Just a Tuesday evening with Tricia

Hello Barrys (and fans of the blog),

Whenever I am home for breaks I enjoy catching up with my good friend Tricia. This break, all she has been talking about is The Barry Table (she is it's number one fan) and how she longs for the good food while at school.
We were chatting away about life and food when we realized that it was approaching 9pm and neither of us had eaten dinner! I know that my mother would be horrified if I skipped a precious meal, so quickly we began going through her fridge.
"How about sandwiches?" I asked (of course).
"Great!"
So we pulled out the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, several fancy mustards, two kinds of hummus, mushrooms, carrots (?), and a variety of nice cheese. I have to admit, I was getting pretty excited seeing all of these great ingredients come out.
"Uh, we might be low on bread..." Tricia said sadly holding up one end piece in a bread bag. "But I have been wanting make some!"
"Okay!"
So we put the sandwiches on hold and pulled out the computer, to look up a bread recipes, and Tricia's bread maker to (duh) make bread. While piling in the ingredients we realized that making bread in a bread maker takes 3+ hours, so we wouldn't have our dear sandwiches until about 12:45am.
This was no good.
Back to the fridge, and ah, glory, english muffins!
We ended up eating fried egg (with mushrooms) sandwiches on toasted english muffins. The sandwiches had orange pepper, tomato, red onion, lettuce, and garlic chili pepper cheddar cheese (slightly melted, to add a gooey warm goodness that complimented the fried egg nicely).
Mustard was tough decision because Tricia had a wide spectrum of mustard types, from sweet to spicy. Organic whole grain from france went on Tricia's sandwich and organic dijon from Whole Foods for me (both of which Tricia kindly pointed out earned the USDA organic seal of approval).
While I was perfecting the art of the fried egg Tricia took the anitiative to make ours a well rounded meal and busted out her organic roasted red pepper and tomato soup. She chose to heat it up in the microwave, adding salt, pepper, and parsely at precisily the right moment in the heating process. Her specialty.

We chowed down on our fantastic meal while listening to the bread machine continue to knead our precious whole wheat bread, now not needed for sandwiches.

After a few more hours of chatting we enjoyed a nice snack of warm whole wheat bread with seedless red raspberry butter (not organic!) and tazo red apple tea at 12:45am.

You want color in your food? I'll give you color!

I hope your graphics card can handle the entire spectrum of color, because that's what I have in this little Mediterranean salad I threw together last night. There are peppers of yellow, red, and orange, cucumbers, imported Kalamata olives, carrots, Italian flat-leaf parsley, Roma tomatoes, wisps of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and a dijon vinaigrette.

Tonight - Soup and sandwiches: Potato-Leek soup and grilled mozzarella and tomatoes on Tuscan bread. Yummm.

Colorful food is healthy, right?

All the articles in the food section say that a meal that screams color tends to be good for you, so before Pam got home tonight I dug around to see what we had and settled on orange, green, white and red. Sweet potatoes, green beans and radiatore pasta with a sauce of dried cherry tomatoes and mushrooms, onions, four cloves of garlic and half of a dried habanero pepper, which was actually not quite enough.

I show it here with my signature yellow napkin, to add a bit more color.