Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit, a glass of orange juice, waffles with maple syrup, and several cups of coffee.
Lunch was a bowl of whole wheat fusilli pasta with Béchamel sauce and a glass of Bolla Merlot. I weighed in at 157 pounds.
Dinner was some turkey rice soup and popovers and two glasses of Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon.
By popular demand 
I have added a link to my Atom feed at the end of my list of links for those of you who would like to be informed immediately of updates to my journal 
. It is an Atom feed and not an RSS feed — since I am using the free services from Blogger and Atom is the only desktop syndication option available to us cheapskates 
. I would like to apologize in advance to those whose news readers do not yet support Atom. Since Blogger just started offering it, I assume that client support will come along fairly quickly.
We have an evergreen tree just outside our window where the English sparrows like to perch while they wait their turn at the bird feeder. Our cat, Sierra, likes to think of it as her own private “cat feeder.”
Breakfast this morning was half of a white grapefruit with a maraschino cherry for color, a bowl of steel-cut oats with brown sugar, milk, and walnuts, a glass of orange juice, and several cups of coffee.
I weighed 156 pounds this morning. Lunch was fried rice and a cup of orange and spice tea.
For our Valentine’s dinner, Gretchen and I started by making dessert — or rather the topping for our dessert. We made glazed apples that we would serve over vanilla ice cream later. The first step was to pour ourselves a glass of Bolla Merlot. Next, we gathered our ingredients.
Peeling, coring, and slicing the apples was easy, since I got Gretchen a peeler, corer, slicer for Christmas. This was a lot of fun, since we had to get our hands on the food and there were invariably the few odd imperfect pieces of apple slice that we did not want in the topping and we got to pick them out and feed them to each other while we were cooking. Next we melted the butter and sautéed the apples and raisins. Once the apples were soft, we added the shrub and the spices and turned the apples until they were uniformly coated. We covered this mixture and set it aside until we were ready for dessert.
So now the question arises, “What the heck is shrub?” Shrub is a light syrup. From the information on the bottle “Recipes for ‘fruit shrubs’ can be found in 18th and 19th century cookbooks including those by Martha Washington and Mary Randolf.” In addition to its use here, shrubs make a nice base for soft drinks or as a flavoring in a Champagne cocktail. We received a bottle of Raspberry Shrub from Tait Farm, just across the valley from us, from my sister-in-law for Christmas.
Once our dessert topping was finished, we went on to making our entree of Soy Braised Chicken. We had left over white rice, from my binge the other day, to go with it.
While we were waiting for the chicken to braise, we fed each other an appetizer of shrimp cocktail.
So, that was our Valentine’s Day dinner — in reverse.
As I just mentioned, it appears that Gretchen and I are not alone in not going out very often because we prefer our own cooking to that which can be had in local restaurants. However, we do go out occasionally. If you are like us but thought that Valentine’s Day would be a good time to break that “eat at home” habit, here are a few people that would caution you otherwise:
Valentine’s day is not a good night to go out to restaurants. Basically, people who go out to dinner only once a year go out on Valentine’s Day. The restaurants have to cater to these people’s narrow tastes and enormous expectations. Not a good night to go out. [tastingmenu.com]
Then there is this:
Ah, Valentine’s Day. It makes me think of red roses, candy hearts, snuggly kisses, over-booked restaurants, grumpy servers, and the time I was seated next to couple that was breaking up. It’s hard to be cooey with your love while over-hearing, “Nope, not once. I faked it every time.” And, as you may recall from my New Year’s Eve column, Valentine’s Day is one of the worst days, service-wise, to go to a restaurant.
I say skip the dinner out, make a kick-ass meal at home, and go out to brunch on Sunday morning. [Cinnamon Cooper]
And this just supports that belief:
With Valentine’s Day falling on a Saturday for the first time since 1998, restaurants have been turning away hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of frustrated diners who didn’t make reservations early enough. One restaurant had to buy more dishes, tables and silverware.
“You hear this phone ringing?” said Ken Lurie, a partner and front-of-the-house manager at Tersiguel’s French Country Restaurant in Ellicott City. “Every call is for [tonight], and we’re just filled. We’ve turned away thousands.”
At restaurants across the area, the message seems to be: If you haven’t secured a Valentine’s Day dinner reservation by now, you might as well forget it. [Baltimore Sun]
So, I hope you have a nice romantic dinner at home planned!
Because of a medical procedure I was having done today, I have not been able to eat anything for the past 27 hours. Everything turned out fine, so now I am breaking my fast with hot and sour soup, egg rolls, lo mien, general tso’s chicken, and fortune cookies.
I find it oddly coincidental that yesterday the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Chronicle both decided to feature recipes for baked beans. I do not normally think of February as being baked bean season. On the other hand, I have been looking for an excuse to get one of these bean pots, so maybe I should give these two recipes a try.
Makes 8 servings
Rinse beans; add to water in saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer 2 minutes; remove from heat. Cover and let stand 1 hour. (Or, add beans to cold water; soak overnight.) Do not drain. Add salt to beans.
Cover and simmer till tender, about 1 hour, then drain, reserving liquid. Measure 2 cups liquid, adding water if needed; mix with molasses, brown sugar and mustard.
Cut salt pork in half; score one half. Grind or thinly slice remainder. In 2-quart bean pot or casserole, combine beans, onions and ground salt pork. Pour molasses mixture over. Top with scored pork.
Cover; bake in 300-degree oven for 5 to 7 hours. Add more liquid if needed.
Per serving: 394 calories; 12 grams protein; 12 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 60 grams carbohydrate; 12 milligrams cholesterol; 365 milligrams sodium
This dish is a time commitment that is worth the effort. The beans taste even better the next day.
Wash and pick over beans, discarding any stones or debris. Place in a 6-quart pot (not cast iron), cover with water and let soak overnight. The next morning, drain beans and add fresh water to cover. Bring to a simmer and cook until the skins of the beans break, about 30 minutes. Drain and set aside.
Bring a kettle of water to a boil. Preheat the oven to 250°.
Combine the salt, brown sugar, molasses and mustard in a Dutch oven, stir to combine. Then add the beans and stir to evenly coat with the mixture.
Press the onion half and salt pork into the middle of the beans. Pour in boiling water to cover.
Cover the pot and bake for 5 hours without stirring. Add hot water as necessary to keep beans covered with water at all times. Uncover the pot for the last half hour of cooking so the beans will brown.
Serves 8
Per serving: 425 calories, 18 g protein, 61 g carbohydrate, 13 g fat (4 g saturated), 12 mg cholesterol, 792 mg sodium, 20 g fiber
Breakfast started with half of a white grapefruit and a glass of orange juice. The grapefruit arrived by mail yesterday. I ordered them from Sun Harvest Citrus. Later Gretchen made mushroom and cheddar omelets and toast from her oatmeal honey bread with strawberry jam. I weighed 155 pounds.
Rosemary Hignett, the Head of Food Labelling and Standards at the [Food Standards Agency], said: “We know that consumers often place particular value on terms like fresh, pure and natural when buying food.
“They rightly expect foods labelled with these terms to be different in some way from products that don’t carry these descriptions.
“For instance, they don’t expect items labelled ‘fresh’ to have a four-week shelf life, they don’t expect items labelled as pure to have added ingredients and they don’t expect products with ingredients described as natural to have used artificial preservatives and additives.” [BBC]
Breakfast was a half of a glass of orange juice and two sausage and scrambled egg wraps. I weighed 154 pounds.
I had a morning meeting at the Nittany Lion Inn with another networking vendor. The Inn provided food. I had two servings of yogurt with granola. I walked there and back — about three miles total.
Dinner was vegetable lo mien, I had two servings and then had a couple hands full of peanuts for dessert.
