My Three-Day Juice Cleanse Experiment

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I’ll try anything once. (It’s true, ask my high school boyfriend.) So when my friend suggested I take part in a juice cleanse at her yoga studio, I said, Sure! I said, Sounds like fun! It took a week for the realization to sink in: No food. For 3 days.

I like to eat. As a kid I would go to parties just for the cake. I’d take my piece to a spot in the corner and eat it alone, like I wanted to give it my undivided attention. I once convinced a bouncer I was hypoglycemic so I could bring a bag of cookies into a club. But I’d heard a lot about juicing, and I was curious. I’d just never been brave or motivated enough to try it.

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to get in the kitchen and make juices everyday and not eat, so I went with a prepackaged cleanse from Juice Hugger in Brooklyn. For $45 a day, you get six juices per day (one for every 2 hours), already bottled and numbered for you. Each day includes a mixture of juiced greens, fruits, and veggies. The juices were surprisingly tasty and varied enough to keep it interesting. The second day—usually the most difficult for people—featured a tomato soup, sweet potato juice, and a lentil mixture, all of which could be heated and placed in a bowl to simulate the act of eating. (I personally found sipping juice from a spoon to be even more depressing than drinking something called “Lean Lentils.”) Below is a day-by-day blow of my experience.

Day 1

All I think about is food. Not because I’m hungry, but because I know I won’t eat for days. I try to read a book but the main character is painstakingly describing his mother’s job at a bakery, where the doughnuts “roil” to life in grease. I mark the next time I can have a juice, 2 hours from now, on my bookmark.

My neighbor burns toast and my mouth salivates like Pavlov’s dog.

Two hours crawl by. I take small sips of the juice, wanting it to last. I cross out the hour I’d jotted down on the bookmark and write the time for my next feeding. I’m reminded of a prisoner counting down his days.

I clear my fridge of anything chewable and put away the dishes on the dish rack, as if to rid myself of the notion that cooking can and has happened in my kitchen.

My stomach snarls at me. I can’t help it; I start seeping gas. I make a note to leave the house as little as possible. Continue reading →

The “It Could Really Be Much Worse” Valentine’s Day Beer Tasting

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Celebrate true love

Happy Valentine’s Day Eve, everybody! I intended to review chocolate beers today and was eagerly anticipating Southern Tier’s Choklat, Heavy Seas’ Siren Noire, and Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout. But there were none to be found at the beer store this weekend! Apparently all the people who like to drink their way through the holiday have good taste in beer. Fortunately another related theme quickly appeared. In the same way Christmas is not really all about giving, Valentine’s Day is not really all about heart-shaped truffles.

Doggie Style Pale Ale, Flying Dog Brewery, 5.5%
Initially we’d grabbed some of Flying Dog’s Raging Bitch, but then discovered this even more appropriately-named brew. It’s an English style pale ale, and therefore more bitter than I am used to; it reminds me of an ESB. There has to be some joke about being bitter and bent over, and Ben and I struggle to be the first to make it. No one wins.
B: It starts out fun but has a harrumph of a finish.
L: A harrumph?
B: There’s a sour downturn. Overall unsatisfying.
L: Don’t try too hard.
B: …Yeah, I’m going to sprain something.
At one point Ben actually says “If you close your eyes and sip it you could imagine it as the best Bud ever. This really could be much worse” Oof. We each finish our halves without serious injury, but were both left wishing we’d grabbed the Bitch after all.

Lucky U IPA, Breckenridge Brewery, 6.2%
We are both encouraged by this IPA’s brilliant orange color, but immediately disappointed by the taste. As I learned the hard way, handsome things are not necessarily worth your time. Continue reading →

Mignon’s Grub Match Pick: Bayou Bakery

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bayou bakeryGrub Match is back, and this time we’re rumbling in a new city. ‘Tis the season of Presidents Day and inaugural balls, so we’re bringing the ruckus to the nation’s capital where three feisty female contenders are ready to duke it out over which restaurant will take home the D.C. Grub Match title. First up is elementary school teacher Mignon Miller, with her favorite outpost of Big Easy flavor, Bayou Bakery. Will her midwestern sweetness and spicy taste in restaurants knock out the competition? Here’s more from Mignon:

If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Definitely cheese, or possibly ice cream.  Or even better, cheese ice cream!

Have you ever worked at a restaurant?
I used to sling garlicky breadsticks from a basket to customers at Fazoli’s fast food Italian chain during high school.  Later, I specialized in spilling drinks on kids at their own birthday parties when I waitressed at a country club in Ohio. Continue reading →

Historic Blizzard: Dairy Queen of My Heart

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dairy queen blizzardI grew up on the edge of the Great Lakes Snow Belt, so impressive snowstorms were no rarity. Any notable storms of my childhood, however, only caused my parents and elder siblings to reminisce about THE storm, the one that had wreaked havoc in the 1970s before I was born. “Remember when Dad shoveled a tunnel through the eight feet of snow on the porch after we’d been stuck inside for three months?” they’d sigh, with nostalgia and, one hopes, some measure of exaggeration. “Now that was a real blizzard.” This weekend it seems that I narrowly missed another historic storm, New York now a slushy, melting mess while our neighbors to the north are still shoveling themselves free. Even so, it has put me in mind of another blizzard, one that I know very well.

It is my firm belief that even people who are largely devoted to healthy or carefully prepared meals have a few fast food skeletons lurking in their pantries. One of mine is the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Dairy Queen opened their first shop in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois (just a hop, skip and a jump away from where the original Ray Kroc McDonald’s would descend fifteen years later), and they first coined the term “blizzard” for their ultra-thick milkshakes. It wasn’t until 1985 that they introduced the Blizzard as we know it today—candy or other sweets crushed and mixed with soft serve ice cream into a cholesterol-laden sludge so dense that it will not slide from the cup when a Dairy Queen employee turns it upside-down. (At small outposts of the chain, they will still enact this ritual for you, unbidden). I love them.

I don’t think I have ever eaten a Blizzard without feeling slightly nauseous afterward, but that’s not important. To me, Blizzards are sacred totems of the open road.

Continue reading →

Unordinary Sweets for Your Valentine

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macarons

You're the wind in my mill, baby.

As the blizzard looms, so looms Valentine’s Day. It’s the last weekend to dream up something sweet to woo your Valentine, and people will almost certainly be rushing to snap up the famed chocolates at Jacques Torres and Kee’s. But what if you long for a more unorthodox and inventive way to express your undying love? I have some suggestions.

Papabubble, 380 Broome Street
If you’re one of those people who thinks that hard candies are only for grandparents, you’ve probably never had one flavored with pear and bergamot or raspberry and sage. In this little shop in Little Italy, hard candy is the only thing offered, but it is raised to new heights. The candymakers (all of whom have such ostentatious facial hair and earnest expressions that you’ll wonder how they made it over the bridge from Williamsburg) hang and stretch and color and mold enormous hanks of sugar as customers look on, hypnotized. Special Valentines offerings include a “heavy petting mix” (featuring faces of cute animals) and a double-ended heart lollipop.

Mille-Feuille, 552 LaGuardia Place
I went many years confusing macaroons with macarons. For anyone who has suffered from similar bafflement, the latter are the small French pastries made of meringue and almond flour that look like Day-Glo sandwich cookies. Continue reading →

Indian Curry Sweet Potato Fries & Purple Carrot Fries

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One of my cooking joys is turning someone who claims to not like a particular food.  Shannon is probably the most frequent victim/beneficiary of this pleasure.  I won out against her resistance to dark greens like kale and mustards, and I have recently joined the campaign for the honor of the sweet potato.

The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a member of the botanical family Convolvulaceae that is, I was kinda surprised to learn, commonly known as the Morning Glory Family.  Yep, sweet potatoes are close cousins of Morning Glory flowers.  They’re the only commonly eaten plant of the 1,000 Convolvulaceae species.

And they’re worth eating.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a D.C. non-prof that advocates for nutritional awareness, found in its ’92 study of vegetables that the sweet potato is the most nutritious vegetable.  Ever.  I know, that seems crazy, it reminds us of a pumpkin or the third substitution option after curly fries, but it’s true.  Given its fiber, complex carbs, beta-carotene, protein, vitamins C and A, potassium, iron, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, et al, it scored in the Center’s test a numeric value of 184.  The second most healthy vegetable, the humble regular potato, scored only 100 points.

So we’re going to be eating some sweet potatoes in the Leahey home.

And you know I had to come up with some novel ways to prepare them.

First Move: The Peel & The Cut  –  Keep the skins.  A lot of the nutritional value is stored Continue reading →

Carrot Cake Breakfast Porridge

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carrot cake for breakfastThere are some food textures that I cannot abide. Enormous hunks of sun-dried tomato make me gag; the mealy, fibrous feel of some kinds of squash turns my stomach. The soggy consistency of overcooked, waterlogged rice might top both of these, however, on my personally calibrated grossness scale. Last week, when Jason got distracted with multiple other components of an ambitious dinner and let the brown rice go too long, I just couldn’t eat it. But since both of us hate wasting food, the conundrum became what to do with a giant pot of leftover rice.

Thus began my scheming for a grand resurrection of the watery grains. In the past, I’ve enjoyed both a Moosewood recipe for stovetop rice pudding and a slow cooker recipe for oatmeal that tastes like pumpkin pie, so I thought I might be able to combine them into a yummy weekend breakfast. Also, we had an abundance of carrots in the fridge after Jason found a mother lode of root vegetables at the farmers market, and when I recalled that I do now have a modicum of carrot cake experience, a plan began to take shape.

Below is the recipe that I came up with. When the rice was cooked with almond milk until it had the consistency of oatmeal, I no longer found it repulsive. And despite having the word “cake” in the name, most of the ingredients are terrifically healthy. You deserve a merit badge, however, if you manage to leave off the cream cheese (cheese of wonder!) and honey glaze that I added at the end for a boost of carrot cake flavor and a touch of decadence. Continue reading →

36 Hours in Baltimore: Part II

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Saturday afternoon, after Reece’s eggs took the edge off a slow morning-after and post museum trip, we went to the Abbey Burger Bistro in Federal Hill.  Abbey patrons can build their own burgers around meats such as alligator, kangaroo, and elk.  I don’t eat that shit.

I didn't eat this. But this kinda captures a lot of what they do. And we were too excited to remember to take our own pictures.

I do, however, eat fried green tomatoes, which the Abbey has turned into a burger, and it will knock you out.  I mean, Knock.  You.  Out.

The batter on the tomato wasn’t too thick, wasn’t too thin (“Juuuust right,” said Goldilocks), and was fried to a golden crisp with the tomato hot and juicy inside.  I topped it with cucumbers, herbed yogurt, and probably a quarter-cup of goat cheese and ordered it on a whole wheat bun.

It was amazing.

I mean shockingly good.

I know this is a bit anathema to say of a place that serves elk on a bun, but this place makes the best fake “burgers” I’ve ever had.  On previous visits I’ve tried the shroom and homemade veggie burgers, and they’re fantastic as well.

Part of the success is based on the mix-&-match component of the build-your-own arrangement, but the greater part of the success stems from the superiority of those build-your-own ingredients and the expertise with which the tomato is cooked.  That’s not to say that this is healthy food, per se.  The burgers come with homemade chips that will fulfill your fat intake for the weekend, and for $2 more Rae subbed about a pound of delicious sweet potato fries for those chips.  And the sheer number of  possible ingredients (meat & “meat” – 13, bread – 7, cheese – 13, toppings – 37) can be overwhelming.   But goddamn if this wasn’t the best lunch I’d had in recent memory. Continue reading →

36 Hours in Baltimore: Part I

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Baltimore.  I love Baltimore.  It’s got that cozy, quasi-beat down feel I dig in East Coast Cities, a good smattering of galleries and museums, and an idiosyncratic funkiness that appreciates the weird.  While there for a birthday weekend earlier in the month, Shannon and I and my best friends, Rachel, Tim, and Reece went to the American Visionary Arts Museum, a place dedicated to self-trained artists, heavy on the work of mental patients, and able to encompass both this haunting applewood sculpture carved by a TB patient soon to commit suicide and a gift shop in which Reece could buy a whoopy cushion for his twin five-year-olds.

And since we like to eat—and since Tim in particular loves food more than most any other product of human civilization—restaurants factored heavily into the birthday plans.  Each establishment we patronized ended up, as if by magic, to be exactly what we needed at exactly the moments in which we patronized them.

Friday night, Rae and Tim were eager to take us to a spot called Ten Ten.  We were planning on going dancing later and Ten Ten boasts “handcrafted cocktails” that proved excellent primers for the club, as well as the reason that my memories of Ten Ten are limited primarily to them.

Pretty. Lethal.

Okay, that’s not totally accurate.  Tim’s lamb shank came on the bone and looked like both a Viking’s dinner and his mace.  And the Fried Brussels Sprouts with Chili Vinaigrette were superb.  As best as I can deduce now, they’d been steamed to the perfect shade of Late Spring Green and then pan fried briefly at very high heat, giving them those caramelized-charcoal spots that make for the best Brussels.

At the time, however, I’d had, as best as I can recall, two Electric Relaxations, composed of gin, Sloe Gin, honey, Pernod, and lime, as well as a nice glass of Talisker (identified by taste alone, I might add) before leaving the house, leading me to declare authoritatively to the table that after the steaming, the Brussels had probably been subjected to a blow torch ordinarily relegated to Crème brûlée. Continue reading →

A Matter of Taste II: Pairing Music and Beer

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Beck and Jack vie for my heart!

“What beer should I drink while listening to this band?” This is a question I run into nearly every night around 7:30 when Ben’s about to start cooking dinner and I’m doing yesterday’s dishes. I turn up the stereo in the other room so we can hear the music over running water and sizzling butter. After pairing beer with authors, setting my evening drink to music seemed the natural next step.

Let’s start by having a ball and a biscuit, baby. Jack White often screams along to our grilled cheese-making, usually in White Stripes form. I suppose it is no surprise that I’m secretly in love with Mr. White, considering he resembles my Mister a good bit. (He’s pretty good looking for a boy.) How easy it would be to suggest a Red Stripe for my White Stripe? How easy, indeed. Here’s what matches White: a black IPA. Try a 21st Amendment Back in Black or a Fade to Black from Left Hand Brewing or even an Iniquity from Southern Tier (an imperial). All strong, bitter and dark as nightmares–same way I like my rock stars.

The Black Keys, while also one of my favorite driving-around-Ohio sing-along bands, is also a great cook-along band. While Ben is slicing potatoes and beets onto a cooking sheet, I’ll be wagging my butt along to the El Camino album, which naturally has a van on the cover. The beer in my hand? A rye ale. It tastes like the bright green fields of winter crops you pass on your drive up to Akron, and it tastes like the rubber processing plants you pass on your way out of Akron. Founders Red’s Rye P.A., mentioned earlier, and Sierra Nevada’s Ruthless Rye IPA. Not for the faint of heart.

When we’re cooking up some particularly sensual meal, like guacamole or something, we turn to Lana Del Rey, whose voice will never break glass, but could maybe glue it back together. Continue reading →