I’m catching up on some work tonight, so although I made a real dinner while practically tethered to my laptop, I didn’t take photos or try anything too experimental or involved. What I made was a sort of hybrid between Peng’s Home-Style Bean Curd from Tigers and Strawberries (one of my favorite non-vegan blogs) and SusanV’s veganized version from Fat-Free Vegan, bastardized versions of which I’ve made before. In the past I’ve been too lazy to fry OR bake the tofu, but tonight I baked it (finally, a use for that spray bottle of Bragg’s I bought when Whole Foods was out of the larger, non-spray version!), which not only gave me half an hour to get some work done while it baked, but really did make the dish much better.

Instead of the shiitakes used by SusanV and often suggested by Barbara for veganizing her non-vegan dishes, I used Soy Curls because I find mushrooms revolting. That was perhaps a lot of soy in one meal, but we haven’t had any other soy products all week, so what the heck. I had to use a green bell pepper instead of red because green peppers were 99 cents at Wegmans yesterday and red ones were $3.76…and I’m cutting back my operating costs in preparation for telling Mark how much my ticket to Sydney is going to be. So expect more thrifty meals in the near future! (I also discovered this crazy thing called the library, which I am visiting in lieu of my habit of buying 5 books a week. I’ll have that plane ticket paid off in no time!)

I’d like to have had more veggies with my dinner, but it was a one-dish meal tonight. Except I just remembered that I bought baby bok choy last night that I could have made. Mark loves those things. Oh well. I was busy. I’ll just congratulate myself on making a fresh – and delicious – Chinese meal instead of ordering Chinese delivery. And it really was delicious! I definitely recommend this dish, either Susan’s version or your own veganized version of Barbara’s original (which is really from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook).

I took a few pictures of the food at the party last weekend, thinking vaguely I might post them and perhaps some recipes, but I was in the middle of doing a million things and didn’t take the time to take decent photos. Seeing how bad the photos were, I decided not to post them. But then I realized it’s been many days since I’ve posted anything and it will probably be a several more days before I have a chance to make a real post, so I thought I’d throw up an intermediate post with my bad photos.

Here’s sort of some stuff:

Some veggies on the London Tube platter my mom gave me (I love London with all my heart):

To the upper left of the veggies is a ranch dip that Fortinbras practically inhaled and asked me how I made it about 30 times. It was one part Vegenaise, one part Tofutti Better Than Sour Cream, and a mixture of spices that I REALLY should have written down (because it really did taste amazing). You can also sort of see my cucumber salad.

Peanut noodles:

Just udon noodles tossed in my peanut sauce (the recipe can be found in this post) and some scallions and sesame seeds. I would have included a julienned cucumber, but I didn’t think to make this dish until the last minute and didn’t have an extra cuke.

Homemade pita bread and hummus:

I really need to do a tutorial on making pita bread because it is so much fun! I love it! I’m sure you’ve seen enough hummus recipes that you don’t need another one. It was very basic: chickpeas, tahini, garlic, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and salt. It was the first time I used dried chickpeas, though, which was exciting. In the way that soaking beans is exciting.

I don’t know if a photograph of food can get any worse than this, but here is the “nacho station”:

It consisted of both white and blue tortilla chips, red and green salsas, and my nacho dip, which is just the “Yeast Cheeze” recipe from this post mixed with one jar of chunky salsa. And our special glowy Jesus lights from Fortinbras because Fortinbras loves us. (If any of you are Smiths fans, you may be interested to know that the one on the right makes me sing, “the sun shines out of our behinds”.)

I bought a pineapple merely because it is my favorite fruit, but was surprised to get so many comments on it:

EVERYONE wanted to know how I cored the pineapple (and when I showed them the tool, they all seemed to want to use it as a weapon…I have strange friends). I used this tool, to which my aunt alerted me. I think I actually got mine at Whole Foods. Or maybe it was Wegmans. I can’t say; so much of my life is spent in both places they blur together. Anyway, the pineapple was devoured.

I’m not a huge dessert person, so it’s usually my weak point, as in I often entirely forget to make it (although I hear it from Fortinbras when I forget). I didn’t forget this time, so no whining from Fortinbras. In addition to three different kinds of homemade ice cream (mint chocolate chip, cookies & cream, and pistachio), I made blackbottoms:

These were also devoured. I think my friend Matty ate six of them himself. His new nickname is Blackbottom. Perhaps I should slap the recipe up here for you.

Not pictured here is Vegan Dad’s green enchiladas. Mark loves them so much and I thought they would be a crowd pleaser, so I made a double batch. They went over very well (and remember, none of my friends are vegan or, at this party, even vegetarian), and all of the people who were still around the next day happily ate the leftovers for lunch. Also not shown is a loaf of sourdough bread that I baked. I think that was gone before I even returned to the table because I don’t remember ever seeing it after putting it out.

So there you go, some crappy pictures of what I hope was good food. The party was great, though. I have a bunch of non-food photos but I’m pretty sure I’d get in trouble with my friends for posting most of them. Here is Mark doing a shot, though:

He did not enjoy it.

So that’s my pseudo-update for now. After all the party preparation, I’ve barely been in the kitchen. Then tonight I wanted to feed my sourdough starter and start preparing dough for a couple of loaves of bread I’d like to bake tomorrow for Mark’s family, and I cut myself chopping onions for a New York deli rye. Cut myself pretty badly, in fact. I don’t even know how I did it. I do know there was a lot of blood and I am a big huge sissy about blood, so there was a lot of feeling faint, dizziness, and moaning. Mark came to my rescue and bandaged it up for me, then, under my instruction, finished dicing the onion and even sauted it for me. He wanted me to tell you that he was my surrogate chef tonight. I did manage to make the sponge for the rye bread and a pâte fermentée for pain de campagne; hopefully my mixer won’t crap out again tomorrow because I probably can’t hand knead with this gimpy finger. One day, my friends, one day, this shall be mine.

We’ll be out of town over the weekend for a wedding, so I probably won’t have a post for another few days. I promise when I return I will have better photos and an actual recipe. Hopefully I’ll have all of my fingers.

A shockingly large portion of my time in the kitchen is devoted to disaster recovery. (The shocking part is how bad I can sometimes be at cooking and yet have the audacity to have a cooking blog.) I think it’s important to be resilient to errors and able to turn mistakes into something edible. Tonight I inexplicably burnt the bottoms of two loaves of Peter Reinhart’s pain a l’ancienne, which I’ve made numerous times before and which I didn’t overbake. I still don’t know why the bottoms burnt. (They were also too flat, but I suspect they fell because they over-proofed.)

This is the better-looking loaf:

Upon withdrawing them from the oven, I sighed and announced, “it looks like we won’t be having bread with dinner.” But I quickly decided to try to salvage the sad-looking loaves. I sliced off the burnt bottoms of each. This didn’t leave a very tall loaf, since they were too flat to begin with. But if you put them cut sides together, it looked like one normal-sized baguette…one normal-sized baguette that I could smear with some sort of garlic paste and call garlic bread!

I had made garlic rosemary oil earlier in the day and had several soft rosemary-infused cloves of garlic sitting around. I smashed them and whipped in a couple tablespoons of the aforementioned garlic rosemary oil, a little bit of flaked salt, and some vegan parmesan, which I then smeared on each loaf:

Then I wrapped them in aluminum foil and stuck in the oven during the last 15 minutes of lasagne baking. Voila! An even more interesting accompaniment to the meal than I’d originally intended!

Speaking of bread, you may be wondering why it is that I’ve been on vacation all week and still haven’t made that sourdough bread post.

I guess I’ve been lazy:

Oh, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair because I have been cooking and baking a lot, and I spent a lot of time at various grocery stores today, but as for the rest of my time not spent shopping or in kitchen, imagine this picture:

… but me in a “swimming costume” instead of Tigger, on a raft in the pool instead of in the window (and with a book in my paws), and you should have a fairly accurate idea of what I’ve been doing instead of spending time with my computer.

And it’s been great.

I am currently in the midst of a week-long vacation from work, staying home to entertain my close friend from Australia, Muck (because he’s Australian, he doesn’t always pronounce his R’s, so his given name Mark became Muck…although since my husband Mark is Smark, Muck is more often Smuck). Smucky and I couldn’t be more different in terms of palate: he’s a vegetable- and spice-hating carnivore with little sense of culinary adventure and I’m (obviously) a vegan with a taste for spicy food and trying new things. So I try to find some compromises when he’s here. He’s generally pretty good about at least trying most of the things I make and sometimes he even likes them! I do let him keep a quart of milk and sliced deli turkey in the refrigerator (the latter meaning the cats really like it when he’s in town) so he doesn’t starve, but I enjoy introducing him to new things.

Sometimes I am really surprised by the things that are new to Smucky. For example: bagels. I offered him a homemade bagel last summer and he said he’d never had nor even seen one before. What?!? How can you spend nearly three decades on this planet and never encounter a bagel?!?! The good news is he really took to bagels once he tried one. Now I feel obligated to keep a supply of them on hand when he’s here. They are fun to make, so it’s okay. After he took his jet-lagged self to bed early Monday night, I got to work and surprised him Tuesday morning with fresh everything bagels:

Somehow we’ve managed to go through 8 1/2 bagels already, so it looks like another batch is in my immediate future.

Smucky adulterates his with non-vegan turkey and mozzarella (and, surprisingly, sliced “beetroot”…apparently it’s a normal sandwich topping in Australia): he’s never had cream cheese because he “doesn’t like cream”. I, however, smear mine with Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese, and in this case, jalapeno jelly from my mother-in-law in Charleston. Is it the healthiest way to start my day? Maybe not, but I’m on vacation, damn it!

Another thing Smucky’s never heard of is blueberries, which is possibly even more bizarre than bagels. He and I were in Wegmans tonight picking out sodas to buy for a party we’re having this weekend, when he suggested we try a blueberry soda. I said I was skeptical about the universal appeal of blueberry soda and asked him if he’d ever had it and it came out that he didn’t even know what a blueberry is: he thought it was just a flavor of “lolly”. Once I got over my shock, I abandoned him in the soda aisle, ran back to the produce section, grabbed some blueberries and returned stating he was going to find out what a blueberry was and not in soda form. Oddly, I did buy the blackberry soda he suggested without asking him if he knows what a blackberry is…maybe he just thought it best to keep mum about it.

One of the few meals I can think of that will satisfy both of our needs is Italian-style pasta. Usually we end up having spaghetti at some point when he’s here, but today I decided to go all-out and spring vegan lasagne on him. His eyes got big with excitement when I announced we’d be having lasagne for dinner, although he immediately asked, with concern in his voice, “but what about the meat and cheese? You can’t have lasagne without meat and cheese.” I told him not to worry his pretty little head about it.

Not only did I make lasagne, I decided to make my own noodles:

I made a very Veganomicon lasagne, with some alterations.

I substituted one spinach layer with commercial vegan “ground beef” in hopes of better appeasing the one who thinks lasagne can’t exist without meat and cheese. I’m very impressed by the fact that he ate two pieces despite the fact that I kept a spinach layer! (He did ask, suspiciously, “what’s with this green stuff?”)

(My homemade noodles didn’t retain layers very well, I’m afraid…)

One thing that I make that Smucky eats without hesitation or suspicion is ice cream, about which honestly I was at first a bit surprised. He’s such a fan of cow milk that I expected resistance to vegan ice cream…but he’s eaten about three quarters of a quart since yesterday!

Smuck’s favorite is mint chocolate chip, so I make it especially for him. Smark’s favorite is cookies and cream, so I made that tonight:

… although it looks like I’ll have to make another batch of mint chocolate chip tomorrow night. I also bought pistachios today in order to make pistachio ice cream for the party, although Smucky today informed me he hates nuts, so I guess he won’t be having any of that. Sigh.

Oh boy, was I ever a good girl about my soy products this weekend. From the okara leftover from my soy milk and tofu, I saved enough to make SusanV’s Okara Crab Cakes tomorrow AND I made Soysage from the New Farm cookbook with the rest of it! Oooooh, AND my tempeh turned out. The one problem, though, is I didn’t think ahead and decide what to DO with the soysage. So now I have a couple pounds (and that was halving the recipe!) of vegan “sausage” and no idea what to do with it.

Here it is in all its glory:

I’m pretending it does NOT look like cat food. Anyway, this is where you guys come in. What should I do with all this soysage?!

(Doesn’t it look a bit like Tigger is pliéing in the background? Is pliéing a word? Firefox says no.)

In other news, this post is little more than a sneaky way to force you to look at some of the pictures I took in the park this morning. I have all the photos ready for an entry on sourdough bread, but the thought of writing up the post leaves me exhausted. It’s been a great weekend and I’m tired. Anyway, it will take you five days to make your starters, so I figure I have another four days reprieve! I thought maybe it would be wrong to make a post that had nothing to do with food, then I wandered into the kitchen, saw the soysage cooling and figured that would be a good excuse for a post, then I’d tack on the nature photos. But I really do want soysage suggestions! THAT’S SO MUCH SAUSAGE!

Now that that’s out of the way, look at how cute these ducks are!!!!

Mark and I were walking a trail that claimed to be wildlife-intensive and I’d been griping about the distinct lack of wildlife. Since we were by water, I said, “I wish there were otters,” because I think after cats, otters might be the cutest animals ever. No sooner did the words leave my mouth when baby ducklings swam into sight! Not otters, but CUTE!

It’s relevant to the blog because they are eating food.

I had to be very patient, but I finally got a picture of a dragonfly:

So how about it? What to do with all the soysage?

Blueberries abound! A couple of things I’ve made are:

Agnes’s Blueberry Cheesecake Ice Cream from Vegan Ice Cream:

Mark keeps saying he doesn’t care much for ice cream, but I know better. I also know what flavors he likes, because he’ll get certain flavors out of the freezer and eat them right out of the Pyrex bowl while playing video games, but pretty much ignore others. He actually confessed to liking this stuff though. I believe he said it was the best ice cream I’ve made. I recently got some MimicCreme and have been playing around with it; I’ll probably have an ice cream recipe up sometime soon.

Wild Blueberry Yogurt Smoothie:

Just some plain soy yogurt (maybe 1/2 cup?), one frozen banana, a handful of frozen wild blueberries, a splash of soy milk to thin it out, and a squeeze of agave nectar for a hint of sweetness. Yummy!

In my post on how to make soy milk, I cautioned that you need to use a pot large enough that that the contents could double because soy milk has a tendency to swell up very high very quickly. Well, this is why I said that.

Ugh.

The last time I failed to post for several days in a row, I had the excuse of being extremely busy. This time my excuse is exactly the opposite. There is a direct correlation between the day they finally fixed my pool filter and the day I stopped having anything to post here. I’ve pretty much been either swimming in the pool, or floating atop it in my inflatable barge, reading a book. In short, doing nothing. Dinner’s been a rushed affair every night as I’ve been making up for all the swimtime I’ve lost while the filter was broken. Although I don’t have any exciting food to share with you, my weekend has been pretty idyllic.

I did spend all of Saturday morning in the kitchen, though. It was a soy extravaganza on Saturday, in fact. I recently purchased The New Farm cookbook to see if it held any secrets that would help with my tempeh-making. I made tempeh per its instructions (the main difference being that I cooked the soybeans for an hour an a half instead of just half an hour or so). Success!!

I think the problem last time was definitely cramming too many beans into the baggie. I’ll just have to weigh them from now on and make sure it’s exactly 8 ounces of dried beans, which results in the perfect amount for one sandwich-sized bag. I used a higher quality, thicker baggie this time and not only was it much easier to pierce it with the needle, but I was able to remove the tempeh without cutting it, so I will be able to reuse it.

In other soy news, I’ve been noticing that when I make soy milk, the liquid drains through the okara bag that came with my tofu press faster than it does the bag I made myself out of muslin, which I concluded was because the weave of my muslin was tighter than that in the other bag, and since the faster the liquid drains, the easier it is, I’ve been wanting to find a fabric even more loosely woven. So Friday night I went to the fabric store and discovered chiffon.

If you’ve ever been a bridesmaid, you may recognize chiffon as the stuff the bride made you wrap 200 tiny plastic bottles of bubbles, or Hershey kisses, or other wedding favors in. (No one had to wrap anything in chiffon for my wedding because my entire bridal party consisted of Fortinbras traipsing down the aisle carrying our rings on a wedding stick as we said our vows before all of six witnesses in a Scottish castle. I wore black, Mark wore a kilt, and there was no chiffon in sight!)

I may not have been interested in chiffon for bridal reasons, but I’m here to tell you it makes a great okara bag! Because it is slippery, it’s a bit of pain to sew, but it’s worth the small amount of trouble. The soy milk filtered right through it, and with just a couple gentle presses with potato masher, I had extremely dry okara. Not only that, but cleanup was a breeze! My other okara bags never get really clean, but the okara just slides right off the chiffon! And it dries very quickly. I also used a piece of chiffon to line my tofu press when I made the weekly tofu. This worked well because not only did the whey drain through it rapidly, making a firmer tofu faster, but it’s not as bulky as the big piece of muslin I had been using.

I think my tofu should marry my tempeh!!

Another new thing I’ve incorporated into the soy milk-making process is the Multiquick. It had never occurred to me to use an immersion blender to grind the soybeans; I guess I didn’t think they were powerful enough to do it. But one of the reviewers on Amazon said she used hers when making soy milk, so I tried it out, and it worked fine. So after they are finished soaking, I pour off the soaking water, add fresh water to cover, and blend them right in the same bowl I soaked them in. This is particularly helpful when making more than a quart of soy milk because I used to have to do it in batches in the regular blender.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m ashamed of how wasteful I am when I make soy milk and tofu. Because I haven’t had much success using okara, I usually just throw it away. Same with the whey when making tofu. This weekend, though, since the chiffon afforded me the opportunity to extract so much liquid from my okara with very little effort, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to dry it as suggested by Maki at Just Hungry. So I spread it on a pan …

… and baked it at the lowest temperature my oven allows (170 degrees Fahrenheit) until it was completely dried out. I’m not sure how long it ended up taking because I sort of did it in cycles, being “busy” in the pool most of the day. It was maybe 1.5 hours total?

Then I ground it up.

Now I will do something with it. I think Bryanna was discussing dried okara as a parmesan substitute recently; I’ll probably give that a whirl. Maki suggests using dried okara in baked goods, but ugh, I’m so disgusted with using soy byproducts in baked goods! I’ve tried using okara before and it turned my bread into bricks! I wasn’t using dried okara, and Maki claims the texture is much better with dried, but after baking a brick this weekend using whey leftover from making tofu – because the New Farm cookbook said it was good to add to bread – I’m about ready to claim that soy products have no place in bread!

I’ve become a bit of a bread snob; I rarely bake any “straight doughs”, that is, dough made and baked all at once, with no pre-ferments or sponges. But since I was too busy Friday night playing with my chiffon to put together my usual doughs to bake on Saturday, I decided to try the whole wheat recipe in the New Farm cookbook (which, as you can see, has gotten a lot of use since I got it), and at New Farm’s recommendation, I added some of the tofu whey.

Big mistake! It didn’t proof very well, which was the first sign that things were going badly, but I thought maybe I’d just put it in too large a loaf pan. But when I removed it from the oven, I recognized that signature pale, deathly color I’d seen in my previous attempts to use okara in bread. Look at it, it looks sick:

I hadn’t mentioned my whey trial to Mark, from whom I have to hide fresh bread if I don’t want it devoured within two minutes, and who cut himself a slice after it cooled. He took a bite and promptly came to me with a skeptical look on his face, asking me to taste it and tell him if it tasted, well, tasteless. It did. It tasted like cardboard. Mark threw the slice away in disgust.

So today, I decided to bake the same bread, but without whey. Look at the difference:

Now, to be fair, the bigger loaf was much better kneaded, because my mixer crapped out on the bad loaf before it was fully kneaded, and due to an injury sustained while making the okara bags the night before (my thumb tangled with a rotary cutter and lost – ouch!), I wasn’t able to knead it by hand very effectively.

So, speaking of the New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, on Thursday night, I was making Vegan Dad’s Green Enchiladas and decided that instead of using my usual “cheese” recipe from Simply Heavenly!, I would flip through the New Farm book to see if they had any “cheese” recipes I could try out. I found one and was shocked to find myself looking at the very recipe I almost always use from Simply Heavenly! I don’t want to say Abbott George Burke is a plagiarist, and I honestly think most of his 1,400 recipes are original, but I just found this weird:

I have made the recipe on the right so many times I have it memorized, so I recognized it the instant I saw it in the New Farm cookbook…which was published 22 years before Simply Heavenly. Incidentally, although I feel lost, confused, and misled – like I did when I realized that Bauhaus’s song Telegram Sam was really a T.Rex song – I actually recommend the “Simply Heavenly” version because it uses 1/4 the amount of margarine (it’s the only difference!), and it’s plenty. Also, this “cheese” was really good in Vegan Dad’s enchiladas, which you really must make. Mark has been absolutely rhapsodizing about them ever since. I’m a bit afraid he prefers Vegan Dad’s recipes to my own! I guess if I’m second best to anyone, Vegan Dad might as well be the one.

Whew…that was a lot of jabbering on my part without posting a recipe! I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you, especially after deserting you for so many days. I can show you a picture of the Sweet and Sour Tempeh I made tonight:

It’s from – surprise! – the New Farm cookbook. I’m probably the last vegan on the planet to buy this cookbook; it’s been on my wishlist forever, but I just never got around to it. Maybe because I think I have half of it in the form of printouts of recipes that have been posted on various websites, forums, and mailing lists over the years. So I guess it’s about damn time I bought a proper version of it. I was surprised to realize, too, that Tofu Cookery, which I have had for years, is also by Louise Hagler and the folks at the Farm. I had no idea!

That’s all the food news from nowhere. Here is a picture of a turtle we rescued from the pool yesterday, though:

Isn’t he great? I named him Prince Harry. I don’t know why I named him that because I have no special interest in the royal family and in fact can’t tell Harry from William, but that’s the name that popped into my head. Prince Harry didn’t think much of me, I’m afraid. He was so eager to get away from me and my animal paparazzi tendencies that he walked right into a chain link fence and had to be helped by Mark, who relocated him to a safe place. Then Prince Harry toddled off somewhere as far away from me as he could get.

I discovered wild raspberries growing by the pool as well.

Alexis, and subsequently a bunch of Amazon users, recommended the Braun Multiquick when I complained my stupid Cuisinart immersion blender had broken…again. The Multiquick arrived today and before even bothering to put my groceries away, I had it out of the box and was wondering what I could immediately immerse it in and blend. I decided to make a smoothie with some of the frozen bananas and strawberries in the freezer. The stick portion of the blender didn’t want any parts of my frozen berries, so I put them, as well as some soy milk and a squirt of flax oil, into the food chopper container. They were pulverized almost instantaneously. Woo!

My Multiquick didn’t seem to come with an instruction manual, but it does have some less-than-helpful pictograms right on the device itself. Apparently I can use the whisk attachment to make sombreros.

Making smoothies in the mixie isn’t a big deal, and in fact, I do it every now and then. It does sometimes leave chunks of frozen berry, though, which the Multiquick did not do. But I wouldn’t have purchased the Multiquick solely for its smoothie-making prowess since the mixie does an adequate job. It’s a little easier to use the Multiquick for the task though and it has a spout for easy pouring unlike the mixie. And I also realized that making myself a smoothie as soon as I get home from work is a fabulous idea. I usually come home completely starving, and although I’ll start preparing dinner right away, I end up shoving whatever I can find into my mouth while I do so. I don’t usually keep horribly unhealthy things around the house, but I still think that’s a dangerous habit because I often don’t realize how much I’m eating. Making a smoothie would stave the hunger off for a little while, without completely spoiling my appetite for dinner, and be healthy to boot! So I’m going to try to get into that habit.

Now I am going to figure out something to make for dinner that involves blending.

Oh yeah, and put those groceries away.

Uh oh, Mark just got home and demanded a smoothie…

My homemade chili oil:

My tempeh-making luck ran out and I ended up with another bad batch this weekend. I’m not sure why. The only thing I can think of is that the Ziploc bag was too full and the soybeans therefore layered too deeply. I didn’t weigh the soybeans; I just guessed at the 8 ounces I was going for, but possibly it was more than that and therefore too much. At any rate, here is what tempeh looks like when it doesn’t turn out. It didn’t smell that great either.

I want you to know that I am very careful about the food I buy and I would never, ever buy anything made of wheat flour that had been breached.

Here are two of my tomato plants. The one on the left is Roma and the one on the right is San Marzano. (Mark’s hot peppers are in the background.)

I grow them in Earth Boxes, which my mother-in-law turned me on to and which are great. In fact, here’s the San Marzano plant I put in a regular container:

It’s not nearly as big and healthy. Unfortunately, the Earth Box isn’t doing wonders for the two heirloom varieties I have, Mr Stripy (which I totally bought just because I wanted to grow Tigger Tomatoes) and Brandywine. Those plants don’t look as healthy.

While I was outside photographing the tomatoes, I scanned the yard for anything colorful I could photograph. The only color I could find in the entire yard was this tiger lily. Everything else is green, green, green.

Well, unless you count my tiny little tomato blossom:

Or the incredibly tiny flowers on Tigger’s catnip:

Much of our backyard looks like this:

As you can imagine, we have a lot of problems with pandas! And ninjas.

The cats can’t stand it when we’re outside without them. They sit forlornly at the door and meow piteously.

They often hang out on the patio with us, on leashes, but it was about to starting raining again, so instead of bringing them out, I went back inside and began pondering dinner…in which I hope to feature: