Cake Bowl

On my birthday this year I was fortunate enough to get to eat three different kinds of cake. Only one was intended as a birthday cake, but the way I look at it, if it's cake, and I'm eating it on my birthday, that stuff is birthday cake.

The first cake was a piece of Blueberry Buckle that Maureen made a few days earlier. This is more of a breakfast cake. It's a great way to get your day started right. To deflect any criticism that eating cake for breakfast is unhealthy, I really just need to reiterate that it is BLUEBERRY Buckle. It's got fruit in it, so that means it is, by definition, healthy.



The next round of cake-o-rama was at a party held for my friend and former boss Ron, who was just laid off after over 45 years of loyal service to the company. It's really quite sad. But the upside is that there was a cake at the party, and I got to eat a piece! Don't worry, Ron got some too, or at least I think he did. The message on the cake reads "Happy Refirement Ron".

If Ron didn't get any cake it's because he was too busy wading through the waist deep drifts of food at the party. Susan, who organized the event, spent the greater part of the party holding people down and alternating stuffing cheese cubes and pizza into their mouths. As Maureen and I were leaving Susan tied a barrel of pasta salad onto the roof of our car, and filled our trunk with pickled eggs.



At home after the party, the day of cake was kicking into high gear. This year Maureen made my favorite birthday cake, something we call "Bowl Cake". This is a kick-ass cake, though a little unorthodox. It's built in layers, with chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, cool-whip, and crumbled Heath Bar pieces. The downside is that it's a little hard to judge how much to dispense for yourself. Inevitably I take too much, but eat it all anyway. This can lead to eating so much that you feel like you're going to spew bowl cake in your lap by the time you're done. Like I said, really good cake.

All told it was a good day. Well, maybe not the bit about Ron being laid off, but if you just consider the part about me eating a lot of cake, it was an excellent birthday.

Egg salad sandwich

When I make an egg salad sandwich, I always like to make sure that there's more than enough egg salad involved. The egg salad is really the critical part of the egg salad sandwich. So it only makes sense to pile the stuff on. It also gives the sandwich a taller, more attractive, overfilled look, that better facilitates photographing the sandwich.



The downside is that when you go to actually eat the sandwich, about 1/3 of the egg salad squeezes out onto the plate, along with some of the pickles and mustard. That's cool though. It just means you get to have a side egg salad with your egg salad sandwich.

pizza bagel

The past couple days it's been pizza bagels. The pizza bagel is a nice way to feel like you're cooking something, when you really aren't. Cut a bagel in half, spread some sauce from a jar, sprinkle some cheese (pre-grated cheese), slice a little green pepper, and you can start to convince yourself that you're cooking something.

You aren't.

With the pizza bagel you can say to yourself, "I worked all day, I'm exhausted, and I want nothing more than to just pour milk into the box of Honey Nut Cheerios and shovel O's into my mouth with a ladle while watching Judge Judy till I pass out in a puddle of honey flavored dairy. But instead I'm cooking dinner for myself, just like the Pilgrims did."

But you're not.

Berry picking

On Monday Maureen and I went to a pick-your-own strawberry farm in our area. While Maureen toiled in the field harvesting fresh fruit, I wandered around shooting photos and picking the occasional berry that fell in my field of view.

I don't think I'm cut out to be a farm laborer, or really a laborer of any sort. I lack the physical and mental fortitude.

I do enjoy eating fresh strawberries though. Perhaps in our new economy there could be a job for me to eat the fresh fruit that the hardworking go-getters of our society harvest, wash, prepare, and place in front of me at a table in a clean bowl.

I just hope it pays well, has nice health insurance and a good 401k plan.

coffee habit

Sometimes I feel as though my need for a cup of coffee in the morning is a bad thing, a chemical dependency that's holding me back from true spiritual enlightenment, or something like that. I'll start entertaining the notion of giving up coffee and pursuing a more natural, wholesome way of living.

I imagine myself waking up each morning bursting with energy. I'll throw back the covers jump out of bed and say in a strong confident voice: "Good Morning World! Today's going to be a great day!" . Then I'd jog fifteen miles, paint the house, and spend twenty minutes meditating on some unanswerable Zen riddle in a rock garden I would've built in my backyard.

However the best part would be the smug sense of superiority I'd be able to have towards all those weak addicts that need their coffee every morning. I'd scoff at the way they can't function till they've had their morning Joe, laugh at their caffeine withdrawal headaches, and always make a point of somehow mentioning in conversations that "Oh, I don't drink coffee. Just don't need the stuff." After telling people about my non-coffee drinking superiority I'd demonstrate how much non-caffeine generated energy I have by doing back-flips while yodeling the Star Spangled Banner.

These thoughts usually come to me after I've just had my jumbo sized mug of java each morning. "I've got so much energy right now! Why would I need to drink coffee? Maybe I'll just stop drinking the stuff."

These intentions only ever last till the next morning.

Seafood

I had two different varieties of fish while out between assignments today. Swedish and Gold. The Swedes, as I've written about before, play an important role in helping me to get through trying days at work. The goldfish are comforting too, but in a different, salty way.

I'm not all that sure how I feel about the goldfish having those big grins though. Maybe they're just resigned to the idea of being eaten alive (headfirst if they're lucky, otherwise it's the slow painful death of going tailfirst) and are enjoying their last moments with their cheese flavored brethren.

It's still a little disturbing. Maybe they know something that I don't, and are actually getting the last laugh. Such as the impact that eating too many salty crackers and candy will have on the long term health of my heart and teeth. Those bastards.

Couscous

Last night Maureen made another recipe by Jeanne can't name her recipes right Lemlin. This one was from the cookbook "Quick Vegetarian Pleasures". The well written, wonderfully prepared, but poorly named recipe is called "Vegetable Couscous".

For this one I'm thinking "Kick-ass couscous" might work. That's still a work in progress though, I'll have to work on it some. It's a little too close "Kick-ass chocolate chip muffins".

Jeanne Lemlin should really start sending me royalty checks for all the help I'm giving her on recipe names. At the very least she could dedicate future editions of the book to me. Right now this one is dedicated to her husband and her mother. That would be easy enough to change.

HOAGIE NIGHT!!!!

Tonight was hoagie night!!! Yeah! Hoagie Night!!!

When faced with the option of going to an actual restaurant to order off the menu, or going to a Wawa gas station to order sandwiches with a touchscreen, we will often go with the gas station.

Here's why.

First, Wawa just makes a good hoagie. I'm not going to say it's a great hoagie, but it's good.

Second, it's not like one of those places where you have to interact with an actual person who takes your order and then makes your hoagie for you. That's the beauty of the touchscreen. It's just you and the screen. Nobody to rush you, nobody to judge you for getting horseradish and extra mayo on your egg salad sandwich, plus you can see all of your options right there on the screen.

After you order, pay, and pick up your hoagie, you drive home and eat at the dinning room table the same way you would if you'd cooked something. Except that you didn't have to cook it, and you didn't have to talk to somebody, you just pushed buttons on a touchscreen.

The other option for where to eat, which I've done on occasion, is to eat the hoagie while sitting in your car in the Wawa parking lot. When you do this you end up looking like a loser who eats their touchscreen ordered hoagie while sitting in their car. I find it best in this situation to park over in a corner of the parking lot. This way you'll have fewer people walking by and staring at you while you stuff your face with hoagie, drip mayo on your shirt, and sing along to "Hammer Time" on the radio.

I also had some nuggets with the hoagie, and some mustard for dipping.

Hardboiled

Maureen hardboiled the rest of the eggs that were starting to get old. We don't usually go through eggs fast enough to finish a dozen before they expire. We'll bake with them, scramble or fry them, or use one with bean burgers, but that all requires planning, and work.

However, like a caterpillar that's transformed into a butterfly, eggs that are hardboiled change from a boring food that requires tedious cooking before I can eat it, to a magical food of convenience. Something that can be easily found and eaten with a minimum of labor while grazing through the kitchen. Just like butterflies.

These little bundles of cholesterol just aren't the same without a nice boosting of the blood pressure though, so I like mine with salt.

Leftover garlic breath

Dinner yesterday was leftover "Rigatoni with tomatoes, white beans, and zucchini". Still very good, still with the wrong name. We had bread with it. It wasn't Italian bread though, it was a French baguette. It made for a multinational dinner.

Garlic Breath

Yesterday Maureen made "Rigatoni with tomatoes, white beans, and zucchini", a recipe from Jeanne Lemlin's cookbook "Vegetarian Classics". The recipe is quite good, hot or cold, with massive amounts of cheese of course. We substituted penne for the rigatoni though.

Maureen did a good job making this dish, and Jeanne did a good job coming up with the recipe, but whoever named it really dropped the ball. I think that a more fitting name would be "Garlic breath pasta dish". 6 cloves of garlic go into this culinary creation, and you can smell every one of them.

If Jeanne is reading this I hope she considers my suggestion for a new name while working on future editions of the book.

berry

There's a little patch of wild strawberries growing on a tiny strip of grass between our and our neighbor's attached house. They look nice, and give our row-home with a 2 square foot lawn a more rural feel.

Today Maureen picked some. As soon as I saw them I started to imagine what they'd taste like, and more importantly how great it would be to eat something that grew wild in our own backyard. My poorly suppressed inner hippie starting grooving to visions of living off the land, growing all our own organic produce, and sitting around with all of my new hippies friends talking about all of our various problems with "The Man."

While I set-up my camera and photographed these little gifts from Mother Earth, I moved on to imagining new scenarios where my independence from "The Man" would finally free me to quit my job and pursue some new found passion like pet massage, hand-crafting pillows made out of human hair, or operating a Ponzi scheme.

As I finished photographing them I popped one of those tiny miracles of earth's bounty into my mouth. I was confident it would be the single greatest piece of food I'd ever eaten, nourishing body and soul, and fundamentally changing my outlook on life.

I chewed it once before realizing the horrible mistake I'd made. Somehow this plant must have been genetically modified to grow bitter red pieces of styrofoam that look like wild strawberries. A wonder of science for sure, but disgusting to eat.

All hippie plans are permanently on hold, and I'm afraid I won't be accepting any orders for hair pillows.

Iced Coffee

This morning was far too hot for hot coffee, and I'm far too dependent on coffee to just not drink coffee. The only answer was to ice the stuff.

fluffernutter

The other night after not finishing the leftover sauce, I decided to indulge in a classic childhood favorite, the fluffernutter. I don't recall eating that many fluffernutters as a child though. Maybe one or two, but not as a regular thing. I need to look into why that is.

A very real problem facing Americans today

I'm going to share with all of you a problem that I have, that's having a real impact on my wife, and I guess me. I have trouble finishing food. You see, I'll go along eating a particular food all fine and dandy, just so long as there's plenty there. But as soon as things start getting low, well, I just can't help myself, I stop eating that food item altogether. Sometimes, if I plan it out right, I'll leave enough for one serving. However I'll often end up leaving about a quarter of that.

That's what ended up happening last night, as is evidenced in the photo of the almost empty tupperware. Right after I shot that photo I slapped the lid back on, and put it right back in the fridge.

I'm sure you can see how this impacts my wife, and to a lesser extent me. I wanted to share this so that other people who have the same problem can know that they aren't the only ones. You're not alone people, plenty of guys have this problem (some women might too, but saying guys added to the double entendre.)

Leftover, leftover, leftovers

We're still working on that sauce we made a few years back. But it's better than eating flour with a spoon.

I got an action shot of applying the cheese.

Touring with Fish

We recently bought a 50 pound bag of Swedish Fish from BJ's. For those who aren't familiar with Swedish Fish, they're a tiny species of fish that are only found in the northern reaches of the Soda Pop ocean, off the Caramel coast of Switzerland. Rugged Swedish fishermen brave the carbonated seas, risking their very lives and enduring higher rates of cavities and sticky clothes. I hear that the Discovery Channel is working on a new reality show about these brave men, it's called "The Sweetest Catch".

I find it very comforting to have a bag of Swedish Fish with me while I'm out on assignments. Whenever I get really annoyed, or frustrated, or lonely, I just pop a couple fish in my mouth and everything seems better. I usually run out about five minutes into my shift.

Oat Gruel

Yesterday's breaking of the fast was a nice big bowl of gruel, oat gruel, cinnamon roll flavored oat gruel. Just like what they served in Oliver Twist. It's really no wonder that headmaster Mr. Bumble was so grumpy if he had to open all of those little packets of oats every morning. He probably had arthritis, and tearing those things open was torture for him. Then that little brat Oliver comes and asks for more.

After dinner snacks

The pasta and sauce were good, but I was still feeling peckish afterwards. The answer? Saltines with peanut butter or grape jelly. I'm quite the gourmet aren't I?

Leftover leftovers

We've still got some of that sauce left. So it was still the best option last night after I got home from work. Leftovers are almost always a better option than what I would come up with foraging in the kitchen (frozen pizza, ramen, flour by the spoonful, etc.)

While the sauce was still in good supply, I needed to prepare more pasta. After a long day simple tasks like boiling water and putting dry pasta in to cook for 11 minutes can start to seem like impossible undertakings. As a result I'll often start to entertain solutions that will really just take longer and require more work.

"Maybe.... instead of cooking more pasta, I could drive to the store buy some of that disgusting looking ready-made pasta, microwave it, decide it tastes like crap, throw it away, and then cook this dry pasta" or "What if I used a pressure cooker? That way the pasta would cook really fast, and I'd have something to snack on in the emergency room after the pressure cooker I've never used before blows up." and then there's "Maybe I'll just eat some flour with a spoon?"

Somehow I worked up the strength to cook the pasta. I had a nice glass of milk with it. You know, to take the edge off my day.

New food

A recent BJ's impulse buy was a giant box of frozen bean burgers. They are new, they are not one of the pathetic crushed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I eat at work everyday, and they can be prepared in the microwave, so these burgers are currently one of my favorite things to eat. We also got a bag of chips on the same day. These salty little jewels share many of the attributes of the bean burger, such as newness and not being a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so they are also one of my favorite things to eat.

The natural thing to do is to eat both.

Sadly there was not a supply of bean burger buns on hand, so I had to use burnt toast instead.

Second Lunch

Yesterday before shooting a softball game at work I ate second lunch in the car. (Okay, before we go any further I should explain that "work" for me is my job as a photographer for a newspaper, so "shooting" is me photographing. Everybody understand that? Good.) I had a pathetic crushed peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some more of those pretzel nuggets from earlier, and a really bad apple. Apples are out of season now, so I shouldn't have expected much, but this apple was severely lacking.

Leftovers

Lunch on Tuesday was leftovers. I forgot to mention that during the first round of the pasta we had Italian bread too. It's just standard issue grocery store Italian bread which I treat with a thick layer of margarine frosting.

Fellow Reading Eagle photographer Susan Angstadt , sorry, Susan L. Angstadt, told me that margarine is one molecule away from being plastic. I'm not sure if that's true, but even if it is I'm still eating the stuff.

nuggets

Just after I finished "breakfast" Maureen came downstairs and got out our giant 55 gallon drum of pretzel nuggets that we bought at BJ's. Naturally I also had some pretzels, but decided that I should document this snacking for future generations.


To answer your question, no, I didn't have just that one pretzel nugget

Honey Nut Cheerios

In an effort to avoid getting the coffee jitters I find it useful to eat some sort of food item in the morning. I call this meal "breakfast". This morning I had Honey Nut Cheerios with skim milk.

Why don't you buy some Honey Nut Cheerios?

Why don't you send me some money for plugging your cereal animated bee that I assume makes Honey Nut Cheerios and is now ridiculously wealthy as a result?

Do you think that bees have to pay taxes? They should.

Coffee

To counteract the effects of "sleepytime tea" I like to start my mornings with "wake the heck up coffee".

Tea Time

As a result of eating a kick-ass chocolate chip muffin last night, and, some might argue, taking a two hour nap late in the afternoon, I couldn't fall asleep till 2 am. In an effort to trick my body into sleeping an unnatural amount I had some tea.

"Oh, wow Ben, you sure are a man of the world, drinking herbal tea. Uh, yeah, that could be considered a man-like drink, in a kung-fu samurai sort of a way. I guess?"

Nope, it was a Celestial Seasonings blend called "Sleepytime tea". There was a drawing of a bear in pajamas with a nightcap on drinking a cup of tea as it fell asleep . I'm sure that bear needed to get some rest for the big day it would have in the morning mauling people though.

I'll point out that I didn't buy the stuff, I think it was a gift to my wife. However she doesn't even drink it.

But you know what? It was sleepy time, and I needed my sleepytime tea. But now I'm all rested up for a big day of mauling people.

Evening snacking

Last night I did some evening snacking. I ate one of Maureen's kick-ass chocolate chip muffins. I had a glass of milk with the muffin, but neglected to get a photo of it, sorry.


I should note here that "kick-ass chocolate chip muffin" is not the actual name of the recipe that Maureen used. That's just a description. So don't go searching for a recipe for "kick-ass chocolate chip muffins", get a bunch of S&M search results and come back to blame me. I don't actually know what they're called, probably just "chocolate chip muffins" or "Susy Cream Cheese's chocolate chip muffins" or something else that doesn't adequately describe their kick-assedness.

Pasta and sauce

Tonight we had pasta and sauce. The sauce is a recipe from the Moosewood cookbook that we've been making for years, but haven't had in a while.
You can see a little dab of cheese at the bottom of the frame, that's a complete misrepresentation of the quantities of cheese I consume while eating pasta. If I had my way, and
the money to pay for it, there would be an Italian chef whose full-time job would be adding more cheese to my pasta as I eat it.

You can get a better idea of my love for cheese in the second photo.