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Mar 21-23 food diary-- heavily featuring sandwiches

3/26/2016

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​Mar 21
Breakfast (7:30, before work): Leftover curry from the night before (it is better simply eaten as a stew, without rice); Liberte lemon yogurt.

Lunch (after work, 2:15): mandarin orange, 2 hard-boiled eggs, small bowl of raisin bran with milk.  Hardly anything in the house to eat.

Shopping (Co-op-- it's been weeks since I did a proper grocery shopping trip): french baguette, Cascadian Farms Purely O's cereal, low-carb bran bread, Equal Exchange French Roast decaf, sliced black forest ham, cage-free brown eggs, 6 individual Chobani Greek yogurts, blackberries, 2 avocados, yellow plum tomatoes, 1 pink lady apple.  $50.

Dinner: baguette sandwiches (buttered in the French style!) with ham, brie, and apple (vegetarian kid did not get ham); a slaw I made from grated carrots and radishes, with slivered sweet bell peppers, and an olive oil/white wine vinegar/honey dressing; a few spare slices of apple and a few blackberries apiece.  These were pretty, colorful plates and I felt very French and wholesome.
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Snacks: 3 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 1 decaf, with half and half.  1 cup of darjeeling tea with milk and sugar.  1 cup of Pero with half and half and honey.  I have got the snacking much better under control lately, and also cut out the nightly drink I'd been having for a while.  I know both of these things have an effect on my weight and I am finally starting to see a trend in the right direction.
 
Mar 22
Breakfast (a little on the late side, 9:30 am): mini baguette sandwich with brie and butter; leftover chickpea and vegetable curry.
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Lunch: ham and white bean pate sandwich on wheat bran bread, carrot slices, mini sweet peppers.

Dinner: avocado, fried egg, and American cheese sandwiches on wheat bran bread; salad of thin-sliced carrots, sweet peppers and yellow tomato with a red wine vinaigrette dressing.  There are normally two contexts in which I don't mind American cheese: cheeseburgers, and Egg McMuffins (or the equivalent).  So I figured I could tolerate using up our American cheese on these breakfast sandwiches, and they might even taste good!  Boy, was I wrong.  The kid threw away half of theirs.

Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  1 cup Pero with half and half and honey.  Mandarin orange before dinner, because my husband was late getting home and I was really hungry.
 
Mar 23
Breakfast (before work, 7:30): one yellow plum tomato, two eggs scrambled with sour cream.  There is hardly anything in the house.

After arriving at work (9:00), I realize my breakfast was still calorically inadequate despite the sour cream (I miscalculated) and supplement it with a banana I buy from the restaurant.

Lunch:  Knowing there isn't anything in the house to eat, I stop by Capital City Cheesecake on the way home and buy a redeye coffee (look, no milk!  I usually buy a cappuccino because I like them, but am trying not be such an idiot), a chicken caesar flatbread sandwich, and chips.  I ask for light dressing on the sandwich, but I think perhaps they misunderstood me and put on extra dressing, because the sandwich was dripping all over the place.  Actually, as it turned out, it was good dressing (almost bordering more on a tzatziki sauce than a Caesar), though the dripping was inconvenient.  I took everything home and ate it while resting in bed and playing on my computer.  I managed not to get any dressing on the freshly laundered bedding.

Shopping (Co-op): Cafe Spice chicken curry, Cafe Spice vegetable korma, Cascadian Farms Honey Nut Os, organic lactose-free 1% milk, half and half, quart of plain lactose-free yogurt, bananas, 2 avocados, low-carb flax bread, green cabbage, yellow squash, organic cauliflower, organic raisins, blackberries, 2 Bartlett pears. $56.

Dinner (early, before proceeding by Metro to the Kennedy Center for this ballet: My kid and I had the two Cafe Spice meals for dinner (chicken for me, vegetables for them).  I have had these meals before and they have been fine, but this time they were badly undercooked: the rice was hard, about as hard as rice you've only cooked for 10 minutes or so, and some split peas that were interspersed were hard also.  They were completely inedible as packaged.  I cooked each of them further in its own saucepan with a little added water for 15 minutes, just enough to get the rice cooked through.  I did send an email to the company just to let them know (since it affected two totally different meals/batches, it seems like some more systemic problem may have occurred?).  Kid and I both also had a few blackberries to round out our meal.

Snacks: 2 other cups of coffee, 1 regular, 1 decaf, with half and half, plus most of another cup of regular that I started but didn't finish before I left work.  Cup of Pero with half and half and honey.  Small bowl of plain yogurt with maple syrup upon returning home at 10:30 pm.
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Mar 18-20 food diary-- a bit of the blahs meet general doldrums

3/25/2016

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​Mar 18
Breakfast: leftover muffin, mandarin orange, toasted challah roll with butter, fried egg.  As I was eating breakfast, my boss called and asked me if I could come in (in about 40 minutes) to cover another employee's shift.  I said I wasn't feeling well and would prefer not to, if she could find somebody else.  I would come in if nobody else was available.  She found someone else.  Yay!

Lunch: mandarin orange; small bowl of raisin bran; egg scrambled with feta cheese, except I accidentally dumped in a LOT of feta and ended up with what I'd hoped might be a kind of toasty cheese pancake, but was actually a sticky, salty mess.  I ate it.  It was horrible.

Shopping (Co-op-- I was really hoping not to have to shop again today, but my ex-husband is sicker than I am and my kid needs to go over there for the weekend, so I am bringing him/them some grocery supplies.  The following are the things I bought for my own household while I was there): challah bread, Glutino sea salt crackers, Brie, 6 individual Liberte yogurts, radishes, organic lactose-free 1% milk, organic mini sweet peppers, yellow plum tomatoes, coffee, Cascadian Farms Hearty Morning cereal, cat treats. $58.

At the normal time that we would have dinner, I met my husband at the movies (we saw Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red in It, which was every bit as formulaic as the original, but sort of culturally fascinating).  I had a cup of peppermint tea (which I would rarely order if not sick) and a peanut butter cookie (which I also would rarely order if not sick; I'm normally candy all the way!).

Dinner (more of a snack, at home afterwards): Glutino crackers, Brie cheese, yellow plum tomatoes (these were surprisingly delicious in March), a little white bean pate.

Snacks, besides movie snacks above: 3 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 1 decaf, with half and half.  One cup of Pero with half and half and honey.  I've been using my Wonder Woman mug  quite a lot the last couple of days.  It is really big. 
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My stepson bought this for me. My husband has Superman. Originally it had a cape but I took it off. (Correction!!!: My husband's is not Superman, it is Robin, his all-time favorite character, as apparently his son knows and I do not.)
PictureFree photo of a crepe, not technically ours, but similar.
Mar 19
Breakfast (before work, 6:30 am): leftover muffin; slice of challah toast with butter and jam; mandarin orange; 1 egg.

Lunch (brought home from the restaurant, 3:15 pm): kimchi cheeseburger with fries & coleslaw.  I also brought a burger home for my husband.  I wasn't so crazy about the kimchi on the burger and wished I had just gotten a regular cheeseburger.

Dinner: we were pretty full from mid-afternoon cheeseburgers and just had solo mini-meals late in the evening.  I had a Liberte yogurt (caramel flavor, which is the best), a slice of challah, and a mandarin orange.

Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  A few swallows of pineapple-strawberry juice at work.  An entire small-sized carrot-grapefruit juice that I made myself at work when I started to hit a wall/feel shaky and sick again around 2 pm.  The juice helped.
 
Mar 20
Breakfast: my husband and I returned to the Fenton Cafe, as promised, to try their crepes.  I had an avocado, tomato, and cheese crepe, followed by sharing a sweet crepe (banana, almond, and honey) with my husband for "dessert."  The crepes had a delicious flavor, although they were a little chewier than I thought the ideal crepe texture should be.  And I especially appreciated that the avocado in my savory crepe was perfect.  So many restaurants simply serve you whatever avocado they have on hand, even if it's completely unripe or spotty or any of the myriad things that can go wrong with avocados.  I got the feeling that Fenton Cafe really cares about how their crepes taste.  The bananas and honey crepe was a little sweet for me (I have a limited tolerance for honey), but I'm the one who ordered it, so not their fault!  And, on a busier morning, the service was a lot friendlier than the last time I was there.  Decaf coffee... though one of my sole complaints about this place is that they offer only non-dairy creamer for coffee!  (They do have regular milk if you ask.)

After breakfast, my husband and I walked around the residential neighborhood in back of the restaurant and looked at houses.  My husband likes to look at houses and I like to walk around.

Lunch: I didn't really eat lunch, but I did have a small bowl of raspberry granola in the midafternoon.  It had come from a bulk bin at the co-op and tasted somewhat stale and dusty.

Shopping (Co-op): Seventh Generation paper towels, organic lactose-free 1% milk, organic whole milk, Seventh Generation toilet paper, can of organic chick peas, can of coconut milk, yellow bell pepper, green bell pepper, organic raisins, 1 lb. bag carrots, 2 yukon gold potatoes, frozen green beans, brussels sprouts. $36.

Dinner: I made a stab at a Thai-esque vegetarian coconut curry with brown rice.  (However, I realized belatedly that a lot of my ingredients-- chick peas?-- would have lent themselves better to a  coconut milk curry with Indian spicing instead of Thai.  Oh well.)  I used onions, garlic, green chili, potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, chick peas, frozen green beans, bell peppers, scallions, and yellow tomato.  The sauce was composed of vegetable broth, coconut milk, Thai chili paste, a little fish sauce, ginger, salt, and lemon juice (because I didn't have lime, or lemongrass).  While it tasted okay, it was a little too soupy and didn't pack quite enough punch with the rice.  I have to go very easy on the fish sauce and Thai chili paste because my husband hates fishy flavors, but Thai cooking gets so much of its umami flavor from fermented fish that-- without lemongrass, galangal, or mushrooms-- there just wasn't enough there there.  Definitely should have gone the Indian route with this, and doused it with spices.
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Snacks: 2 other cups of coffee, both regular, with half and half.  1 cup Pero with half and half and honey.  ​

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Mar. 17 food diary-- tea and muffins

3/25/2016

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Well, drat.  Maybe all that low-appetite and crappy feeling and exhaustion after work last night and so forth was because I was getting sick.  Not much doubt about it now.  Still hanging in there, though; it's not too serious as yet.

Breakfast: kid's leftover half-sandwich from last night (white bean pate, cheese, pea shoots, on rye).  Additional slice of rye toast with butter and jam.

Lunch: open-faced sandwich (because I only had one slice of bread left) of ham, melted gouda, and pickles; 2 mandarin oranges.

Shopping (Co-op, when I decide my headache is better and I feel well enough to walk over there; this was a mistake): pint of Fage whole milk Greek yogurt, half & half, raspberry & cream bulk granola, package of 6 challah rolls, 2 cans cat food, maple syrup, blackberries, strawberries, cage-free white eggs.  $46 (what? the challah rolls cost $8.69?).

Dinner: banana-peach muffins in the Amy Dacyczyn pattern, bowls of plain Greek yogurt with berries, maple syrup, and granola.  I have never really had Greek yogurt served this way before (my household is partial to the little flavored cups), and it is surprisingly delicious.  So much creamier, so much less tart than a low-fat plain yogurt.  It would probably even taste good without sweetening it with maple syrup.  A revelation.  Except, another revelation: I feel queasy after eating it.  Too much dairy again.  Better in small quantities.  Or maybe I am just sick.


Banana-Peach muffin recipe:
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 c. cornmeal
1/4 c. wheat germ
1/2 c. turbinado sugar
slightly heaping 1/2 t. salt
1 T. baking powder
about 3/4 c. frozen peaches,  partially thawed and chopped
1 good-sized banana, chopped
1 c. milk
slightly heaping 1/4 c. sour cream
1 egg

Measurements are approximate!  (except the milk.)  Don't worry so much!  Note that the sour cream is standing in for oil in this recipe, quite successfully.


Mix together dry ingredients.  Stir in fruit until coated with flour.  Mix in wet ingredients.  Divide into 12 (or so) greased muffin cups, and bake 20 minutes at 400 degrees, or until toothpick comes out clean.  Remove from pan and cool 20 minutes before eating, preferably warm with butter.
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Snacks: 3 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 1 decaf, with half and half.  Cup of Echinacea Plus tea mid-morning.  Cup of Pero with honey and half & half in late morning, and another one in the mid-afternoon.  I'm not exactly pushing fluids on purpose, but it is working out that way.  A mandarin orange while making dinner, because I was on the phone a long time with a friend and started dinner late and I am starving.
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Mar. 14-16 food diary-- happy smobriety anniversary, baby!

3/25/2016

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​Mar 14
My husband has been nicotine-free for 1 year today.  Congratulations, honey.  In Nicotine Anonymous, which he tried (mostly unsuccessfully) for a while before eventually quitting cold turkey all by his lonesome, they call this "smobreity."  (An even better word is "smober."  I enjoy saying it whenever possible.)

Other than this, March 14 kind of sucked.  Daylight savings.  Stomachache.  Allergies.  Neighbors yelling at each other and stressing me out.  This perfect storm of morning blech turned into an entire day of inertia.  On the up side, I didn't feel as though inertia needed to be paired with jellybeans.  I was, still, not very hungry.
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Breakfast: last bit of spinach with sorrel; half an avocado; strawberries (I put some sugar on them this time); mandarin orange; piece of rye toast with butter and black currant jam; peanuts.
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Lunch: mixture of peanuts and almonds; dried pineapple rings.

In the late afternoon, I roused myself to go over to Capital City Cheesecake and buy some little individual cheesecakes in celebration of my husband's non-smoking accomplishment.  One each seemed too little, while two seemed too much.  I went with too much, of course: two plain mini-cheesecakes, two chocolate, and two salted caramel.
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Dinner, on the other hand, was entirely utilitarian: eggs scrambled with colby cheese and sour cream; mixed fruit (mango, strawberries, and mandarin orange again, this time with some sugar and lemon juice to salvage the bad strawberries); soda bread made from white flour, wheat germ, and cornmeal, which I ate with butter and honey.

For dessert, we had the mini-cheesecakes.  Kid and I brought them in with candles, singing "Happy birthday, [husband's] Smobriety..."  We each had two flavors.  As the mom (or just as myself?), I am by definition last to choose flavors, but I got what I would have chosen anyway!: a salted caramel, and a plain cheesecake.  The salted caramel cheesecake was fresh and fantastic, the plain cheesecake was a little stale and tasted kind of off.  You can't win them all.  Meanwhile, we watched The Great British Baking Show, which I wasn't aware of until I read about it on Bon Appetempt.  Thanks, Bon Appetempt!  It is great!  And the people really are all nice!
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Snacks: four cups of coffee, two regular, two decaf, with half and half or heavy cream.
 
Mar 15
Breakfast: soda bread with butter and honey, a few cashews, fried egg, strawberries.

Lunch: colby cheese and pickle sandwich on rye bread, additional slice of rye toast with butter and jam.

Shopping (Co-op): organic lactose-free 1% milk, organic whole milk, Nature's Path blueberry flax cereal, quart of Brown Cow vanilla nonfat yogurt, 2 individual Liberte yogurts, Mrs. Meyer lemon verbena dish soap (I always forget I don't like the smell of this), swiss chard, organic flame raisins, scallions, frozen peas, long-grain organic brown rice, 1 lb. bag carrots, crimini mushrooms, sweet pea shoots, bag of mandarin oranges, bananas. $53.

Dinner: after late-afternoon yoga class and a couple of consecutive days of not over-eating (except the cheesecake), I finally felt hungry!  I'd bought a lot of vegetables and brown rice, though, to make a light stir-fry.  I didn't even buy meat, tofu, or eggs-- just high-protein vegetables.  So we had stir-fried carrots, mushrooms, peas, scallions, chard, and pea shoots, with garlic and ginger, and a sauce made from soy sauce, mirin, thai chili paste, sugar, and sesame oil-- thinned with water-- a bit of a cultural mishmash.  Served over the brown rice, which I managed to burn somehow.  It was not blackened, just brown and crunchy, in a somewhat-more-than-ideal-Persian fashion.  We ate it anyway.  The meal was good, but I was hungry again later.

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Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with heavy cream or half and half.  Handful of almonds before bed.
 
Mar 16
Breakfast: soda bread with butter and honey, almonds and raisins.

Lunch (10:45, before work-- I switched shifts with another waitress and started at noon today): two eggs scrambled with colby cheese and sour cream, carrot sticks.

Shopping (I meant to buy some tuna salad and egg salad from work, but the afternoon was very busy and, by the time I left, half an hour late and exhausted, I forgot.  Stopped by the co-op before I went home): Applegate sliced ham, red gouda cheese, herbed white bean pate. $16.

Dinner: sandwiches on rye bread, two mandarin oranges apiece, carrots cooked with fresh thyme, lemon and honey.  My husband and I have ham and gouda sandwiches with pea shoots on them, my currently vegetarian kid has a white bean pate and colby sandwich with pea shoots.  Kid only eats half, so I save the other half for breakfast tomorrow.  Even though this doesn't seem like a particularly gigantic dinner, and I should be hungry, I have trouble finishing my sandwich too.

After dinner, we watch another episode of the Great British Baking Show.  It is all about cookies ("biscuits").  Now I really would like two cookies to finish out my evening.  But we don't have any.
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Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.

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    Whodunit

    The author is a waitress, home cook, and foodie who has trouble sticking to a subject.  She currently resides and works in the Maryland suburbs of D.C..

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