Hello! I was just thinking I was about ready to settle into bed to read for a while (Richard Dawkin's The Greatest Show on Earth), and then I realized I hadn't done a post for today. And I had the photo and everything, so... okay.

The picture is of my lunch. I made Seitan Chorizo Crumbles the other day, and I think this is my favorite way to eat them -- with scrambled egg whites and a tortilla. Vital wheat gluten is amazing stuff. I still can never quite believe that it's possible to mix it with just a few other ingredients, and it becomes something delicious. I've never had real chorizo, but the fake version is definitely a good thing.

After assembling my new closet shelf yesterday, things started to fall into place with the Great Bedroom Reorganization of 2010. The clothes situation is taken care of now, and that was the big project for the room. I find it absolutely boggling that I -- a person who would definitely not be considered a clothes horse -- have so many clothes. I'll have to do a post about the bedroom once I've finished, and I'll explain how I've organized things, but I'll say right now that it seems as though there are entirely too many drawers and shelves of clothes for one person.

I think that once I've finished with my bedroom (which will still be a little while yet), I'll move on to the kitchen. I'm leaving the guest bedroom for last, as it's currently the catch-all room and is a disaster. And I'll tackle the basement in the summer, when it's more pleasant to be down there.

Well, I'm journeying up to Sandstone tomorrow to watch the football game (on TV, with my parents), so I hope you'll all have a nice rest of the weekend. And if you have Monday off, enjoy it!

Today has been a slightly strange day, mainly because I was so tired right in the middle of it. I went to the gym in the morning, as I usually do during the week, but today's run just wiped me out, for some reason. It wasn't even particularly difficult. I came home, ate lunch, sat down to proofread, and then I just crashed.

I dozed for a bit (after making some progress on the proofing front, but eventually I just couldn't keep my eyes open) and then had my afternoon snack. This was one of my reject cookies, since the cat wound up looking like a cat-giraffe mutant. It still tasted like a delicious cookie, thank goodness. After I ate that, I blended up a big glass of juice (chopped pear, spinach, apple juice, and ice -- yum!) and tried to get back into my productive groove, but I just kept thinking about tofu instead.

I've been putting off buying tofu, because once you know that it's super cheap at the Asian supermarket, it's pretty hard to justify buying it elsewhere. So I made a late-afternoon run to Sun Foods for the precious bean curd and a few other essentials... most of which I forgot to buy (I still can't remember one of the things I know I forgot).

But I DID get a big bag of baby bananas and a bag of bruised apples for 99 cents each. I love the discount produce. A lot of it is scary, but there are usually a few good finds to be had (the best grapefruits I've ever had have been from discount sections at two different stores). I peeled all the teeny bananas when I got home, broke them in half, and put them in a plastic bag in the freezer. Three pounds of bananas for making smoothies!

And I peeled and chopped the apples and made them into apple sauce. I didn't add anything (I put a bit of water in the pan to start with, so the apples wouldn't burn as they started to cook, but I drained it off as they started to soften); I just occasionally stirred and mashed them up with a potato masher, and then I pureed them in the blender when they were done cooking. When I got applesauce in Germany this last time, I couldn't quite put my finger on why the texture was so different, since the only ingredient was apples. But after pureeing my sauce, I realized that's what it was. It makes it so much smoother, and I think air gets worked in, which really changes the mouth-feel. (I usually just mash up the cooked apples and leave the sauce a little bit chunky.) Anyway, I got an entire jar's worth of apple sauce out of my 99 cent apples.

Hooray for fruit that nobody else wants!

I woke up this morning at 4:00am. I dutifully tried to go back to sleep until about 5:00, at which point I gave up, turned my lamp on, and played a few hands of iPod solitaire. I started making plans for how to use my 'extra' hours, and I even discovered my gym has a 'gentle flow' yoga class at 8:something, which I thought would be nice. Then, just before 6:00am (okay, maybe it was more than a few hands of solitaire), I realized I was really tired and went back to sleep until my usual wake-up time. Score.

While I had been awake, though, I started mulling over my breakfast options, and, well, I should just know by now that any idea I have right after waking up is not going to be a good one. When I made Käsekuchen a while back, I used cottage cheese that I smoothed out in the blender. Wouldn't it be a good idea, I thought, to added some blended (and sweetened) cottage cheese to oatbran that I cooked in vanilla soy milk? Genius.

One flaw in the plan, though -- I really don't like hot dairy. I would say that I 'hate' it, but I'm sure there's some exception to that claim (hot, savory dairy, like cheese-y things are better, for example). Oats cooked in soy milk = delicious. Oats cooked in cow's milk = bleaurg. I put half-and-half in my Americanos, but lattes are a bit too cloying for me. I'd rather have hot chocolate powder mixed into water than real cocoa made with milk. So I wasn't really digging the combo this morning. There's a reason cheesecake is served cold, after all.

But I'm glad I tried it. I imagine loads of other (stubborn) people are like this, but when I get an idea in my head, even if I'm not positive it'll work out, I usually have to try it, or I won't be able to stop thinking about it. I need to test it out and see -- I'd rather prove to myself that it was a waste of time than have to wonder about it for days and days and days. So, 'cheesecake' oats goes in the 'bad idea' column, but at least I know now. And it looked good.

I woke up this morning, and my thermostat was officially lower than I generally keep the house during winter. I had been complaining about making note of the fact that I was too hot on Saturday, and it was positively brisk today. Of course, with winds gusting around 50mph, it's not surprising that the change came quickly.

I'm not quite ready to turn the heat on, though, so I instead used the cool weather as an excuse to oven-dry the big batch of yellow pear tomatoes I picked yesterday. Which, in turn, wound up being a good excuse to not leave the house; wind is my least favourite kind of 'weather'. It's too blowy, is what it is. I warmed the oven to 200F, tossed the halved tomatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper, and some garden herbs, and let them dry out for about seven hours. I took this photo at the four-hour mark, after I transferred them to the rack, thinking that would be more efficient.

I probably should have just called it quits at four hours, since I've put them in a jar in the freezer, anyway (I didn't want leftover moisture to spoil them). Seven hours left them not burnt, but teetering on the edge of perfect and over-done. Oh well! I'm sure I'll wind up using them for something, and they would have gone to waste, otherwise. (Speaking of salvaged near-disasters, I used my blender to mix a block of silken tofu into the baba ganoush I made the other day, and now it's delicious instead of eye-wateringly garlicky.)

With the latest haul of regular-sized tomatoes, I made up another batch of tomato sauce. I've had several conversations this summer about making tomato sauce and the preserving of it. This is what I do: once the sauce is ready, pour it into the cups of a muffin tin that you've oiled. Let it cool to room temperature and then put it in the freezer (it helps if you have a chest freezer). Once the sauce is frozen solid (or two days later, when you finally remember about it), use a knife at the edge of each cup to pop out the sauce-puck and store them all in a plastic bag. Presto! Single servings of tomato sauce, ready to be thawed out. I usually use two when I make my veggie bolognese. Everybody I've shared my method with thinks it's genius, and I think I can unbiasedly agree.

I've also got several jars of tomato soup in the freezer for this winter. The weather man's been talking about overnight frost tomorrow night, although it might not creep in this close to the city. Either way, I'm pretty sure the ripening of tomatoes is drawing to a close, so now I can think about what to do with all the green ones. I'm definitely going to try breading some, fried-green-tomatoes-style. And I'm very excited about making a green tomato pie, which I've heard tastes just like apple pie.

One last thing, since I'm on the topic of tomatoes. When I was picking all the little yellow pear tomatoes, I decided to see how big the plant 'really' was. It had grown to the top of the cage, then grew and grew some more, so it had flopped over and was trailing on the ground. When I grabbed the end of one 'branch', I was able to lift it above my head, pretty much as far as I could reach! Yep, it's been a good year for tomatoes, alright.

Happy Labor Day, fellow Americans! And happy Monday to the rest of you. I woke up feeling a bit ambivalent about the day; I didn't really have much to do, but I liked the idea of not working. I'd spent all of Saturday similarly aimless, though, and it just dragged on and on and on.

Today's been good, though. I had a nice breakfast and then did a bit of this and that around the house, and I got an early start on preparations for lunch -- Susan's BBQ Seitan Ribz. As I said on flickr, I don't usually abide by the use of 'z' in place of an 's', but I think this recipe earned it. My only changes were to omit the liquid smoke (because I didn't have any), and I only needed 1/2 a cup of BBQ sauce, not the full cup called for in the recipe.

These are really, really good. I mean, I never had an actual rib from an actual pig, so I can't compare, but they're good just as what they are. The seitan has a good texture and chew, and the charred bits (whoops!) were crunchy and extra delicious. I might have to wait until next grilling season, but I'll definitely make these again, someday (for now, at least I have three more servings in the fridge!). The only thing I would do differently next time around would be to NOT cut the strips a second time, before putting them on the grill. Some came apart, and it would have been easier to handle the seitan on the grill as one big piece.

The 'ribz' were part of what wound up being a good, traditional Labor Day lunch. I had the last little ear-let of corn from my garden -- sad to see that go! Booty had a great holiday, too, as I let him out with me three times today. He kept and eye on the squirrels while I ate lunch.

I also had a Labor Day doze after lunch, ate a piece of zucchini cake, made myself a new wallet (more on that in another post), and went for a walk. All in all, a pretty good day!

Hello, tasty dinner! This was one of those occasions when I really wished there were somebody else to share my dinner with, just as evidence of how delicious it was. The garden really came through for me tonight! I had a steamed/sauteed (sausteamed -- I mostly steamed it, but in a skillet) green beans, kale, and the very first little Brussels sprouts, with a bit of (non-garden) onion. I also made breaded eggplant medallions, pretty much exactly the same way I made eggplant the last time. Definitely a favourite method now!

And then I sliced into my big Striped German tomato. It weighed nearly 1.5 pounds (not record-setting or anything, but pretty big!), and the slices were about as big as my hand (fingers included). I crisped up a high-protein wrap in the oven, then topped it with the tomato slices, which had been salted, peppered, and sprinkled with feta. Oh boy. This was pretty amazing! The tomato was unbelievably mild (which meant the feta went perfectly with it), and it was so meaty that it was almost the texture of cantaloupe. I don't want to make any hasty declarations, but the Striped German may take the place of Brandywines in my heart.

I needed a cheering dinner today, because my laptop pretty much lost it last night. I can't bear to bore myself by going through the details again, but suffice to say, I tried everything available to me to fix it, and it's going to the Apple store tomorrow for a visit to the Genius Bar. I'm fairly confident the data will be recoverable, but it's still a great big pain in the butt. Bah.

I'm on a posting roll today! Well, you would be too, if you'd had this dinner. I'm very pleased with myself! About a month ago, my mom was given three bags of couscous for free when she bought us lunch at Holy Land, and I somehow wound up with all of it. I've been meaning to make tabbouleh for myself, and I finally got around to it today. It has all the usual ingredients (tomato, onion, cucumber, parsley, lemon juice, etc), but I kept it more couscous heavy than the recipe on the package suggested, cutting back on everything else -- particularly the parsley (I know it's the essence of tabbouleh, but it sure gets overpowering quickly!).

The cauliflower and beans were from my garden. It's my first year growing cauliflower, and I'll definitely fit it in again next year. I wish it were more like broccoli and would keep producing florets all season long, but it's worth the space, even so. I steamed the cauliflower until it was pretty much falling apart (how I like it best!), and it was delicious.

But the star -- the star! -- was the breaded eggplant. I can't NOT grow eggplants, because they're just so cool, but to be honest, there aren't that many ways I enjoy eating them. They're good in curries or in ratatouille, but there are only so many times I can crave either of those things in one summer.

One of my Dusky eggplants (the traditional shape you usually see in the supermarket) was ready to be picked today, so I sliced it into planks and salted both sides. I let it sit for about ten minutes and then wiped off the moisture than had formed (this is supposed to make them less bitter). Then I resalted and also sprinkled over garlic and onion powders, paprika, dried oregano, and a bit of nutritional yeast. I wrapped them in plastic wrap and stuck them in the fridge for an hour.

To cook them, I just heated a bit of olive oil in a non-stick pan and used the traditional breading technique: dedge in flour, dip in egg, then coat with bread crumbs (I seasoned mine with salt, pepper, and oregano). I'm not entirely sure how long I cooked them over medium heat -- probably about seven minutes each side.

It felt like a real gamble -- if they were bland and slimy, no coating was going to hide that. But they were perfect. Full of flavour, tender on the inside, and crisp on the outside. So good. I topped them with red pepper hummus (thinned out with a bit of milk), and that also really made the 'dish'.

And if that weren't enough excitement for one night, I still have Julie's visit -- and the cheesecake! -- to look forward to. What a day. Since I'm having a couple visitors this week (including one overnight guest for my new guest bedroom), I bought flowers to have in the house. My sunflowers are blooming outside, so I brought one in to keep the store-bought guys company.

Lastly, I added six new photos to my Garden 2009 flickr set. Take a look, if you like plants 'n' things.