The downside to working in the office all day, every day is that packing lunch is a macabre affair

Today's noontime menu:

-banana (1)
-carrot (1)
-crackers
-cheddar cheese (5 slices)
-cottage cheese
-hardboiled egg (1)

I also have a bag of rice cakes in my desk drawer.

I am a good eater. I like to eat. I do not "diet."

This lunch, which I patched together at the last minute out of what was to hand in the kitchen, depresses me.

I am now teaching at an institution with one of the highest rated food services in the country. It's outstanding. But I will not allow myself to drop $8-$10 a day on lunch, especially not at what happens to be a lean financial time for my family.

So...what on earth do people take for lunch? I used to do this regularly, like back when I was 23 and had a miserable office job--although I do remember an exhausting number of cheese sandwiches being consumed in that period.

Leftovers, when we have easily transportable leftovers, are an obvious solution, but otherwise...? I need to get better at this.

Party Time

I love my husband, and I love our evenings together. But it is kind of fun to have a night alone now and again, isn't it?

He's got a dinner thing tonight and I do not. So! Here's what's on the agenda:

Cook up a pot of spaghetti and my favorite sauce-from-a-jar (Newman's Own Sockarooni).
Eat too much spaghetti, drink wine, and watch back episodes of "30 Rock."
Throughout, cuddle kitties.
Put on pajamas and read some stuff until he gets home.

It's funny how sauce-from-a-jar seems like a special secret treat. It's so declasse: a guilty indulgence. And that just tells you something about the fantastic-fancy cooking guy I married.

Accidental InAdWriMo (& a Recipe)

Okay, I don't really know what the acronym is, and I'm too lazy/busy/distracted/hungry to go look it up.

But here goes. I need to write a concluding chapter-esque-type-thing to my book this month. I'm thinking 20 pages (for this part, the part that has been stressing me out and keeping me from sleep lately), so we're looking at about 5000 words, plus footnotes. I'm starting today, and I plan to have a draft by the 16th (2 weeks) and to have revised it by the end of the month. Because, you know, my revised MS is due in 6 weeks. (I think. I can't really remember what I told the publisher; I may actually have 10 weeks. But from mid-December to mid-January I will have no time, so those last four weeks wouldn't count anyway.)

I've written 895 mediocre words today, and I plan on hitting 1000 very soon. Of course, I don't really have my scholarship lined up yet, so I have a lot of other stuff to get done, like, now. I think the reason that this really rather brief piece of writing is keeping me up nights is that it's feeling so incredibly half-assed, which is really not the way that I want it to be. This is a good thing to add to my book; I want to do it right. But I have no time. And I'm rather terrified.

Anyway! More cheerfully, here's the Special Pasta Recipe mentioned in the previous post. I don't think I've posted it before. Yes, the jam sounds funny, but it's quite delicious.

Measurements are inexact: I just made this up one day and re-invent it every time.

Ingredients
-About half a good-sized onion, chopped
-An apple (I usually use Golden Delicious, but whatever you've got should be fine), chopped
-A bunch of blue cheese (to taste; I like a lot of it)
-A goodly dollop of raspberry jam (Bonne Maman is the best)
-About half a pound of pasta (shells work best; spaghetti is not so good)
-A tablespoon or so of olive oil
-A tablespoon or so of brown sugar

Directions
-Commence the boiling of the pasta.
-Whilst the pasta boils, heat the olive oil and add the sugar in a skillet. Toss in the onions and caramelize them a bit.
-Once the onions start to soften, add the apple. Stir it around a little, then cover the skillet and let it cook until the apples are soft. Once everything is sufficiently cooked (I usually start the onions when I put the pasta in the boiling water and the apples are generally soft by the time the pasta is done), turn off the heat.
-Drain the pasta. Drizzle a very small amount of olive oil over it to keep it from sticking together.
-Put the pasta into a bowl or back in its boiling-pot.
-Toss with the apples and onions.
-Mix in as much blue cheese as you want. Stir it all around so that it gets gooey. Here's where shells are great--they catch and hold the blue cheese and apples. Yummmm.
-Add the raspberry jam and mix it all around.
-Taste to determine whether you'd like more jam or cheese. If you've somehow overdone it with either one of these ingredients, well, you're out of luck--although it's worth noting that I've never found this dish to have too much jam or cheese.
-Eat!
-C'est magnifique!

Bad Apples

A student brought me an apple today.

Seriously.

It was very sweet. Um, the gesture, that is--not the apple so much.

The thing is, I brought an apple in my lunch. And my apples are good apples: when the Minister's parents were in town, we went all apple-picking at a (mostly) organic orchard (they do spray a little early in the season, before there are any fruits) and got some amazing apples. Lots and lots of them.

So I went back to my office and ate my main lunch dish, then decided to eat the student's apple. It was a regular grocery store apple. In fact, it may have been the lesser cousin of the grocery store apple: the dining hall apple. It was mealy and dry and not very sweet. I got like 3 bites into it and thought, Screw this. Into the bin it went. I am now eating my own deliciously juicy fantabulous apple.

I feel a little bit guilty, though.

I might have made a mistake.

I ate some questionable tofu for dinner, and now I'm feeling a little ungood. It might just be heartburn, but it also might not.

...Okay, a confession: When I realized that the tofu was indeed questionable, I thought, "Hey, if I get sick, I can take a day off!"

Evidently I really wanted tofu. Or a day off. Or both.

Hm....

Epoisses

The promised cheese blogging!

Epoisses de Bourgogne is an unpasteurized cow's-milk cheese from France. It comes in a little round wooden container like a camembert. It is creamy and soft, with a fine orangey rind.

It's described as a "pungent" cheese, but I don't think it quite fits with the stinky-cheese variety. The smell to me is vaguely ammoniac, but in a pleasant way. The taste is kind of dark and musky. It's mild but full; it's hard for me to describe what it tastes like, exactly, but it's feeling in the mouth is really wonderful--so cool and creamy and big, somehow. It tends to coat the tongue and teeth.

I've eaten about 1/4 of it now...so one round should yield a full week of cheesy enjoyment!