Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Not Pictured

So my blog turns out to be mostly about what I'm eating. Not the most scintillating for you perhaps but it keeps me entertained. I'll add stories to go with it. Check out my dinner tonight. Wasn't I good at eating my veggies?
Tuesday's dinner: eggplant salad, squash, corn, and Ethiopian flatbread. 
The eggplant is the Indian eggplant salad from page 48 of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen. It's a very excellent vegetarian cookbook and that particular recipe is delicious. I broke it out to help handle the eggplants coming out of the garden. So far I've only had to compost one that rotted before I could eat it, but they are starting to build up and I need to apply myself. It's far to easy to have an apple, some bread, and cheese for dinner which isn't terrible nutritionally but probably leaves my short of my five servings of fruit and veggies a day. This dinner had three servings all by itself though and when you add that to the blueberries and oatmeal for breakfast (the blueberries were from Canada by way of Costco but they were really good with an almost huckleberry flavor) I'm doing pretty well. 

The other thing I'll be eating a lot of for a while is the squash. That's the one crop that did fabulously in the garden this year. I've got 10 butternut squash sitting in my big basket and I bet at least that many more still in the garden. I even bought a heavy duty vegetable peeler at Eastern Market to help deal with them. Fortunately I really like squash so this should not be a problem. 

Here's my other really excellent dinner plate of recent days. 
Sunday's dinner: A Cherokee Purple tomato with chevre, lettuce salad, and Alaska salmon. 
Of course what's not pictured is the leftover chocolate cake I had for breakfast. I make a layer cake, vanilla cupcakes, and chocolate cookies for the bake sale at St Augustine's end-of-summer fair. That was Saturday and it was also the SW Art Fest. We spent a while tabling about the community garden project. It was a fabulous day. Here's a couple of pictures I took down by the church so that you can see how nice it was. 
Looking across the street to Arena Stage

St. Augustine's, if you look closely there's an airplane flying out of DCA 
As a bonus for reading to the end of this rather rambling post, here's a provocative NY Times article arguing that bike helmets are bad for cycling. Basically the author is making the case that requiring helmets is a major barrier to cycling becoming normalized and the risks of brain injury from falling off a bike are no greater than the risk of falling off ladders or slipping in the shower. Requiring helmets for biking makes a relatively safe activity (statistically) appear much more dangerous so people just don't do it. Leading of course to the greater dangers of automobile congestion, air pollution, obesity, and heart disease. 

So what do you think? To helmet or not to helmet?