I decided to have a special breakfast today. I usually eat the same thing every day, and quite happily, but it seems like I've been seeing a lot of bagels around lately. I'm not even sure when I last had a bagel -- I don't eat many bread-y things, and almost never anything as dense and doughy as bagels. But sometimes the craving strikes, so you make some from scratch:

I thought mine seemed a bit small, but I looked at a package of French Meadow Bakery's yesterday, and they were about the same size. I guess I've been been confused by those giant bagel shop bagels. At any rate, I do prefer to make my own bread, since I know what's in it. But I made a loaf of oat bread yesterday, and I just never get the baking time right. I worry so much about it drying out or burning that I always JUST undercook it. Still delicious, but not perfect.

So, yes, special breakfast. I get really excited about having peanut butter (another foodstuff I rarely eat), but the half with Tofutti cream 'cheese' was much better. I also bought a pot of Greek yogurt and had it with fresh mango and strawberries.

Here's a thing. I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (thoughts: good, learned a few new things, but he's preaching to the choir in my case), and he mentions that we should try to eat a pound of fruit and veg each day. I thought, wow, a pound seems like a lot, so I tallied up everything I had et that day (which was a typical day). I'd had over a pound and a half of fresh fruit and veg! Who knew!

On the topic of food books, I've been working my way through Hungry Planet, sitting in front of the fake fireplace most nights and reading a few chapters. Each family in the book contributed a family recipe, and I've been really disappointed that none of them so far has been vegetarian. (Wait -- there's been one: a family in the UK gave a recipe for cheese and potato pie. To summarize: Put mash in a pie plate, cover with cheese. Bake.) It's sort of surprising, given how little meat a lot of the families have access to, but I suppose they're giving their 'best' recipes -- dishes they would have during celebrations, at which time they'd be cooking with meat.

Bah.

Oh, internet friends. My car decided to get in on the comedy of errors that is this February and died yesterday. The door doesn't always latch properly, which happened when I last took it out (Tuesday), and since I didn't have to go anywhere until yesterday evening, it had all day to wear out its battery. Thanks goodness for AAA; they were out in about five minutes this morning to jump it.

And dead cars always make me think of soup. This is my soup of the moment. I usually go for tomato-based soups packed with veggies, but I think I've been in need of some food comfort lately, so this is what I've been making. I do it one bowl at a time, so the noodles don't go manky.

Here's a rough recipe, not that there's much there you couldn't guess:

-- 1 cup vegetable stock
-- 1 tsp white miso
-- 2 stalks asparagus
-- 1/2 a carrot, peeled
-- 1 or 2 cremini mushrooms
-- one green onion
-- a small amount of ramen-style noodles (about 35g)

Heat the stock over a medium flame. I usually add between 2T and 1/4 cup water to my stock; you can wait until the soup is almost ready to see if you want to thin out the flavour. Slice the asparagus thinly, on a diagonal. Use a vegetable peeler to make thin slices of carrot. Slice up the mushroom(s). Add all that to the stock, and remove some of the hot stock; mix in the miso and return to the pot. Add the noodles and cook for three or four minutes. Slice up the green onion, mix in; salt and pepper to taste. The whole thing takes under ten minutes, since the veg is so thinly sliced. Tada!

One last thing to add to the list: I managed to slice my finger with a flat-head screwdriver last night. BUT: My foot is starting to feel better.

I finally dug out my last home-grown butternut squash (from the back of a cupboard) and roasted+pureed it. I tried a tofu-less vegan pumpkin pie recipe with one cup of the puree, but it had cornstarch in it, and that plus the ground spices made it too gritty for my liking. I used another half a cup to make some apple/squash sauce:

Even with equal parts apple and squash, I still think the apple flavour dominates. It was satisfying (if a bit tedious) to scrape it all through the mesh strainer, though. I've still got a cup of puree in the freezer -- we'll see if I get any ideas for it.

Just because it's all I've been thinking about since about seven pm yesterday (and even though it's a slightly inane subject), I need to mention that I got a haircut. The style itself isn't really different -- just a trim. But I decided to finally get proper bangs, after having half-hearted ones for quite a while. The girl cut them wet and dried them after doing the rest of the cut. Once they were dry, I was starting to feel pretty good. They fell just below my eyebrows and I felt it was a look I could pull off. Then she came back to trim them and thin them out.

A few seconds later, and they were suddenly almost a centimeter ABOVE my eyebrows, and it just makes me want to cry. I look so stupid. Despite the fact that there are much more terrible things going on in the world, it makes me sick to my stomach to think about my fringe. Why would a hair stylist do that? I really feel like canceling everything for the foreseeable future, until they've grown to a decent length.

Excuse me, I have a duvet to hide under now.

I've been playing in the kitchen a bit lately. I go between wanting old standby type dinners (veggie burger+broccoli+apple is a popular combination) and trying new things. For Valentine's Day, I made ratatouille-polenta 'pot pie' (the polenta was spread over the finished ratatouille and everything was baked), from a 1999 issue of Vegetarian Times. It was a success. Tonight I'm making palak paneer for myself -- not new for me, but I don't make it very often.

Pepping up my cilantro in a cup of water. I took another photo for the ten euro group, which you can see here.

Now, on with what I will call 'The Good and The Bad'.

The Good: As I mentioned before, February has been a really productive month so far, and it continues to be so. I've done more sewing in the past couple of weeks than I have for months, and I've actually been doing things rather than thinking about them. I realized the other day that this is probably because I started running again. The chemical dolphins get in one's brain and fill one with vim and stick-to-it-ness. Hooray for running! Let's run every day!

The Bad: I hurt my foot and can't run for a while. I think I overstetched some of the connective tissue in my arch, so I'll have to take it easy for a while. Well, crap.

The Good: I went to yoga today instead of running, and it was good (and didn't strain my foot).

The Bad: Yoga is hard! I haven't down-dogged since university, and this morning's class proved to me how weak I am. It's funny how being fit and being running-fit have nothing to do with each other.

The Good: I had a coupon for Mill End Textiles, so I bought fabric (for the shirt I made and for the dress I'm planning to make) yesterday for a grand total of $6. That's the way to do it! I came home and stuck them in the washing machine so I could get to work right away. A bit later, I was feeling both cold and tired, so I thought I might have a little lie-down in my bedroom, which stays toasty warm with the doors closed. 'I'll just move the laundry to the dryer first,' I told myself, and headed down into the basement. At this point, acceptable discoveries/substitutions to my plan would have included A) Finding a hidden room in my basement with a working fireplace and a box of calorie-free, vegetarian s'mores. B) Seeing that the cats had learned to clean their own catbox and had done so. C) An unopened birthday card that had slipped down the stairs and which, upon opening, proved to contain several scratch-off lotto tickets, all big winners. Instead. . .

The Bad: The laundry sink had overflowed and flooded the basement! So instead of having a nice, warm nap, I stood in my cold, wet basement and mopped up water. Not an even exchange, in case you were wondering.

The Good: At least it was laundry water, not toilet water.

So, despite a few disappointing events, I would say that I've been mostly Good over all. Particularly because of that last point.

Just a quick post before I scamper off to the gym to do, wait, what? Yoga? That doesn't sound like running. But more about that later. For now, the veggie burger I made the other day:

I scaled down (and tweaked) a recipe from one of last summer's Vegetarian Times. I have yet to experience failure with a VT recipe, though I'm sure one is lurking somewhere. The bulk of the burger is made of oats and minced mushrooms, and I was skeptical, but it worked. I think this might be the reason I spend so much on fruit and veg:

This was a particularly produce-heavy meal, but not ridiculously so (for me). I've never been good at choosing mangoes, but I got one the other day to make some fruit salad, and it was perfect. Meltingly good.

I'll probably talk about this more later, but I made a shirt. That's the worst photograph ever, but it'll have to do for now. I used the shirt variation of the dress I made the other day, and it's obviously quite a bit different -- and SO much easier. I'm going to make another dress using this (elasticized) collar, and I don't think anybody will ever guess they came from the same pattern.

Off to yogercise.

[Garden Journal 2. Apologies for the recycled photo, but everything outside happens to be dead at the moment.]

It seems strange to start talking about flowers so early on in my garden journal, since flowers are so low on my list of priorities. But the spring (did I say spring? I meant the deepest deep of winter) is the time for planning, for choosing what will go where in your plot of land. So, flowers.

It's hard for me to want to give over any space for a plant that doesn't earn its keep – and by that, I mean 'feed me.' Gardens are a lot of work, after all. Last summer was filled with unbelievably hot spells and marked by a distinct lack of rain. Getting out with the hose every day, usually more than once, was necessary to keep everything alive, and I'm not sure I would have been as dedicated if it weren't for all the vegetables clinging to life. They were like my tiny children that I had to cherish and tend to (and then pick and devour).

To begin a post about accomplishing goals, I give you this picture of the perfect bite:

If you can't make the connection, that's simply because there isn't one. I just really like poached eggs. You get the still-runny yolk that represents the best part of a fried egg, but without the over-cooked, film-like white that comes from frying. This wasn't the finest poached egg I've ever made (I'm very particular), but it was still in a different league from the egg I got from Chain Breakfast Restaurant the other week. That poached egg, presented in a little bowl and accompanied by some of its very own cooking water, was startlingly uniform in shape and more like a hard boiled egg sans shell.

But I digress. Or. . . can you digress before you've even properly got into the topic? Anyway.

Goals. Accomplishments. Motivation. I'm full of 'em. And it. Those things. I think it must be due, in part, to the time of year -- my brain has decided that wallowing (though fun) isn't actually helpful, so it's been driving me to get on with projects. I've also been keeping a list of goals in my monthly mini-journals, and despite all the resistance I gave to that practice when I was in school, I think it really works.

So far in February:

-- I redesigned this site. I surprised even myself with how quickly I did that.
-- I started my garden journal.
-- I made a lap quilt with most of my Liberty fabrics. Will have to take a photograph of it. I got sick of all my swatches (some quite small) sitting in the cabinet, never seeing the light of day.
-- I painted the front 'bedroom' -- twice, technically. And there was a rejected test colour in between the two paint jobs. It's perfect now, and I'm just waiting for some finishing touches to take pictures.
-- I made a dress.

Yes, a dress! That I sewed by my very own self. See here. I really like the dress (it's a shame about the apparent squareness of my jaw, though -- I never knew!); it's a Built by Wendy pattern -- look for 3835 on Simplicity's website. I had my issues, but it's finished and wearable! I do have real problems with pattern sizing, though. The measurements they list, the sizes they give, and the general sense one has of sizes in the 'real world' have absolutely nothing to do with each other, as far as I can tell. I wound up just picking a size at random (a couple of sizes up from what I usually buy) and had to decrease the seam allowance in the skirt to make it slightly bigger (so I can wear it over jeans -- I do not actually wear dresses this short out in public!).

Ah, well. Assuming it doesn't fall apart as soon as I step outside in it, I'm considering it a success!

I'm pretty excited about Anne's new flickr group, 10 Euros. The invite I received today was timely twice over, firstly because I was just about to head out to the supermarket:

Three Pink Lady apples, three Cara Cara oranges, four bananas, a yellow onion, two tomatoes, a red pepper, a grapefruit, two kiwis, three crowns of broccoli, and a loaf of bakery bread.

Secondly, the timing of the invite seemed uncanny because I had just been looking at this the other day. It's a series of photos (on the Time website), which show what a typical family eats each week (in ten different counties). I found it SO interesting -- And there's a book! I want it.* -- that I made both Mo and S look at it with me.

The problem with translating the weekly costs directly to US dollars is that is doesn't give you an idea of what that figure means for the family in question. What I would rather see is 573 Quetzales (for example) as a percentage of the average income for the country. With absolutely no evidence to back me up, I would bet that Americans spend a pretty low percentage on food compared to other countries. Don't you think?

What I also found fascinating was that (with the exception of Mali), the families that spent the least each week ate MUCH more fresh fruit and veg. My own eating trends in that direction, but I definitely don't save money by doing so. My loot from the supermarket today was almost completely comprised of produce (I make several food-shopping trips a week, going to different places depending on what I need), and it cost over $40. And that won't even last me a week.

I guess that makes me sad, because of what it implies about American eating habits (imagine how much crap junk food I could get for $40!). Poor old America. But mostly, poor old me. I guess I'm just a sucker. Sure I'll live a lot longer, but those are just extra years of paying The Man for expensive fruit and veg!

* Stupid Amazon! Making it so easy for me to buy books. I was supposed to start a shopping/spending break yesterday, and it's going. . . uh, not so well.

[This is my first garden journal entry. You might notice a slightly different style in the writing (and the length), which is because it was written in Word instead of MT.]

So, it's only the middle of early February (or is it the beginning of the middle?), and I've already got my garden started. Of course, it happened by accident. Yes, I'm guilty of fondling seed packets, was doing so as early as a month ago, but I've always had the good sense to put down the packet of potential bush beans (or whatever) and face the fact that it's still winter. And it will be for a long, long time.

Even though I've been thinking about this year's garden since before last year's was done growing, I don't want to rush things. The Minnesota climate doesn't support year-round growing, unless you count listless indoor herbs. The fact that Swiss chard supposedly gets sweeter the colder it gets outside is interesting, but useless. Nothing gets sweeter at twenty below (that's Fahrenheit, of course); it only gets crispier. Frozen, I mean.

My favourite part of the new design? I no longer have to think of titles for posts! Thanks goodness. As far as I can tell, the only glitch is that Firefox viewers will see a couple of pixels of padding between images and their borders (correct), while IE folks will not. Of course, my own opinion is that the glitch lies in the use of IE, so I'm not worrying about it.

Anyway, onward! Let me tell you about my new stick-shaped diet.

That would be a good gimmick, no? If all your food is stick-shaped, your body will follow. Actually, I've just been meaning to try tofu 'fish' sticks for a while. I more or less followed the recipe, and I wouldn't say they were at all fishy, but they were still good. Surprisingly, I'd never tried the breaded-and-baked tofu thing before, so I'll definitely do that again, but with my own combination of spices.

Another stick food:

I got Heidi Swanson's Supernatural Cooking for my birthday, and I had been meaning to try her power bars (although I do not care for that term -- 'power' bars), but I actually wound up making something much more like this version of her recipe rather than the one in the book. Very good!

In other news, I painted the front bedroom/old office/thing space today, and I shall be painting it again tomorrow (if I can muster up the will). It was sort of an unnecessary project in the first place, but I wanted the painted walls to be brighter, so I found a lighter shade of grey. I used a gift card (to a big box DIY store) to buy the gallon of paint and was feeling quite pleased at doing the project on the cheap.

Of COURSE it wasn't until I had completely finished the job that I realized I despise the colour. It's not at all as warm as the grey in the living room; in fact, it's life draining and generic. It's the CCCCCC of the paint world. Tomorrow I will go to Sherwin Williams and do it properly (pick one shade lighter from the same colour card as the living room).

The hateful colour is 'Dolphin Fin' by Behr (my apologies for insulting your paint choice, should you have this somewhere in your home). I should have known better. I loathe dolphins and their patronizing party tricks.

I'm going to be implementing a new design here, so forgive any funniness that might occur.

[update] Hmm, I'm always a bit suspicious when redesigns seems to go flawlessly. Where's the giant, gaping hole?

Hey, my ebay purchase showed up on my doorstep yesterday! Excited? Oh yes.

I've been quietly obsessed with Heath Ceramics since seeing. . . oh, shoot. Who in the blog world recently visited the Heath factory store and posted a picture? Well, since seeing that. I hadn't really noticed that I was obsessed -- I just liked the idea of visiting a factory store -- but then I bothered to look at their website and started to drool.

Their stuff is definitely worth the price, but that doesn't really mean I can afford it, so you can imagine how excited I was to find this set (only older) on ebay. I bought-it-now for a total for $13, including shipping. Hooray!

We went to an anything-but-football party on Sunday, and since it was a potluck, I dug through a few back issues of Vegetarian Times. It was much more fun to try some new dishes knowing I would get to share them.

In the front, there's BBQ tofu and vegetables (delicious and ridiculously easy -- everything's just tossed with bottled BBQ sauce and thrown in the oven!) and there's sweet potato hash (with black beans and corn) cooking in the background. They were both successes! So now you know to invite me to all your potlucks.

February already! Why, this year is practically over. The devastating coldness has gone for the time being -- you know you're in Minnesota when you walk outside to 20F temperatures and think, 'Ah, nice and warm today!' But if it's already February, and that means it's nearly March, so it's practically spring! I wish...

I've put comments back to normal, by the way, although they're closed completely on two of the entries below, which the spammers were hitting the hardest.

The above is a Cara Cara orange -- an unexpected variety that was on special at the super market. It's the colour of a red grapefruit inside, and I think it has a bit of that tang as well, although it's plenty sweet. I've got a small cold at the moment, and I'm not sure if that has anything to do with anything, but I've really been craving citrus fruit lately.

The head cold is particularly annoying, as I've found my groove at the gym. I missed going yesterday, but I'll pop over there today and give it a go. I will run away from the germs, see.

There may be nothing growing outside, but there are crocuses indoors! I've also got several daffodil bulbs to plant one of these days -- a head start on spring.

I had a few projects I never got around to in January, namely the garden journal. I can't decide if I should keep it as a typed document (too cold and impersonal), a hand-written journal (takes too long, so I won't get into as much detail as on the computer), or a separate blog (I don't really like having more than one blog). I might have a redesign of this site anyway, so maybe I'll just include it here with everything else. Thoughts?

Just a quick entry to say that I've had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery with the comments. For the time being, you can still comment, but it won't appear until I've manually published it. I don't know why the spam bots like my site so much, but they do.

I've hung a new 'inspiration' wire above my desk. Though what exactly it's supposed to inspire, I don't know. It inspires me to look at it instead of getting work done. There are a couple things I bought at Shelf in London (one of my favourite stores), including a card made by Studio on Fire, which is based -- would you believe it? -- in Minneapolis. Definitely check out their website. I want it all.