Food diary

In an attempt to eat more interesting things, I'm following in the footsteps of the food blogging greats, Grub Street and Mark Bittman (who wrote maybe my favorite Minimalist article in awhile) and keep a food diary for at least a few days.

Dinner last night: Jason and I rummaged through the fridge and found: some chicken thighs and drumsticks that he had roasted two nights ago on top of root vegetables, parsnips, carrots, butternut squash, celery, onions and some leftover French bread in the pantry so the only thing we could really think of was making a chicken salad sandwich deal for dinner.

We shredded the chicken and he made this sauce that he first had at this fish taco place in Texas: it's just mayo, yogurt, garlic, something acidic to cut through the richness (he used lime juice) and chili peppers, that we tossed the chicken in. I threw in some radishes and celery for crunch and some golden raisins and craisins for sweetness. Pretty standard but that sauce is SO good.

We still had those root vegetables, and I had remembered seeing something in Food and Wine last month about a root vegetable mash so I just boiled up two potatoes, then threw all the leftover root vegetables in the pot and mashed the whole thing up with milk, butter, a little salt and pepper, and yogurt. Usually, I like to add a tiny bit of sour cream into whatever mash I'm making, it makes the texture a lot better but we were out and yogurt was a fine substitute. It needed a little something extra to pick up on the sweetness of the root vegetables, so I threw in a little cinnamon and it was great.

Finally, I just sauteed some spinach with garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper (why are people constantly not seasoning their food?! I put S&P in EVERYTHING), and a splash of rice wine vinegar.

Voila! Dinner (I realize no one wants to read this much text, so pictures will be posted soon).

Breakfast: Roasted pork buns from Boston's Chinatown which don't hold a candle to roasted pork buns that you can get in the NYC Chinatown. This is pretty true for anything epicurean between the two cities. An orange (my life is a constant battle to eat more fruit) and coffee.

Lunch: One of the perks of my job is a million opportunities for expensed meals out; today's was a mentor-mentee lunch where I am supposed to ask my mentor the pressing questions I have about working. Mostly, we just complain about the hours and catch up on bad reality shows. Unfortunately, this being Back Bay Boston, our allocated budget puts us in the category of restaurants of what I like to call "mediocre fine dining". Things that fall under this category include but are not limited to, Joe's American Grill, Legal Seafoods, and today's offense, the Cheesecake Factory, where things taste fine enough, by virture of if you deep fry something and cover it in cheese, it tastes fine enough.

I ordered the Pasta Da Vinci, which is just penne with chicken, mushrooms, and onions cooked in a madeira wine sauce. I'm not sure how restaurants have this freakish ability to put copious amounts of salt into their food without having it taste oversalted but now I'm sitting at my desk feeling dehydrated and like I'm about to burst at the seams.

I hate mediocre restaurant experiences.

Dinner: Leftovers again but I am a firm believer that they can and should taste better - this NYTimes article interviews Eli Zabar who thinks it's not enough to just use leftovers, they should be better than the original (his ability to do this allows him to charge 24.99 for 8 oz. of his Parmesan toast which he makes from stale Foccacia that he couldn't sell in his stores). In this tradition, we cooked dinner tonight.

First up a roasted potato soup, which we made a few days ago but it seems like I can't make soup except in bucketfuls. It was too rich and too thick, almost custardy so we thinned it out with some water, cut the richness with some red wine vinegar and wilted some spinach in it as it was reheating and chopped some green onions and threw that on top. The result was incredible, like liquid salt and vinegar chips, only with spinach thrown in so I could pretend to be healthy. We had the soup with some French bread we had thrown in the oven and the crunch reminded me even more of potato chips.

Some Trader Joe's mini pitas, celery and lemon hummus (I used to be skeptical as well but I think it has a really refreshing flavor and a complexity that you don't really get from hummus which I mostly find to be bland) rounded out the pre-dinner snacking.