typical tuesday

I’ve been reminded twice in the last two days that people really do read this blog, and some are actually inspired by it!  So, here goes:  a typical post tracking the food I ate today.

Breakfast:  lemon water; oats, almonds, cinnamon, ginger, arugula, mango; traditional medicinals chai.  Haven’t heard back from Mom’s on my special order of chai.  Down to my last two packets.  Things are looking grim.

Lunch: chips and salsa, garden fresh lettuce (thanks, Susan) with black beans, avocado and pineapple; carrots and pickles.  Forgot my water again.  I have got to remember my water.  Meanwhile, what a bright and sunny day it was!  I spent all my money on new glasses and now I need sunglasses.  Oh my.

Dinner:  rare burger from BGR.  Ah, so tasty.  Just as rare as is legal to sell, the line cook warned me.  Lots of pickles.  I’ll get tomato just as soon as the tomatoes are in season.  They’re just flavorless mush until then.

Was I Sucre Libre today?  Hmmm.  Yes, yes, I was!  I bought some chocolate covered graham crackers but didn’t eat them so put me down for Sucre Libre Day 1.  Again!

shakin’ up Monday

Okay, so things didn’t shake up dramatically, but I tried something different than scrambled eggs and toast for dinner this Monday evening.  Poached egg and cornbread.  Whew eee!  I’m really living on the edge.  Thought you might appreciate the beauty of this dinner:  poached egg on a bed of fresh (homegrown) (thanks, Susan!) arugula drizzled with stone ground mustard; tangerine sections; cornbread and butter.  Ate it all while watching HIMYM, ’cause it’s best that some things never change.

Side note:  had some dark chocolate covered pretzels today.  Generally dark chocolate is exempt from Sucre Libre rules, but the way I went after that sweet and salty confection said it all.  Sucre Libre Day 0.   Ugh.

sweet and spicy cashews

Here’s a recipe that was a hit this weekend at my mini-housewarming party.  And yes, both the house and the party are/were “mini”.  These Sweet and Spicy Cashews come from a Bon Appetit recipe I’ve had in my file for sometime – not sure how long as I’ve been collecting Bon Appetit recipes for almost thirty years.  My grandmother gave me a subscription when I was 13 or so, and I’ve been getting the magazine and tearing out recipes ever since.

This was Sucre Libre Day 7, right up until Heidi showed up to the party with a fruit and custard tart from Heidelberg Bakery.  And then there were Kate’s cookies.  Please note that my cashews, however, are refined sugar free!

Sweet and Spicy Cashews

2 cups cashews (whole rather than pieces)

1/4 cup maple syrup

1 T cumin seed

1/4 t cayenne pepper

Toss all ingredients together.  Line a baking sheet with foil and spray with cooking spray.  Spread coated cashews onto foil and bake at 350 for 15 minutes or until golden brown, stirring occassionally.  Remove from oven and transfer to another baking sheet lined with cooking spray sprayed foil, allow to cool and then break up any clusters.  (Keep an eye on that first sheet of foil, all the syrup that dripped off is going to cool, harden, and make it’s own wonderful shattered-glass-like candy that is super tasty.)

life giving chocolate sauce

Dear Friends!  I’ve pulled my head up out of my morass of uselessness and self-pity (and what a deep morass it is) to share with you what may well be the magic elixir for any ailment:  chocolate sauce.  Make yourself a batch and take heart, I’ve been promised that those feelings of uselessness and self-pity will slip away, hopefully hastened by emergency ingestion of this chocolate sauce and the new meds the shrink prescribed for me this afternoon.

Chocolate Sauce

 

2 T raw cacao powder

1 T agave nectar

1 T coconut oil

 

Combine.  Use to drizzle, dunk, or just eat straight from the spoon.  (Scale up as needed.  This is a good little bowlful for one.)

zucchini soup monday

I’d love to tell you I was inspired by the warm weather, by a need for creativity in the kitchen, but something more noble than I just couldn’t stand to see one more zucchini go bad but, that is indeed the real reason I made zucchini soup tonight. Yes, yes, I’ll share the recipe.  I know you’ll soon be staring down the girth of a soon-to-be-soggy zucchini any day now.

Breakfast: lemon water; oats, almonds, ginger, cinnamon, mango, mache, almond milk, yogurt; traditional medicinals chai.  MOM’s is out of my chai.  Better be a short term thing but they took the label off the shelf and that can’t be good.

Lunch: rare burger from Burger Joint.  The guys at Burger Joint don’t know my name but they sure as heck know my order.  Completely forgot to take photo.  Met Eric in Old Town for a quick lunch; we got burgers and walked down to the fountain to eat them.  I think that’s called Town Square or something.  It is square…

Dinner:  zucchini soup, cornbread.  Following is the cool and creamy and way too easy soup recipe, let me know if you need the cornbread recipe.  I do that one a lot.  This time it came out better than ever.  Oh, I did dishes between breakfast and dinner, hence double dipping on the happy bowl.  Oh, and:  Sucre Libre Day 2.

Zucchini Soup

zucchini * avocado * salt * pepper* cayenne * coriander * lemon juice * apple cider vinegar

Put it all in a blender. Puree. 

Serve with a sprinkle of nutritional yeast if you’ve got it; a dollop of yogurt would be tasty, too.

slow stoop sunday

Got up early and got myself up to Baltimore for a 10am rehearsal for The Stoop; I’m in a show they’re doing in June.  It’s their “I Do” show, about holy and unholy matrimony.  I’m telling the tale of how my former spouse proposed.  It’s pretty funny, and hard to believe, but true, true, true.  Check out Stoop Storytelling for more info and to get your tickets (they always sell out).

Breakfast:  lemon water; oats, almonds, almond milk, yogurt, mango, mache, cinnamon, ginger; traditional medicinals chai.

Lunch:  amy’s black bean burrito, blue corn chips, black olives, avocado.

Dinner:  mahi mahi burger on whole wheat toast with avocado schmear and grilled pineapple; potato chips; lemon pepper broccoli.  My taste-vision of this “california mahi sandwich” was much better than the real thing.  Not sure why.  Maybe it would have been better on a hot day rather than a cloudy, dreary day.  Truth told, but the time I sat down at the table all I wanted was a big bowl of spaghetti bolognese.  This was definitely not spaghetti bolognese.

Dessert:  black bean brownie; Coconut Bliss Naked Coconut.  Delicious, but I think I gave myself too big a portion.  However, that concludes Sucre Libre Day 2!

swear off saturday

Today was all lined up to be a busy day.  Client in the morning, lunch with my parents, over to a friend’s for a visit, over to Eric’s to help plant some flowers, out to dinner and then a movie.  How is it weekend days are so much more busy than weekday days?  The day ended up easy then planned, my parents had to cancel lunch, sadly and there were no good movies out so Eric and I stayed home and watched hockey.  Leisurely.

Breakfast:  lemon water, hard boiled egg, mache, cinnamon toast, orange, traditional medicinals chai.  I was just crazy in the head craving that orange.

Lunch:  no recollection.  I often depend on the photos to remind me of what I ate in a day, but I’ve got no photo.  I think I was at home, so it must have been leftover something… nope, no idea what I had for lunch.

Dinner:  salad, pizza.  This is where the swear off part of the title of today’s post comes from.  Following this albeit delicious meal at Uno’s – that pizza had pepperoni, onion and eggplant – I begged Eric to not let me get pizza anymore.  I’m lactose intolerant.  Gluten makes me bloat.  Pizza is not my friend, but I love it so!  The denoument of the conversation was that pizza is okay once a quarter, but only from a new venue.  I’ve got a list of the “best pizza in DC”, so we’ll start to chisel away at that list.  But very infrequently.  And no more Uno’s, I mean, our pizza was undercooked again, in apology for which the manager kindly comp’d our salad, but jeez.

Dessert:  Coconut Bliss Vanilla, Pamela’s Ginger Cookies.  That’s the photo from the other day when I broke into the ‘ice cream’ and cookies.  Finished these off, and have achieved another Sucre Libre Day 1.

Sensorium DC!

Last night I attended Sensorium DC, a ten course tasting meal – slash – variety show being presented for just two more weeks down by the Navy Yard in DC.  These ingenuitive actors and chefs came together, set up a dining tent with a on-site kitchen and have been wow-ing audiences throughout the month of April.  And they’ve extended for two more weeks, so be sure to get your tickets and go, go, go!  Sensorium.com

I will share that I had my usual breakfast of oats and almonds with yogurt and mache; a salad at Cosi with my friend Holly for lunch.  I was very ready for dinner, and the evening of eating filled me up just fine.  If you happen to be a larger than life huge man with a teeming appetite, however, you may want to have a snack before dinner.  The ten courses are each appetizer size, and I’d hate for you to be hungry and a bit whiny about it all night long.

#1:  kir royale jellybean with magic crystals.

#2:  fennel salad.

#3:  gnocchi with peas and gorgonzola cream sauce, fresh cracked black pepper.  I love me some gorgonzola.

#4:  beet gazpacho with goat cheese.  A crowd pleaser.  Converted Eric past the “I don’t like beets” thinking.  Our table mates, Erica and Ashley, liked this one too.  Somewhere around this course we had a chance to get up and meet our fellow diners – which would have been dreadful for this introvert if everyone weren’t so friendly and in such good spirits. Good food has a way of doing that.

#5:  braised rabbit with caramelized onion.

#6: fried eggplant with honey and thyme.  I’ll be making this at home sometime soon.  Honey and thyme something, anyway.  Yum.

#7:  pork belly, asparagus and sweet potato.  I was so tickled when they set this tiny table and chair in front of me that I actually cried a little.  How delightful!  I loved it.

#8:  shrimp and clam, polenta.  Remind me to put lots of parmesan and capers in my next polenta.  Dear goodness.

#9: fried artichoke with heirloom tomato and balsamic reduction.  I’d pretty much eat tin cans if they were drizzled with a balsamic reduction.  This was much better, though.

#10:  oxtail ragout, yuca.  Warm and savory.

#11:  lemon pudding pop.  Of course they had a portable liquid nitrogen freeze table side contraption.  Doesn’t everyone?  Portions of pudding frozen instantly onto sticks.  Genius.

#12:  ricotta donuts with cayenne chocolate. I ate this with my fingers, wiping up every last bit of chocolate and powdered sugar.  Would have licked the plate if I hadn’t been wearing a dress, but I felt that way about every course.

#13:  (if you count the amuse bouche, the intermezzo and this, you get 13 courses)  magic bean.  I ate the magic bean, of course I did.  Don’t want to spoil the surprise, though. You simply must go to Sensorium.  Just go, already.  I didn’t even tell you about the singing, dancing, poetry and magic going on throughout the evening.  Fun, fun, fun!

Snack:  tres leches cake.  Had to stop by Whole Foods to get Eric some food. He was still hungry. He got indian food and some mashed potatoes and my eye fell on a piece of tres leches cake, which was moist and sweet and, with a cup of deep, dark decaf, the perfect end to the evening.

wednesday sucre libre day 3

I’ll tell you right off I have no plans to go past Sucre Libre Day 4.  More to the point, I have big plans to eat some sugar Friday night.  I’m going to Sensorium, and I’m going to eat everything they serve.  Should be an amazing night, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.  Meanwhile, I did accomplish 3 days Sucre Libre thus far, and here’s what today looked like:

Breakfast:  oats, apples, almonds, kale, ginger, cinnamon; lemon water; traditional medicinals chai.  Didn’t snap a photo.  Sat out on the porch to enjoy breakfast, was surprised to find breakfast to have the texture of wallpaper paste.  That usually doesn’t happen, but I usually use Bob’s Red Mill Thick Cut Oats, and today I used some no-brand rolled oats.  Would not have thought there would be such a difference.

Lunch:  eggsalad on sesame Ezekial toast, carrots, grapes, mache.  Hardboiled eggs from Easter. I liked it when I was a kid and the Pazs dyes would go through the cracks of the eggshell and the resultant eggsalad would be streaked with hot pink, blue and green.  That was cool.

Dinner:  catfish, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, garlicky kale.  Whole Foods buffet extraordinare.

Dessert:  vanilla island ice cream and ginger with sliced almond cookies, Numi honeybush tea.  Hoorah to CocoBliss for their agave sweetened frozen creaminess, and to Pamela‘s for her gluten free, molasses sweetened cookies.  Very tasty.

chocolate pudding: raw, vegan, sucre libre!

Here it is, the salve for these unusally hot April afternoons:  chocolate pudding that just about everyone can eat!  It’s dairy free, gluten free, sugar free, raw, vegan, cool, creamy and delicious.  Enjoy!

Chocolate Pudding

14 oz silken tofu

6 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted in microwave and cooled

2 T maple syrup

1 T vanilla extract

4 t raw cacao nibs

Combine tofu, melted chocolate, maple syrup and vanilla in a blender until smooth and creamy.  Pour pudding into four pudding cups and garnish with cacao nibs.  Refrigerate.  Eat.  Sigh with deep dark chocolate pleasure.