{1} Coffee

I made a fantasmic batch of cold brew this week.  Brooklyn Roasting Company Iris Espresso brewed with pumpkin spice and vanilla bean paste.  Two notes – 1. Go read all of the coffee descriptions on BRC immediately; you’ll drool all over your keyboard.  2. I am adding vanilla bean paste to all of my coffees from here on out.

Served over ice with Almond Breeze Hint of Honey.  <– I’m a fan.

{2} Chocolate

Dark Chocolate Mint from NibMor.

Did y’all know that NibMore lives right up the road from me in Great Neck?  I’m excited that this tasty bar is local.

{3} Oatmeal for lunch

I know that these overnight oats look a little rough, but the flavor was perfect.  In the morning before work I stirred together 1/3 cup pumpkin puree, 1/4 cup oats, 3/4 cup almond milk, and 1 Tbsp chia seeds.  The mixture thickened up nicely by lunchtime.

The blob on top is butterscotch peanut butter.  <– Ahh-mazing!  Adam and I are obsessed.

Another day, another (oat)meal.

Veggie and fruit leather, a SweeTango apple, and *new* Quaker Caramel Apple Oats.

{4} A great, Greek, green dinner

Leftovers.

I was worried about the phyllo dough, but my Greek Tofu Pie reheated just fine.

Plus leftover green beans sautéed with garlic aioli mustard sauce and sliced almonds.

We had a rough week health wise – one night Adam had a fever and I had a migraine and we sat on the floor and ate chips and aspirin for dinner – so having leftovers available was great.

Worth mentioning too – My leftovers from Max in Williamsburg.

The pasta and sauces are all made in-house and they are out of control.

{5} A new favorite novel

The Center of Winter by Marya Hornbacher.  I haven’t actually gotten all that far into this book yet – partially because I’ve needed to nap on the train and mostly because the writing is so beautiful that I go back to the beginning of the page and reread when I hit the end of most of the pages.

Hornbacher is one of my favorite authors and her first book, a memoir focusing on her eating disorder, shaped the way I think about literature.  <– I am planning on blogging about that in more detail next week.

Her first novel has been truly one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.  I wanted to share a short {meta!} passage to give you guys a taste –

All the seasons here in the north move toward their own end, except winter, which moves towards its center and sits there to see how long you can take it.  Spring twitches impatiently in its seat like a child wanting to go outside, straining toward summer, and summer, all lush and showy, tumbles headlong toward the decay of fall.  Fall comes and goes so fast it takes the breath away, arriving in brocades of red and gold and whipping them off in only a few weeks, leaving a landscape ascetic, stunned with loss.

Outside, in the soft blue-gray dark, the snow fell.  A child sat at the kitchen table and pretended her father had not died, because you were there.  As long as you were there, she did not need to be afraid, or go outside, and so she was not afraid, of cold or anything else.  Death did not kill her off but merely left her maimed, like a shot animal that startles at the noise more than the pain and scrambles even faster through the underbrush, wide-eyed and sweating at the flanks, not pausing for the ripped and useless leg it now drags behind it as it runs.  The animal has three legs left.  Terror makes that enough.

Have you read any of Hornbacher’s work yet?