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This is based off a breakfast sandwich I had in a dream. This also serves as a good brunch meal as well. The theory is that anything served with avocado and tomato is awesome. With two fried eggs and a quarter can of black beans, this breakfast is packed with protein, good fats, and nutrients to ensure a good start. Also this can be made as quickly as you can chop, so it is good for a quick morning! Add sliced deli ham for an extra flavor and protein boost.
Flow of Ingredients:
- 1-2 eggs, fried
- 1 avocado, mashed
- 1/4 can black beans, drained
- 1/2 tomato, sliced
- opt: thinly sliced cheese (rec: hot pepper jack or raw milk cheddar)
- opt: sliced deli ham
- opt: horseradish mustard*
The ideal bread is of course an English muffin. However pre-made English muffins are small and, well, not very good. My breadmaker had a recipe for English muffin toasting bread, which looks suspiciously like white bread made with buttermilk. Point is, it doesn’t matter.
Stacking order (bottom to top): Avocado, beans, cheese, ham, tomato, egg, mustard.
Tell me if there is a better way. This way allows you to embed the beans in the avocado so they don’t slip.
Serve with fresh fruit and if you’re hungry, with some bacon or homefries.
* I know I know, horseradish mustard? A slight amount helps clear the sinuses. I kid you not.
I’ve revamped the main site to support my new push into electronics consulting. Of course some of the content still requires construction, but most information has been successfully transferred.
I took the time to learn CSS a little better and found it to be no more than a header file for HTML. What a relief! All the pages have been formatted using a two-cell table. The navbar is contained in the left cell and the content is in the right cell. If there is a better way of doing a left-handed navbar let me know.
While reading about navbar implementation I was thoroughly engrossed by an intelligent, spirited, and mature debate between web designers as to the viability of left-handed navigation. If you are interested in user interfaces or web design you might find the following articles a stimulating read.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/11/the-case-against-vertical-navigation/
http://astheria.com/design/in-defense-of-vertical-navigation
http://www.impressivewebs.com/response-to-in-defense-of-vertical-navigation/
In baby boomer politics, the phrase “for the children” is bandied about so often it’s almost a meme. May I say without sarcasm, thank you for the wonderful investing opportunities you’ve created for us. It’s quite noble of you to sacrifice your own retirement portfolios just for the benefit of us children. I hope Medicare, Social Security, and pension are enough to see you through. They won’t be around for us anyways.
Cheers,
The Children
Nickel slot success runs in the family. Although I didn’t quite live up to my mom’s $50 haul from the nickel slots in Reno, I managed a respectable $20 haul off triple 7’s in the Las Vegas airport. (The middle icon is a wild.)
It’s no secret that I love blueberries. But for when blueberry pancakes are just too much damn work, there are now blueberry muffins in my life to step up and fill that blueberry doughy void in my breakfast life.
I based my blueberry muffins off of this recipe which seems to be universally loved by Internet denizens. In the interest of making these not so unhealthy, I reduced the sugar by 33% and removed the butter/sugar crust abomination, replacing it with a simple half-half cinnamon/sugar mixture and sprinkling 1/2 tspn of the mixture per muffin. This keeps the sugar down to about 3 tspn per muffin, which is still a little on the high side but better than half a can of Coke for sure. I also like this recipe because there is no butter involved, which makes them super easy to make. All you need is one mixing bowl, one small bowl and a fork! Cleanup is super easy.
- In a small bowl, crack in an egg (and beat it). Add in 1/3 cup canola oil and 1/3 cup milk.
- In the mixing bowl, add 1 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 tspn salt, 2 tspn baking powder.
- Add the wet ingredients (in the small bowl) to the mixing bowl and mix well.
- Add in 1 cup of fresh blueberries and mix in carefully.
- Spoon into muffin tins. These will dome up and rise so don’t fill them up all the way!
- In a small container (I have this metal tartar sauce cup stolen from a restaurant) mix in 2 tspn cinnamon and 2 tspn white sugar. Sprinkle about 1/2-3/4 tspn of the mixture on top of each muffin.
- Bake at 400 F for 20-25 minutes.
I can’t stress how easy these are to make, the hardest part is buying blueberries! The blueberries tend to burst in the muffins and add an extra moistness to the muffin, but Dariya finds them dry somehow. Hopefully they will work out for you.
I spent the greater part of a semester developing a presentation target towards middle and high school kids on cardiac problems and how pacemakers came about to solve such problems. After spending so much time at the graduate level it was an exercise to break down complex physiology and design problems into simpler scenarios without sacrificing accuracy or quality of content (as is so often done in mainstream science reporting). The result is this little presentation which I delivered to a boisterous group of kids at Kennedy High School in Richmond, CA through the EEGSA Outreach program. It was a fantastic experience and a priceless first-hand look at where high school education is today. (And that is a subject for another time.)
I am pretty sure that with the completion of this report, I am a master of science, according to the EECS department at UC Berkeley.
Snacking. I love it. But as I’ve come to learn the importance of healthy meals, I’ve also had to revise my conception of snacking as an unhealthy indulgence. Cutting out the bad snacks are hard because they taste so good. Part of the fun is not just eating a little bit but an enjoyable quantity. Have you ever had a 100 calorie package? So unsatisfying! So 5 chocolate almonds become 25 and all of a sudden I feel like crap.
To drive the point home I recently did a nutrition comparison between Costco chocolate covered almonds (my former favorite) and Costco almonds served with separate Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. The first staggering observation is the chocolate to almond ratio. For the chocolate-covered almond, the thickness of the chocolate layer is about the width of the almond. Assuming cylindrical shapes, this means the chocolate volume is about 3 times as much as the almond! Meanwhile the ratio of the mixture can be variable, which means I can have a simple 1 to 1 ratio, and actually taste the almond with my chocolate.
The second is the net nutritional information. Human nutrition is complicated, but two simple things to minimize are added sugar (anything sweet that is not a fruit), saturated fat, and two simple things to maximize (but not indefinitely) are protein and unsaturated fat. The nutritional labels say it all here:
The Nestle info isn’t pictured, which has 2.5 g/Tbsp sat fat, 8 g/Tbsp sugar, where 1 Tbsp is about 15 chips. Even for a generous 3:2 chocolate to almond ratio, this accounts for all the ‘negative nutrition’ in a 1 ounce snack (1.5 g sat fat, 5 g sugar). Compare this to 4 g sat fat and 10 g sugar in a 1 ounce chocolate covered almond snack!
Even though in retrospect it sounds kinda gross, it was quite difficult to leave the chocolate-covered almonds behind. But the result is a snack that’s lower in sugar, higher in protein, which gets me fuller. I had to retrain my senses to expect less sugar and be okay with the new taste, but once that is done snacking becomes fun again, and this time much healthier.
Buying 20 pounds of organic all-purpose flour from Costco leaves a man looking for new ways to use it. When Dariya brought home some fancy cocoa powder from Spun Sugar I took one look at my stash of chocolate chips and I knew what had to be done. I found this recipe for chocolate cupcakes. It is a basic cake batter with chocolate chips thrown in for good measure. I reduced the sugar to 3/4 cup in the interest of preserving my pancreas. While they claim to be better than sex, I have tried both and respectfully disagree.
You need one large mixing bowl and one smaller (cereal) bowl for this adventure. To minimize dish-washing afterwards you can get away with using just a 1/4 cup and a 1/4 tspn measuring things.
- Take 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter and let it reach room temperature in the mixing bowl.
- Add in 3/4 cup white sugar and 2 eggs, and beat together thoroughly.
- In the cereal bowl, mix 3/4 cup white flour, 1/2 cup cocoa powder, 1/2 tspn baking powder, 1/4 tspn baking soda, and 1/4 tspn salt.
- Beat in half the cereal bowl mixture, then add in 1/4 cup milk.
- Beat in the other half the cereal bowl mixture, then add in another 1/4 cup milk and 1 tspn vanilla extract.
- Mix in 2/3 cup chocolate chips, or more or less if you like.
- Once you are satisfied with your batter, scoop and dump into muffin tins. I use cupcake wax paper things donated to us by one of our good friends. Bake at 350 F for 25 minutes, or 35 minutes if you want a little crispiness.
Some notes:
- Making cupcakes becomes way easier with a motorized (hand-held or stand) mixer. Simply beat the butter, sugar, and eggs together, and then add in the other ingredients and mix further. Bonus: Lick the blades afterward for yummy cupcake batter goodness.
- The linked recipe gave me a great note (although maybe this is common sense) – mix the dry and wet ingredients separately, and then alternate adding them in to the butter/sugar/eggs mixture. This prevents flour from flying everywhere when you are mixing, and keeps the batter at a nice constant viscosity.
- The recipe calls for 2/3 cup chocolate chips, but you can add as many or as little as you want. I’m usually sick of measuring things by this point so 2 large fistfuls is what I use.
You can’t claim to be eating a full breakfast if you’re not including some delicious sides. I have alluded to these recommendations in the other breakfast posts, and so here they are.
Good Breakfast Fruit:
Berries – blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. Antioxidants and a punch of flavor.
Kiwis – slice in half and eat with a spoon. My favorite with the pancakes.
Mandarins – peel and eat. Preferred for the french toast.
Bananas – Superfood! Eating this with anything obviates the need for homefries or meat.
Grapes – I like these with eggs or pancakes, since they can be dry.
Apples – Just kidding. Apples will never be a good breakfast fruit.
I prefer to combine my favorites in an irresistible fruit bowl. I don’t know what it is about fruit bowls but for some reason they are way more fun to eat than individual fruits. Chop your fruits as desired and throw them all together. The photo above has blueberries, strawberries, bananas, and kiwis.
Potatoes:
No edible item fascinates me more than the potato. You can do just about anything to it. For healthy breakfasts, the objective is quick and easy prep. This is an easy recipe for home fries that is about two minutes of prep, and 20 minutes of cooking. Throw these in the oven while working on your main breakfast and enjoy both when they are done! Easily scalable but be warned: they only reheat well in an oven (toaster or conventional).
- Peel and dice red potatoes.
- Toss well with olive oil (2 Tbsp per pound. Don’t be stingy!)
- Spread out on a baking sheet and throw in the oven at 500 F for 20 minutes.
- Season or garnish as desired. (Above is healthily seasoned with Gilroy Garlic Dude Garlic Salt. Yum!)
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