Egg and cheese sandwich

Heap-big flavor fried egg and cheese sandwich. On homemade sourdough and with homemade mayonnaise heavy on the mustard, and with ginger and garlic so that it's a veritable aioli. If you think about it, since this mayonnaise is made with an egg, and the bread is also made with an egg, this sandwich is egg on egg on egg. I spread grated horseradish over the mayonnaise, on an impulse, for BANG!

Ceviche with vegetable and fruit salad

Two fantastic taste sensations brought together for the first time. Ceviche and fruit salad, two of the three make-ahead go-to meals to stave starvation between regular meals that absolutely melted off excess body fat within the span of a few weeks. I attribute this to steady glucose/insulin level.

The original idea was for ceviche on Romaine with tomatoes and to let the marinade drip down to flavor the vegetables. Simple enough. But once started, I added yellow bell pepper and fruit salad. This iconoclastic combination -- vaguely cooked fish and vegetables with fruit, flaunts culinary canon. La la laaaa. I. Don't. Care. It's like, my favorite things at once! 

Each fork jab brings up another surprise. Salmon and plum, halibut and celery, shrimp and fennel, tuna and apple, sole and kiwi, swordfish and cucumber and so on in endless combination, mango, papaya, lettuce, pineapple, tomato, onion, cantaloupe, weeeeeeee.

Shrimp frittata with spinach cheese sauce

Shrimp frittata made the usual way. Started on the stove top as an omelet, finished under the broiler for only a few minutes until raw shrimp turned pink. Removed immediately. Folded in half as a stuffed frittata.

Sauce prepared in advance. Butter/flour in equal measure, about 1+1/2 teaspoon each. Chopped spinach and milk blended in mini Cuisinart.

* Garlic
* mustard powder
* S/P
* juice of 1/2 lime
* 1 tablespoon raw grated horseradish
* Grated cheese. Some kind of imported hard white cheese with a dark rind. I just used whatever I had left of that particular type of cheese without tasting it. It's all good. Cheese melted into sauce off the heat.

Nutritionally speaking -- and who doesn't like that? -- spinach is nearly worthless raw. How so? Oxalic acid is a nutrition blocker that binds with desirable vitamins and minerals preventing them from being absorbed by the body. In raw spinach Oxalic acid forms an insoluble complex with calcium and iron rendering it non-nutritious. I learned this by reading about Popeye and spinach. Popeye ate canned spinach which is cooked. That's how his muscles got so big immediately after squeezing open a can and inhaling the entire contents through his corn cob pipe. If you ever saw Popeye inhale the contents of a garden spinach patch and then become instantly empowered, well, that's just flat wrong!

Search: [ oxalic acid + spinach ]

You'll see this conclusion is disputed, as ever the case on any nutritional subject, because spinach contains many other important vitamins and minerals in abundance that oxalic acid doesn't interfere with, too numerous and too boring to list. So screw it, I eat it raw and cooked. Ever notice how it makes your teeth feel fuzzy? Why don't they ever talk about that, huh? I have to brush my teeth immediately after eating it to get rid of that fuzzy teeth feeling or else I'm miserable neurotically worrying about my fuzzy green teeth like moss is growing all over them with little green bits hanging off. Here's my idea: all meals containing spinach should come with a tooth brush and floss and a tiny tube of toothpaste along with a little mirror so you can manage the post-spinach fuzzy teeth syndrome right there at the table. It'll set a new standard for customer consideration.

I'm good to the finich
'Cause I eats me spinach.
I'm Popeye the sailor maaaaaan.
Toot toot.

Chicken tenders, salad

Chicken tenders dusted with flour and seasoning, a la meuniere, in the manner of the miller’s wife, because she was always most likely to have flour around given her husband is in the business.

I intend to eat mostly chicken and seafood for a while and to that aim I bought a metric ton of chicken tenders. ← possible exaggeration of 725%. It was really a 4LB bag or something like that, but it's huge I tell you. Chicken tenders, or supremes, are the lean tender strips found on the underside of the chicken breast. It’s a separate portion from the breast but attached to it with connective tissue. I suppose they’re analogous to tenderloin on beef or pork. I’ve never seen a whole bag of them before, much less a gigantic bag, so I bought them, instead of chicken breasts which sometimes are too big. They're frozen. They cook within minutes.

The tenders were cooked with the glowing warmth that I feel for the industrialists that bring battery chickens to our tables and sizzling butter on a medium hot stove top, but mostly with sizzling butter on a medium hot stove top.

Salad with the usual vinaigrette but with garlic and ginger powder added because I’m lazy tonight and didn’t feel like grating those things. I probably used a little too much rice vinegar and mustard. If this were a competition on Top Chef one of those guys would ding me for that. And you know what? That kind of pisses me off sometimes because those judges who are so judgmental in their judgements, not just on Top Chef, but on Chopped, Iron Chefs, various other challenges, you never see them cook anything. Maybe they run a magazine or wrote a book or two or ten, but damn, we never see their own mad cooking skillz in action so how are we to accept they're qualified as judges? Just say'n. Sometimes cooks we have seen in action become judges on occasion so they're not the ones I'm remarking on. Although, they've all had their own disasters. It's those snotty nose little know-it-all pissants saying what they like and what they don't like that get me. It's all so arbitrary. I'd be a terrible contestant, I'd be all, "Well, let me see you do it, Bitch." At home, I imitate their voices. I exaggerate their vocal foibles then imagine words they'd never actually say just to ridicule them unfairly. It's impulsive and if I did that within a competition, well, I'd never be asked back. Confirmation dog shows are completely arbitrary too. The biases present are astounding. The judges never ever pick a Belgian sheepdog for best of show even though there's always a Groenendale and a Tervuren right there in the ring, and often a Malinois or Laekenois, and they're always totally mind-blowingly awesome.

Hot sour soup

My lips are burning, as if I had applied habanero flavored ChapStick®, and it’s not going away. When, oh when, will I learn to stop overdoing it with that habanero powder? Never, that’s when!

I have no bamboo shoots, not in a can even. This must be corrected immediately. I mean come'on, no pantry worth its Pantry Certification is ever bamboo shoot-less or without water chestnuts, because you never know when the urge for an Asian dish will come upon you, and you must at least have the basics on hand. Epic fail. So I put spinach in instead because I have a lot of that and because I like it better than canned bamboo shoots anyway. Do you know fresh bamboo shoots do not keep for more than a couple of days? They stink up the whole refrigerator something terrible.


* onions, celery, and garlic sweated in the pot in olive oil with habanero powder added when finished
* home-made chicken broth
* thickened with corn syrup
* rice vinegar
* prepared sauces that make things Japanese
a) mirin for sweetness instead of sugar
b) fish sauce for saltiness
c) soy sauce for umami (fifth taste sensation) and also saltiness
d) toasted sesame oil
* mushrooms (my last two. Yay! I used the whole box without waste)
* beaten egg drizzled into soup forming strands
* shredded spinach
* sliced frozen chicken tenders

See what's going on here? Sour + sweet + hotness, thickened, vegetables + protein

☒ bitter
☑ sweet
☑ sour
☑ salty
☑ umami
☑ oil (unsaturated)
☑ carbohydrates (slow)
☑ protein