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.