The Girl Who Ate Everything

Eh. There are worse things than cooking. But...

First off, check out the latest strip from kawaii not: milk or yogurt? Another good food one is the can of mystery and pancakes vs. waffles.

Also, check out these perfect looking pancakes. Wow.

This morning I went to the Union Square Greenmarket at around 8:30 AM. I don't usually go food shopping that early but I was in the area and I had time. One large vendor at the north end had crates overflowing with white peaches and nectarines, plump, almost exploding (although exploding fruit would be kind of bad, and put a damper on the fruit-buying experience). I bought four of each and ended up eating two white peaches for lunch while sitting in Washington Square Park. They were perfect.

And then it was off to my Essentials of Cuisine class where I unsurprisingly had nothing to offer to the discussion about...food. I never do. (sigh) It's a wonder I've gotten to my junior year of college without having participated in class discussion for, say, my whole life. You'd think with food I could, but nope. I can't even discuss food in class.

I went back to Union Square to pick up some food from Whole Foods, mainly Greek yogurt. I assumed that a larger container of yogurt would cost less per ounce, but it doesn't. Hm. I don't know if that's just Whole Foods, but their small container of Greek yogurt are cheaper than other places I've been to ($1.70 versus $2). Due to lack of math skills, I stood in front of the dairy case for way too long, trying to calculate the price per ounce in my head (brains might be better than calculators but damn, I can't do long division).

I also bought a bottle of Nama Shoyu (raw soy sauce) since I didn't have any soy sauce. As to why I bought raw soy sauce as opposed to regular, I don't know (it ends up getting cooked anyway...I seemed to have forgotten that at the time). For some reason I didn't see the price when I bought it; when I finally got home, I found out it was $10.50. Uh. Crap. It's not much considering that the bottle will probably last me a year or more (I don't use soy sauce much) but that's a lot for soy sauce.

I gotta stop buying food and eating so much.

Even though I just decided that I have to cut down my grain consumption, I completely pigged out on bread today. Yes, my head was full of much arghy-ness, but my stomach was also going "Uhhh you like bread and you haven't eaten dinner and eat the bread, EAT IT." No, I wasn't in a bakery--rather, I was stuck in the nutrition department's kitchen, completing four of 16 required lab hours. I didn't know what I was expected to do during the lab but I soon found out that I and my three classmates were to be used as slaves in food prep for the nutrition department's catered events.

Okay, not slaves. We weren't whipped and forced to butter phyllo pastry and chop swiss chard, but we didn't have much of a choice either. It wasn't torturous, but the four hours, which initially seemed like enough time, soon felt like not enough time, "soon" being "three quick hours later after chopping stuff and getting butter all over my hands and forgetting to hydrate myself". Oops. Our lab wasn't meant to be hectic since eight people were technically supposed to show up, but there were only four of us. Argh...well. It was alright.

Oh, as for the bread, one of the recipes called for bread crumbs. What did we have to make bread crumbs with? A few large boule loaves of bread from Amy's Bread. Whoa. Yes, the department got Amy's Bread to make BREADCRUMBS from. Pretty awesome, as we were left with a few naked loaves of bread after the crusts were removed for the breadcrumbs. One of my classmates and I visited the bag of bread innards quite frequently...*cough*.

I'll probably get wheezy tonight. We'll see. (sigh)

So. Cooking. Not so fun. Baking? More fun. I didn't get to bake though; my main duties as serf to the nutrition department was sauteing swiss chard, grating craploads of parmesan cheese, and butterling a gazillion sheets of phyllo dough to make swiss chard parmesan tartlets. I hope that the people being catered to eat every tartlet because I SURE DIDN'T GET TO EAT ANY.

...actually, I probably wouldn't like them. I tried the filling and it was too parmesan-y for my tastes.

So, what was good? The freshly baked shortbread cookies! You can't go wrong with cookies of the freshly baked, super buttery variety. These were the last things we had to finish during our lab and I got to eat a too-thin "mess up" cookie. ;) We all also got to try a regular cookie, a nice treat for our work.

...time for sleep.