The weather was beautiful today. See that? That's the sun washing out that picture of our neighborhood.
When Ian and I awoke to find that it was sunny for the second winter day in a row, we decided to celebrate with a walk. Our destination was the New Deal Cafe over on Halsey Street. It's not very far. It was chilly, but it felt so nice to use our feet for transportation again that we didn't care (we walked almost everywhere in Korea). Plus, it's a whole heck of a lot colder over there, so (for the sake of our buddies Ben and Amy) we'll keep the temperature complaining to a minimum.
The cafe is a simple place with a simple menu. We ordered the vegetarian biscuits and gravy. It comes with eggs, but I ordered fruit instead.
Housemade biscuits, mushroom gravy, breakfast-style russet potatoes and "seasonal" fruit in the background. Apples and oranges, sure, but bananas and kiwi? In February? Who are we kidding, there is no "banana season" in the US.
Ian's cage free eggs. The yolk is a pretty good color, but nothing beats Mom and Bruce's chickens' orange-yolked eggs. Those are so healthy it's just silly.
Overall, I was really impressed with this place. I'm into simple foods. One thing bothered me a lot, however. In the mushroom gravy, there seemed to be a minuscule amount of soy sausage. I don't eat processed soy products, especially this month. They have weird things in them, like "soy protein isolate/concentrate." I wished it had listed that ingredient on the menu. It was too much gravy for me anyway, so I scraped it off and avoided the soy-sauge bits.
That brings me to our concession. Eating out during this challenge needs to be extremely limited in order to reduce the chance of making a mistake and becoming entirely frustrated. It's all too unpredictable. It took me 15 minutes to buy soy milk at Trader Joe's today and I could see the ingredients.
So, if and when we're eating out, online menus will be perused before hand and we'll mostly be sticking to soups and salads. Luckily, natural and handmade food is big here. But, honestly, Ian and I need to limit our eating out on our weekends. It's a vice of ours. If we're firm on this it will be good for our bank account balance and our eating habits.
On a lighter note, my coffee mug had a coffee mug on it at the cafe.
the biscuits and mushroom gravy looks really good. Maybe they used something like field roast, which I think is grain based not soy. I don't know why they think you need to take a good thing like soy and isolate the protein, then add that to every product they can think of, all in the hopes of giving it a protein boost. Ridiculous. I love the mug, even has the lipstick stain
ReplyDeleteIt warmed up to 40 lately around here, I think the worst has passed... By the way that breakfast looks absolutely SICK! I'm gonna try and hide this from Amy so her heart doesn't fail. And eating out makes us feel soo much better, glad to here your feet are walking again!
ReplyDeleteI can't stand soy products either. I try to avoid all soy in general. The breakfast looks amazing otherwise. Those eggs look super yummy. I can't wait to have my own chickens someday, maybe I too will have orange yoked eggs.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I love that you are complaining about the weather. :) It was 10 degrees when I walked outside today. Colder with windchill. I have learned to really hate the term Windchill...
YUMMNESS!!! add this to the list of restaurants I want to eat at especially for breakfast when we get there. YAY for sunshine! The winter temps finally broke here... its been in the 40's and we're out with Joey a lot more so thats helped.
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