I’m still just as bad at eating proper lunches as ever. I didn’t finally sit down to some non-trivial calories until 3 PM today. But, thankfully, I was able to assemble this semi-filling, semi-healthy lunchish platter. That’s rotisserie chicken, cornichons and olives, some delicious Dutch cheese, half a Landjäger sausage, and an organic apricot.

What I need is to figure out a way to incorporate more vegetables into this type of super-speedy thrown-together meal, ya know? Then I wouldn’t feel so bad about my spastic work-from-home eating habits!

I’m normally a very hungry person, and between boredom, stress, and I guess just timing at work, I’m always acutely aware of when it’s lunchtime at a normal office job. Sometimes I’d have a big project or be engrossed in a deadline and I wouldn’t eat until an unhealthily late hour, or I’d stay late well past a smart dinner time. But for the most part, I ate regularly at normal intervals that didn’t make my metabolism crazy.

At home, I’m a menace. Grant and I are sharing our car and attempting to stave off the purchase of a second vehicle until we have kids someday. So I’m sometimes driving him to work or to the bus stop, grabbing a latte, mocha, or chai, and then not consuming anything else for breakfast. And then I don’t realize it’s Food O’Clock until about 3 PM, when I’m DYING and my entire metabolism is screaming at me and I need to lie down and can’t imagine getting back to work because my blood sugar is crashing so hard. (I exaggerate a little, but not much; I’m an idiot who forgets to eat.) I don’t think this is one of those healthy things where I lose weight; I think my body goes into starvation mode and starts conserving anything that touches my lips as fat. So it’s not like I devised a brilliant breakfast-free stratagem here! I need to eat.

More and more, the thing I wind up eating to chill myself out is one of these:

Yeah, that’s a “green” smoothie. Only yesterday’s is more like brownish-purple because I included lots of blueberries. In fact, all this contains is filtered water, ice cubes, two lemons, half a bunch of Italian (flat) parsley, and about half a cup of blueberries.

Here’s today’s, which was a third a bunch of Italian parsley, a few (five?) big leaves of green kale, a large Braeburn apple, and two small lemons, plus ice cubes and filtered water:

One of my tips for making more nutritional smoothes is that you should generally blend up as much of the fibrous parts of veggies as you can, in addition to the part you’d normally eat. So for kale and parlsey, this means you don’t discard the stems (though you can trim the very end bits off if they’re scuzzy). And for lemons, you cut them like this:

Actually, you can be even less aggressive than I was. I just accidentally cut through to the pulpy part, but an ideally butchered lemon would be opaque pale white with all zest removed but no juicy bits poking through if you know what I mean. I first learned of green smoothies from Green for Life by my mom’s pal Victoria Boutenko. Victoria posited that you could even eat leafy parts like carrot tops and other veggie greens that usually get discarded in our country. I’ve tried it but never with a proper blender, which makes a HUGE difference; so I can’t attest to the carrot top thing (nor the Carrot Top thing, if we’re honest) but I bet it’d be lovely.

Here are my prep tips for an awesome green smoothie that won’t gross you out:

• Include ice cubes. Both in the blend and in the glass you drink from. I find that green smoothies are WAY less ick-inducing when they’re really cold! I also often use some frozen berries both for fiber and flavor, and they have the side benefit of chilling things down a bit.
• Use a Vitamix. You just have to. You’ll never get truly smooth-ish smoothies with a regular blender. See if you can find a used one on Craigslist or at a yard sale; my mom did this for me and saved hundreds!
• Add more water than you think you need. You may want to make your smoothie more concentrated, but more water makes it blend more easily and heck, it keeps you hydrated!
• Don’t use powders/boosts/etc. Just don’t. There’s a place for that crap, but in my opinion it’s not in a smoothie like this. The ingredients in what I’m describing are so pure and healthy that they shouldn’t need a helping hand from some chalky powder that’s just going to diminish your final product.
• Start on Low, wait until all the bulky bits have been grabbed and are starting to spin in the slushy form, and then kick it up to high. If you need to, use the blending stick to poke your produce through the hole in the lid (I KNOW; that’s what she said). Poke as much as necessary, but be careful because liquid can spew out around the poking stick once everything is blending properly. I don’t even want to hear the jokes that might come from this.
• Consume rapidly, ideally within a couple hours. They get gross if you leave them, even refrigerated. And they start to taste really different and not in a good way.
• Stir before you sip! I like to use these metal spoon straws, which are also excellent for many a melty dessert. (I definitely don’t just eat kale, after all!)
• Rinse your equipment right after. Even our badass dishwasher can have trouble getting dried smoothie-blend-bits from the inside of our glasses, blender carafe, and reusable straws if I don’t stay on top of the rinsing. Which just looks super gross to the next person who uses that item. So be diligent!

I’ve been doing much better home-food-wise ever since I got back on the green smoothie train. I know they look scary, but I urge you to give them a try! Heck, come over and I’ll make you one. :)

A: The C&H company. (OK, by “time” we should probably round up to “massive industrial complexes and machinery and infrastructure” or something.) So check this out: you can buy supafine and also ULTRAFINE (“baker’s”) sugar in the grocery store! I knew that sexy fine cake flour existed, with a creepy name that makes it sound like knockoff Dove Body Wash, but I never realized that a fancy sugar also existed. I bought some recently, mainly because I was at a sketchy little mini-mart that didn’t have great selection, but I’m SO GLAD I did. Its deceptively weird milk-carton packaging is actually way easier for storage, and the stuff inside is amazing.

I’ve been using it to make the odd cocktail, such as my standby Sidecar or more recently, an Old Fashioned, which I started enjoying thanks to the most recent The Talk Show with Marco and Gruber. Anyway. Great for Old Fashioneds because you want something that dissolves quicker in less water, so you can move on to filling the majority of the drink with the important part (the whiskey). And today, I tried making white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies with it—delish! I actually under-estimated the amount I would need, since I thought my cookies from before were both too sweet AND too crystally-crunchy. Turns out they may have only been the latter. But I daresay the texture is much improved now!

I can’t wait to try this stuff for cakes, as well as any recipe where I need sugar to dissolve fast. I think I’ll always keep a carton on hand. However, I do wish that I could get a luxury product like this in a less processed format—I know, what a brat, right?—because I do think organic sugar tastes better. It’s kind of like how I wish they made unbleached recycled Charmin, or unbleached recycled Bounty, ya know? It’s a real shame when natural products are inferior products. If I ever get windfall-rich and accomplish all my other many MANY windfall-rich goals (get a Ph.D. in linguistics; pitch a movie about online dating and actually get hired to do something with it; buy the silly ice cream joint by my house and turn it into a combo ice cream joint/neighborhood pub; get a legal pet ocelot somehow; ever fix our goddamn deck; start up a natural skincare line; buy the overpriced .com equivalents of all my silly domain hack websites; the list goes on and on) then I totally plan on making a company that makes Luxury Natural Products. Eh, maybe I will grind up a bunch of organic evaporated large crystal sugar for my next confection, just to see how it goes.

Oh, and isn’t my new foxy cookie jar adorable? It’s still on clearance at West Elm if you hurry. (Curse the lack of affiliate link.) We’d been wanting a sleek, mod-looking yet fun cookie jar for ages, and this could not fit that description better. They have some other cute animals too. Happy baking!

• I doubled it, so quantities adjusted accordingly.
• I added enough molasses so that it was like using dark brown sugar.
• I used two big bananas and two tiny ones which I think are a sweeter species.
• No walnuts, a tad more vanilla than called for, and my usual pinch of xanthan gum with the dry ingredients.
• Added about 1.5 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp allspice, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp ground cloves.
• Didn’t quite have enough sour cream, so I supplemented with about 1/3 cup leftover cognac-spiked vanilla-bean-infused sugar-sweetened whipped cream from Thanksgiving. Shut up; it worked great.
• I wound up needing to bake mine for at least 10 min. longer than she called for.
• If I did it over I might experiment with cutting back on the sugar. Didn’t seem like it truly needed it all, esp. with the richness of flavor that my other additions contributed. (No offense, dear anonymous Internet Janet! Your recipe was a badass base for my compulsive experimentation.)

I brought these in to work today, and my coworker Cassie was so effusive and inquisitive in her praise that she finally motivated me to stick them in a proper post with proper instructions. Here ya go, Cassie!

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup dark brown sugar*
• 2 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
• 1 large egg (NOT Omega-3), room temperature if possible**
• Up to 2 sticks salted butter, room temperature (I use somewhere between one and two sticks depending what I’m after – more butter = less fluffy/cakey, more crispy/chewy. Lately I’m a Full 2 Sticks kinda gal)
• 1/2 tbsp (or less, if you like) real vanilla – don’t use imitation, buy a good but cheap real vanilla.***
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 12-oz package chocolate chips****
• Optional – if you’re going to add nuts or dried fruit (dried sour red cherries make a wonderful addition), make sure to remove some chocolate chips to make room for them.  My advice is 2 parts chips, 1 part fruit/nuts/both, for a total of 12 ounces of add-ins.
• See my personal baking tips for more detailed ingredient advice and techniques.

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350ish, and set out your baking sheets (but NOT on top of the oven). Cut up parchment or throw down the Silpat or whatever else you like to do to preserve your cookies’ asses.
• In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar about two minutes, scraping sides and bottom well (especially if using a stand mixer).
• Add molasses if you’re doing a brown sugar substitution, add vanilla and egg and keep beating.
• Mix dry ingredients together lazily in a separate bowl, then add this mixture in about three parts, mixing after each addition. Don’t go overboard mixing once the flour is added, or your cookies will get all hard because you’ve teased the gluten out of the flour and accidentally started kneading the mixture like bread. Avoid that. Be lazy.
• Stir in chips with a wooden spoon or paddle and try to make sure they’re evenly distributed.
• For easy storage, use your hands to shape dough into balls or patties and keep loosely packed in Tupperware in the freezer for easy removal and baking of just one or two.
• Chill dough if possible for at least 45 minutes, then bake at 350 degrees for 10-20 minutes, depending *very much* on your oven – check at 10, 12, 15, etc. minutes and remove at the first hint of browning on top.
• Allow cookies to cool for at least 30 minutes.  For cookies you want to eat immediately, cook a bit longer (but leaving the ones for later to cool even if they seem a bit undercooked will make for softer, chewier cookies even after cooling – salmonella, shmalmonella, I say!)

*Best is if you do the whole white sugar but add molasses at egg stage thang.
**Duck is definitely best here! The biggest one in the dozen; be extra careful with shells since they’re thicker and even more unpleasant to bite into.
***An easy way is to do “vanilla sugar” — whenever you use vanilla bean caviar in a recipe, stick the hulls in a spice jar and fill with sugar. Use that sugar to bake things like these cookies. You’re welcome. (Still use the normal amount of vanilla bean extract as well.)
****I just use Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chips, but obviously, fancier chocolate makes for fancier cookies.

Aaaanyway, why am I mixing cocktails at 3:07 on a Friday? Because it’s my Sunday, baby, and it’s almost Christmas, and I vacuumed and swept and mopped up a storm and made banana bread out of the worst bananas ever, AND we needed to use up some lemons.

It should go without saying that this drink is better with the highest quality ingredients — I use Cointreau because it really does taste better than other cheaper Triple Sec type options. My brandy this time around was Raynal VSOP, but I would welcome recommendations of other good ones to try. I use organic lemons and organic Grade B syrup — it has a stronger mapley flavor than Grade A.

Maple Syrup Sidecar
2 oz VSOP brandy or cognac
1 oz Cointreau or equivalent
2 oz lemon juice, strained
1/2 oz Grade B maple syrup

Combine all and shake well with ice, pour directly into glass, or strain into chilled glass if desired. Skip the sugared rim unless you need it for the aesthetics; if you must sugar the rim, reduce syrup in drink by 1/4 oz, grind your sugar to superfine using a (well-cleaned!) coffee bean grinder or food mill, and use maple syrup to make the sugar stick to the rim.

Indispensable tools for the job: shaker, stainless steel funnel with strainer, mini measuring cup

Cheers!

Well, this morning I got to crack into my new brew, and I have to say I’m a bit disappointed. It’s definitely true that you taste the beans more than the roasting process, which is nice I guess (roasting flavor = yum!), but there’s still a pungently acidic note to my coffee. I actually think it’s a symptom of the beans — my beans are a weird blend of Victor’s and Zoka house decafs, and I’ve noticed an overly acidic note to them when brewed via heat methods, too. Perhaps I’ll give this iced coffee thing another whirl with a different decaf someday. (WHY can’t they make decafs as snobbishly well-curated as regular beans?)

For now, it’s a reasonably nice pick-me-up, especially if you add cream and maple syrup like I do! Using cream instead of milk means the maple doesn’t curdle the dairy, and maple syrup adds a lovely depth of flavor that’s yummier than agave or other low-cal sweeteners, but lower on the glycemic index than sugar. Try maple syrup in a plan latte sometime, too — it’s amazing!