Mac'n'cheese: The leftovers that eat like slime.

Mac'n'cheese is one of those dishes that is really tasty on day 1, but becomes a congealed mass on day 2.  Actually, it becomes a congealed mass about an hour after it's made.  You'd think that it would microwave OK, that the sauce would re-become saucy and whatnot, but no.  It just kinda gets gross and oily and the pasta turns to mush.  It's not my favourite leftover.

Less than satisfactory lunch.

Now, if you fry leftover mac'n'cheese, it's a totally different story.  A nice crust forms and you get a lovely crunch out of it.  But, you know, the break room doesn't have a stove top or even a hot plate and I'm guessing that keeping one at my desk would violate some fire safety policy or something.  Which means that I won't be having fried mac'n'cheese at work.

For "dessert" I had one of those low-fat Greek yogurt thingies that promise a decadent, creamy texture without loads of fat, gelatin or cornstarch.   I gotta say that it wasn't bad, but it still lacked the fatty mouthfeel of full fat yogurt.  But I probably shouldn't be eating full fat yogurt.  Or at least the guys in the office tell me I shouldn't.  Apparently even though they down Wendy's burgers for lunch, they are very health-conscious.

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!

How Much Yoga Do I Have to Do to Burn Off My Lunch?

Do you remember The Raccoons? You know, that Canadian cartoon about a bunch of scrappy raccoons that prevented some evil aardvarks and their piggy minions from ruining their forest? Of course you do because I'm talking to myself here. I mean, I even remember that the theme song for The Raccoons was called Run With Us and was sung by a chick that I confused with Alanis (pre-Morissette). I also remember that The Raccoons debut was on some education kids show about fitness.

Of course, I also seem to remember that that guy from The Guess Who was somehow mixed up in all this, so it might not be totally accurate.

Anyways.

300 Calories?

The point is that on this fitness show, some old guy and a pig would demonstrate how many minutes of physical activity you'd have to do to burn off the calories in foods. Like you'd need to do half an hour of jogging to burn off a chocolate bar.

And full-fat yogurt, too!

This is salient because today, before lunch, I went to the gym. In a fit of post-New Year's resolution fanaticism, the gym posted the expected number of burnt calories per class. The yoga class I attended boasted 300 to 600 burnt calories. That probably took care of the VIA Xmas Bleuch, cheese string and Japanese rice crackers I had in the morning, but it was all negated by my lunch of leftover black bean and sausage soup with avocado I had after the class. I did, though, opt not to drink one of the millions of cans of Sprite currently sitting in the office fridge, so there's that.

Philosophical Food Blogging: Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner?

If you're not imaginary and you have actually read this blog regularly (as opposed to accidentally landing here because Google went berserk and returned this as the top link when you searched for "winter gazebo maintenance"), you may have noticed that I haven't posted anything lately.  That's because I had a deadline looming, I had to move cubicle and I was spending my free time with the Silvia.  

Cup of mystery

But now I have time to tell you what I ate, but you probably don't care.  Nor should you.  Because I could totally be lying to you.  How do you know that I'm not totally making up what was in these empty plates and containers?  For example, I ate some Veggie Straws in this paper cup the other day.  (Veggie Straws are what you eat from the snack closet once the chips are done.  When the Veggie Straws are done, you eat the Ritz crackers.  When those are done, you start prowling the cubes for random food on people's desks.)  But maybe I didn't.  

Maybe I'm just pretending that this cup was full of Veggie Straws to make my life seem more mundane.  Because you'd be more likely to believe that I ate Veggie Straws out of this stupid paper cup while discussing memory leaks with a developer rather than the truth:  That it was full of marshmallow and popcorn Jelly Bellys that I ate while discussing the Cirque Du Soleil with a guy in Support who's also an amateur opera singer (he's a "true tenor").

Bad dahl or a clever decoy?

This other container contained red lentil dahl with rice and yogurt.  There wasn't enough water in the rice and it came out gloopy and partially burnt.  There was too much tomato in the dahl, so it looked like globs of orange stuff.  The yogurt was OK, though, as it was store-bought.  But maybe I'm actually a better cook than I'm letting on and the dahl was super-flavourful, the rice was perfect and the yogurt home-made.  You will never know.

Food Amongst The Ruins of Good Taste

Today was a bad day for food and conversation at the office.

The snack cupboard was starting to go bare, which meant that the denizens of the office were starting to get grumpy.  I ate the before-last cheese string.  Whomever had the last cheese string neglected to take the empty box out of the fridge, making everyone expect cheese when there was none.

The next thing to go were the chocolate chip cookies.  This huge box of Chunks Ahoy! was opened yesterday.  By 2pm today, there were 2 cookies left.  I took one and left the other on the communal table. Being the nice person I am, I "recycled" the box.  Of course, the "recycling" bin goes into the trash, but I pretend it doesn't to appease my conscience.

In between the cheese string and the cookie courses, there was lunch.  My lunch today consisted of stir-fried leftover rotisserie chicken with rice and carrots with Peri-Peri dipping sauce.  The Peri-Peri did an adequate job at masking the taste of the stir-fry.  For "dessert", I had extra-fat blueberry yogurt.

My lunch purse is hiding the coworker who was sitting across from me and who didn't want his face on the internet.  Presumably he is a fugitive from justice. Or he didn't want to be associated with today's lunchtime discussion about horse husbandry.  Either way.