Weeks in review

I haven’t done a legit post in an extremely long time, so I’m ridiculously behind on food adventures. For example, I’ve completely missed the chance to tell you about everything I ate at the Union Square Holiday Market (which I guess is just as well, since the friend I went with has not yet chosen a blog pseudonym). I also have no pictures of the excellent life experience I had at Murray’s new cheese bar, so I’m going to skip that too.

But here are some other food-related adventures of note. Or not of note, but I will talk about them anyway. (And more good things upcoming–I am now in possession of a really cool vegan soup cookbook (thanks Ma), so there will be more soup, and cool soup accompaniments if I can find/afford rye flour.)

1. Whole-wheat pancakes with almond butter

It looks horrible, but it’s good. It’s these pancakes—presumably with a milk/lemon juice mixture to approximate the buttermilk, since I never have buttermilk—they were good, except for the fact that I used very old blueberries that had been frozen, thawed, refrozen, rethawed, used as an ice pack, etc.

The almond butter is made by roasting raw almonds for 10-15 minutes, then putting them in a food processor and processing them for an extremely long time. My food processor is a mini, low-power one and it didn’t enjoy the process, but I was eventually able, after maybe half an hour and a lot of stopping and starting, to create a reasonable facsimile of almond butter. It’s good with honey, and keeps forever (I hope; I made it months ago and have been eating it ever since).

2. I more or less figured out the barley. I just cooked it in a pan with this sauce, though I didn’t measure anything. Then when I was eating it, I kept finding cat hairs in it.

3. The dread Cat Food Incident. After posting that, I got emails that said things like, “Whhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?” I also had the following conversation with my younger sister.
Me: I ate a piece of cat food.
Her: WHY?
Me: I was curious. [It was a very expensive piece of cat food.]
Her: Why do you always eat cat food???
Me: I have never eaten cat food before!
Her: Yes you have.
Me: I have? What did I say about it?
Her: You said it was horrible.
Me: Oh.

I also have a picture of my empty hand, after I ate the cat food.

4. Diner Eggs. I make diner eggs all the time, but these looked nicer than usual.

(I call anything “diner eggs” that involve cooking eggs in melted butter, in a neither totally fried nor totally scrambled way. Usually I also cook the toast in butter in the same pan; this rendition involved home fries. Yum.)

OK, more in the next post, this is getting ridiculous.