Breakfast: My husband and I go down the street to the bakery for pastries and coffee.  I have a mushroom-and-cheese turnover (so good, lots of mushroom and little cheese), and a slice of multigrain toast with butter. 

Shopping (Co-op): 3 rolls toilet paper, dental floss, Cascadian Farms multigrain squares cereal, organic Equal Exchange coffee, half and half, tissues, $25.

Tea preparation:  I had such a fun time preparing all the little dainties!  While I have made the Indianers before, I was afraid they were not going to work out this time, because my egg whites just would not whip to stiff peaks.  Eventually I gave up and finished the batter with very, very soft egg whites, expecting that the cakes would fail to rise and the whole Indianer plan would soon be finished (fortunately I had other sweets ready to go too).  But they rose perfectly, and seemed exactly the same as when I'd baked them before.  They take a while to make, because there are a lot of steps that involve chilling, but really are not difficult, and apparently are forgiving too.  Recommended!

Breakfast (before work, 6:30 am): more cooked fava beans; leftover roasted broccoli; blood orange; little packet of mustard peas.

Lunch (from the restaurant after work, 3:15 pm): Grilled dill havarti cheese sandwich with tomato, on multigrain bread; side of broccoli. 

Dinner: I cooked cheeseburgers as described in the October issue of Bon Appetit, in the "editor's letter," no less: the low-class/super-hipster way, with American cheese, crappy buns, iceberg lettuce, greasy meat.  You know what?  They were delicious.  Like fast-food burgers, but fresh!  Oven-fried french fries on the side.  Everything with ketchup, plus I also had mayonnaise and pickles on my burger, as recommended.  Also.  It has been a long time since I have made a burger without mixing various additions into the meat, forming patties, etc. etc.  These instructions told you to basically grab a handful of meat, smash it onto the pan, and then salt it right in the pan.  Do not disturb.  Flip.  Salt other side.  They were good this way.  I kept thinking of the scene in Parks and Recreation where Ron Swanson and Chris Traeger taste-test Ron's "Meat. On a bun." burger against Chris's gourmet turkey burger.  Ron's wins, hands down.

Before and during cooking dinner, I was also starting some prep for having guests tomorrow.  I invited them for "tea," with the caveat that there would basically be enough food to count as an early supper.  Menu: chicken salad and egg salad finger sandwiches.  Deb Perelman's morning bread pudding.  Deb Perelman's brownies.  Tipsy Baker's Indianers (which I think of as "cream puffs").  Fruit brought by guests.  Coffee, tea, milk.  So, this evening beforehand, I made the chicken salad (chopped Whole Foods cooked chicken breasts, dried cherries, sliced almonds, minced scallions, mayo, salt & pepper) and the egg salad (boiled egg, chopped celery, whole-grain mustard, mayo, salt & pepper).  I also assembled the bread pudding, which needs to soak overnight and get all eggy before being baked at the last minute.

Snacks: A number of spoonfuls of different milkshake flavors at work.  Started drinking a mini-cup of ginger chai at work, but then thought better of it (too much milk gives me a stomachache, also: random calories).  4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  A certain amount of necessary tasting of the chicken and egg salads.  Sherry after dinner.

Breakfast (early in morning, before appointment): one packet of mustard peas.  (After appointment, also after getting gas and stopping for prescriptions at the CVS... hungry!!): Habanero-lime tortilla with sliced hard-boiled egg, melted cheddar cheese, and salsa; carrot sticks.

Lunch: 2 scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese, also salsa and a little green onion and cilantro on top.  Very small bowl of Trader Joe's granola (all that remained) with whole milk.  How is there no food in the house when I just did a major grocery shopping trip two days ago?  The eggs are great, though.

Shopping (Co-op): organic 1% lactose-free milk, 2 cans cat food, Equal Exchange organic coffee, unbleached cone coffee filters, 2 boxes Cascadian Farms granola (1 maple-brown sugar, 1 chocolate almond), brown eggs, 3 blood oranges, bananas, $35.

Dinner: Madhur Jaffrey's Broccoli Rabe Served on a Bed of Fava Beans, whole wheat pita.  The whole fava bean puree thing proved complicated.  First of all, it is difficult to find dried fava beans, and I was unable to find the skinned, split kind that cook quickly.  I did manage to buy the large dried beans with skins.  Then, for some reason, it did not occur to me to presoak and cook only part of the fairly large bag, so I ended up boiling a LOT of fava beans.  They did not take as long as I expected to become soft in the middle, so I drained and cooled them and then tried to shell the individual beans, as most recommend (although I seem to have missed the fact that most people shell them right after soaking).  This did not work-- the skins stuck to the beans and the insides crumbled and I decided they were "too done" to shell.  However, the skins were still a little chewy, so I added some more water and put them back on to cook a while longer, figuring we'd eat the beans whole.  After more cooking, when I drained the beans again, I discovered it was now possible to shell them.  So I shelled about five cups for the recipe, and put the remainder of the cooked beans in the refrigerator for later uses.  As it turned out, the mashed beans topped with very garlicky, oily broccoli rabe were okay, but not very exciting.  It wasn't really worth all the effort.  I have had fava bean puree in restaurants that was fantastic, but this wasn't that.

Dessert: Jennifer Reese's chocolate pudding.  Easy and not terribly sweet.  My husband and daughter really liked it.  I felt it needed a little more something.  Salt, perhaps.  And maybe sweeten the whipped cream more than I did.  And the recipe made 4 petite servings, so if I made it again I would probably double it.  But it would be really easy to make it again, so that's a plus.

 Breakfast (somewhat later than usual, after driving my daughter to school because her bus mysteriously didn't show up this morning): leftover red lentils, ambasha bread with butter, crystallized ginger.

After breakfast I start the dough for Jennifer Reese's homemade "Oreos."  It is not actually as hard as she makes it sound, although I'm glad she warned that the batter, at first, "will look like a mistake-- a tacky, fudgy brown mess.  Don't worry.  Let it rest for 20 minutes at room temperature to firm up."  It did look like a mistake (how could I possibly roll this loose glop into a log?), and it did firm up.  Another amazing thing: the dough actually tastes like Oreos.