Mar 8
Breakfast: leftover gnocchi with pesto, one hard-boiled egg, a few Seasnax sesame seaweed sticks.  The latter are weird: very sweet.  Seaweed does not need to be sweet.  Will ask the kid what they think of it.  (Update: Mikey likes it!  You never know.)

Lunch: raspberry Bellavitano cheese, sandwich on rosemary bread with curried chickpea sandwich spread and raw spinach.

I spent some time this afternoon trying to work out exactly what our gut repair diet/cleanse will consist of, and making a list of supplements I needed to buy.  The list looked financially intimidating, at least at the kinds of prices I see at my local co-op, so I decided to look online for cheap natural-foods supplements.  I decided on a site called Vitacost, and still managed to spend $167.  That sounds like a ton, but for two people on a three-week cleanse it comes out to $28/person/week.  Plus there will be some supplies left over.  Why did I buy supplements for myself, when I don't really have any significant digestive problems?  This is a good question.  I could say "solidarity," but it would be more accurate to say, "wasn't really thinking."  I'll probably go ahead and take them anyway, not so much in the spirit of solidarity as of science: then my husband and I can compare notes.  Larger sample size.

Dinner: Kid was at their first-ever rock concert!  (This guy.)  So husband and I had chicken, braised with some scallions, sage, rosemary and thyme; white rice; and Madhur Jaffrey's Sri Lankan Greens, which I chose to make with mustard greens.  I didn't have any curry leaves, nor time to go to an international grocery, so I left those out.  The greens came out pretty spicy, so next time I would probably go with just one green chili pepper instead of two.  (Since I've been keeping a big package of green serranos in my freezer, however-- there must have been about fifty of them, and I think I paid something like $1.47-- I have become generous with them.)  However, between the mustard greens themselves, the spice of the chili peppers, and the unusual addition of dried coconut, this was a flavorful dish, and its pot liquor jazzed up the chicken and the rice as well.

Mar 1
Breakfast: leftover collard greens, handful of sliced almonds, cherry pie.

Lunch: just as I was preparing for a lunch break at home, the phone rang and my boss asked me to come in to work and cover for a coworker for a couple of hours.  As far as lunch goes, this was lucky, because I had very little food at home and brought something home from the restaurant.  (At 2:15): cheeseburger (with American cheese!), fries, little coleslaw.

Dinner: picked up takeout from our local Thai restaurant on my way home from yoga class.  My meal: yellowtail and scallion sushi roll, green curry with beef and white rice. 

Dessert: we finally had the grapefruit sorbet I made yesterday.  Its texture was not perfect (probably I should have let my stupid ice cream machine keep on stirring longer than the suggested 40 minutes), and it was a little more sugary than I think it needed to be.  But the fresh grapefruit flavor was definitely appealing.  Even my husband said he liked it, and he always says he hates grapefruit.  Of course, sometimes it seems like he harbors food prejudices that he can often get over just by tasting something.  Exceptions: seafood (I witnessed him tasting it once, and he nearly threw up), cucumbers.  And eggplant, which he ate over and over until finally admitting a distaste for it.

Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  I poured the last half-glass of sherry in the evening, but it was sludgy and full of sediment: is this normal?  It didn't seem so to me, or at least not appetizing. So I threw it out.
 
Mar 2
Breakfast (before work): Leftover green curry with beef, white rice.

Lunch (after work, 2:30): 2 boiled eggs, the last little bit of green curry (because it was the only thing I had with vegetables in it), grapefruit sorbet.

Shopping (Co-op): organic lactose-free 1% milk, organic whole milk, quart of Brown Cow vanilla nonfat yogurt, Field Day Bran Plus cereal, bag of navel oranges, dried apricots, dates, slivered almonds, Equal Exchange coffee beans, organic broccoli, bananas, 2 avocados, 3 Ataulfo mangoes.  $54.

Dinner: I made some white rice with slivered almonds and minced apricots and dates mixed in, with an Arabian spice blend called kabsa (at least I think that is what I used!).  Also roasted some broccoli and served the rice with fried eggs on top.  I liked the rice, but not with eggs.  It would have gone better with chicken or lamb, but my daughter is a vegetarian for Lent.  It also does have some protein from the almonds, so is fairly nutritious all by itself.

Breakfast: leftover collards, leftover biscuit with butter, tiny leftover smidge of white bean soup.  With some salt added, it actually turns out to be better than the minestrone.

​Lunch: 1 avocado, 1 cara-cara orange (delicious), 1 banana, 1 "hard-boiled" egg that turned out to be slightly soft-boiled.  Surprising how sustaining this meal was as compared to all the meals of toast 'n'stuff I've been having lately.

Feb. 25
Breakfast: beef jerky, dish of honey Chobani Greek yogurt, strawberry-peach bar.

Shopping (Co-op): organic lactose-free 1% milk, organic whole milk, Good Health avocado oil potato chips, Tazo darjeeling tea, white cage-free eggs, Field Day toasted Os cereal, curried chickpea mango wrap, california crunch sushi roll, avocado sushi roll. $45.

Morning snack: half a medium-sized bag of potato chips fried in avocado oil, because I bought them at the store, intending to serve them at dinner, and I have a potato chip problem.  I couldn't resist.  It was hard to eat just half, and I came very close to caving in and eating the whole thing.

Lunch: 1 hard-boiled egg, slice of toasted challah with mascarpone cheese spread on it, 2 small slices toasted baguette with butter, 2 strawberries dipped in mascarpone.  There isn't much food in the house.

Dinner (eaten early for us, at 6 pm, because afterwards daughter and I are going to see Montgomery College's performance of In the Heights!! Very exciting!!): california crunch sushi roll, some more potato chips, a single large strawberry (I had two, but I gave one to my husband because he liked them so much and I love him). 

Other snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  Cup of Pero with sugar and half and half.  A toasted hamburger bun with butter and honey, eaten at 11 pm after returning home hungry from In the Heights.  Fell into bed right afterwards.
 
Feb. 26
Breakfast (before work): celery sticks, two slices toasted baguette with butter and jam, 3 flatbread crackers, 1 fried egg.

Lunch (takeout from the restaurant, after work at 2:45): Bulgogi BLT on wheat bread, side of mung bean pancakes.  The mung bean pancakes were perfectly fresh-- the cooks were just making them as I was wrapping up my shift-- and so were delicious.  When they've been made a day or two in advance, and just reheated on the grill, they are a lot less good.

Dinner: I made the Collard Greens with Browned Onions from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, and served them American-style with braised pork and two biscuits.  I liked this meal, and when I woke up the following morning couldn't wait to have it again for breakfast.  Regarding the collard greens: I always expect greens to cook down to practically nothing, and am perpetually surprised that this is not true in the case of collards.  I started with two big bunches of collard greens, so much I could not fit them all in my wok without waiting for some to wilt down first, and ended up with enough collard greens to give substantial portions to about 8 people.  Not complaining.  My husband and I had plenty of collard greens, I gave a bowlful to my vegetarian ex-husband who happened to stop by as we were having dinner (yes, okay, we have a perfectly friendly relationship), I had some for breakfast, and there are still plenty left.  As for the recipe itself, it was fine, nothing to write home about.  Lots of onion, some garlic and ginger and tomato... but basically they just tasted like collards.

The pork was just okay, but that was because I was cooking the leftover "stew pork" I had in my freezer.  I knew it wasn't going to be tender and delicious, but I hoped to render this approximately $2.50-worth of meat into something edible.  So I cut it into kind-of-medallions and braised it more or less the way I do chicken, browning it first, then adding butter, a vegetable bouillon cube, and fresh herbs (this time: parsley, thyme, rosemary, sage, and scallion), and some water and sherry, and allowing it to simmer covered for a long time while the collards cooked and I baked the biscuits.  It still was not terribly tender, but had a good flavor and was not overly tough either, so I considered this successful enough.  I'm not sure why I decided to slice it first, and I think next time I would not do that.
​
Now to the biscuits.  They were, in a word, amazing.  Pillowy and warm and perfect.  Some of the best biscuits I have ever had, and certainly the best I've ever baked.  Which is weird, because I baked them before: they are the biscuits from Jennifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.  (I don't think I wrote about them here on the blog, but made them sometime earlier in 2015).  I marked in the book that they were "good biscuits," but I don't remember them being this good.  Which goes to show you how many factors go into the results of your labors, besides the written recipe.  Was it different flour, or different buttermilk?  Was my ratio of dry to wet ingredients just a little bit more perfect this time?  Did the fact that I changed up certain salt-related details (I didn't have any unsalted butter, so I used salted butter to brush on the biscuits at the end; also my buttermilk is very salty, so I halved the amount of added kosher salt) actually result in a better recipe?  Was my baking time and temperature better? (Reese's recipe calls for baking at 450 degrees, which I know in my oven will burn the bottom of my biscuits, so I am constantly adjusting the temperature and extending the time until the biscuits just "look right.")  Anyway, enough about biscuits.  Suffice it to say, I recommend these biscuits highly.

Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  1 cup of Pero with half and half and sugar.  Glass of sherry in the evening. 

[A note on photography.]  You guys.  It turns out I am a moron about photography, and it took me several months to realize something obvious.  I thought I was just a bad photographer, or maybe had a bad camera.  But, the following: at night, when I typically cook, it is dark.  When I take photos of what I am cooking, there are two choices: the automatic flash, which looks horrible and creates unpleasant glare, and flash-turned-off (which is what I generally do), which results in dull colors and, most frustratingly, blurriness.  I do not have a steady hand when it comes to photo-taking, and a long exposure is almost always blurred.  Answer (and you all know the answer)?  Other people do their food photography in the daytime!  Using natural light!  On the rarer occasions that I have taken photos then, they are quite nice.  So, enjoy this picture of biscuits that I took the next day.  ​