I'd say there's something of a tomato situation at the moment. I drove up to Sandstone today, so I brought all the ripe tomatoes up with me to boil down into a plain sauce (then I can freeze it in muffin pans to make pucks I can thaw individually and season as I want them). I might roast the pear tomatoes or make oven-'sun'-dried tomatoes.

The cats survived the trip up here with very little fuss. I've learned to put them in separate carriers and then face the doors towards each other in the back seat of the car, so they can see one another (reassuring) but won't freak out and start fighting. Usually there's a lot of yowling on the way, but I just sang along to my iPod the entire trip, and they were quiet. Or I had the music up too loud to hear them! (Just kidding -- I didn't.)

Speaking of the iPod, I set it to shuffle through all the songs, and I realized that A) I have a lot of music on there that I don't really want to hear most of the time (and that's of the hand-picked artists/albums I put on there in the first place) and B) there are a LOT of lyrics stored in my head. Like, I couldn't recite most of these songs word for word out of the blue, but start the song playing, and it all comes back. Surely that brain space could be used for remembering foreign languages, no?

Two summers ago, I was all about the homemade. I made bread from scratch every week, started making my own yogurt, etc, etc. That was the height of my make-iness, but I've been feeling the urge again. The main goal of whittling down the contents of my pantry, fridge, and freezer has been to get through all the various fake meats and bread-y type products so I can make some of my own. I've come a long way in the past few years, as far as making food from scratch goes, and I'd like to stop buying packaged protein sources and so on.

I've made quite a dent in what's in the freezer (I think there's one Boca patty, some Morningstar burger crumbles, a Trader Joe's Italian meatless sausage, and just a couple odds and ends left), so today I went ahead and made seitan sausages/brats. I wanted something that could be thrown on the grill, and I knew that this recipe (for the fauxsages, scroll down) had turned out well for me before. I changed the spices -- replaced the oregano with chili powder, the basil with cumin, nixed the fennel seeds, and used half a teaspoon garlic powder instead of real garlic cloves (added it before seeing the cloves on the ingredients list!). I also made eight smaller sausages instead of four (steamed them for the same amount of time, though), which seems like a better serving size to me. They're great!

I thought about trying to make buns, but there was no way I was going to turn the oven on in this heat. Instead, I made tortillas with this recipe. [Link fixed now -- sorry!] Well, I changed that one, too. Instead of two cups AP flour, I used 1c whole wheat bread flour + 1/2 cup AP flour + 1/4 cup spelt flour + 1/4 cup buckwheat flour + 1 Tbsp vital wheat gluten. (I added the gluten because I was worried that the spelt and buckwheat flours might make the tortillas too brittle.) They ALSO turned out really well! I made a wrap with both the sausages and tortillas, and it was top notch. I expected my tortillas to resist the folding and rolling, but they were very supple and even held everything together when I cut the finished wrap in half.

The above was my lunch yesterday -- a pressed sandwich with hummus, red peppers, tomato, red cabbage + beet salad, onion, and honey Dijon. The pepper, tomato, cabbage, and beet all came from the garden! It's been good to me this year.

The sandwich kind of exemplifies the ways I've changed with regard to food. Well, first, there's the fact that I grew so many of the components myself! I was not a gardener growing up (although my mom was), so the fact that I can consistently grow huge tomato plants is sort of a surprise. Well, it has a LOT to do with the garden's location (sunny!) and the good dirt/humus I've brought in.

But even more than that is the fact that I wouldn't have touched this sandwich five years ago. Honestly, I think the only thing I would have willingly eaten was the bread. Possibly red cabbage, raw and sparse in a lettuce mixture. Thank goodness my palate has matured! I just couldn't have dealt with the sweet/savory/vinegary combination that this sandwich had. I remember trying to eat a brie and cranberry (or something similar) sandwich about six years ago, and I couldn't come to terms with it.

These days, I think anise (think black licorice) is the only flavor I'm not on friendly terms with. So I don't like stuff that's loaded up with fennel seeds, but I can still enjoy it in a curry. It always seems silly to me when grown men and women pick things out of their meals at restaurants (except excess slices of raw onion -- I think we all get a free pass on that one, for our fellow human beings' sakes). Do you have any foods or ingredients that are just no-can-do for you?

-- Oh, hey there, internet blog site. I've been neglecting twelve22 about as much as I've been neglecting my garden. The garden, though, still rewards me with amazing produce. I've yet to figure out how to get the blog to feed me. Seriously, though, the tomatoes started ripening at the beginning of the month, and there's just no stopping them now. I made a sauce entirely from garden ingredients today: tomatoes, red bell pepper, red onion, thyme, oregano, and parsley. Salt and pepper were the only other ingredients, and it was amazing. I had some of it on top of vegetable pasta shells for dinner tonight -- the photo above was taken with the camera balanced on a drinking glass, because it was so dark and stormy (hence the unusual angle).

-- I was also equally impressed with this cooking effort, so it's a double photo post today. My parents gave me several potatoes that they grew in their garden up in Sandstone. I sauteed some red onion from the garden with mustard and coriander seeds, curry powder, and a bit of extra cumin. I added most of a diced tomato from my garden (a Great White, which is actually yellowish and has the strangest texture: very meaty and dry-ish, but it cooks wonderfully) and let that all mingle for a bit. When I'd finished boiling the potatoes, I added them to the pan and did some in-pan splitting and mashing. I'm pretty sure it was the best curry-based dish I've ever made.

-- It's been hot AND humid around these parts lately, which makes running less than pleasant. We had a short reprieve at the end of last week, and I was able to run my fastest ten miles to date. That was very reassuring, because I was starting to think that I'd just become really awful at running, but I'm pretty sure the weather is actually to blame. The weekend after next is Ragnar, so let's everybody hope for a nice cooling trend, eh?

-- The cats continue to be amusing. When Beany was younger, she used to spend a lot of time alone in the basement, which I referred to as 'doing her experiments'. There's less of that now that she's older, but Birdy has picked up the slack. Her favored method of scientific inquiry, however, seems to include testing the reactions of everyday objects with water. Namely, the water in the cats' bowl. Last week, she concluded that a catnip toy becomes far less desirable when saturated with water (although she made sure to carry it around and drop it at various points around the house to test this theory). This weekend, I returned from an errand to see a plastic bag floating in the oddly-pink water of the cat dish. So now we know that Gu Chomps will dissolve completely in a bowl of water, even if they're wrapped up and placed on the counter. My furry little scientist.

-- I read The Great Gatsby last week, for the first time ever. I know, right? I got one of those English degrees that was more about writing and poking at words than about reading... stuff. At any rate, I'm glad I never touched it in high school or college, because I wouldn't have appreciated it. I really enjoyed it, though, and it set me off on this vague mission to read everything on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list. Vague in that I have no deadline for myself, nor much drive to actually follow through. I thought that, since I'd just read #2 on the list, I should start from the top and work my way down. But, hey, who put Ulysses at #1? That's going to take me forever. Sigh.

When I asked for Q&A-style questions a while back, Kara wondered about my weekly 'menu' (if you have a question for me about any topic, leave it in the comments, and I'll try to blog about it!). It would be either impossible or incredibly boring to write up an entire week's eats, but I made an effort to photograph everything I ate yesterday, just to give you an idea of my usual meals. Everybody eats differently, and I wouldn't want anybody comparing their eating habits to mine (for better or worse), but I do think it's interesting just to see how other people structure the food in their lives.

The top photo is of my pre-run breakfast. I feel like I'm on a never-ending mission to tweak my diet to make my running the best it can be. I usually have a piece of Ezekiel sesame toast with almond butter before a run -- and sometimes an extra piece of toast with jam before a really long run -- but I always wind up feeling hungry after the second mile. After some recent reading on the subject, I thought I would try going out with only a banana and a graham cracker for breakfast. For the first time, I was NOT hungry while running, which makes me think it was never hunger at all, but an upset stomach from trying to digest while active.

I always have a cup of tea (PG Tips of Yorkshire Gold) with my first breakfast; I need that hot beverage to refresh my body after a night's sleep. If I don't drink it all right away, I'll reheat the leftover to drink with my second breakfast. (The photo above was actually taken this morning, but it's exactly what I had yesterday -- except for the full cup of tea.)

I'm going through a Kashi GoLean phase again, after being 'off' it for several months. I like the texture and its high protein content. I always add some sort of fruit for sweetness and eat it with almond or soy milk. Yesterday, I ran six miles, and I always really look forward to a bowl of cereal at the end of a run!

A sandwich with the first Brandywine from the garden! Homegrown tomatoes are the best. My favorite sandwich right now goes like this: skillet-toasted bread, avocado with a sprinkle of salt and garlic powder, cucumber, thinly-sliced carrot, tomato, fried egg, lettuce, and honey Dijon mustard. This particular edition was one of the tastiest so far.

I've been eating mostly salads for lunch this summer, but I realized the other day how few carbs I eat compared to what I should be eating as a distance runner. Carbohydrates are the fuel your body banks for any sort of endurance sport, so I feel like upping my carb count will really help me go further without tiring myself out so much. I gravitate towards fairly un-carby things (like protein and veggies), so I have to stay quite aware of my choices.

I don't snack during the day, although I do eat several smaller meals. But something like the sandwich and cantaloupe (and glass of iced tea) above makes me feel very full without actually being enough calories. So sometimes I wait a while and have a lunch dessert, like this granola bar. I also made more iced tea (sweetened with stevia), because it was so hot that I needed to stay hydrated but couldn't bear to drink any more plain water.

Afternoon tea time! Except I didn't have any tea, because I felt I had probably caffeinated myself enough for the day already. When I'm at home, I usually have a cup of plain yogurt with fruit and cereal. If I'm out, something like a Clif bar will do.

Dinner wasn't too fancy. I made brown rice, and I thought about making a curry from scratch, but I had a packet of ready-made aloo palak, so I took the easy way out. I did cook extra cauliflower and stirred that in with the half of the packet I made last night. I seem to usually eat something cold for lunch (a salad or sandwich) and if I'm going to have a cooked meal, I'll have it for dinner.

Ice cream time! Alex and I recently had a discussion about whether ice cream is better in a bowl or a cone. I'll tolerate a cone if I'm out and about and trying some sort of fancy ice cream, but otherwise it's bowl all the way (across the sky). In fact, my three favorite daily eats are those which require a bowl and spoon -- cereal, yogurt, and ice cream. And if I ate soup every day, I'd include that, too.

I'm currently going through a period of meal shake-ups (straying from my habitual breakfast toast, etc), which happens every few months for me, and it applies to ice cream, as well. I'd been a loyal Edy's Mint Cookie Crunch enthusiast for ages, and there's still a container of it in the freezer, but I had a Double Fudge Brownie affair, and now I'm dabbling with Moose Tracks. I like to have it with a semi-frozen chocolate pudding cup (which is also essential with Mint Cookie Crunch), because it sort of mellows out the dairy sweetness of the ice cream. And it's chocolate-y.

So that's about it -- oh, I also had a very small bowl of Kix later in the evening, after dark. I am a 100% non-believer in not eating at night. It makes me crazy when people arbitrarily decide they won't allow themselves to eat anything after dinner. I'd much rather assume that I'm going to (because I get hungry like clockwork when I'm awake!) and eat accordingly during the day. I sleep terribly if I'm at all hungry, so I've lived and learned.

Anyway, as you can see, I eat fairly often through the day, because that's what suits me (and also because I work at home). Things don't vary too much from day to day, so just multiple this by seven, and you've got a week's worth! If you want to get a better idea of the range of meals (lunch and dinner) that I make for myself, you can take a look at my flickr set.

-- Last night, Chris and I grilled pizzas. It's something we'd talked about doing, and yesterday's heat made it seem like a good idea. I was pretty dang excited, actually. I used this recipe to make the dough for the crusts, and I can heartily recommend it. It was easy to work with, rose well, and it smelled amazing while it was on the grill. I had seasoned it with garlic powder and oregano, but I'm pretty sure it would be indescribably delicious if a person left those out and topped it with cinnamon sugar before putting it on the grill. Grilled dessert pizza? The one in the photo above was Chris', but you can see mine here. It had homemade sauce, onion, green pepper, zucchini, eggplant, corn, black olives, and a bit of feta. We WILL be grilling pizzas again!

-- So, I moderate all the comments, because I get so much spam, and I had Movable Type set up to e-mail me every time a comment came through. Great, except that the ratio of spam to actual comments is about 60:1 -- and MT puts all the REAL comments into its spam folder, so it wasn't even alerting me about those! After months of apathy, I finally decided to go into MT's settings and turn off the e-mail alert, and when I did that, I realized I can use Captcha to weed out the bots. How did I not know this before? What a dummy. So now spam comments = 0. Except for the real comments, which MT is still convinced are spam.

-- I enjoyed the round of Q&A we did a while back, so if you guys have questions, I'd love to do it again. Running? Eating? Cats? Life? I'll answer your questions! Just leave 'em in the comments.

-- p.s. I'm pretty sure Chris would like you to know that that is a Steve McQueen shirt he's wearing.

Hello! I don't usually post in the morning, but I woke up early today and am not allowing myself to go for a run (have to rest up for tomorrow's 10k race). I've been meaning to write a post about my most frequently bought food items for a while, now, so here's a good opportunity to do so. I was reminded of my intention this morning, because I had a bowl of Kashi Go Lean, which used to be one of my frequent purchases, but then I sort of went off it. I had an unopened box in the cupboard, and I recently discovered how tasty it can be if I eat it with sweetened almond milk (plus about half a cup of yogurt) and berries. Yum.

Anyway, here are some of the items I buy almost every time I go to the supermarket:

Broccoli -- And I usually buy two big bunches at a time.
Kale -- I planted extra kale this spring, because I've been loving it so much.
Lettuce/Spinach -- With my current salad craze, I feel like I'm buying this stuff all the time.
Avocados -- I've been eating them more than usual, lately. I think it's why my hair has been so soft.
Sweet Potatoes -- I'm not sure why people bother with white potatoes, to be honest.
Baby Carrots -- Perfect for when I'm proofreading late at night and feel like crunching something.
Bananas -- For with my oatmeal.
Egg Whites -- Also for oatmeal.
Milk -- This would have been 'yogurt' a little while ago, before I resumed making my own. I go through milk-milk very slowly (I use it only in tea), but a half-gallon lasts just over a week, when it comes to yogurt-making. I always feel a little silly when I buy a half-gallon (for yogurt) and one of those Grab-n-Go bottles (for tea) at the same time.
Ice Cream -- Oh, Edy's Mint Cookie Crunch. I buy extra whenever there's a big sale discount. Just in case... there's a sudden ice cream ration.
Chocolate Pudding -- Ice cream is good. Pudding is good. Ice cream + pudding? Is amazing.

And the stuff I buy slightly less frequently, but always keep in the fridge/pantry:

Oat Bran -- I love that my regular supermarket sells this in bulk; it's cheaper, and I can buy the right amount to fill the jar I use.
Apples -- The handiest snack.
Ezekiel English Muffins -- I've actually been buying these less, now that I eat two small breakfast on run days. But I use Ezekiel bread for my pre-run meal, so I'm still doing my part to keep them in business.
Nut/Seed Butter -- My true love is (almond) Barney Butter, but I bought Sun(flower seed)Butter when my last BB ran out, and I'm loving it almost as much. There are flax seeds in it!
Almond/Soy Milk -- I use soy milk to make oatmeal, almond milk for coffee or with cereal.
Flax Plus Pumpkin Granola -- I sprinkle a spoonful or two on top of my oatmeal. Not much, but it's essential.
Truvia -- I like this brand of stevia -- some others I've tried are too concentrated and taste slightly bitter. I use it in oatmeal and plain yogurt. (I use real sugar in tea, and those three things are about all I sweeten.)
Frozen Blueberries -- This is currently my favorite thing to add to yogurt (I thaw them most of the way in the microwave for adding). I also like tinned peaches, for the record.
Cottage Cheese -- Great protein; good in salads or on sweet potatoes.

Hmm, there's probably some really obvious stuff that I've forgotten. I always keep fresh fruit and other veg in the house, too, but the exact selection depends on what's currently on sale. Same with protein sources / fake meat. How about you? What's something you feel like you're constantly buying every time you go to the grocery store?

Hello! I thought I'd address two comments/questions I received recently, both on the topic of foodstuffs.

-- First of all, my green veg. I think I've written about this before, but I can't remember if I did so here or on flickr, so this is what I do, for the record. I steam broccoli until it's nearly cooked through. Then I sautee a bit of onion in a separate pan, usually just using a bit of cooking spray. I drain any excess moisture from the broccoli and throw it into the pan, along with asparagus and kale that I've cut up. The pan gets covered for about a minute, and then I pour in a splash of soy sauce, stir it up, then add a few shakes each of nutritional yeast, cumin, and chili powder. Stir it up again and cover for another minute or two, or until the kale is tender.

At that point I leave the lid off, so that any trapped moisture can cook off, and I'll add some sort of protein, if I'm going to. Well, I wait until that point for stuff like veggie sausage or fake bacon, but if I were using beans, I'd add them right before I season everything (but after the soy sauce), so they can benefit from the spices. If I do tofu (like so), I cook it first and THEN add the veg.

That's how I do it, pretty much every time. You might think I'd be getting tired of green stuff flavored with soy sauce, nutritional yeast, cumin, and chili powder by now. But nope. I'm especially going through a kale-craving phase.

-- Second, yogurt. I started making my own two summers ago, after reading about it here. It's very simple, and you really only need two ingredients: milk and a starter culture (I've never added powdered milk to mine). I usually use plain Dannon naturals as my starter, since that's what I eat if I'm not making my own yogurt.

That first summer, I just used the oven, and I figured out that a good method for me was to let the oven preheat for a minute every hour or so. Just a minute, and then I'd turn it off. Obviously, that required being around all day. But I found an older Salton yogurt maker a little over a month ago, and I've loved using that. It maintains the proper temperature, and all I have to do is to remember unplug it and stick the yogurt in the fridge afterward! You still have to repasteurize the milk and then cool it down before adding the starter, but that doesn't really take too long, especially if you use an ice bath for the cooling.

And the best part? I can make a quart of yogurt for $1-$1.50, once I'm using the previous batch as starter for the next. Thrifty!

P.S. -- I successfully ran 6.2 miles (10km) this morning, which I'm awfully pleased about. I'll write more this weekend, hopefully!

What to tell you today? How about a few updates on all the usual stuff.

-- Running: No running today, because it's rainy and windy (and because I don't have to run all the time. That meant I could have my 'old' pre-run breakfast, which I've decided is too heavy these days. I needed that coffee to pick me up, considering how grey and dark it was/is outside! BUT! Yesterday was a fine morning, and I went out for a four-mile run. It was great. Running outdoors has really helped me pick up the pace, even though I expected the opposite. My last mile yesterday was probably one of the fastest I've ever run; I was annoyed at having to wait for so many cars at the intersection (luckily the only 'real' intersection I have to cross, thanks to the parkway), so I really pushed it the last half mile.

-- Cats: Birdy has been taking amoxicillin for her red, floppy ear, and I'm pleased to report that it's no longer floppy! The vet said she might have been 'pulling' it down because it was sore, but I'd never seen a cat move her ear like that on purpose. Perhaps he was right, though, because it went back to normal pretty quickly. Thank goodness. I paid for two pointy ears when I got her at the humane society! Birdy is starting to understand what 'c'mere' means, and she continues to be a cuddly cat, both with me and with Beany. They are both most excellent.

-- Food: I finished off my puffed rice 'Smacks', so I made a new batch with puffed kamut. It's even crunchier than the rice was, and I really like it! I also finished off the last of my last batch of homemade yogurt. I usually hold some back to use as starter for the next round, but I bought a quart of plain Dannon Naturals to eat over the next few days and then start homemade yogurt anew. My homemade stuff was getting sort of grainy (but not bad -- too much acid, I guess?), so I'm happy enough to start over again.

-- Other stuff: I watched The Thin Man last night, which I'd been wanting to see for several months. How can I become more like Nora Charles? I reckon I need to A) stumble into a large inheritance, B) start wearing much more fabulous dresses, C) up my alcohol tolerance by a factor of ten, and D) work on my snappy one-liners. So, you know, basically learn to be a different person. My hair's the right color, though.

-- I'm so pleased with myself over this ice cream. I had whole milk and half-and-half left over from my first (and semi-failed) ice cream experiment, and I knew I wasn't going to use them before they went bad (I use skim milk for yogurt and tea, and I put almond milk in my coffee). So I stirred 1.5 cups whole milk, 1 cup half-and-half, and one small box of instant vanilla pudding in a bowl for a few minutes, and then I dumped it in my ice cream maker. Ridiculously easy and SO good. It sat in the freezer for about an hour after it finished churning, which meant it was the perfect froziness when I was ready to eat some. And it was still light, so I took a photo (FOR YOU, ALEX).

-- If one could create a 'word cloud' for my blog, but with entire phrases, I'm pretty sure 'pleased with myself' would loom large. Of course, every time I say that I'm pleased with myself, what I really mean is that I'm pleasantly surprised with how well something has turned out. I'm not really that chock full of self-confidence, complacently chuckling over my abundant talent all day long.

-- But speaking of being pleased, my second batch of yogurt made in my thrifted Salton Cosmopolitan yogurt maker came out even better than the first. I used half a cup of yogurt from the first batch as my starter culture and let it cook overnight (at least ten hours, in the end). I'd almost forgotten about it by the time I stumbled into the kitchen this morning, so that was an exciting discovery. I expected it to be thinner than the first batch, since the culture generally gets weaker every time you use it, but it's actually much thicker than the first time. Success!

-- Beany and Birdy continue to get along better and better. When they walk by each other now, they'll usually stop and bump noses, and then Beany give Birdy a few licks on the head. Affection the other way around usually isn't accepted, however; Beany hisses if Birdy tries to get too close on her own. I imagine Beany is just trying to keep the balance of power tipped in her favor. They were doing a lot of play-chasing earlier today, and I saw Beany streak by more than once with Birdy in hot pursuit. What will become of the household when Birdy weighs more than two pounds?

-- I made a taco salad for dinner, and it was delicious. To make the shell, I oiled (sprayed with Pam) and salted both sides of a high-protein tortilla, draped it over a metal bowl, and stuck it in a 350F oven until it was crunchy (5-10 minutes?). It's not exactly restaurant style, but it's a heck of a lot healthier, and I still enjoyed it. Of course, now I'm thinking about the taco salad that Little Angie's in Duluth makes. It might be time for my annual trip up there.

-- True to my word (well, eventually), I tried making my own Smacks today. Well, I used puffed brown rice instead of puffed wheat. In a saucepan, I melted a tablespoon of butter and added 1 tbsp brown sugar, 2 tbsp honey, and 3 tbsp maple syrup (I would've used all honey, but I was running low). Once it was bubbling, I added a splash of vanilla (maybe 1/4 tsp?), a dash of salt, and 1/4 tsp baking soda. I figured that Smacks are basically a wheat version of caramel corn, so I based my ingredients very loosely on caramel corn recipes I've used in the past. After mixing in the soda, I poured the syrup over the entire 10-cup bag of puffed rice (in a bowl, of course), tossed it to coat, and then spread the rice out on two baking sheets. Into the oven for ten minutes -- the first five at 350F, the next five at 250F. It gets crisper once it starts to cool, which it should do completely before you put it in a storage container. If it's still warm, I'm guessing it would form condensation and go manky quickly. The result is lightly sweetened cereal; if I would have used half the bag (or doubled the syrup), it would've been a bit more like Smacks.

-- I added a few more Birdy photos to my pet set on flickr. She and Beany aren't friends quite yet, but Beany's slowly relaxing. In response to people who've asked where the name 'Birdy' came from: I decided a while after getting Beany (and thus forming a B-y theme with cat names) that my next cat, if it were a boy, would be called Bertie (as in Wooster). The obvious alternate for a female cat was 'Birdy', which is said the same way with an American accent.

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.