TGIFuggedaboutit Friday

The weekend has arrived! HUZZAH! And the parentals are in the USA again - twice in two months! Pinch me! So like a good daughter I have Mayflowered (verb form of pilgrimage?) myself on up to CT to spend the night with them. Jet lag has lured them to bed already, though, so I'm all by my lonesome for the moment...or am I? I can hear you breathing! Speaking of which, you have a boogie. Made ya look!

(Did I turn 26 on Monday or was that just some Benjamin Button's sh!t???)

So I got a coupon in the mail recently for a free frozen Kashi entree, and the resulting non-purchase was lunch today. Behold the Mayan Harvest Bake:

FYI, this is one of Kashi's only vegan meals. I think it is officially my favorite now. So many of my favorite foods all in one mush! And a good tasting mush too! It has a kashi pilaf-amaranth polenta at the bottom, layered with kale (not much), sweet potatoes, black beans, and a spicy sauce, topped with plantains (SWOON!).

So many frozen entrees are "really good, but..." Not so with this one; I don't even have a good (bad?) butt joke to go with it. It didn't even have a high sodium content, as compared with other Kashi foods. Score - I've found my new emergency staple.

I made my way up the Harlem Line to hang with the parentals after work...a wittle Tasti d-Lite (99 cent coupon!) and a Kombucha may have found their way to my belly in the meantime, followed by a nap on the train, which kinda threw me off since I rarely nap. Was it the plantains? Maybe I swooned so hard I passed out.

Anyway, Mom and Dad had picked up some prepared dishes from Stew Leonard's for dinner. Do you have this store near you? Back in the day, it was just a dairy, but it has since grown WAY beyond that and I knew it as the grocery store with animatronic cows and singing Dole Fresh Vegetables throughout out the aisles. Well, not aisles - the store was essentially one long winding path and you had to go through the whole thing to even pick up one item and pay for it. To a 10-year-old, however, this is nothing short of the freaking Emerald City.

We had quite a spread, courtesy of Mr. Leonard (the king of tax evasion himself), including one of my favorite foods, eggplant parmesan! Extra squishy, just the way I like it. My plate had only started to get ugly when my parents reminded me to take a picture - you know you're a bad blogger when other people have to remind you to do that, but have one look at this picture and tell me you wouldn't want to dig in pronto too.

There was also a broccoli-tomato salad, a fresh baguette with EVOO for dipping, and some fancy olives from the olive bar, which I don't remember Stewie Lewie's having when I was a wee babe.

They also did not have house-made rice cakes the last time I was in a Stew Leonard store, which was I-don't-know-how-many years ago...but Mom tells me they now make their own Magic Pop rice cakes! I recently found those in the city by a different company, but I expect they will grow in popularity because they're whole grain and precious few calories per generous piece. So Mom bought a bunch of their rice cakes and deemed them the chosen vehicle for the Sabra hummus that she now cannot resist. :) Bwahaha...

But here's something curious - froyo between rice cakes! It DOES exist!

Stew Leonard has an ice cream shop just outside their main entrance, seducing toddler tornadoes far and wide, and remembering the cup of froyo we'd always get after shopping there, I knew I had to sample this new creation of theirs. Verdict? Meh. It tastes like froyo between rice cakes. That's health food. Health food does not dessert make.

I ate two.