I really love eggs. I enjoy eggs as a vehicle for vegetables, and with a nice piece of crusty bread, I can’t think of a better breakfast. This recipe is a fairly typical mash-up for me, grab some eggs, veg and cheese out of the fridge, combine in a pan and serve on bread. Lots of options here, but this is a classic Florentine combination shown here.
Omelette Florentine Sandwich
2 slices hearty bread
1 egg, whisked
1 cup raw spinach, chopped
1 small tomato, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 ounce mozzarella cheese, diced
salt to taste
Place the garlic, spinach and tomato in an oiled pan over medium heat, sauté until spinach wilts. Keep moving the mixture to avoid burning the garlic.
Add salt, cheese, spinach, tomato, and garlic to egg in bowl and mix lightly.
Pour egg mixture into re-oiled pan over medium-low heat and heat through until egg is mostly firm and cheese is melted, flip and cook for a minute to finish.
Slide omelette on to bread and enjoy this less than 500 calories of deliciousness.
Peanut butter is a semi-solid and can therefore hold peaks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I love Peanut Butter and Jelly. It’s a treat, especially when it’s made with super crunchy peanut butter and real preserves where the fruit still has some of its texture, shape and deep flavor. I like mine on lightly toasted 12 grain bread, with about a tablespoon each of peanut butter and strawberry preserves. However, I like the taste of real fruit so very much that I prefer it to preserves, even when it is not nearly as sweet. So here are some ideas I’ve tried for improving on a classic:
Top your bed of nuts with chopped fruit! Here I’m sharing the ideas of strawberries and bananas, but that’s just a start. Try thinly sliced granny smith apples, strips of ripe peaches, chopped raisins, or crushed blackberries.
Add more nuts to your nuts: Nut Butter Medley
I always use natural peanut butter, almond butter, or cashew butter for these sandwiches, meaning that the ingredients list says “nuts, a little salt” and nothing else. If your label reads differently, skip it. The original marketing concern with natural nut butters was that people would see the oil sitting at the top of the jar (perfectly normal) and think there was something wrong with the concoction. The trans fat and other ‘ingredients’ are unnecessary and unnatural except to keep the look and feel of fake nut butters, and so why have them there? Extra points if you grind your own in the store, as you can at places like WholeFoods Markets. I like to take it a step further and make a sort of nut butter medley by adding my own walnuts, cashews, peanuts, hazelnuts, and almonds fresh from the shell, on the spot, per sandwich.
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The Nut Butter Face-Off: Almond Butter vs Peanut Butter (empowernetwork.com)
In this post I’ll talk about two pancake recipes. One has seven ingredients, and one has only two, but they both have merit.
So I love pancakes. I really enjoy the fluffy texture, sweet flavor, and crisp edges of a well-done pancake. I always choose to avoid mixes for the task because the from-scratch (I mean, I’m not stone grinding wheat or anything) recipe is so simple and easy to remember:
Traditional Pancake Recipe
1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp sugar
1 egg, whisked
1 cup milk
1 Tbsp oil
Mix the ingredients in a medium bowl, cook a quarter cup of batter per cake in a lightly greased nonstick skillet over medium high heat until bubbles form, flip and cook through for another minute or until lightly browned on bottom. Ignore first batch’s sadness and failure.
Keep hot in a 200 degree Fahrenheit toaster oven while cooking rest of batch. Serve with real maple syrup.
Simple, right? (about 800 calories for the batch) Well, it’s also delicious, but me being lazy, I decided to try the no-flour alternative I had seen in a couple of places, where a ‘pancake’ is made with two ingredients.
Two ingredient no-flour pancakes
2 eggs
1 banana, sliced
Mix by hand if you dare, but a small food processor will make this far easier. Place into a 8-10 inch buttered skillet on medium heat. Cook until firm, flip and finish cooking. Serve with honey, peanut butter or fresh strawberries.
Although I do not have celiac disease, and don’t subscribe to a gluten-free nutritional lifestyle myself, this is gluten-free.
The 2 ingredient version is more of a sweet dessert tortilla than a pancake, but the texture, sweetness, and flavor are not far off. Maybe the best part is the 240 calories for the batch!
I have decided recently to stop buying baked goods like cornbread and start making my own. Flour, sugar and other raw ingredients are far cheaper than the packaged, processed breads, crusts, and other baked goods. The act of cooking gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment. The fact that I know exactly precisely what is going into my baked goods means that I have control and agency with it. I have been doing a lot of stove-top cooking lately, and I decided that it was time to begin learning more deeply about the baking side. I’ve made plenty of breads in the past, and so I knew how easy it was to do and what great rewards came from it.
I was looking for a reasonable idea for dessert for my boys, who I visit with a few times a week, and cornbread seemed like just the thing. I recently told them that we were going to stop getting donuts and pretzels at Wawa for snacks, and start making most of our own food during our visits. Not only did they understand the financial reasoning behind it, they genuinely love to help me cook, and seem to enjoy the food that they helped to make far more than the processed foods we used to purchase. This may have started as a temporary fix to help pinch some pennies, but it is making more nutritional, philosophical, and emotional sense now too.
Simple Cornbread
This recipe has some great nutritional value: it’s vegetarian, low in fat, low in sugar, has whole grains, good oil, and is a great vehicle for nuts, fruit, or greens, like sauteed spinach.
1 cup stone ground corn meal
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup raw sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 cup water
1 egg
In two bowls, combine the dry ingredients separately from the wet ingredients. Then slowly mix in the wet into the dry. Do not over-mix but mix until smooth. Pour into a oiled loaf pan and bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes.
This genmaicha tea from ujinotsuyu is traditionally called ‘the people’s tea‘ and combines green tea and toasted rice, the rice being a kind of filler to make the tea less expensive, though it also gives the brew a distinct flavor which is surprising to anyone who’s only ever had tea or rice separately. It’s also called popcorn tea because some kernels of rice can pop in the toasting process.
The color of the brew is typically a light yellow, but I thought it was reminiscent of flat mountain dew, a very neon green.
The flavor is subtle, nutty, and tastes of brown rice, of course. It is a nice contrast to richer teas and an awful lot like a thin, unassuming broth.
The aroma reminds me of fresh-baked bread. You can smell the toasted rice, but behind it is a slight grassiness of a meadow. A very nice scent.
The tea is rather dry, and has a light lingering finish near the back of the tongue. There is very little viscosity.
So in this post, I want to talk a bit about the stresses of modern life, and a possible antidote.
I just lost my job of two years at Princeton University. It was a glorious opportunity, but it was not for me. There were certain skills that particular job required that I did not have. The skills that I do have and thrill in using, including playing with technology, media, consulting, training, graphic design, presenting, and other creative skills were not the ones that caused an issue. There were a lot of necessary skills related to short-term memory, intense and tight focus, methodical and diligent site testing, and political sensibility that I do not, and may not ever own. In the end, it comes down to a misunderstanding on my part about what the job was going to be, and despite that misunderstanding, a need for that job to be done and done well in the way that they wished. Writing styles, working styles, and other stylistic differences also contributed. I wish them very well and continued success, and they did the same to me.
So, what to do now?
One of the things that had happened more often than I would have liked is having to turn down consulting work. An endless schedule of a nine-to-five job often eclipses the flexibility needed to succeed in consulting work. One of the outcomes of this change is that I am very free to pursue consulting work now. If you are interested in following my effort there, please visit https://www.facebook.com/lemasneycreative
Another thing that has become quite clear is that I do not need, nor want all the stuff that I have acquired. In my separation and later divorce, moving from a single home to a studio apartment, two cars to one, alcoholism to sobriety, obesity to fitness, and lots of money to very little, I have learned many things, but chief among them is that more is not better. In fact, to the contrary, losing all of those things has been a struggle in change, but a relief in the gloriously simple result.
I have also gone deeper into my embrace of nutrition via simplification and minimalism. One of my favorite things now is to grab 2 or 3 fresh whole vegetables from the fridge, like potato, tomato, and broccoli, and gathering it together into a delicious, simply prepared, subtle beauty of a meal. I have recently closed off my television service. I have stopped voluntarily going out to eat at restaurants. I have increasingly moved towards a whole-foods and local-seasonal nutritional lifestyle, going so far as to throw out my Splenda tonight, and realize with certain joy that I’ve drunk only a variety of loose leaf teas over the last week or so.
This is leading somewhere. I’m developing a new budget that eradicates my credit debt, maintains my living space, supports my family, maintains my auto insurance, and allows me to eat. Eventually, I’d like to get rid of my car and rely more strongly on walking, biking, and public transit. As a final goal, I’d like to own a very small plot of land (40’x40′?), with a tiny structure (20’x20′) to eat, sleep, meditate, play, think, and work. The world will be my yard.
