Tonight was sort of a cause for celebration. Last. Midterms. Ever! Errr, last undergrad midterm studying session ever. Whatever. Hannah and I headed over to Pommes Frites for a little pick-me-up.

Pommes frites are Belgian fries that are, in sum, heaven on earth. They’re big, fat, twice-fried fries. They’re perfection. Pommes Frites, the restaurant, just happens to be a five minute walk from my apartment. I haven’t been in quite some time, but these fries were on my mind and tonight was the night for my fix.

They offer about a million dipping sauces to choose from. I’ve had probably 75% of these listed! My favorites are the pesto mayo and the pomegranate teriyaki mayo.

The place is tiny but is chock-full of potatoes. Obviously.

Our frites!

Tonight’s selection: lemon dill mayo, rosemary garlic mayo and sundried tomato mayo. All fantastic. My favorite was the sundried tomato. We also had some classic ketchup + mustard.

Are you drooling yet?

Such a good way to end a long weekend/few days of straight studying!

I am a little worried about my midterms tomorrow. One is on political + economic development and the other is on bureaucracy + public policy. I’ve been a complete slacker all semester and have a bad case of Senioritis, so I’m not sure how I will do. Plus — how about this weather?!? It has been so distracting! I would obviously rather be out walking around in 60 degrees than cooped up in my tiny room studying! Anyway, enough blabbing — moral of the story, I did study a lot so hopefully I’ll do alright.

Tomorrow will be celebratory Taj, then work Thursday and straight to Boston to see Kev! I promise that I’ll have some great recipes next week…I already have a couple picked out I’ll need something to get me through a week of hardcore thesis work, after all. Also, I am dying to try Coppa in Boston. Hopefully Kev and I will get a chance to go so I can review it here. Coppa is by the same owner as Toro, my #2 favorite place in Boston (second to Grotto), so I know it’s got to be good. Yum yum yum. Can’t wait!

Buona notte!

• 1.5 cups lentils
• 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes
• 3 celery stalks
• 3 carrots
• 2 shallots
• 1 box vegetable stock
• 4 cups water
• 3 Tbsp butter
• 1.5 Tbsp curry
• 1 Tbsp ginger
• 1.5 tsp cumin
• 1.5 tsp coriander
• dash cayenne pepper
• dash cinnamon
• salt + pepper to taste

Method:

• Melt butter in pot over medium heat. Add shallot, celery, carrot and sweet potatoes. Cook until tender, about ten minutes.
• Add curry, cumin, coriander, cayenne, cinnamon, ginger, salt and pepper. Let cook about one minute.
• Add lentils, vegetable stock and water. Let it come to a boil and then lower heat. Let soup simmer for 45 minutes.Puree with immersion blender if desired!

Prep and hands on cooking – about 25 minutes.
Cook time – 45 minutes.
Total – 1:10 hours.

Before:

After:

Pureed with a dollop of tangy Greek yogurt. I don’t know how I have lived 21 years without an immersion blender! Second best kitchen tool to the Microplane.

This soup is slightly smoky, slightly spicy and slightly sweet. I love the flavor combination and am psyched I can eat this all week long! I knew I wanted to make a big soup recipe so that I didn’t have to worry so much about meals during midterm time. For just a little time and effort on the weekend, I knocked out having to make four or five dinners during the week. Another plus: between the sweet potatoes, lentils and other veggies, this soup is a nutritional superstar!

Give this soup a try!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend

Please excuse the grainy, dark iPhone photos! Still drooling over the Canon S90. Someday.

Peasant serves olives at the bar only — luckily we had some time to kill before our reservation so we got to snack on them. They’re delish. People who dislike olives baffle me.

There’s a huge exposed wood fired oven — the pizza at Peasant is obviously fantastic.

My #1 favorite thing about Peasant is that they serve you fresh ricotta along with their amazing bread. It literally melts in your mouth. My favorite way to eat it is with a little bit of olive oil and the ricotta smeared on top. My mouth is watering now just thinking about it!

We shared the beet salad that was a special last night. I believe it had: red and golden beets, Gorgonzola, apple, fennel and arugula. As Ina would say, “who wouldn’t want that?”

I ordered the seasonal risotto. It is currently being served with wild mushrooms. ‘Twas fantastic. I love risotto — it’s one of my all-time favorite dishes.

My friend Lucy ordered pasta with goat ragu. This was my favorite dish at the table. The sauce was really light and downright delicious. It reminded me of my grandmother’s sauce!

And Hannah ordered the mushroom gnocchi. Peasant’s gnocchi is some of the best I’ve ever had.

All in all, a glorious meal! Love, love, love Peasant!

I might be a bit MIA for the next week or so. The first draft of my thesis is due Monday and I have two midterms on Wednesday. Yikes. That does mean, however, that a week from right now I will be on spring break! I’ll be in Mexico, laying on a beach, sipping cocktails in Boston, freezing, editing the crap out of my thesis. At least I’ll get to hang out with Kev

I plan on making some soup this weekend with my brand new immersion blender! I have dreamed of having an immersion blender for so long since I love pureed soups, and finally just bought one! I haven’t chosen a recipe yet, but I promise it will be good!

One of my favorite comfort foods is a heaping bowl of steaming pasta. I knew I had whole wheat spaghetti, spinach, lots of garlic and Parmigiano Reggiano on hand so I whipped it up. While boiling the pasta, I sauteed the spinach in EVOO (2 of my friends asked me what EVOO was — extra virgin olive oil, duh!), three gigantic garlic cloves, crushed red pepper, salt and pepper. I topped the pasta with tons of nutty, melty Parm.

This dinner + a steaming hot shower + 3 consecutive hours of Grey’s Anatomy reruns on Lifetime + good night’s sleep = all should be well in the morning.

Newsworthy –

Have you heard about this backwards new regulation that passed last week? Only nine months after banning most fund-raising bake/food sales in NYC schools, a city panel voted on an amended regulation that would allow foods like Pop Tarts and Dortios to be sold in place of homemade goods.

Their reasoning? Homemade goods have no calorie count, no solid portion sizing or ingredient information which is important for kids with allergies. Ok, fine, that makes sense, but this is what they are allowing in place of homemade goods (according to The New York Times article):

To qualify as an approved item, a snack must meet 11 criteria developed by the city. For example, all products must be in marked, single-serving packages with a maximum calorie count of 200. Artificial sweeteners, like Splenda, are banned. Less than 35 percent of the item’s total calories may come from either total sugars or fat. Grain-based products must contain at least 2 grams of fiber.

The criteria led some foods not normally thought of as healthy to make the list. For example, approved items include two of the 21 varieties of Frito-Lay Doritos: Cool Ranch Reduced Fat, and Spicy Sweet Chili (1 ounce packages). The Cool Ranch variety contains three food colorings — Red 4D, Blue 1 and Yellow 5 — and two laboratory-produced flavor enhancers — disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate. The criteria don’t ban these additives.

In addition, the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos appear to have only half as much as the required amount of fiber, according to the manufacturer’s Web site. (Could a new version have been reformulated for city use?)

The city has also green-lighted one of 29 types of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts, the Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon (1.76 ounces), although the manufacturer’s Web site said the item has 210 calories. When asked about this discrepancy, the city sent over a copy of the nutritional facts for a different kind of Pop-Tart, Whole Grain Brown Sugar Cinnamon, which has 200 calories.

This is a disgusting development. It’s truly unfortunate that the panel has voted to allow highly processed, packaged edible food-like substances with tons of artificial ingredients in place of homemade baked goods made with real food: butter, sugar, eggs, chocolate, etc. I would argue that processed foods are a bigger contributor to obesity than some homemade brownies. And I’m not alone.

In “The End of Overeating,” Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.

Come on, NYC. You’re supposed to be leading America in fighting the obesity epidemic. Hopefully parents with kids in NYC public schools fight this one.

On that note, Grey’s Anatomy calls. I am a huge McDreamy fan…that may be because Kevin just happens to kindasorta look like a blonde Patrick Dempsey.

Can you see it — the nose/mouth/chin?! What a handsome guy(s)! Kev may kill me for doing this, but oh well

Night!

You need:

• bundle of asparagus
• 2 eggs
• freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano
• salt, pepper and EVOO
• slice of toast (optional)

Preheat the oven to 425.

Coat asparagus with EVOO, salt, pepper and Parm.

Let the asparagus roast in the oven for about twenty minutes. Halfway through cook time, flip the asparagus.

At that point, put your bread in the toaster and then heat your pan (medium heat) to fry the eggs. Coat the pan in a little EVOO, crack the eggs and sprinkle with salt and pepper. My foul-proof method for not bursting the yolk is to not touch the eggs at all until they are opaque — takes about five minutes. At that point, I flip the eggs, turn the heat off and let them stand for about a minute.

Finished product with a light sprinkle of Parm:

I overcooked the eggs a bit, but hey, it happens. Ideally, I would have had more yolk flow, but this was absolutely delicious as is.

The dish takes about 20-25 minutes total to prep and cook. I’m not even sure if I can call this a recipe since it’s so incredibly simple.

Mid-meal!

I am a big fan of this dish and I highly recommend you try it! It’s a great example of how “healthy eating” can be fast, cheap and delicious.

Newsworthy –

According to ObFo, both the House Committee on Education & Labor and Senate HELP Committee will meet this week to discuss child nutrition and obesity. Hopefully these hearings will mean real progress for Let’s Move!

I hope you had a good start to your week. I’m so happy it’s March — spring is so close I can taste it!

Attempt #2 was much better. I put 1 cup of milk, two handfuls of spinach, a frozen banana, a few frozen berries and 2 Tbsp flaxseed meal into my food processor. I don’t have a blender so the food processor has to make do. The result was a thick and creamy Green Monster. I’m not sure I am a Green Monster fanatic just yet. The taste and texture definitely takes some getting used to. You really cannot taste the spinach at all, though! I do wish I had a blender to make this smoother, but it was still good.

I took a few other photos but the quality was pretty bad Speaking of…I think I found the camera that I want to buy once I can afford it: the Canon PowerShot S90. Tina recently posted that her’s does particularly well in low lighting, which I think is important for taking photos in restaurants. The camera is a little pricey so I need to (a) get a full-time job offer or (b) have a wonderful family member give it to me as a graduation gift (cough, Dad).

The Violet Ball was fun last night though I am feeling a little hungover today. Meh. Here are a few photos!

Enjoy the remainder of your weekend

Hannah and I ventured out to Brooklyn to hang with my cousin (“in law”), Liz for the day. First stop: Diner.

Diner serves an awesome brunch and was packed even until 2:30 pm.

Their menu changes daily, and this is how they give it to you.

The fried chicken, of course, caught my eye. Maybe it had something to do with the *!! I knew it had to be good.

Me & Liz!

Us girls decided to share the following:

Fried chicken sandwich with jalapeno aioli, pickled jalapenos and soft-boiled egg on sweet potato foccacia. WOW. This sandwich was good.

Country breakfast with scrambled eggs, mustard greens and homemade biscuits with homemade pork sausage gravy. The eggs and mustard greens were not my favorite. This was my first time having biscuits and gravy…mmm…a great first experience!

Open-faced ham sandwich with honey-glazed ham, mustard greens, pears caramelized in bacon fat and a fried egg with cheddar cheese. Also delicious! The flavors were fairly subtle for being caramelized in bacon fat

Indulgent much?!?! So worth it, though.

The owners of Diner, Marlow & Sons, have sister restaurants and shops right in the neighborhood so we decided to take a stroll.

This one is a specialty foods store in the front, restaurant in the back.

We took a Nutella brownie with us for the rest of the stroll. I did not need anything else to eat, but this was fan-tastic!

Marlow & Daughters is a meat and cheese shop with some groceries as well.

As we approached the shop, the butcher outside asked if we wanted to see the smoker and the meat inside. He saw me taking out my camera and said “you’re not a food blogger are you?!” Haha. He still let us take the pictures though

I think he said that there was pastrami and sausage in here. Made in house, of course.

This shop reminded me of Italy! Hannah and I even found the same cookies we loved while we were in Florence (we have lived together for the past three years and studied abroad together as well).

Utter Foodie Heaven. When I go into stores like this, I go into sensory overload. I can no longer focus my attention on anyone around me — food only! Needless to say I enjoyed myself very much!

Tonight, my friends and I are going to NYU’s Violet Ball. I rarely do anything NYU/school-spirit related, but this is an opportunity to dress up, dance and drink in the atrium of the library!

I’ll be back tomorrow with a recap of tonight and a first second attempt at a Green Monster!

I tried something for breakfast this morning that may just be my new favorite breakfast. I had read about Bob’s Organic High Fiber Cereal online recently, and the nutrition stats grabbed my attention. The cooking process is very similar to that of oats, and I used basically the same ingredients as in my whipped banana oatmeal.

• 1/3 cup hot cereal
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 banana
• 2 Tbsp peanut butter
• cinnamon (not pictured)
• pinch of salt

For 1/3 of a cup of this stuff, which was plenty, there’s only 150 calories and 38% DV of fiber! Along with the peanut butter, this breakfast got me to half of my DV of fiber which is amazing. Fiber = keeps you feeling full longer.

The ingredient list is all superfood: whole grain oats, wheat bran, flaxseed meal (Omega-3s), oat bran, wheat germ.

The cooking process took about ten minutes total from start to finish. I added half the banana in at the beginning to get it “whipped” and another half towards to end so it would still have pieces of banana. Cinnamon also got added at the end.

I dare say that this was supremely better than oatmeal. Something about oatmeal’s texture throws me off, but this was creamy, a little gritty and just good.

The peanut butter melted right into this and made it even more creamy and nutty.

I am a convert. Something that is yummy and is ridiculously good for you? Yes, please. Give this hot cereal a try!

Enjoy the start to your weekend

Today’s recipe was inspired by We are not Martha’s quinoa & black bean salad. I tweaked it a bit to fit what I had on hand.

Here’s what I used:

• 1.5 cups of quinoa, rinsed
• 3 cups of water
• 3 limes
• EVOO
• 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed well
• red + green peppers (your choice)
• cumin
• coriander
• cayenne pepper

Chop the peppers into bite-sized pieces. For the dressing, I used the juice of all three limes and the zest of one. I added EVOO, salt, pepper, cumin, coriander and cayenne all to taste.

Quinoa is incredibly easy to cook. Combine the quinoa and water in a pot and cook until the water is absorbed. I started on medium heat, and once it began to bubble, I give it a stir and turned it down to midway between low and medium. It takes about fifteen minutes total. You can tell when the quinoa is done once the little white thing (technical term) on the grain shows.

This recipe takes about 20-25 minutes total. It makes a lot of salad, so be ready for leftovers!

Here it is all combined.

This salad is delicious and super healthy. I let mine chill before eating. I have a feeling that the longer this salad marinates in the fridge, the better it will taste. The dressing is not overwhelming, but gives a nice flavor. Red peppers are by far tastier than green so next time I might use only red. However, as Giada always says, we eat with our eyes first, and using both green and red peppers makes this salad gorgeous and colorful!

Today was a SNOW DAY! NYU never, ever gives snow days, but this is the second one this winter! I don’t even have Friday classes so it was sort of a bummer that the snow didn’t come earlier. I have no plans to leave my apartment any time soon!

My thesis is due one month from today! SCARY! I have to get a lot done this weekend. Meh. At least there is no temptation to go outside, I guess? Fortunately, I have a delicious quinoa salad to keep me going all weekend

I tried to make a Green Monster smoothie today too, but I failed. Epically. I actually had to throw it out, which I hate doing. More on that tomorrow or Sunday, when it will hopefully be a success!

HAPPY WEEKEND!

PS – The black beans and quinoa come out of the Pantry Challenge running tab! I have barely anything left!