Remember when I used to update this blog?

Here's what I ate today - for old times' sake:

Morning:
-red pepper
-green tea
-eggs

Lunch:
-salad with lettuce mix, cucumber, green pepper, tomato, broccoli, purple cabbage, egg, tuna, feta, sunflower seeds, craisins

Dinner:
-yogurt w/ oat bran and raspberries
-avocado
-turkey burger

There it is, folks! If for some reason you have been checking back here every day looking for a new entry, then God help you and I am very sorry.

Oh, I have been getting a series of exertion headaches. They do not make me happy. That's about it I guess. Tune in next time for another exciting entry! Who knows when it may happen again!

Also this one.

I don't generally like to do this, but I found this non-food-related music video pretty fun today.

Let me tell you a few things about Buenos Aires:

-Buenos Aires is a city in Argentina, South America
-It is a big city - like 12 million people
-The food is fantastic
-and cheap
-People don't have snacks, from what I can tell. They sit down and eat meals and then they get up and they do what they have to do. They don't mess around with eating stuff while walking. In fact, if you do that with anything besides ice cream, I don't think they like it very much
-The coffee is just amazingly good. It is all cafe con leche (like espresso with milk), but again, you have to sit there and drink it. You don't get stuff to go. You just don't.
-My girlfriend and I ate at some of the best restaurants we have ever been to. EVER. We live in a major east coast city that has some pretty nice restaurants, but in terms of food quality, decor, atmosphere, and service, the places in BA just blew everything else away, as far as I am concerned. All the pasta was hand-made. If you want to find fresh hand-made pasta in the US you are going to have to get yourself an Italian grandmother or something because no restaurant is going to do it for you, because they don't think you are worth it.
-Buenos Aires is really clean, with lots of nice big parks, and slender, good-looking people.
-There were no obviously drunken, crazy, ranting homeless people. With all the huge beautiful parks, they seem like they would be a natural place for people who like to yell stuff to no one in particular to hang out, but no. This may have been a function of the nice neighborhoods we were staying in, but it seemed consistent throughout the different areas of the city. I know that if any city in the US had parks like BA did, that they would be filled with people who slept there all day. Oh, and there was no trash in these parks. Did I mention that? It was like being in Canada or something.
-Some restaurants don't open until 9 pm. People do stuff late. All kinds of people walk their dogs at like 3 am on a Tuesday, yet everything is open in the morning. It's like a riddle.
-Buenos Aires is awesome.

So I'm back from there. I've been eating a bunch at the City Girl Cafe in Inman, and they have a good salad (spinach, onion, chicken, some kind of cheese) that I always get. While you're there, you can say hi to my good friend Beth, who told me to start this blog because she was sick of me telling her what I had eaten every day. They have good music, too.

Also in Inman is Montien, which is a good Thai place. It is very red inside. I had the most boring dish I possibly could have ordered, the chicken and broccoli, but it was good and I enjoyed it. I thought about getting chicken massaman curry but as I have said previously, that is special and to be saved for special occasions otherwise I will start down the slippery slope of becoming a shut-in who starts only wearing the same pants because they are "the ones I like".

I've been working on a few projects recently that have turned out ok. Projects #1 is the mock mashed potatoes. Bascially you steam a head of cauliflower for about 15 and then mash it up in a food processor with a tbsp of butter and some garlic. It's a pretty convincing subsititute. Unfortunately in my zeal I put in enough garlic to bring tears to my eyes. I ate this yesterday and I can still taste the garlic. There are a lot of people out there who are all, "You can never have enough garlic!" I used too much garlic. I promise.

The other project is trying to eat more cabbage. Cabbage is good for you, and I eat a lot of vegetables, so I'm kind of looking for new vegetables and new ways to eat them. I bought a head of cabbage (which weighs about 3-5 pounds, it's pretty heavy), chopped it, and stir fried it with carrots, onion, garlic, and a peanut sauce I made out of omega-3 peanut butter and soy sauce. It's not bad, although I can imagine other people not loving this.

So I don’t really update anymore. I’m sorry about that. Here are some things I ate last week while I was on vacation in my house:

Salmon w/ butter sauce
Hamburgers w/ extra lean beef
Turkeyburgers
French mix of beans with wax beans, green beans, carrots
Broccoli
Greens+ powder (this is sort of like a vegetable when I am feeling lazy)
Fish oil
A ton of mixed nuts. Too many, really. (Did you know that hazelnuts are sometimes called “philberts”? Now you do!)
Omega-3 Eggs w/ pesto, sour cream and salsa. This may not sound that appetizing, but really it’s good. Don’t judge me.
Really this was about it. Not too much variety

Oh, lots of holiday stuff, too. Xmas cookies are brutal. They just sit there all helpless and waiting for you and before you know it there are crumbs all over you and you snap out of it, dazed and greasy.

Ate at a few restaurants:

Massaman curry again at Spice and Rice in Inman Sq. I was really torn on this one. I’ve eaten at Spice and Rice before, and I had the massaman curry, so I felt like you know I should really try something else and test out their menu, but then I was like that massaman curry was so stupidly good that if I get something else and it is not as good then I will be disappointed and sad and angry at myself for not getting the massaman curry in the first place. So I just got what I had before. This is the reasoning that leads people to order the same foods over and over again until they are just scared to order anything else. I felt this was about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when I was young. I knew I liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so why would I risk eating something else that I didn’t know about when I knew what I liked already? Generally this kind of reasoning does not produce a very interesting life for whoever lives by it, however, so I have tried to stay away from it. In the case of Spice and Rice, however, I was in a particularly fragile mental state for some reason and needed some kind of comfort food. Massaman curry was my port in the storm.

Texas chili at Redbones in Davis. This was a good bowl of chili with several large chunks of quality beef in it. I didn’t get the sense that they were just the scraps that they couldn’t serve without drowning them in a meaty broth; this was decent beef. Good and covered with cheese. It did cost like $7, however, which is a lot to pay for chili, so this is not like a great value or anything. Tasty, but you pay for it. It was ably washed down by a Bud Light.

Huh. Seemed like I ate out more last week. Oh well.

Today Morning:
-coffee (that's it. kind of in a hurry.)

Lunch:
-spinach salad w/ broccoli, tomatos, mushrooms, egg, turkey, tuna, feta, craisins, pineapple, and bacon with “oriental” dressing. This is the awesome salad that I eat at work every day. Sometimes it has green pepper in it.
-fish oil
-water. I drink upwards of 160 oz of water every day. That is just at work. It is really dry there.

Dinner:
I have no idea. If I know my patterns, probably some fish and vegetables. You never know when some spinach souffle might pop up, though. I'm feelin' a little frisky today.

I am not very good at this these days. My apologies, blogging community. in payment for actually turning up to read this blog even though i have not updated in nearly a month, i will take jesse's suggestion to post my very first "what I listened to today." i will select a few songs that i listened to over the past 24 hours.

"addiction" - kanye west
this is a nice song that i think is about being addicted to things that are bad for you, and having a girlfriend who only really goes out with you because you have drugs or booze or something. i kind of forget but it's got a great beat, etc. the skits on his albums are actually pretty funny, too, which is nice. so many skits are terrible.

"i'll believe in anything" - wolf parade
when i first heard this, i was like "what kind of crazy time signature is this in?" when i counted it out it was 6/8, which is not all that crazy, but it's got a cool off-balance feel to it. i always seem to hear this song when i am approaching the school i work at.

"she said, she said" - black keys
a not very good cover of the beatles song. it doesn't add very much and it just sounds badly done. they have much better songs.

"f*ck the ying yang twins" - ying yang twins
i am not proud of this. the ying yang twins are ridiculous and kind of sleazy. i don't think i listened to this the whole way through.

"almost was good enough" - songs:ohia
i really like jason molina and this is a really good song for a sad grey winter day. it's got some interesting tension and lonesomeness in it despite a full sound.

"tiny paintings" - architecture in helsinki
this is a pretty silly song with funny instruments, but it's melodically interesting enough to not be too obnoxious/precious. i'm not sure what to think of the guy with the high voice in this song. i'm alternately and annoyed and ok with him. if you're in a bad mood, this song is not going to help.

"banquet" - bloc party
this is a good song, but after listening to silent alarm again, i don't like it as much as i thought i did, despite the great energy the songs have. the songs just aren't all that strong. except this one, though. it's good.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Today Morning:
-protein bar
-mixed nuts
-2 clementines

Lunch:
-the big spinach salad i get every day that makes me think doing this blog is getting boring. spinach, marinated mushrooms, green pepper, broccoli, tomato, egg, turkey, feta, craisins, soybeans, and balsamic vinaigrette dressing. i mean, it's awesome. it's like the perfect lunch. it's an "all you can fit onto your tray" buffet-style salad bar, where they charge you one price no matter how much you cram onto your salad tray. I of course build a huge salad that weighs many pounds and eat it for basically two meals. it is the awesome. i eat this salad with 32 oz of water.
-fish oil

Dinner (uh, i'll give you yesterday's, i guess):
-salmon cooked in olive oil w/ green beans also cooked in olive oil and topped with a walnut vinaigrette
-omega-3 peanut butter and celery

It's hard to do this with the new work schedule, but I'm working on it.

Morning:
-oatmeal w/ blueberries
-pineapple
-coffee
-protein bar

Lunch:
-ginormous spinach salad w/ egg, tuna, edamame, broccoli, cherry tomatos, cucmber, mushrooms, sweet potato, feta, craisins, almonds, pineapple, bacon, with asian dressing of some kind. i made this. it must have weighed 2 pounds. not much news on nutrition from work to share quite yet. oh, there was some discussion about the recent decaf coffee study linking decaf coffee with higher risk of heart disease around it being hugely overblown by the press. it was a study of only 187 people drinking 3-6 cups a day over only 3 months, and the 18% rise in non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA's) could be burned off by exercise anyway. not that i'm in any way considering going back to decaf, but it's not the recent study that's stopping me - it's my addiction/love affair with caffeine. may we never part again.
-mixed nuts

Dinner:
-roasted vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, little tiny cocktail onions, roasted red pepper) with green beans. from a frozen pack of veggies from trader joe's. there were these little things in there that confused me since they were shaped like little hershey's kisses and not like any vegetable i had ever seen, but they turned out to be little frozen hershey's kisses made of butter and herbs that melted in the pan as i cooked them. fascinating.
-butternut squash soup
-turkey chili
-3-bean salad
-omega-3 peanut butter with carrots. kind of an ADD dinner. this was mostly me wandering around the kitchen in a daze and eating things that were vaguely orange-red.