My lovely partner-wife-ladyfriend Abby decided to document a week in the life of my eating habits, a nod to New York magazine's Grub Street Diet. She even made one of their collage-style images (above) except she used non-digital components — that's a real collage, baby!

Anyway, I'm reposting the diet for my readers; follow Abby's Sun Pup Digest here. Or don't! I'm not the boss of you.

xo,

Jesse

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Jesse Hirsch Is Cutting Back On Hot Dogs

Saturday, May 3
Start the day as always with a tallboy of iced coffee. Right now we have 42-ounce bottles of La Colombe — Abby notes they’ve redesigned their bottle a bit. It’s a bit more slender now (sexy?) which we feared was a sign that they’ve shrunken the portion size. A bit of online research makes me like, 60% sure it’s the same amount of coffee as before.

Abby makes us special breakfast: lox, capers, pickled onions, cream cheese on Montreal-style bagels. They’re actually from Montreal’s legendary St-Viateur bakery - we snagged these precious goods at a Visit Montreal tourism event here in the city. Shameful admission: We brought a dozen of these same bagels back from a trip to Montreal last winter and let a few of them get moldy. Now we keep them in the freezer: learning and growing!

Also notable from breakfast: I made a Talenti container-sized portion of pickled red onions for carnitas tacos a couple weeks ago and have LOVED having pickled onions on demand. Good for kielbasa, breakfast tacos, pierogies, bagels, etc. The sun-dried tomato cream cheese was nicked from my work fridge, an acceptable form of larceny. See, my colleagues host a bunch of after-hours parties and events that typically leave extra food behind. We’ve benefited with all sorts of random snackables: charcuterie, homemade hummus, shawarma, lox.

Cleaning out my gym bag in the afternoon I discovered three mayonnaise packets from Shake Shack, which I will work into our mayo rotation (no waste!)

For lunch I heated up some banging pasta Abby made while I was out of town, a ground turkey/chickpea/broccoli rabe situation. We’ve noticed something odd about this dish, that some bites are markedly better than others. It’s pronounced.

Waiting for Abby to get home from her workouts, it was under an hour until dinner, so I didn’t want to spoil my appetite. And yet! So hungry, I couldn’t just eat chips or an apple. Looked for an old buffalo chicken egg roll but I couldn’t find it in our overstuffed freezer. Settled on half an avocado with a sprinkle of salt and two slices of cheddar cheese.

Dinner was a now-rare frozen pizza (trying to eat better), Tombstone “Tavern Style” supreme. First time trying this variety - solid entry. They put banana peppers on there, which is zesty! Made a simple spinach salad on the side, topped with pan-toasted walnuts and parmesan shreds.

For movie snacks, I mixed together Tostitos nacho cheese dip with Tostitos salsa, heated it up a bit, and used Tostitos corn chips for a dipper. (Pls sponsor me Tostitos.)

Sunday, May 4
Leftover slice of pizza for early breakfast, before our 90-minute Bikram yoga session with dreamy John, a lovely older Southern man who I wish was my uncle.

Second breakfast wasn’t until 1pm, so we decided to abandon all breakfast aspirations and heat up some leftover chicken and mushrooms, a dish Abby made earlier in the week. Kind of stroganoff-y, quite delish. Sauteed some extra mushrooms from our weekly CSA bag and dumped them on top. Abby microwaved some frozen broccoli on the side.

Classic dinner this night: Omaha Steaks that my mom sent, pan-fried with only salt and pepper to season. The steaks were wrapped in bacon, which seemed silly/decadent/American, so we took the bacon off and cooked it separately. Was going to save it but fresh bacon beckons, so we ate it immediately. The bacon grease was perfect for cooking the steaks, so maybe the combo wasn’t so dumb after all. For sides we had marvelous roasted fresh asparagus (lemon and salt) from our CSA and Omaha Steaks scalloped potatoes, which were squishy.

I intended to have another Tostito night but got lazy once I was watching TV and there was a family pack of Cape Cod chips nearby. One (1) bag of salt & vinegar, garçon!

Monday, May 5
My work-food friend Dylan came back from a “staycation in Baltimore” (he lives in NYC so this doesn’t make sense) and ordered lunch from an all-time fave: Xi’an Famous Foods. I got the spicy ground pork noodles, a truly spectacular dish. They deliver it with all sauces, meat, and noodles separate so the quality isn’t compromised in transit. Classy.

Later in the afternoon, Dylan and I caught up over some dumplings he ordered for the team. I made the mistake of trying a spinach one, which tasted mealy and medicinal! I was very dramatic about how gross they were.

Dinner was wild—Abby made a large number of fancy chicken tenders, then roasted CSA potatoes and frozen broccoli on the side. Healthful-ish, no? There was some ranch dressing involved.

Tuesday, May 6
Had the last Montreal bagel and lox, which Abby left for me because she’s sweet but also because it’s my fair share. While the bagel toasted, I did meal prep: a six-egg scramble with crumbled breakfast sausage and a couple of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. I did not eat the scramble; rather it will provide filling for easy-breezy breakfast tacos for the week.

Dinner was such a hoot. I invented a new kind of dumpling by stir-frying ground pork and an “oriental mix” of frozen vegetables, then mincing everything up and putting them in little wonton wrappers and pan frying them. I also made dipping sauce by taking the pork juice gravy and mixing it with some pre-made spicy/sweet dumpling sauce. The end product was ugly but very delicious. Abby calculated the amount of protein and calories in each dumpling and ate six (6) total.

Wednesday, May 7
Had a hot dog (boiled, toasted bun, ketchup/mustard) before a 7:50a downtown yoga class. This used to be my go-to pre-yoga snack, a perfect burst of protein that won’t weigh you down, but I keep reading about how every hot dog takes between like 38 minutes and one day off of your life. So I am cutting down.

After class I was ravenous and remembered I had no more frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches in the office freezer. Ordered a veggie breakfast burrito from a bougie little Australian cafe (why are there SO MANY??) and felt sad. I can’t explain what went wrong, but the textures were wack and the interplay of flavors weird. I was staring off into space mulling this over when my coworker Tom came in and asked what was wrong. I told him I was “profoundly disappointed” in a burrito. Wan smile in response.

Ordered sandwiches from Court St Grocers for lunch, one of my all time favorites. I can only order sandwiches on certain days when my colleagues who hate sandwiches aren’t here. Got the Macho Man, which is this incredible, sloppy mess on a hero roll: pork shoulder, coleslaw, pickled jalapenos, cheddar cheese, secret sauce. Ate with one of my fancier colleagues and felt self-conscious about how impossible it is to eat that sandwich with grace.

Had some leftover pork dumplings for a mid-afternoon snack. These were not “mine” but if something sits in the work fridge for two days it is mine/ours. We do not mark our goods with sticky notes. Tres communal.

Friday, May 9
Reheated (fancy) chicken tenders with ranch for pre-yoga breakfast. I do “meal prep” with tendies, baking around 15 at a time so I can eat a couple for power snacks when necessary. It’s important to not overdo my portion before yoga or I feel logy and weighted down.

After yoga I went to El Pollo Campero near my office for a spicy chicken sandwich. Though this may seem on-brand (and good Lord, I didn’t even consider the double fried chicken hit before noon lol) it’s mostly because I had a very tight window between yoga and a morning meeting and this was the most efficient way to get full. There were NO OTHER OPTIONS.

For lunch I ordered a wrap from this weird-ass place called Wolfnights, where they tell you how many antioxidants each item has, and where the ingredient combos seem designed by a randomization machine: Grilled chicken wrapped in a chestnut and chili dough with pickled shitake mushrooms, raisins, pickles, plantain chips, and chipotle aioli What kind of wrap is that? Wack attack. The worst part was that they heated a bunch of lettuce in there which is an amateur move, soggy with a terrible mouthfeel.

I ate most of that wrap for dinner, after hand-picking all the lettuce out. The raisin-and-pickles combo was still bizarre, but I could eat it. For second dinner I had leftover spicy beef and noodles from Xi’an Famous Foods, a place Abby and I have had multiple dates at.