Day 6

I used the last of my farm-fresh eggs for another eggwich this morning.

Since I was working from home I made a salad and had some of my roommate's homemade "Moroccan Red Lentil" soup from the freezer. It has an odd taste but I like it. I'll probably get and post the recipe eventually. The salad is romaine, tomatoes, cucumber, feta and Kalamata olives with "g/s" dressing. g/s stands for garlic/shallot, and consists of a clove of garlic minced with equal part shallot, 1/4 cup evoo, 1 Tb white wine vinegar, 1 tsp balsamic vinegar, s&p. It's a great quick and easy dressing to make.

For dinner I ate hot dogs, rice pilaf and broccoli. The hot dogs are all natural, uncured beef dogs from Applegate Farms. The rice pilaf is a recipe I make fairly often so I'll post it later, and the broccoli was blanched then sauteed in olive oil with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes.

It occurs to me now that Day 6 is the first day of the year when everything I ate came from my kitchen.

Day 5

I started the fifth day of the year with one of my favorite breakfasts: the homemade eggwich. This consists of single fried egg, Morningstar sausage patty, slice of Horizon American cheese in an Orowheat Multigrain muffin. This is a relatively low calorie, filling and delicious breakfast.

Unfortunately one of the books I read last year suggested that Horizon's practices are hardly any better than factory dairy producers, but until I look deeper into that claim I'm going to believe it's at least marginally better. For the last few months I've been getting eggs from one of the managers where I work. She and her husband have taken to raising chickens, so I know they're being fed and treated well. When I can't get eggs from them I get them at the co-op who in turn gets them from a local farm called Vital Farms.    

My new team had their first bi-weekly lunch of the new year today and I went along. I wanted enchiladas but I ordered crispy tacos in an effort to be a little healthier. I ordered beef rather than chicken or pork on the ground that they were probably all factory farmed and beef is generally less inhumanely treated than chicken and pork. This doesn't sound as persuasive as I type it, but that's what went through my head. In any case the tortillas were so soaked in oil I probably could've gone with the enchiladas and had just as healthy of a meal.

I was craving steak for dinner so I gave in. I didn't even bother coming up with a rationalization for it, and I have no reason to believe that the restaurant I went to, Texas Roadhouse, uses local, humanely raised or natural beef. I went with the 6 oz filet cooked medium rare. I skipped dessert so I wouldn't add insult to injury by being grossly unhealthy in addition to ethically insensitive. Granted those buttered rolls (I ate two) are like a dessert in themselves, and the egg crumbled on the salad was a pile of unnecessary fat and calories. I only ate a few of the peanuts, though. I often go through half of that bucket at those places. 

Day 3

The second leg of the Chicago > Austin train ride.

For breakfast an omelette with potatoes and vegetables.

Lunch was an "Angus burger" with cheese. As explained on that Wiki page, a successful PR campaign in the US has convinced many people that Angus beef is superior in taste and quality. Some even believe that the Angus label is akin to organic or all-natural. However I probably wouldn't be able to pick it out in a blind taste test and I'm not aware of any evidence that Angus beef is more or less likely to come from factory farmed cattle than any other burger.

For dinner I had the salmon again. (I also had Reese's Peanut Butter Pie for dessert after lunch and dinner on both days of the trip, both ways. It's no wonder the scale says I put on 10 lbs. over the holidays!)

Day 2

I spent the second and third days of the new year with Amtrak, so pardon the blurry pictures.

First, a microwave egg & sausage sammich with coffee on the Ann Arbor > Chicago train. Not much to say about that.

Lunch was fried rice and some kind of sweet and sour type chicken from a stand in Chicago's Union Station.

For dinner I had salmon, rice and green beans on the Chicago > Austin train. I forgot to bring my camera to the dining car, so I ordered the same thing the following night and copied the photo. When I'm in a situation where all the food is likely to have come from a factory farm, I will often choose a fish entree instead of beef or chicken. It's probably not from a sustainable source but at least it was probably wild-caught or raised/killed in a more humane fashion than your average factory-farmed chicken, pig or cow.