I have one of those events coming up, let’s call it my special day. There will be a gathering of people, and a dinner. The place that we’re going gives me options that I’m not quite ready to tackle. There is a mostly well known fact, that I really enjoy ice cream, particularly when it comes in the form of a shake or malt. I’m also a fan of adult beverages, primarily beer, especially in a celebratory fashion. Here’s where the problem comes in; on most days, it’s only socially acceptable to order one type of beverage with dinner, but the place we’re going to offers both. The first thing that occurred to me was, it’s my damn day, why can’t I have both? Once again I’m teetering on the edge of good taste and humanity, letting my impulses push me away from social norms that I merely breeze by before crushing them with two glasses, one filled with beer, and one filled with milk and ice cream blended deliciously together.
August 17, 2007
August 1, 2007
Ye Bountiful Harvest
Can it be summer squash? It is! And those are tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, a lone green pepper, cabbage, arugula. Not easily visible are some great smelling herbs, rosemary and dill, along with a thing of fennel. We ate one of the tomatoes, it was good. This is one of the first boxes we’ve gotten where we feel like there’s a majority of vegetables we like to eat, instead of things we had to experiment with, like kohlrabi.
Steamy Stir Fry Shrimp
Stir fry broccoli with anything and it’s bound to be delicious. I wasn’t around for the saucification, but I remember there being bottles with sesame oil, tamari, and hoisin sauce on the counter at some point. Also included were shrimp, onions, carrots, and beet greens, served next to some exotic red rice.
Who Eats Kale?
Apparently we do.  I think there was kale, and some carrots, onions, garlic, and maybe chicken broth reduced down. There was still a lot to the kale, but it was pretty good. There’s something wholesome and satisfying to chewing a vegetable for a while, and getting flavor the whole time. The same does not apply to steak.
A Week Ago and Some Change
Some real nice looking vegetables this time, carrots, zucchini, broccoli, beets, onions, kale, raddiccio, and some lamb’s quarters, which is apparently a weed that got thrown in for fun. We ended up using it in a banana / mango smoothie, and it was pretty potent. When I say potent I mean it tasted like grass. It was the first time I actually followed a recipe though, and the consistency was near perfect as far as smoothies go. We also got some really nice raspberries, super juicy.
July 13, 2007
The Highs and Lows of Getting Old
I woke up this morning, and as I was working from home, I had plenty of time to eat a delicious breakfast. I set my eyes on the prize, Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch. One of the joys of growing up is feeling like a kid again, and sugary breakfast cereals are an instant flashback to childhood. Things then seemed so much bigger, so when I grab a giant bowl and fill it with the nearly worthless puffed corn cereal, it’s probably three times the amount it was. That’s the funny thing about time though, it’s all relative. So I fill this giant bowl with cereal, and turn around to the fridge to grab the milk.
We have a little flashback here, to ten minutes earlier when I’m making coffee. Get all the parts, empty the bag of beans, and throw it in the garbage. (You can’t see it, because it’s my flashback, but there are very important details in the garbage.)
Back to the present. Or the past. The present of the past. The fridge opens, and I look around for the milk, to complete my fantastic time bending breakfast. It was perhaps half a second after opening the fridge, before even looking in, that I realized I had seen the empty milk carton, sad and discarded, laying amidst the rest of the trash. I continued looking desperately for more milk, or something else that resembled milk, but without any reasonable results. My time traveling, soul soothing breakfast extravaganza failed, horribly and painfully. Here I sit, eating dry Peanut Butter Crunch, saddened not only because Peanut Butter Crunch without milk is not very good, but because now I realize that every bite I take is one less bite that I could have taken with milk.
July 10, 2007
Steak Salad!
Easy steak salad, with some leftover steak from Erica’s parents house on Sunday. Topped with a corn and tomato and green onion salsa / dressing, along with olive oil. Very delicious!
New Time Vegetables!
Monday means more vegetables, and we got some fun surprises this week. More delicious strawberries, the best I’ve ever had. More awesome broccoli, green onions. There’s more turnips that we don’t know what to do with yet, as well as kohlrabi, which neither of us have even tried. We’ll see how it goes.
July 9, 2007
Simple Spinach Salad
Salad for lunch, real simple, real good. Spinach, figs, walnuts, and some amazing bleu cheese from Trader Joe’s. I think the figs are also from Trader Joe’s. The salad was (eventually) topped with a balsamic vinaigrette.
June 29, 2007
Drinkable Salad
These first couple weeks from the CSA we’ve gotten a LOT of greens. This is a good thing, cus they rock all kinds of good fiber and nutrients, and that’s something my body needs anyway. The problem is, there’s two of us, and so much greens, we’d have to eat salads for every meal to make it all the way through the stuff, and that’s just not going to happen. Jeff said that they make ‘green smoothies’ — and I’d seen them at the store as well, Naked brands whozits, green goop in a plastic container. I looked online for some recipes, and they seemed pretty simple, whatever type of green you have, some fruit, a little bit of whatever, and whatever else you feel like. I took a banana, and some strawberries, it seemed like a good start to trying out a green smoothie. There weren’t that many strawberries at the end, though I did add a couple more after the picture. One banana, for the whole thing, and it still really came through. I added a whole crapload of lettuce, what you can see in the picture, pushed in, and then do that two more times. There is a whole ton of lettuce in there.
For as much lettuce as I put in there, it really blends down. This was all I got out of a big bag of the stuff.  All in all, it was really tasty, though I could have used a spoon, as it’s pretty thick. One thing I would like to try is adding some fresh coconut, for some creaminess, which I saw on one of the recipes online.