January 21, 2012: The Beauty of Leftovers

Breakfast:

• 1 Brown rice cake spread with 100% natural peanut butter and drizzled with clover honey
• This was nice to wake up with. The peanut butter is the kind you can get from Whole Foods where they will grind the peanuts for you and put it in a little plastic container. The honey was a sweet touch on top. The dry crunch of the rice cake and the lip-smacking stickiness of the honey peanut butter complimented each other well as textures.

Dinner:

• 1 orange bell pepper
• Eaten like an apple, as I always do. Not as crunchy as I hoped, but it's still good. The thing is, if I ever get an apple that I think is going to be juicy and crunchy but instead it's grainy and kind of soft it's the biggest disappointment! If I get a pepper that I think is going to be juicy and crunchy and it turns out to be kind of wrinkly and flimsy, it's not as disappointing to me because peppers are always going to have that sweet juice to them when you start to chew. If you go to Italy, you will never see someone shopping at a market poking and prodding each of the vegetables and fruits to make sure they are ripe. If you do, there's a good chance that that person is American. I went to the market when I was in Venice a year ago and when I reached for a pear to see if it was ripe, the owner swatted my hand away and said that this was not allowed. It was then that I realized I had offended him. In Italy, people don't sell things that aren't ripe and ready to eat. It's about quality more than quantity. I apologized and bought the pear I had touched which, of course, was exquisite.
• 2 pieces of toasted 9 grain sourdough bread spread with the leftover meat sauce and topped with over-easy eggs (garnished with a sprinkling of black pepper)
• Believe it or not, the sauce was even tastier the next day. Eating this leftover sauce made me remember when my old step-dad used to cook meatballs we would always make the leftovers into meatball sandwiches the next day. And these were no ordinary sandwiches. Oh no, these meatballs were an event. When someone would be about to take the first bite into this juicy, messy, unbelievably flavorful meatball sub with crunchy, golden toast encasing it, the whole room would stop whatever they were doing and whoever was around would zoom in on this first bite. The person eating it would take the bite in what seemed to be slow motion. Nobody breathed as that first crunch echoed through the room and the eater licked the sauce that was falling out the back. That's how I ate this sandwich. 
• The beauty of leftovers is that you can be creative with them. It doesn't have to be a heat-up-and-go ordeal. Instead, you can make an entirely new dish out of similar flavors! So, the next time you have leftover Chinese food sitting around in your fridge, take that chicken fried rice and get creative. Let me know what you come up with too :)

 Late night snack:

• 1 cup of hot chocolate with homemade whipped cream