Faux Bagels

Unless the name of your shop is St-Viateur Bagel or Fairmount Bagel, I'm sorry to say that you make fake bagels.   And, depending on which side of the St-Viateur v. Fairmount bagel argument you lie, one of those two places also makes fake bagels.  (Between you and me, Fairmount is the imposter.)

No real bagel would be caught with these toppings.

Anyways. 

Since real bagels aren't available fresh in my area, I can either eat bagged real bagels or fresh fake bagels.  I opted for fresh fake bagels.   The selection above was an "everything" bagel and a "cinnamon crunch" bagel.  (Neither of these flavours, btw, is acceptable in a real bagel.)  

The cinnamon crunch bagel was too sweet, but was OK once I slathered it in butter and salt, and topped it with stinky camembert cheese.  The everything bagel was OK just with the butter and salt.

And of course, I had coffee.  It was a "fair-trade" Sumatran dark roast made in my Bodum.   It was very, very tasty.  It sure beat the hell out of anything Silvia ever produced.

Rice And Peas, Inauthentic Style

You've probably heard of the West Indian dish, "rice and peas".  It's a side dish and you have it with jerk pork/chicken/goat/etc.  Or at least I believe you do.  Despite living in a West Indian neighbourhood for several years and eating my fair share of West Indian food, I never really learned the finer points of the cuisine. 

I remember once trying to make potato curry the way the local curry-n-roti place made it.  I used to have it often with a vegetarian friend.  My attempt didn't work out in the least.  After thinking about it for a very long time, I came to the conclusion that the secret ingredient in that place's vegetarian dishes was meat.

Anyways.

Rice and peas is made with black eyed peas, which are one of my favourite legumes.  They aren't really easy to find outside of West Indian neighbourhoods, but thanks to all the health-conscious SUV-driving (isn't it ironic?  don't you think?) people in my current neghbourhood, they're way easier to find now than they used to be.    

One of many rice and peas lunches. 

The rice and peas from the other night -- which I had for lunch several times in the subsequent days -- was not authentic, but it was still tasty.  It was made with Uncle Ben's basmati rice that I found on sale.  I didn't even know Uncle Ben's made basmati rice! 

Mmmmm...Burger

The business park where I work is a desolate food area, with only two cafeteria-style diners in two of the towers.  There's a tower down the street that has a Tim Horton's, but it's not really worth the 10 minute walk just to go to a Timmy's.  If you want to eat out otherwise, you need to get in your car and drive.  And if you take your car and drive, you better be going somewhere better than the two cafs.  And it better have parking.

There are two food "malls" within a 5-10minute drive, but both have horrendous parking situations: there is no way in hell to get a parking spot that isn't a 5 minute walk away.   You need a really damned good reason to go there.  Like you've decided to take a two hour lunch and go for dim sum or something.  

Or, in our case, you have a 20% off coupon for the burger place.

We never go to the burger place.  Aside from the crazy parking situation, there's also the issue with the wait.  It's a "gourmet burger" place and so the burgers take 5-10min to be ready to begin with, then the place is always packed with guys from the Large Hardware Company down the road, so in the end you end up spending a good half hour just waiting to get food.  There was no reason to go there except for that 20% coupon.

But man was that a tasty burger!  The fries were good, too!  The burger is a 100% naturally-raised, antibiotic-free, free-range Angus beef 4oz patty with tasty, tasty sauce, like guacamole and chipotle sauce.  Damned, it was good!  It was moist, fresh-tasting and good.  The fries were fresh-cut and brown.  

But I won't be going there again anytime soon.  Even with the 20% off coupon, it wasn't worth the 30min dent in my lunch hour.

The Saddest Snack

The God of the Snack Closet (i.e. Linda, the office manager) has been trying to make us all healthy.  Apparently she was alarmed by the rate at which chocolate chip cookies, chips, Cheetos, and snacky cakes disappeared.  So she has started (a) rationing out the goodies and (b) buying healthier goodies.  Gone are the heady days of Fudgee-Os with Cheeto chasers!  Now we have Veggie Straws and Fruit Cups.  

So, so wrong, but not in a way that makes it right.

Ugh, the Fruit Cups!  I had avoided them for the past two weeks, but on Friday it was impossible.  On Friday all the veggie straws were gone, the stale Ritz crackers had been eaten and even the 0% fat Splenda-sweetened yogurts had disappeared.  All that was left -- ALL THAT WAS LEFT -- were the Fruit Cups.

Sweet Cheez Whiz on a Cracker, it was bad!  I haven't eaten a fruit cup since I was, what, nine?  I hated the damned thing then and I hated it now.  It was slimy, sickly sweet and mushy.  The guy who sits next to me ate two in a row and was like, "As long as you drain the liquid, it's all good."  But it was not all good.  It was all bad.  Never again.  This was worse than the Hostess Cupcakes.

Happier Days.

There is no "Chicken Dinner" Jelly Belly

So here we are at the end of another work week, and what do I have to show for it?  Roast chicken.  Spousal Unit decided to make roast chicken one night.  I thought he was insane, but aside from eating at 9pm, it worked out quite well.  We had leftovers for days!  (Especially since we didn't really eat much when it was made because we kinda ate grilled cheese sandwiches while we waited for the chicken to cook.)

On Thursday I had leftover roast chicken with rice "pulao" (it wasn't really rice pulao...it was rice made with some random spices that kinda didn't really work) and Peri Peri sauce.  I also threw caution to the wind and had a root beer from the office drink fridge.  It was so good!  I haven't had root beer in years.

During lunch, one of my coworkers wandered in with a handful of Jelly Bellys.  It turned out that he had had a bowl of them on his desk for months and no one had noticed.  He was tired of seeing them there, so he brought them into the lunch room one handful at a time.  Mmmmm...

Because I can't say no to Jelly Bellys, I took some.  But because you can't pick and choose your Jelly Bellys when you're in company, I had to just take a handful and deal with what I got.  I still tried to grab more Buttered Popcorn and Marshmallow ones, but a stupid Watermelon one got in the mix.  I hate the Watermelon Jelly Bellys:  Sure they're all clever being green on the outside and red on the inside, but they taste like Watermelon Bubblicious Gum and that is a sin that cannot be forgiven.

Soup, Sandwich and CS3

See that in the background?  That's a totally legit copy of CS3.  It has a valid license that's been paid for and everything.  The only reason it's sitting there is because I can't install it on my machine.  It keeps telling me that my license isn't valid.  Sure the license is eons old, but it's still fucking valid!  Dammit, Adobe!

After ages of trying to install it, I've given up.  Kinda like the way I've given up on Silvia.  See Chartreuse Mug, there?  You know what was in it?  An allongé made with the QA manager's Nespresso machine.  You know why?  Because I came into work, wanted a coffee and didn't want to putz around with Silvia for 10 minutes just to have her make me a mild-tasting, lukewarn coffee.  I would normally make my instant coffee, but I'm all out of Xmas Bleuch and I keep forgetting the marginally-better Colombian at home.  So I popped by the QA manager's office, made myself a really good coffee -- complete with proper crema! -- in about 30seconds.  There.

 

For lunch I had a tasty tuna salad sandwich with avocado instead of mayo, and a hearty bean soup that I really didn't like because it was full of separated skins.

Something Different: Kichri

Have you heard of kichri? No? Yeah, that's not surprising, and not just because I'm imagining my imaginary reader to be far too sophisticated to ever eat kichri.  Unless you're Indian, like from the subcontinent, you've probably never eaten kichri.  It's not something they serve in Indian restaurants of any stripe.  It's simple food that you make when someone's sick or when you don't feel like cooking.

Kichri comforting my notebook.

Kichri is basically rice and {split red lentils, split yellow peas, split mung beans}.  (Did you like the quasi-set-notation there?  I did, too.)  I usually make it with mung beans, but split mung beans are hard to find.  But on Monday, one of my coworkers had the loveliest-smelling kichri for lunch.  He told me he made it with red lentils, using a pressure cooker.  I don't own a pressure cooker. because my mom told me that they explode and that I should never buy one.  But people swear by them.

Anyways.  

Monday night I went home and said to Spousal Unit, "We must have kichri!  I need kichri!  And let's make it with red lentils."  And we did.

Now, our kichri wasn't quite like my coworker's kichri.  First of all, we didn't have mustard oil, bay leaves or cardamom in the house so we couldn't put it into the kichri.  Second of all, we buy powdered spices rather than toasting and grinding our own.  And, finally, we didn't finish it with ghee or homemade yogurt, made with a starter obtained from the nearby Hindu temple.  We used unsalted butter and full-fat yogurt.  It was fine.  In fact, it was more than fine:  it was warm and spicy, and just as comforting as a big heaping bowl of mac'n'cheese!

Catching Up: A Week's Worth of Eating Out and Some Risotto

What a week! There was a deadline looming on Friday and, to make matters worse, everything we made for dinner -- Spousal Unit and I -- was complete crap. Well, everything except Wednesday night's pea risotto. That was pretty tasty. It was made with home-made chicken stock. I had it for lunch on Thursday.

Otherwise, I ate out for lunch every day this week. On Monday I had some kind of crap from the lunch counter in the office tower next door. On Tuesday, I had a bento box from a fake Japanese restaurant. On Wednesday I had The Most Amazing Sandwich Ever from a Greek-Italian panini-and-pita place. And then on Friday, I finished off the week with Chicken Curry Roti.

Tuesday: Bento Box From Fake Japanese Restaurant

A reasonable facsimile of Japanese food.

There are a zillion Japanese restaurants near my workplace. Most of them are either Korean restaurants with a Japanese component or Chinese restaurants with a Japanese component. The place we went to on Tuesday was a Korean place. It has bulgogi and bim bim bap as well as sushi, katsu and tempura. My dining partner and I had the same thing: a chicken katsu bento box lunch. It came with a mysteriously-filled gyoza, two deep fried pieces of tofu, some rice, and some random sushi rolls. I chose to substitute the random rolls for spicy tuna rolls. They were not spicy. They may have been tuna.

Wednesday: The Most Amazing Sandwich Ever

I ate everything. All that was left was the flyer.

The guy in the cube next to me didn't want to eat his rather tasty homemade lunch on Wednesday, so he offered to drive the both of us to his favourite sandwich shop. It's a tiny place in a shitty location that serves Greek and Italian food. The first time I went there I had chicken souvlaki on pita. It was good, but, you know, souvlaki is souvlaki. If you fuck up souvlaki-on-pita, you have problems. The guy in the cube next to me, though, always orders the veal cutlet sandwich. When he ordered it the last time, I was totally jealous. It was an awesome-looking sandwich. It had veal cutlets, tomato, peppers and cheese. This time, I also ordered the sandwich. It had two veal cutlets between a soft bun with spicy tomato sauce and cheese. It was The Best Sandwich Ever. It didn't have avocado spread or goat cheese or caramelized onions, but it was fucking tasty. Tasty. And it was super messy to eat. All the men in the lunch room stared at my sandwich with envy.

Thursday: Risotto

Pea risotto.  Edible.  Quasi-vegetarian.  Healthy.

Spousal Unit made pea risotto with Le Sieur peas and homemade chicken stock. It did not suck and it was probably healthy.


Friday: Chicken Curry Roti

Oh Chicken Curry Roti... You warm the cockles of my heart.

Mmmmmmmm....chicken curry roti. With scotch bonnet hot sauce. Mmmmmmmm..........