A Look Back at Today's Meals

Breakfast: My usual (for over a year now) bowl of chopped fresh fruit with raw nuts and raw-whole-milk yogurt.  This concoction is much more exciting during the summer months, when berries and stone fruits are in season.  In winter, I make do with the ubiquitous bananas, and whatever Urban Organic has brought us.  This morning, a particularly bland apple and pear needed help (and sweetness), so I threw in a handful of hunza raisins — left over from making my holiday chutney — along with the cashews.  Golden Darjeeling tea drunk plain.

Lunch: We had two sets of leftovers, which I thought would take us through lunch and dinner today, but we ended up eating both of them midday.  First we finished off the last (except for what I froze) leg of chicken in green sauce — copious dill and coriander — which I made using one of my favorite Madhur Jaffrey recipes I hadn't done in probably 10 years or more.  It's a Hyderabadi dish out of the first Indian cookbook I ever owned — I can barely recall a time when I didn't cook Indian food! — A Taste of India.  We followed this course with our staple dish, this time as usual cooked by Peter, what we call mélange.  It's a steamed, well, mélange of whatever veggies we have available, served most often with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, salt, and cubes of cheese.  Today I had mine with some leftover tahini-miso sauce, which Peter pronounced too vinegary, but which I enjoyed.  A few squares of Mast Brothers chocolate finished off the meal.

Speaking of Peter cooking mélange, here's the star of Male Pattern Boldness himself, wielding a spoon instead of a needle:

Dinner: What to do?  The leftovers I'd planned to dine on we'd already consumed earlier in the day.  When all else fails — i.e., when I am too lazy/tired to cook — call for take-out.  I called CoBa, a local Vietnamese place and ordered their specialty, a Bahn Mi sandwich and an appetizer consisting of 5-spice quail with some sesame rice cakes on the side.  The sandwich was as delectable as always — where do they get such marvelous french bread? — and, because the restaurant was understaffed tonight, we were lucky enough to have our food delivered by an adorable young rocker type in tight black jeans and a motorcycle jacket who looked as though he was probably at the restaurant on a date and got commandeered into delivery duty.  Maybe he'd forgotten his wallet....at least he escaped dish detail tonight.   Dessert was some of my mom's Xmas cookies, which I broke up into a mug and doused with milk the way most people eat cereal.  This is the way I eat a lot of baked goods, especially the crunchy ones.  I prefer mushy to crunchy most of the time.  And it gives me another excuse to imbibe our delicious raw milk from the Amish.

I skipped wine tonight because I'd had a couple of glasses of (not very good) merlot during a performance of 3 Pianos, a show revolving around Schubert's song cycle, Die Winterreise.  The show was much better than the wine that they served, both before the show and by the performers at intervals during it.