Aka Miracle Berries aka Synsepalum dulcificum, a plant whose berries don’t taste sweet on their own, but have a compound (Miraculin) that binds to sweet receptors on the tongue and makes acidic foods which are ordinarily sour be perceived as sweet.
Please note – I was sent the berries free of charge to review. I was not provided with further compensation for this post.
You eat the pulp, not the seeds, and the effect lasts about an hour. They recommend trying the berries 1-2 at a time with foods such as citrus fruits, yogurt and kefir, and vinegar, so we set up a little tasting station.
It totally worked!! The limes and plain yogurt were both sweet and delicious. I could definitely see this working as a great way to get kids interested in trying new foods. I am excited to have the berries in my freezer so I can continue trying them out on different things.
…I also ate things that were sweet all on their own – cookies!
Many, yummy cookies. Like a chocolate chip cookie sandwich from Whole Foods.
And macarons from the tea place near my work. We tried milk chocolate marshmallow, Nutella, and cream brulee.
Marshmallow was the best, of course.
…We went to Smorgasburg
Per usual, we focused on duck buns and iced coffees.
We also went to Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory – – and hated it. I have no idea how that place always has such a long line.
…I got a summery green pedicure
I sipped a delicious cold-brew iced coffee from Bareburger while I got my toes done.
That cup – squee!
…I ate leftovers that weren’t half bad
I drizzled leftover egg salad with Sriracha, served with leftover roasted green beans and buttered whole-wheat cinnamon swirl toast.
Roasting veggies is the real miracle, how can leftover green beans taste so good?!
…The dog ate wet food and this happened:
I tied his ears back so he could eat mess-free. What a cutie!
We bought tons eggs and dye for Easter this year, and of course, never did a darn thing with them. The dye is in our “holidays bin” for next year, but the eggs had to be cooked. And so, I enjoyed hard-boiled eggs as a meal almost every day this week.
I was also all about the Cara Cara oranges and Medjool dates. It’s starting to taste like summer!
stuff
I started Ruth Reichl’s first autobiography on the train and I think I’m in love.
She is so funny, and I love any story about food!
We were insanely busy at work all week and I’m dying. That’s why this post is a day late (and is short about 10 more coffee and candy pictures), because I did sessions with 18 patients on Friday – many of them with gestational diabetes – and when I got home I just wanted to lie down.
breakfast
I made an awesome cold-brew blend this week: Community Coffee French Roast and BRC Peru with brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pumpkin pie spice.
But this triple – chocolate oatmeal bowl wins a close second.
Rolled oats with a heaping Tbsp of hot chocolate mix, chocolate-covered cocoa nibs, and dark chocolate chips.
And this busy day “lunch” was a loser. Vanilla soy milk at 11 am.
And Easter candy at 4pm when there was finally a lull.
dinner
Omg. Kids! I made the tastiest stroganoff-inspired noodle bowls ever. Adam and I could not get over them.
Served in heaping scoops on egg pappardelle.
Yummy Stroganoff-ish Pasta, serves 4
Heat 1 Tbsp evoo in a large skillet over high-medium heat. Add 20 ounces sliced white mushrooms, and a big pinch of salt, and cook until the mushrooms have lost their juices and browned, stirring regularly (10 – 13 minutes). Deglaze the pan with a healthy pour of cream sherry. Remove mushrooms from pan and reduce heat to medium-high, adding an additional Tbsp evoo if needed.
Add 1 lb lean ground turkey and two large shallots, chopped to the pan. Season with pepper and 1 Tbsp smoked paprika. Cook 5 minutes, stirring regularly and breaking up the meat into small pieces with the side of your spatula. Stir in 1/2 Tbsp ground garlic, 1/2 Tbsp fish sauce, and 1 Tbsp soy sauce. Continue to cook, stirring regularly, until meat is cooked through (5 – 7 more minutes).
Reduce heat to low and stir in 3/4 cup reduced-fat sour cream.
Serve on top of pasta of choice.
The leftovers were still great.
Served on top of spinach salad. Plus, those of us who can eat chocolate had Lindt caramels for dessert.
We had cobb salad.
Baby spinach with balsamic / roasted asparagus / turkey bacon / avocado / TJ’s cave-aged blue cheese / hard-boiled eggs.
And egg salad.
Eggs with shredded carrot, chopped green pepper, mayo, pickle relish, garlic mustard, dill, tumeric, smoked paprika, and s & p. With great seeded crackers my parents sent us for Easter.
And roasted broccoli and green beans.
Egg salad is good – and I wasn’t even tired of eggs yet! – but roasted green beans are always the best part.
This post feels long, and I am le tired, so I will try to be less loquacious than usual.
Very chatty sidenote – how great are some of the words that describe how much a person does or does not talk?? Loquacious. Taciturn. Verbose. Gabby. Love them!
Real talk though: I somehow caught a springtime cold and I am cranky and sniffling and need to go to bed. I know I’ve wasted 60+ words on an intro, but I’ll try to let the pictures speak for themselves as much as possible.
breakfast
Vanilla iced coffee with vanilla milk.
Smoothie #1 – strawberry mint. Chocolate mint soy milk, frozen strawberries, and plain Greek yogurt.
Smoothie #2 – blueberry bliss. Frozen blueberries and dates with plain almond milk, plain Greek yogurt, and a little honey.
I made another batch of Community Coffee French Roast, this time in our coffee machine. Traditional/hot brewing did make this a little bitter, but it was still quite drinkable. Especially with skim milk and a splash of toasted marshmallow coffee syrup or a sprinkle of cinnamon and brown sugar.
lunch
Subs with the in-laws for Easter. With chips and hard-boiled Easter eggs.
Coffee Chobani with Cocoa Coconut Renola and a Cara Cara. I am very picky about my coffee yogurts and this stuff was on point.
A half turkey sandwich from the cafeteria with seaweed salad and Easter candy delivered by a coworker.
I apparently don’t have a photo to speak for itself, but another day I packed a sandwich from home. An epic sandwich. Sweet cheddar and extra-sharp cheddar on a toasted English muffin. Swoon.
This mix was random, but it worked – spicy Thai chili tuna salad, brown sugar and sea salt seaweed, and a Cara Cara.
The husband and I are both obsessed with these two dessert items.
Plain Greek yogurt with butterscotch peanut butter and chocolate-covered cocoa nibs
I made How Sweet Eat’s Brown Butter Oatmeal Chunk Cookies for a birthday at work and they received rave reviews. I subbed vanilla bean paste for cinnamon, subbed dark chocolate chips for chocolate chunks, and made much smaller cookies (for a yield of 40 cookies versus her 15), and I recommend all three changes if you make a batch of your own.
I’m including two non-edibles that fed my soul. The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman was like a grown-up version of Francesca Lia Block’s stuff. It was hard to put down; I read on the train and one night I had to sit in my car in the parking lot for twenty minutes to keep reading.
Dessert was angel food cake layered with a yummy Cool Whip + vanilla pudding mix + shredded pineapple concoction.
An easy, amazing soup. I cooked shell pasta in chicken broth then dumped in sautéed chopped bok choy and green onions, shredded cooked chicken breast, and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. My bowl was drizzled with sweet chili oil as well. Adam absolutely raved about this dish.
I turned the rest of my never-ending marinara sauce into a bastardized version of Jenna’s Channa Masala. On top of brown rice and roasted broccoli. Topped with plain Greek yogurt and sweet chili oil.
Safe Catch sent me a can of their wild skipjack tuna.
Please note: I was sent this product free of charge to review. I was not provided with further compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
Seafood is a great thing to include in your diet. It is a lean protein, a good source of iron, and a good source of omega-3 fatty acids. Unfortunately, due to the fact that seafood contains mercury, it may not be a good idea to consume it daily, and some varieties are safer than others. Canned tuna, for example, I have to tell my pregnant patients to limit to </ once per week. Safe Catch is a new, mercury tested, tuna brand that enforces a strict limit on the amount of mercury allowable in the fish that go into its products (their standards are 90% stricter than the FDA’s mercury safety limit of 1.0 parts per million). Also important – the fish is caught exclusively with pole and line from managed stocks.
I wanted to be able to really taste the tuna – we give it two thumbs up – so I made it into a super simple tuna salad.
Served on a challah roll with a side of roasted broccoli.
Last night was my sickest, and the husband worked overnight, so I made a(n incredibly tasty!) frozen meal from Trader Joe’s and called it a night. I also ate a bowl of cereal in bed.
There were entirely too many photos of my hands in this post.
I wrote this post at midnight on Saturday… while I ate dinner/my first meal of the day… it’s been kind of a rough week. Hopefully I’ll be in a better mood while this is auto-publishing because I should be in the car on my way to Easter celebrating with the husband’s family.
I’m missing a ton of photos from the week (chips and dip!) and posting two days late, so I almost skipped this post, but some of these eats (chocolate + oat bowls!) were just so good.
breakfast
Community Coffee sent me a variety of their ground coffees to try.
This was a free product sample that I’m reviewing for no additional compensation. It will take me some time to make it through them all, but I will let you know as I open each bag.
Quite nice! Roasty and not acrid at all. I am going to make a (hot) batch in the coffee machine soon and I will let you know if that changes my opinion, but for now we give this two thumbs up.
Salted crack caramel + salted honey with honeycomb and chocolate-covered potato chips.
dinner
Chipotle, because heaven forbid we go longer than five days without rice bowls.
Or salty lime chips, or giant diet cokes.
I made us a huge batch of marinara sauce in the crockpot.
It was a great idea in theory, but I didn’t season the sauce enough and the end result was very “meh.” Too bad we ate it three days in row for dinner and still have gallons left.
The best part of that meal was our side dish –
roasted broccoli with pesto gouda melted on top.
On a much more exciting night, I had drinks with a girlfriend at my favorite Brooklyn bar – Pork Slope. No photos, but I had a Keegan’s Mother’s Milk Stout on draft that rocked my socks off. Then we met up with Adam for dinner at Talde, Pork Slope’s Asian-American sister.
That’s my Navy Grog {Diplomatico rum, honey syrup, lime and grapefruit juices} and kale salad {cantaloupe, pickled beets, candied almonds, creamy ponzu}. I am going to be heartbroken when we move on from our national kale obsession.
Who else has obsessively binge-watched their way though the entire first season of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” already? We finished the whole thing over the weekend. We loved it! I’m considering a rewatch. I hate the two trial episodes – I thought they were god-awful, truly some of the worst television I’ve ever seen – but I adored everything preceding them. The 10 second concept makes my life. Unsurprisingly, this is another smart and funny win from Tina Fey.
The theme song has permanently ear-wormed its way into my brain.
Related, Lisa – Born Round was amazing!
I read it on the train and then would sit in my car in the parking lot for at least 20 minutes each night to keep reading. I’m pretty sure Bruni should be giving TED Talks for all would-be crash dieters, emotional eaters, and aspiring journalists.
breakfast
I did the chocolate milk and iced coffee combo two days in a row.
Paired with a Special K protein bar both days.
Not the best bars – for taste or ingredient list – but they were free in the cafeteria and I had some extra morning hunger this week.
Another day I did hot chocolate mix in hot coffee with a lot of milk on top.
So basically just the lukewarm version of my chocolate milk and coffee.
My breakfast plan for St. Patrick’s Day was a green smoothie. Then I hit the snooze button and the plan was iced coffee with green dye in my milk. Then I hit the snooze button five more times and I barely managed to get coffee, ice, and boring plain milk into my cup.
…and then I also got Starbucks once I got off of the train.
I usually don’t let myself do two coffees in the morning, but I had stayed in bed until literally 10 minutes before I needed to be in the car so clearly it was a double coffee kind of morning. And yes, mom, I fixed my hat hair before I saw patients.
lunch
Thankfully the cafeteria totally came through and helped me get some green-theme on St. Paddy’s Day.
My bagel was topped with pepperjack, sliced turkey, mayo, mustard, and frisee lettuce. Plus baked onion rings on the side.
Blood orange Fage with Nature’s Path Heritage Flakes and blackberries and a fresh mandarin orange on the side.
I can’t believe I had only ever eaten canned mandarins up until this year, they are my new favorite citrus.
Tart cherry Noosa with coconut butter, homemade butterscotch peanut butter, and a Pinata apple.
We are loving the new 4 oz Noosa packs. Noosa is Adam’s top favorite yogurt – in fact it’s one of his favorite foods in general – but the original packages were a bit too large to enjoy on the go.
Vanilla-caramel yogurt with blackberries and 18 Rabbits caramel apple granola.
I loved the flavor of the grass-fed yogurt but I’d still be a little nervous about trying it plain.
snack
Popcorn / all-time best Easter candy / beer…
All good.
A small but gourmet sandwich.
Toasted whole-wheat with Applegate Farm herb sliced turkey, mayo, and leftover carmelized onions.
Weird pasta salad from the cafeteria.
Why do they keep putting croutons in pasta??
An Austrian iced coffee.
Aka coffee (delicious Grady’s cold-brew in this case) with ice, (skim) milk, and (vanilla-caramel) ice cream.
dinner
Asian-style baked shrimp bowls.
From the bottom up, I filled my casserole with quartered bok choy, sliced wild mushrooms, chopped orange and yellow bell pepper, shrimp, fish sauce, rice vinegar, soy sauce, canola oil, and Sriracha. Then I baked it for 15 minutes at 425 degrees.
Served on top of brown rice cooked in chicken stock.
Leftover bbq salads.
Spicy, local arugula topped with bbq sauce, cucumber, avocado, bell pepper, caramelized onions, and TJ’s fire-roasted corn cooked with turkey bacon.
These were some of the best salads we’ve made in months.
The next night I did a 180 from salads and made my grandma’s recipe for an awesomely retro chicken and rice casserole.
Complete with condensed soups, chow mein noodles, and crushed chips on top. I swapped half of the rice for shredded cauliflower but otherwise did not healthy it up at all.
Served with green beans baked with fish sauce, honey, Sriracha, and evoo.
We ate casserole the next night too.
And we will probably been eating casserole the next few nights as well!
Hope everyone has a great weekend, good luck getting that song out of your head!
When it comes to the big, important stuff – having jobs, our health, and a great marriage – Adam and I know that we are unbelievably lucky. That said, man oh man, this week was annoying. The snow has been relentless, I wore my favorite sweater to work only to get to the cafeteria and douse myself head to toe in balsamic vinegar, Adam had to have both of his big toe nails emergently removed, and my car has a flat tire. When it rains it pours*. I’m pretty sure I have never been so glad for a weekend!
There was a lot of stress snacking going down this week that I didn’t do the best job of photographing, but I am going to recap the most delicious things…
breakfast
Iced coffee on the train and plain yogurt with peanut butter at my desk.
I had a ridiculously amazing coffee combo this week… Cold-brew with chocolate milk and toasted marshmallow coffee syrup!
So insanely good.
Are you admiring my nails? Scroll to the last section of this post.
Note – the popcorn was sent to me free of charge to review. I was not provided with further compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
Pre-popped popcorn can never really compare to freshly popped, but these are definitely the best bagged varieties we’ve ever tried. They are nice and crisp. Adam – who likes to pretend that he doesn’t like popcorn – was crazy for them, so that’s saying something. We preferred the Simply Salted because the EVOO was good, but not quite as flavorful. Both are organic and kosher and have 40 calories per cup.
I surprised my sore husband with a giant, sweet latte.
The citrus fruits shown in my lunches this week are fresh Mandarins from Trader Joe’s that were wonderful. Very sweet and juicy with almost no seeds.
Baked yucca fries from the cafeteria. I had about double what’s shown because I started eating before I sat down.
They were paired with the salad that ruined my outfit.
TJ’s egg white salad and popcorn.
The egg salad was practically inedible; whyyyy was there so much turmeric??
Popcorn, Applegate Farm sliced turkey, mini Jarlsberg, and olives.
The tasting plates were fun, but I was missing my yogurt bowls.
dinner
If you judge a dish by how good it tastes cold and leftover, straight from the casserole dish – I definitely do! – then my pizza mac and cheese was a real winner.
Adam heated his serving up, but he also recommends that you try the recipe.
Chipotle night. I ate a giant rice bowl with chicken, veggies, and pretty much all of the toppings.
Our neighborhood is pretty much a food wasteland, but I think Chipotle would be Adam’s first pick even if we lived somewhere with more going on!
This was our best dinner of the week:
Roasted broccoli and kalettes (aka kale-Brussels sprout hybrids).
Southern pickle “fried” chicken. <– I am so proud of this one; check the recipe sidebar!
I served mine on a toasted, open-faced sandwich with a bit of mayo.
Last night we had fabulous kale salads.
I massaged a bunch of kale with Sepo sauce in the morning and then tossed it with roasted broccoli, cubed avocado, and roasted coconut chips when it was time for dinner.
We were supposed to have chicken on top of our salads but I accidentally left the remaining tenders sitting out on the counter overnight so instead I had a grilled cheese sandwich while I wrote this post.
fancy nails
So my jazzy nail polish? Actually nail wraps from Jamberry.
One of the girls I used to cocktail waitress with is a Jamberry consultant (her sales page is what I linked above) and she sent me a sample kit so I could try them out. I am pretty amazed by how easy they are to put on; really not tricky or time-consuming at all, maybe almost as easy as slopping painting on polish. Plus they are very cute! I will definitely buy some to try again.
P.S. Thanks to Way Back Machine, I was able to find my old employee profile (click to enlarge) –
I finished reading my latest book on Friday – Fairyland, a memoir about growing up with an openly gay father in San Francisco in the 80’s. (Not much of a)spoiler alert – he dies of AIDS related complications. I was wracked with sobs for the last quarter of the book. Steve Abbot was a published author who kept detailed journals his entire adulthood and wrote copious letters to Alysia while she was in college, so she had a lot of source material to pull from which was nice; it was practically a biography within a memoir.
A big chunk of Saturday is missing because we went on a fun foodie tour and I am devoting a whole post to it. (coming tomorrow)
We upgraded our phones on Sunday. My new Galaxy is giant and tacky, obnoxiously gold.
breakfast
Adam and I tried the new raspberry white chocolate coffee from Dunkin’.
Our opinions ranged from good to meh. I still want to try the Starbucks version.
Cereal bowl.
Cocoa Pebbles and Nature’s Path Heritage Flakes. Pebbles have absolutely no flavor and were deeply disappointing.
Oatmeal bowl.
Rolled oats – cooked in the microwave – with 1 heaping Tbsp each chopped pecans, raisins, chocolate chips, and brown sugar. Plus milk on top.
Coffee from 7-11 with wasabi almonds.
Yes, that was a terrible combination.
lunch
Chipotle!
White rice / chicken / black beans / sautéed veggies / fresh salsa / tomatillo salsa / sour cream / cheese. I would normally get lettuce but I split this bowl with Adam and he didn’t want it. I’ve stopped putting the corn salsa on my bowls in general because even though it’s tasty it isn’t really necessary to pile another carb on top of a rice bowl.
Adam went to a post-ABSITE surgical exam party and brought home leftover mini pizzas.
Paired with green juice.
NYC Jamba Juices recently introduced a new line of 12 oz Cold-Pressed Juice bottles and they sent me a $10 gift card so I could try them out.
I was not provided with further compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
The juices contain no preservatives and three servings of fruit and/or vegetables and each full bottle has between 140 to 190 calories.
Citrus Kick was way too spicy for me – Adam liked it but I just can’t do ginger – but I found Tropical Greens to be nicely balanced, neither two sweet nor too grassy. (There are four flavors in total; the two I didn’t try were Orange Reviver and Veggie Harvest).
dinner
We had another stupendous meal at Russ & Daughters.
The Breakfast Martini = Beefeater gin, jam, lemon juice, egg white, Pernod Absinthe, Angostura Bitters.
I adore cocktails with egg white. <– I was about to type that they will be hard for me to give up if I get pregnant! I guess the alcohol may also be an issue.
I ordered the Eggs Benny, which came with Scottish smoked salmon and sautéed spinach on challah.
No surprise, the eggs were perfectly poached and the hollandaise was loaded with flavor. <– more reasons I’m not chomping at the bit for a baby
Sunday night we made a nice, but less exciting dinner at home.
We were helped out by a jar of Sepo Sauce, a creamy garlic and horseradish spread that’s meant to be used as a dressing, dip, and/or sandwich spread.
Sepfonifiq sent me a jar of sauce free of charge to review. I was not provided with further compensation for this post. All opinions are my own.
The sauce has 150 calories and 2.5 grams saturated fat per 2-Tbsp serving, so it’s not any healthier than most typical dressings, but it packs a lot of flavor so you would rarely need to use any more than a serving.
We decided to go the bread and lettuce route.
A sandwich of part-skim mozzarella cheese, thick-cut uncured turkey ham steak, and whole-wheat cinnamon swirl bread spread with Sepo Sauce and oven-toasted.
A salad of baby kale tossed in Sepo Sauce and topped with roasted broccoli and sweet and spicy pecans.
Plus we split a sumo mandarin on the side.
Sadly, we hated the thick cut turkey, which kind of ruined the sandwiches. We both got rid of the meat halfway through and ended up eating big desserts instead. But we loooved the Sepo as a dressing and were both blown away by the salad. I will definitely look forward to making that again.
Please cross your fingers that it’s not actually snowing in NYC right now?
A short weekly wrap-up since my pictures were terrible, the two best from each category…
breakfast
I made wonderful coffee this week with the help of Grady’s Cold Brew Bean Bags. Paired with 1) A coconut berry smoothie.
Hint of honey almond milk, frozen strawberries and blueberries, and coconut butter. I love the way the coconut doesn’t totally blend in and you end up with little pockets.
2) A surprisingly good omlette from the cafeteria.
Eggs with onions and peppers.
lunch
1) A mix of seafood items from the caf made me feel fancy.
Tuna salad sandwich, lobster bisque, and a honey tangerine from home.
2) A snack plate that was actually the first half of lunch; I had Vietnamesse food at a party later.
Pretzels, turkey jerky, and cinnamon apples.
snack
1) The party was a goodbye party for my boss. I brought in cookies. Lavender chocolate caramel chip and my Smore’s Monster Cookies.
I ate way too much dough then stayed up half the night with a stomach ache/sugar high finishing the latest Kathy Reichs’ book.
2) More sugar?
I enjoyed these crispy m&m’s much more than I was expecting to.
dinner
1) Chipotle is always good.
White rice, pinto beans, veggies, corn and mild salsas, cheese, sour cream, and lettuce.
2) This salad, sans chips, was good too.
My take on a copycat of TGIFriday’s pecan-crusted chicken salad.
Copycat TGIF Pecan-Crusted Chicken Salad
chicken tenders
honey mustard – I used cranberry honey mustard which I highly recommend
chopped toasted pecans
baby spinach
dried cranberries
crumbled blue cheese
canned mandarin oranges
balsamic vinegarette
Preheat oven to 425 degrees Farenheit. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray. Pour mustard and pecans into wide, shallow bowls.
Dip chicken into mustard, then into pecans, pushing gently to help set the nuts (I only coated one side of my tenders).
Place chicken on prepared baking sheet, naked side down. Bake for 27 – 30 minutes, until chicken is cooked through. Allow to cool before slicing.
Assemble salads with toppings.
instagram share
1) I bought these cards to brighten up my office for only 99 cents at Trader Joe’s.
Eating Chalk 