turned out to be banana walnut, yum! Here’s my piece, heated in the microwave and then slathered in whipped vanilla frosting that I found in the fridge:

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The cake kept me going until lunchtime, when I broke out another fun treat: butternut squash, ground beef, and eggplant shepherd’s pie from mom! She packed this big slice in the food bag I brought home from MA yesterday.

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I think there’s kale in there, too? I had it on a bed of arugula. It was perfect and yummy and tasted like mom’s cooking because that’s what it was. I wish I had more!

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I also had a bite of Vianni’s tasty tuna macaroni salad:

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And finished Mildred’s salad for her:

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And two of Mildred’s daughter Adriana’s chicken nuggets:

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I haven’t had chicken nuggets in years! Somehow, they tasted better than I remember …

Post-lunch was a blood orange. I shared half with my coworkers (finally, they liked the looks of something I brought in!) since they were intrigued by the color. None of them had ever seen or heard of a blood orange before.

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I also had some blurry yogurt art made from fruit salad and yogurt that traveled from MA to NY with me yesterday:

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I was hungry again by 2:30 and had a cheese stick, also courtesy of mom:

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The final mom treat of the day came at 4:30. I broke up two of mom’s kitchen sink muffins (she sent me home with a ton yesterday!) and spread about a tbsp of cashew-almond butter over them before microwaving to get it all melty, YUM:

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It’s probably worth mentioning that I left my Newman’s mints at home by accident, so lots of other candies made their way into my belly throughout the day.

I stayed late at work because I was planning to go to the 6:30 gyrotonic class at Kinespirit with the free coupon Melissa gave out at the blogger brunch last month. I was somehow still feeling a little bit underfed when I left work and knew I would need to last until I got home at 8:30, so I had an emergency spoonful of the office’s extra chunky Skippy:

That did the trick!

I was very unsure of what to expect from the gyrotonic, but it ended up being just what I needed tonight. I’ll have to talk about it more in my next post because I’m too tired now!

What’s the best exercise class you’ve ever taken?

Phew, that was close!

April 12, 2009February 6, 201520 Comments

Today had the potential to be yet another monster of an expansion day, but my tummy is kind of relieved that it was not!

When I got up this morning, I went downstairs (ohhh, to live in a multi-level house again …) to the living room so I could do my Self Challenge 2009 workout. What can I say … I’m serious about fixing my legs! I can feel my poor little muscles getting stronger again, too, and I was able to do some of the exercises that hurt too much to do last week, yay!

My dad picked me up a bit after 11 am, and we headed over to LA Roberts, a NaMA (that’s coolspeak for North Attleboro, MA) restaurant, to enjoy Easter all-you-can-eat brunch with Rae Ann (my stepmom) and her family.

Some background on LA Roberts: it was the fanciest place in town in 1987. In 1987, I distinctly remember that the all-you-can-eat brunch included yogurt because it was the only thing I would eat. The famed LA Roberts brunch seems to have devolved over time because there was no yogurt this morning, hmph. Nor was there cereal, toast, peanut butter, or jam.

The brunch did, however, come through with lots of lukewarm serve-yourself buffet platters full of foods that are not my favorite: ham, sausage, hash browns, other potato things, scary quiche. Because I’m good at scavenging, however, I put together a lovely little big spread.

Let’s play a game. I’ll show you a picture of the item, and you see if you can guess what it is. I’ll provide the answers at the end.

Item #1:

Item #2:

Item #3:

Item #4:

Item #5:

How do you think you did?

The answers, clockwise from the beans: (1) baked beans (I found them in a tin between the maple syrup and the whipped cream, hmmm), (2) broccoli (I spooned out all the broccoli from a giant vat of chicken penne alfredo), (3) fruit salad topped with apples in syrup (I found this teeny bit of fruit salad on a table by itself in the corner, floating in a flood of its own juices … or the juices of its originating can), (4) piece of berry scone (yes, the scones were pre-cut into fourths, but that ended up being fine with me since it was actually too sweet, if you can believe that coming from me, the cake queen. I ate half and gave the other half to my dad), and (5) the star of the show, a slice of French toast with thawed frozen strawberries.

I think I managed to do pretty well for myself, and I was pleased the the food was good enough to eat but not good enough to lead to further expansion.

The company was also quite enjoyable. My step-uncle (?) David brought bunny ears for everyone to wear. My dad was serious about arranging his perfectly. It was clearly a multi-step process:

As soon as we finished eating and the bunny ears were properly arranged, we all headed back to my dad and stepmom’s house to relax for a few before I had to leave to catch the bus. I received some fun Easter goodies that will surely be making an appearance quite soon.

At 2:15, dad and I left to go pick up my mom so they could both take me to the bus station in Providence. I heard through the grapevine that, after the big drop-off , my mom went back to my dad’s house to hang out with my stepmom’s family and they all passed a lovely afternoon together.

What a whirlwind trip! It’s relatively easy to get to MA from here, but I so rarely have the time and it always ends up being very rush rush rush. I hope I can go back for a more leisurely visit this summer!

As you know already, my bus came equipped with Wi-Fi. So excited that Peter Pan is moving with the times! If only my computer could have lasted longer without a charge …

On the bus, I ate my packed “snunch” of 1/2 cup matzo muesli with 1/2 cup plain yogurt and a cup of fruit left from yesterday’s chocolate fountain. Pardon the blur. We had some bumpy roads, and I wasn’t about to wait for smoothness to dive into this!

I got back to my apartment just before 8 and made a little snacky plate while I raced around to get ready for the week. The plate included the final two pieces of pumpernickel baguette with cashew-almond butter and coconut, a pile of peanut roasted chickpeas, and some overflow fruit salad from home that I couldn’t fit into a container for the fridge.

I also had this itty bitty piece of a slice of my mom’s birthday cake.

She saved and froze (now you know where my dessert-freezing compulsion comes from) the slice for me from her birthday celebration with my step-dad’s family. Wallen, step-grandpa (I’m realizing I’ve never had to explain these family members in writing before, so I’m suddenly having to concoct labels I’ve never actually used!), makes the most amazing chocolate fudge frosting from scratch, so my mom requests it on yellow cake every year.

I’m in bed now and it’s wayyyyyyyyyy past my bedtime — not how I wanted to start the week! — so I need to hit the sheets stat.

What is your favorite activity when traveling as a passenger in any kind of vehicle? Sleeping is mine.

Don’t forget about the pistachios!

It’s raining chocolate

April 12, 2009February 6, 201518 Comments

Happy Easter!

I’m blogging live from the Peter Pan bus back to NY … as long as my battery lasts (which is probably not much longer). What an exciting new development for the world of bussing.

Yesterday seems like about 10 years ago, but I’ll try to remember. It would be a tragedy to leave out any details. I got home from dinner(s) with my sister on Friday night around 12:30 and spent the next hour or so packing. After four whole hours of sleep, my alarm went off at 5:40 am, and I crawled out of bed to get moving so I could catch the 7:30 am bus up to Providence from Port Authority. At 10ish, I had my packed bus breakfast with 1/2 cup matzo muesli soaked in 1/2 cup unsweetened soymilk overnight:

Doesn’t it look like cat food?

I dumped a cup of fruit salad (strawberries, pineapple, plum) on top:

My dad picked me up at the bus terminal in Providence at 11:15 and dropped me off at my mom’s house. As soon as I walked in the door, she instantly stuck one of her just-baked famous kitchen sink muffins into my mouth. It was obviously delicious even though I was still stuffed from all my dinners the night before.

I spent the next hour sleeping blogging, and we headed off to my aunt and uncle’s house for our seder at 1:30. I snacked on two teeny pretzel sticks before we got started:

After some chatting time, we all took our (assigned) seats to carry out our super abbreviated version of a seder. We’re pretty informal in my family, and now that there’s a new generation of babies around, we have to move quickly! Here’s some of the Haggadah we’ve been using since I was teeny. I think my grandma wrote it all out way back so that it would be easy for young ears to understand. It’s very cute:

Here’s the seder plate (decorated by my cousins in their younger years!). These foods are all there for symbolism, so we don’t actually eat what’s on this plate. It just sits there taunting us the whole time 😛 There’s charoset, maror, karpas, an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a lamb shank:

And of course, we had some Manishewitz going. It’s the only type of wine I like!

As we went around the table reading the Haggadah, we pinky-dripped wine drops onto a plate to represent each of the 10 plagues, plus a list of modern plagues we added in to keep things relevant. Here’s my cousin Joshua pinky-modeling:

As I mentioned, each food has a meaning, and we finally get to start eating each thing as we get to it in the Haggadah. Here’s the legend:

Charoset is my FAVORITE part (well, maybe tied with my mom’s matzo balls) of Passover. My Aunt Sherye makes it each year — basically mashed up apples, honey, wine, walnuts, etc. Once we hit it in the Haggadah, I always end up inhaling pretty much the table’s whole bowl. So consider this photo a small token of my pre-meal meal of charoset.

The maror is the red — horseradish mixed with some beet juice. I hated it when I was younger, but I love it now. The heat and bite of the maror mixes perfectly with the sweet charoset. Seriously, picture me eating an entire box of matzo topped with mountains of maror and charoset. Because that’s what happened.

Gefilte fish … another Passover staple that I hated when I was younger. I don’t know why I love it so much now since it’s just kind of a reformed patty of mashed random white fish. But I’m claming my love. Gefilte fish, I love you.

And mama’s matzo ball soup!! No two batches are ever the same. This year’s batch was light and fluffy and delicious … and mom is sending me home with a whole container full of them so that Passover can keep giving and giving over the next several months 🙂 I had two bowls:

And then it was time for the main meal. Because the five meals’ worth of food I had just eaten were simply teasers. We had turkey with cranberry sauce:

Eggplant parmesan:

And lots and lots of salad with balsamic and olive oil:

We took a little breather to digest. I played with my first-cousins-once-removed, Lilly and Jonah. We built things with blocks and then bulldozed them:

And then, it was time for dessert! Well, time to prepare dessert since my mom was learning how to set up the chocolate fountain she’s had sitting brand-new in the box for a few years. While the fountain’s motor was revving, we all snacked on the candy fruit slices I bought during my Jewish shopping spree the other day. I had at least one of each:

And then we got the fountain running!!

I managed to snap this picture during the 7.59 seconds it was running before the motor gave out and the chocolate fountain became chocolate fondue. We didn’t have a problem with that. Melted chocolate is melted chocolate 🙂

I had at least three huge plates full of chocolate and all the fixings: strawberries, oranges, pineapple, pears, apples, bananas, and cubes of the blood orange Passover sponge cake I made the other day:

When the chocolate got low, dipping got hard and it was time to resort to finger-swiping and licking. Uncle Jim and mom in action:

I pounced on the spoon:

And made short work of the dregs.

Once there was really nothing left, I stopped and sat for a while alternately holding my belly and playing with the kids. It was so fun to visit with my cousins and have some family time since it’s pretty rare we all get together. I wish we could do it more often!

dd_protal_07 At 6, my mom, stepdad, and I had to race out of there and head to Boston for our evening engagement: Dirty Dancing On Stage!!

I literally grew up watching
Dirty Dancing — I remember coming home from first grade every day and immediately popping the VHS in the player. I knew every word … and apparently I still do! The musical was SO TRUE to the video, and I loved it! If you have any special place in your heart for Dirty Dancing, you need to do everything in your power to go see it right now! The music, the dancing, the story … it was all perfect (except for Johnny’s native Australian accent that kept popping out every so often).

I was still stuffed from the big seder when we got home at night, so there wasn’t much more eating going on. Oh, except for when my mom offered to squirt half a can of whipped cream into my mouth while my fingers were busy typing … and I accepted. I did take photos, but believe me when I say they are totally not blog-appropriate!

Today was the big Easter buffet with my dad and stepmom’s family, so I’ll report bag later with all of that once I’m back home in Brooklyn. My battery’s going to give out pretty soon!

Did you feel expanded at any point during this weekend? Was it worth it? My expansion was definitely worth it, but I’m also really looking forward to getting back to normal eating tomorrow!

Remember, tomorrow (Monday) is your last chance to enter the pistachio giveaway. Get your entries in by 6pm!

Theatrical tea

April 11, 2009February 6, 201513 Comments

While Emily napped yesterday (for four hours!), I took care of some business of my own … and snacked of course!

Jasmine tea biscotti bites (with soymilked yogi mexican sweet chili tea in the kitty mug):

And the last 2 tbsp of my Total Cranberry Crunch sample with splash of soymilk:

I also got this recipe for peanut roasted chickpeas (from The Peanut Butter Boy) underway after my developmentally delayed chickpeas took nearly 24 hours to cook. I’ve never had that happen before. Once the chickpeas were finally tender, the roasting took an hour and a half (twice the amount of time in the recipe!), probably because my oven is old and slow. They also weren’t tasting peanutty enough, so I added lots of extra PB2 and a big pile of cashew-almond butter.

They still weren’t all that peanutty once they were done and crunchy, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t addictive! I snacked on about a tablespoon of them. Three or four times.

I’m pretty sure there was also some straight-out-of-the-jar cashew-almond butter action 🙂

I roused Emily from her slumber around 12:30 so she could start getting ready for the afternoon while I pulled together a sister lunch for us. We started on arugula salads with Newman’s dried berries, chopped dates, fat free feta, peanut roasted chickpeas, and Annie’s Lite Gingerly Vinaigrette:

I also made us steak and spinach wraps. I made the wraps from scratch as usual (for 2: 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1 tbsp olive oil, dash salt, teeny bit of water to pull it all together). I gave the perfect one to Em, but mine got a little extra toasted — fine because I love the crunch, but troublesome because it wouldn’t wrap.

For the wrap filling, I sauteed the last 1/3 cup of leftover steak Nydia gave me on Friday with about 3 cups of spinach, 1/2 a baby onion, and 1 tbsp of the sofrito I made the other day. I split the sauteed mix between the two wraps and added a teeny bit of gouda to each, a bunch of grated homemade parmesan, and a huge pile of arugula:

For dessert, Emily and I split one of the little tangerines she’d brought for airplane snacking:

We hung around and chatted for a bit, and then we headed to Gramercy to drop her luggage off at her friend’s apartment. From there, we walked down to the Lower East Side in the general direction of dinner #1 (yes, there was more than one dinner on the agenda last night). We were running a little bit ahead of schedule, so Em asked if I’d like to stop into Whole Foods for samples. She knows me so well!

Pistachio ice cream and camembert (not in the same bite obviously):

Cranberry granola and maple granola (and unpictured similar cups of blueberry granola and berry medley granola):

For dinner #1, we met Emily’s friend Yan at Stanton Social. We ate way too much in light of the fact that we were going to head right off to another dinner, but what else is new? I’ll have a full review of the dinner and the expansion coming along shortly.

After that first dinner, we took a walk around the block to “burn it off” and, while doing so, to sample a peanut butter cookie piece and an m&m cookie piece from Sugar:

We still had about 30 minutes to kill — and I had a camera battery in need of charging — so we stopped into teany for a spot of tea. We ordered a performance by tea #33. Watch the process:

Fully charged and partially digested, we left teany around 9:30 to go meet Emily’s friends Megan (the birthday girl!) and Aimee at Apizz for another expansion-inducing festival of deliciousness. I’ll have a full review of this one coming along shortly, too. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my favorite quote of the night. The waiter asked if we’d like more bread for the table, and Megan responded:

Why not? I’m trying to get in as many calories as possible before I turn 40 in an hour and a half!

So we got more bread 😀

I’ll be back with like 10,000 more food updates eventually, so brace yourselves.

In the meantime, what’s the most exciting tea you’ve ever experienced?

And remember to enter this giveaway by Monday for the chance to win your very own stash of safe pistachios!

A number of things

April 9, 2009February 6, 201518 Comments

I’ll start with scenery.

My kitchen looked pretty in late morning sunlight:

And flowers were blooming out my bedroom window:

In all the spring excitement, I went for my first real run in about a week and a half, and it was glorious! I ran in capris and no sleeves because Brooklyn decided it would let spring visit for a day. Again, I felt some groin/gluteal (ugh, how much longer am I going to have to say that?) discomfort and found that I had to take much shorter strides than normal, but nothing was overly anxiety-provoking. I ran slowly and carefully and pictured the yoga string pulling the crown of my head straight up 🙂 Stats: 3.83 miles, 46.5 minutes, 352 calories, 145 average heart rate, 171 maximum heart rate. I came home, did the 20-minute Yoga for Runners #1 from yogadownload.com, and then iced for 20 minutes. I’ve got a bit more of a limp now than I did pre-run, but that’s to be expected.

Look what I encountered during my cool-down walk home!

This is what I love about my neighborhood. We’ve got this unofficial swap system. If you don’t want something, you just leave it out on your stoop. It will be gone within the hour 😀 I went through everything and picked out and washed what I wanted. The remainders will go back out on my stoop. Here’s what I’m keeping:

(You can’t tell from the picture, but there are nine plates there: 5 with the design, 1 plain blue, 2 white, and 1 clear glass. I feel like I just got back from a shopping spree at Crate & Barrel.)

I had a lovely lunch today. I sauteed the last of my asparagus and portabello with curry butter with spinach stems, roasted red pepper, and 1/4 cup of steak left from Nydia’s lunch at work yesterday. I also added in a tsp of sofrito that I made the other day using Inginia’s recipe (cilantro, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, ancho, onion) and a packet of magic seasoning that Vianni donated. This is what helps all my coworkers feed me deliciously authentic Dominican delicacies 🙂

Final product:

I had the sauteed mix on a bed of spinach and arugula with four Newman’s spelt pretzels crumbled on top for crunch:

Arugula, how I love you.

I also spent a large chunk of today whipping up a batch of jasmine tea biscotti bites to send to Kelsey, the highest bidder on these in Meghann’s bake auction. Some of the cookie dough did not make it into the oven. Instead, it garnished my dessert: a pile of pineapple with a dollop of plain Oikos and a sprinkle of cardamom (on a new plate!).

Picture that cookie dough times about 4. That’s probably closer to what I actually consumed.

I spent a different chunk of today baking a Passover-friendly sponge cake to bring home this weekend. Details on that will come later. In the meantime, there was batter:

Rest assured, the batter is now gone. Phew. I will let you use your imagination to figure out where it went. Hint: it did not go down the drain. Where did the batter go? And are you in charge of making anything exciting this weekend?

Win some salmonella-free pistachios!

Tales of Expansion: Baby Butternut Edition

A Natural(ish) Parenting & Food Blog

Tag: lunch

Nut safety (and a winner!!)

Phew, that was close!

It’s raining chocolate

Theatrical tea

A number of things

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