the best lunches

The best lunches are spent with people you like!

Alone meals < With Friend Meals

Now that Steve and I are both on student schedules, lunches are the best mealtimes for us to meet up Tuesday-Thursday.

Arriving at his place is fun and unpredictable. Sometimes he has an adorable appetizer waiting for me.

 

These were absolutely delightful stacks of sliced banana, peanut butter, a shredded wheat piece, honey, yogurt, and a blueberry on top.

 

As for the main course, it typically involves rice, beans, and veggies cooked in some manner. And by usually I mean always. This particular day, those items went into tuna tacos. Odd but good. Particularly good with Cholula atop, and kale chips on the side.

The best pictures in Steve’s apartment are taken next to the glass door… but it means you get really intense carpet texture in your shots. Nonetheless, the food looks good.

 

And Steve’s latest obsession is oven-baked sweet potato fries (yum) with a condiment of mayonnaise mixed with sesame-oil-enriched Korean hot sauce. YUM YUM YUM!

True story: I may claim to love to cook but I think I actually hate it, because I am always soooooooooo grateful when Steve makes meals for me. And they are always soooooooooo delicious. And his kitchen is walled off from the rest of the apartment and I only wander in and out while he cooks which meaaaaaans… I don’t have to know how much butter he uses.

Friday I met up with my best friend Lydia for lunch. It was a fun if slightly woeful lunch, since Lydia’s skippin’ town to go up to the frigid North. Her boyfriend, and a buncha great opportunities are up there… but I will miiiiiiiiss herrrrrrr!

Anyway, we went to Sweetgreen, where they make you salads the size of babies. It was a beautifully sunny, if depressingly cold, day.

Let’s see if I can remember everything this contained:
- base of kale and baby spinach
- roasted broccoli
- roasted teeny cubes of sweet potato
- cherry tomatoes
- almonds
- baked falafel, which was kee-razy good. If any of you are fortunate enough to have tried the chickpea two ways at Cava, it tasted like that. Crispy outside, heavenly light and olive-oily innards.
- carrot-chile dressing

 

Came with their outrageously delicious whole grain bread. PERFECT bread (in my opinion): dense chewy crust, puffy bubbly slightly tanger center.

Hosted a farewell dinner for Lydia on Saturday. Didn’t feel like documenting with fun pictures (see “will misssssssssss herrrrrrrrrr”, above) but the meal was EXCELLENT.

- Steve’s pico de gallo
- homemade plantain chips (just so-so, didn’t use enough oil)
- kick-ass enchiladas: cooked up soy chorizo (Lydia’s a vegetarian… and it’s DELICIOUS) with some veggies (a little onion, lotsa mushrooms, green pepper) and browned everything all up. Then added diced sweet potatoes (!) and water and cooked down til tender. Meanwhile made this incredibly easy homemade enchilada sauce. For some reason I have always been intimidated by making enchilada sauce and was thisclose to buying a bottle at Trader Joe’s til I read the ingredient list, scoffed at the various sugar derivations and nasty oils and artificial whatsit, and decided to make it myself. REALLY easy, REALLY good. Anyway, so into my pan went whole wheat tortillas (too big, oops!) wrapped around that great filling with that great sauce and a whole buncha cheese on top (Steve was in charge of shredding!) Spectacularly delicious, actually
- Mark Bittman’s fruit crumble. Apples as the filling (used a mix of sweet, tart, and sweet-tart, per some authoritative article about baking with apples I read a million years ago). Used the citrus-herb variation of the topping, which involves large amounts of citrus zest, ground coriander and black pepper (!) along with a stick of butter. How could it not be glorious?

market, motivation, mystery

Farmer’s market chef series returns. Love! Starring the amazing chefs at Willow, as well as their super cute sous chef.

  

Costarring lots and lots of butter.

 

Ricotta pancakes with oven-dried strawberries cooked in balsamic and asparagus on top. All from the farmer’s market.

I could’ve eaten just the strawberries. Sheesh. Amazing.

Also enjoyed awkwardly interacting with the woman who originated the farmer’s market chef program.  I met her at a foodie thing last year. Said hi. Was awkward. As usual.

Not awkward: for some reason I am a subject of fascination for the vendors we in our family call “the sarcastic farmers”. One more than others (who gives me the silent treatment when I bring Steve to the farmer’s market. Hah! Well, I think it’s funny.)

Anyway, I was making fun of him for a sign that they had in a previous week saying, I quote:

“No” bugs were harmed in the raising of this product.

I didn’t add those quotation marks. They did. And I went, uh, hello, do we know what it means when you use quotation marks in that context? I worry for the bugs.

So I returned the following week to this:

Ridic.

I’m pleased I started this post on an amusing and cheerful note. I’ve been sick all week (blah blah blah, nothing you haven’t heard). I’m down on myself (blah blah blah, nothing you haven’t heard). I’m eating poorly (blah blah blah definitely nothing you haven’t heard, plus nothing I haven’t heard for, oh, my entire adult life).

I should’ve studied for my midterms all day to have any, ANY hope of even PASSING Chemistry (though honestly if I don’t get an A forget it. What grad program accepts someone who can’t handle a community college class? I wouldn’t blame them in the slightest).

Oh but wait. I didn’t. Does folding laundry and watching Julia Child on PBS count for studying?

If I was in my perky mode of posts past I could go on and on about how it’s okay to relax “for once”- and I’ve taken that attitude about as often as this hilariously spot-on Onion article.

But, no.

“For once” has translated to a gazillion pounds around my midsection and a gazillion hours I should’ve studied that I didn’t.

And I am now venturing into the territory of somewhat self-indulgent self-pitying, so I’ll stop.

Things I wish grew on trees: healthy coping mechanisms, work ethics.

Thing that does grow on a tree:

NAME THIS FRUIT! Any tropical fruit savvy readers? Steve picked this up, just for funsies.

  

Inside: positively sweet as candy! Huge inedible black seeds.

Guesses?

birthday part 1: you know you’re a foodie when…

… even the non-edible gifts you get for your birthday are food related.

I turned 23 on Friday and my loved ones spoiled me rotten.

Chai soap from my cousin Lara and coconut frosting bubble bath from my aunt Jeanie. Both, upon using, make me want to lick myself off after because they smell so stinkin’ good.

Jeanie and I had an epic conversation about Nanaimo bars not long ago, so imagine my delight when she also gifted me their essential ingredient:

I definitely owe her a batch! I’m delightedly researching variations, of which there are GAZILLIONS!

Jeanie also told me that my grandma always used Bird’s custard powder to make her dessert creations, including her legendary trifle. So I am excited to play with it in many, many ways in our upcoming holiday season.

My most exciting and unexpected birthday delivery came with a characteristically hysterical card.

 

The contents? Scads of CHOCOLATE COVERED STRAWBERRIES!

There were initially a dozen in the box, but there were quickly less than that :D (The box recommended that you hide behind furniture while opening it so no one knows what’s in it!)

So you get a picture of each delectable flavor.

In three delicious flavors: an adorable tuxedo-looking white chocolate with drizzles of dark; crunchy and sweet milk chocolate with chopped walnuts; and rich and decadent chip-studded dark chocolate.

Eating these makes me kind of want to lie around all day having people fan me. They are that indulgent.

Also on the subject of chocolate covered fruit, Steve got me these goooooooorgeous dark chocolate covered figs.

They were meant for a romantic evening picnic that ended up not happening due to me generally being a very difficult and often unpleasant person to date. But he insisted on sending me home with the goodies regardless, because he is a Quality Boyfriend.

He also got me (this was all from Whole Foods, incidentally) delicious organic goat cheese.

 

Oh, did I mention I had a megabag of apples because he, in one of his many additional thoughtful gestures, also took me APPLE PICKING? (There is a reason my birthday will need to be divided into AT LEAST three posts)

Well I decided that the first thing I would do would be to look up apples in my NEW FAVORITE BEAUTIFUL COLOSSAL COOKBOOK!

I literally squealed with delight when I unwrapped this.

Yes, my amazing aunt Kathy, my most loyal blog reader, gave me How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I know. I know. I am having a hard time leaving the house because all I really want to be doing is reading it. Mark Bittman, you clever, clever man.

I flipped to apples in the index and was highly intrigued by this recipe:

Which, in the practical and extremely expansive way in which the book is organized, is part of a larger, user-friendly section on the art of a perfect omelet.

 

The recipe was so user friendly that even I, the girl who always ruins omelets, made a beautiful omelet. It was great, too, because the methodology was so clear that I knew I could adapt it. Thus, lacking cream cheese and blue cheese as the recipe called for, I substituted goat cheese. It was obviously fantastic. Rich, light, fluffy eggs; sweet crunchy apples; tangy melty goat cheese.

Absolutely sublime breakfast!

 

With toast, sunshine, gratitude, and lots more cookbook reading!

breakfast, from sunny to green

What a difference a week makes. For Spring Break, I’d eat breakfast on the deck, noshing on my oats and sipping my tea…

… as I read the paper and watched the dogwood burst into bloom.

  

Classic oats: caramelized ripe banana, 1/2 cup oats, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup water, and, my latest additions, a heaping 1/2 tsp. ground flax, and a splash of vanilla and a dash of salt.

With almond butter on top. All I need in this life.

  

Doing a megabatch early in the week and reheating individual portions works PRETTY well, but stovetop oats eaten the day they are made are absolutely exquisite. The texture is PERFECT!

 

Anyway, there’s something wonderful about sitting outside, admiring nature at its most beautiful, having nowhere to be. It’s a gift.

Easter morning I woke up a bit queasy- we have a midnight service, and at the end they give out hard boiled eggs, dyed red in the Greek tradition, for Easter. So I ate a hardboiled egg at… 2 am. And then there was fresh made baklava in my kitchen, so I had that too.

I woke up feeling… iffy.

So I sat down in my beautiful sun-drenched kitchen and ate an absolutely luscious champagne mango, as I admired the flowers from the Good Friday service we’d saved in a vase in our kitchen.

Have people tried champagne mango? This was my first time. They are confusing because compared to regular mangos, they don’t look ripe… they are yellowy orange. But they are!

Inside is luscious juicy mango! Nommmmmmmmmmm.

Well, enter the work week. Going back was… um… a bit tiring. Had my phone and more than $100 in my wallet stolen. Broke out in some weird rash all along my shoulders and hips (Sweat? Bugs? Bugs who like sweat?). Kids kind of hate me right now. And am, as usual, WAY too reliant on late night stress eating.

A good nourishing breakfast, the one that makes you think, or at least hope, that it’ll give you the fortitude for a successful day… the first Green Monster of the year.

 

In the blender:

1/2 a bananer
1/2 T almond butter
handful of frozen spinach, micro-thawed
1 cup milk (too liquidy! Next time less. Caused me to require too much ice, which then melted too quickly. Mess!)

Cold. Frothy. Filling. And unbelievably virtuous; it’s a serving of veggies before 9 am. And you really don’t taste it!

Topped with Shredded Wheat. Try it, you’ll like it!

perks of singleton

Sat down to one of (in my opinion) the ultimate “I’m Single And Have No One To Impress; Damn This Tastes Good” meals.

Beans on toast!

Rumor has it that my cousin’s husband Richard (who’s English) used to eat beans on toast on a nearly nightly basis before he fell in love with my cousin, who is conveniently a ridiculously talented cook and pastry chef. Aw.

That being said, I sort of could see myself continuing to eat beans on toast on a nearly nightly basis and be happy. I like Single People Food.

Though I must say, I clarsed mine up considerably: cannelloni beans mashed with fresh rosemary on farmer’s market Celtic wheat toast.

More by-necessity single people food: have people ever beheld these wonderfully weird things?

Potatoes? I wondered when I saw them on the counter. Dinosaur eggs?

Grapes!

Some kind of winey grape. It had thick skin (as seen above)…

and seeds!

It was delicious but it was also odorous. I can’t quite put my finger on what the smell was (definitely not fruity! More… minerally? I’ve heard wine grapes compared to sulphur but that falls a little short too).

Anyway, yay, I’m single! Who cares how my house or breath smells?!

Something that may keep me from being single for long…

Based on the poor decisions I made in the vicinity of Dave’s Fresh Pasta last autumn, I am inclined to believe that pasta is dangerously alluring food. Best re-gift ever. My cousin had too many homemade pasta rollers, can you imagine?!

Finally, potentially creepy habit that may keep me single (arachnaphobes avert your eyes!):

Spiderwatching!

We had this beautiful wise well okay I’m being anthropomorphic but we had this spider who used to set up camp on our back deck. She it would weave her its web right by the light bulb, so moths would flock to the light and she’d ensnare them.

However, the spider we christened Charlotte (can I get some E.B. White love up in here?!) seems to be no more, and she seems to have DAUGHTERS who now seem to have set up together!

Their webs are works of art, as are THEY! Look at those beautiful markings!

I know this is kind of creepy of me. Honestly, ordinarily I hate spiders and if I ever had one in my house, even one of these cool ladies, I’d flip out.

But in their proper environment (SAFELY OUTDOORS), I see them as the pest-eating, beautiful, mythical things they are.

No scientist has ever figured out the strength and flexibility of spider silk!

While I photographed Sister #1’s beautiful underbelly, Sister #2 was busy chowing down on dinner.

That moth had no chance!

So yes, this is my current habit. Of animal fixations, it seems relatively harmless. You all are free to give me a talking to if I get into taxidermy. Or snake charming.

among the apples

I spent Friday afternoon in a magic world of growing things.

The week I plan the field trip you knew it was going to be edible.

It is fair to say that farms and animals are few and far between in South Arlington, where I work, through Americorps, at an afterschool program for low-income, mostly immigrant children. While the parents of these kids want them to have every opportunity and advantage, they are also people working multiple jobs, often learning English, and supporting multiple family members. Apple picking trips are money, time, and transportation-intensive.

So, dammit, I was planning one.

Kids, ALL kids, should get to see growing things.

I said a prayer to the Traffic Fairy and we set off on 66 West on a Friday afternoon (locals know why this could’ve gone horribly, horribly wrong).

Blessed be, traffic was relatively calm and 10,000 school bus songs later, we arrived at Hartland Orchard.

I can’t say enough about the great treatment we got there. They greeted us with big smiles, fun things to do, and a gigantic and adorable dog that enthusiastically returned hours and hours of hugs and kisses.

First stop was a very loud and very crowded hayride (there were ultimately 27 kids and 6 adults on it).

We stopped on the way to the orchard to watch a pig race (!) which I was too slow with my trigger finger to capture, but the kids ate it up.

Then we went to the land of the apples, where we gleefully ran through the trees, squashing the sweet and tangy smelling soft apples with our feet, clutching our bags, looking for the most perfect specimens to take home. Farmer Hank gave the kids tools that almost looked like lacrosse sticks to reach up in the trees and grab the high-up fruit.

So great to see kids dwarfed by these beautiful living trees, connecting the food on their plate to the soil under their feet.

There was lots of “Get me that one Ileana! No, not that one—that one!”

And “LOOK how HUGE this apple I got is! Just look!”

When picking had ended, we went to their, for lacking a better word, playground.

Really, all playgrounds should have goats.

The animals were incredibly sweet and friendly (unsurprisingly, really, since the kids were feeding them through the fence).

In the background, note the totally awesome horsey swing.

There was also, how are these not everywhere, a corn box. Not a sand box. A corn box.

At the end, when the kids were running around and getting out some excess energy before getting on the bus, I sort of just wandered around marveling at how beautiful it was.

It meant SO MUCH to me to be able to help give the kids this experience.

The kids I work with are all what you could call disadvantaged. Fortunately that’s a bit of a misnomer, since they do have the advantage of having the staff of our learning center along with my fellow Americorps members all personally and fiercely invested in their well being.

However, it’s a reality of our country that some kids are growing up with a lot less. Sticking with the food discussion, we get weekend bags from the food bank to make sure that the kids get enough meals to eat when they’re not getting their subsidized school lunch and their snack at our afterschool program (which we also get from the food bank).

It’s important to me that these kids matter. Kids don’t just belong to their parents, you know? They belong to the community, the state, the country that produced them. The future of the world as a whole is wrapped up in their well-being, and it matters to me.

And they are great, great kids.

On a less serious note, I just love my job because when working with children one can do ridiculous things.

We decided to do a team building activity to celebrate the first day of fall (somewhat ridiculously, since the temperatures here in Virginia have been hovering right around 94).

Introducing the idea of a farm, we wanted to do a scarecrow clothes relay race (the first person on the team has to put on a complicated layered scarecrow costume, run the race, then run back and take off the getup and help the next person in line put it on).

Which was great, except, hello, nonprofit, we have no costumes.

So we made do. How INTENSELY SEXY ARE ME AND ERIN?!

Each costume had a “shirt” (paint-stained art smock), a “bib” (fabric scrap with a head hold cut in the middle), a “leg scarf” (another, longer fabric scrap; it was originally going to be a belt but we weren’t positive it’d fit everyone and didn’t want to create any weight trauma), and the piece de resistance, “fake bird wings to scare away the crow” (fairy wings).

Ridic.

I had my first apple (well other than the one I munched in the orchard!) after church today.

As usual arrived home ravenously hungry.

Sliced apple vair thinly, put in teensy baking dish (the picture’s of my mini countertop oven; adjust your perspective accordingly), sprinkled with scads of cinnamon and a wee bit of water to let everyone steam.

 

That was to serve as lunch dessert.

Actual lunch was… any guesses what hides in the interior of this warm pita?

Falafel! Homemade falafel from the church bazaar! I highly, HIGHLY recommend being a religion that is widespread in countries with delicious cuisine (Orthodox FTW- we get the Greeks, the Ethiopians, smatterings of the Middle East, etc. etc.)

Snarfed that down (wonderfully herbaceous, not at all greasy, and substantially enhanced by the pickled turnips alongside it. Yum!) and then sat down to dessert:

Baked apples that look like french fries. Score.