Healthy choices

My new year's resolution is to make better choices when it comes to food. Thus far, I've made a simple chicken salad a few times.


And last night, Jill and I ordered the vegan hummus pizza from East Side Pies.

All hallows eve - eve

First a quick garden update, then a recap of pre-Halloween activities.

My cukes are staging a comeback, but my basil doesn't seem to want to give up any of it's newfound territory. Thankfully, the purple beans continue to ignore the feud and continue to produce plentiful harvests:


Maurie and her daughter (and her daughter's friend) and their dog stopped by for a visit last night. The two girls decided to decorate my sidewalk with holiday themes:


Jill was in Baltimore last week (at Washington College), in Minneapolis this week, then off to Wisconsin next week. We manage to stay in touch by email, text, and phone calls (post run this morning):


While Jill is away, I'm taking care of her 3 cats. Mavis (the black one) likes me a lot. The other 2 (Baxter and Claude) tolerate me:



This afternoon was Sean and Amy's annual pumpkin carving party. Sean outdid himself this year with 40 cake balls on a stick and a prosciutto and cheese skull:




This is what the skull looked like after people helped themselves to tasty bits.


Afterward, we retreated to the living room for some serious pumpkin carving:


I went with the angry, upside down jack-o-lantern (no time for an intricate design):


Unfortunately, we didn't get to stay long at the pumpkin party because we had to be at Pete and Maria-Elena's for an Austin Shakespeare event. Their house was the perfect setting for a few of the Bard's soliloquies. It was a nice evening to be outside, and Pete and Glenn's home brew was also excellent.

Garden party

Been trying to clean out the freezer recently. In my rush to leave town on vacation, I stuffed everything from the fridge section into the freezer section. I guess I hadn't looked in there since I got back. And now I realize there's no room for anything else - like ice cream. Anyway, had leftover mac and cheese (from Jill) with pulled chicken (from Jill's b-day party - Zocalo) and beans (from the garden) the other day. It wasn't bad:


Speaking of which, while I was picking beans, I noticed that I have a nasty aphid problem in the back garden. That and some fungus has been wreaking havoc with my pumpkins and gherkins (the beans seem unaffected). I pulled up a bunch of both to stop the spread of the bugs and fungus. Hmmm... I may have been a little overzealous in my eradication:


Oh, well. This is what I have left - a couple of softball sized pumpkins and an over-sized gherkin, along with a bunch of smaller ones:




A bright spot in all this is that I discovered I had basil plants buried under all those broad leaves:

Meatloaf and beans

This was my dinner last night - smoked meatloaf from Pete and purple hull beans from my garden. Both were excellent:


Speaking of garden, I've given up on trying to organize mine. Time to watch Darwinism at work. At this rate, my entire backyard will be a pumpkin patch by late October:

And one to grow on, part 2

Thanks to my family and friends for the birthday wishes. The fact that I could talk a couple dozen of you to come out on a school night to help me celebrate at the Black Star Co-op really means a lot to me.







And thanks to Denise for taking these photos:






Btw, I managed to locate a basil plant in my back bed yesterday:


I'm still amazed how fast everything is growing:

And one to grow on

I made a trip to Houston this weekend to celebrate my birthday with my family. But before I get to that, I wanted to share another garden update.

The back garden has gone wild. I'm having a hard time locating my basil plants, but I know they're in there somewhere:


The purple hull beans are coming in nicely. I'll start picking them when the bees and wasps let me:


The pumpkin vines are flowering with these really cool yellow blossoms:


Friday night, Jill surprised me by cooking dinner for me while simultaneously cleaning out my fridge of misfit vegetables. Her creation of fried tofu with sauteed mushrooms, celery, onions, and bell peppers was excellent. She also made a nice tomato salad to go with it:



My birthday trip started at Benihana's for lunch Saturday. It was just the siblings, plus Ron and Joe (my brother-in-law):


Later that night, my parents took us out for Peking duck and a lot more Chinese food:



Afterward, we went home for cake and eggs (gotta have the lucky eggs):




I think my fortune sums up my weekend nicely:

Garden update

My backyard garden is thriving. It's a bit of a jungle out there. I really need to take some time to separate out the plants to reduce crowding. But for now, I'm just happy that the plants are happy. The soaker hoses have proven to be a huge time saver - I turn on the water when I take my morning shower, and off when I'm finished showering.

Btw, you may have noticed that I added 6 or 7 updates to my blog this morning. I back-dated them, so they'd be in chronological order (just realized you can do this with Blogger). I thought the individual posts would be easier to read than one giant post that aggregated the past couple of weeks.

Wontons

Garden update: In the back bed, the purple hull beans, gherkin, and pumpkins are doing well. The Thai and sweet basil are starting to come up also:


In the front bed, the pole beans are starting to break ground too:


Last week was a bad week for eating out. I don't believe I ate a single dinner at home. I vowed to remedy that this week.

One of the few things I can make without a recipe is wontons and wonton noodle soup. Connie likes to cook and expressed an interest in learning new things, so she stopped by for a quick lesson. They're really easy to make, but take a number of ingredients:


and prep:


We made about 75 of these things:


And the resulting wonton noodle soup was pretty decent:


Connie originally wanted to take a bunch of pictures to document the process for her dad, who also likes to cook. I thought it'd be easier to just shoot a quick video: