Veggies!

Here's what I picked in my garden today.

Lisabees,

Are those some kind of purple tomatillo at about eight o'clock in your picture?

I am just thinking of what I could make with your assortment of vegetables. Yum!

Fresh cucumbers calls for a dish of sunomono.

I really gotta stop thinking about this picture and all the possibilities, all your veggies look sun warm, fresh and delicious!

On another note, I have noticed high up in the mountains that things are turning already. Actually I noticed it about three weeks ago. This is really early for these changes. Ants & wasps are acting funny already. I really don't know what these things mean except that some of the old timers have noticed it too. A hard winter? An early winter?

Ooh, nice, Lisabees! I find vegetables harder to grow than flowers in general....... you are doin good girl! ;-)

Pewjumper, yes those are purple tomatillos - aren't they cool? Can't wait to use them. I never knew there was such a thing until I went to buy my plants. I will have green ones too but not yet. What is sunomono? And just what are the ants & wasps doing, inquiring minds want to know? I have heard it's going to be a winter of heavy snows this year.

Kyla, my veg garden has the best soil of all my gardens by far, it get the most water, the most weeding etc. - those veggies better look good! Actually though, even with all that effort, not everything does as well as I'd like.

Nice crop lisabees. You're making me hungry. I can also identify with not everything doing really well. Some things grow well and some things are so-so. Rooting vegetables do really well here as do Peppers. My Acorn squash is huge. Tomatoes are marginal. Lettuce does OK if grown in the Fall. I am a bit more inclined to grow the things that do well just for that reason.

Lisabees,

Last week the ants that were normally fairly sedate were in an uproar, now they are not to be seen. This seems unusual for this time of the year. I have been going to this spot once every two weeks for over six years to draw water samples. The wasps and hornets are getting aggressive which is normal for Fall, but again this seems very early in the year for this kind of behavior.

I understand that we have El Nino conditions and the weather service is forecasting a slightly heavier snowfall this year.

The purple tomatillos are very cool. I wonder if they will hold their color in a tomatillo salsa.

Sunomono was the wrong word. I can't think of the correct Japanese word but here is a typical recipe:

2 medium cucumbers or 1 large English cucumber
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted (see Tip)

1.Peel cucumbers to leave alternating green stripes. Slice the cucumbers in half lengthwise; scrape the seeds out with a spoon. Using a food processor or sharp knife, cut into very thin slices. Place in a double layer of paper towel and squeeze gently to remove any excess moisture.
2. Combine vinegar, sugar and salt in a medium bowl, stirring to dissolve. Add the cucumbers and sesame seeds; toss well to combine. Let marinate for twenty minutes

Thanks for the recipe Pew, it looks good. My son is a student of all things Japanese, so let me know if you remember the right word for it. I'll let you know if the tomatillos hold their color - salsa is exactly what I have in mind for them.

I had forgotten to comment on your beautiful veggies, Lisabees! They sure are.

mmmmmmm looks yummy drooooooooool

Pewjumper, I think that recipe is for sunomono. It sure looks like some I have seen. I am going to whip up a batch of it with your recipe and cucumbers from today's farmers' market.

That looks like a wonderful vegetable haul, lisabees. I am so jealous, I think I will go out and plant some lettuce and spinach. At least it isn't too late for planting those.

I planted more lettuce, radishes & peas last week too.

slurp snack burp. Picked up some fresh cherries from BC cherryguy last night. slurp snack burp.

I went to the farmers' market yesterday and came home with fresh corn, squash, green chile, pinto beans, carrots, sweet onions and okra. I will be busy cooking all this stuff. For inspiration I am going to see Julie and Julia tonight. Or is it Julia and Julia? Can't remember.

Movie review please paj. I think that one is going to be good. Julia was way too much fun on cooking shows.

I am a great fan of Julia. Will report here on the movie. I think I am going to like it.

I saw Julie & Julia with a group of friends & everybody liked it. We all agreed though, all the food looked really good, but someone else should cook it.

Just came back from Julie and Julia. I loved it. So did my husband and the friend who came with us who is an actress. We all loved it. I almost wanted to try cooking the entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking myself, but I think it would take me a lot longer than a year. Then I decided I really should do something more original -- like writing the book called Mastering the Art of Cooking for Health or some such since that has been my interest for about a year now. There are so many good things to eat in the world but so many of the ones available in the US are really unhealthy.
Afterwards we went to a very good Vietnamese restaurant where we had a lovely and healthy meal without mayonnaise, hollandaise, bacon or cheese.
In the movie I watched the smoking and the alcohol consuption and realized that both Julia Child and her beloved Paul lived into their 90's. And all that butter! Makes you wonder how accurate our current beliefs about what is healthy really are.
In the meanwhile, I will plug along with grains and fruits and vegetables and hope that the doctors are right about those things being healthy.

Healty eating. My opinion on the three most important things regarding the american diet:
1) Get enough exercise
2) Don't eat things that are chemically modified. Example: hydrogenated oils are far worse for you than naturally saturated fats. We are finally realizing this and publically recognizing this. The "in vogue" wording is trans-fats.
3) Eat whole foods (don't have good things removed). Example is fiber that is frequently removed from grains and leaves us with plugged up intestines.

I'm reminded of the "mediterranean diet" that adheres to the above principals but violates the "rules" regarding fat content. The consumers live longer than americans with fewer health problems.

Having decided to eat healthy, because I got a new doctor who was much more concerned about blood lipids than my previous one, I launched an attempt to live on whole vegetable products. That turns out to be harder than I suspected. It works reasonably well as long as I eat at home. In the restaurant world, there is little for vegans except salads minus the cheese and bacon and meat most restaurants put on them. For that reason, I eat mostly at Asian restaurants because Asians have a long history of vegetarianism and offer many vegetarian dishes.
At home I eat many veggies and legumes. I find I actually enjoy this way of eating and nowadays I do eat a bit of meat when I go out.
And I have lost quite a bit of weight.
Summer is the best for vegetarians. I love buying at the farmers' market. I will miss them at the end of the season.

hahaha i so agree about letting somebody else cook it, but it is so fun to watch people do that, thanks for the movie review.

I also totally agree with DWiD's food advice. Grow it in healthy soil, treat it with respect, don't put poison in it, eat it as whole as you can, keep it simple, and heck, just doing all that is pretty good exercise.

I, too, agree with you dparsons, but as the family chef, I am always looking for some new way to deliver healthy food. I guess I am sort of a foodie when you get right down to it. That's what growing up among French and Italian people in New Orleans does to you!

I agree with the DWiD diet. Would add to go light on processed foods, things in cans. Sometimes there are extra things in there, like lots of salt or corn-whatever, that you may not want. Julie and Julia sounds like a good one. D.H. and I have been busy previewing submissions for the Santa Fe Film Festival. We are in the "narrative shorts" category. Lots of people do this and this is the 3rd or 4th year we've done it. The festival has a new director this year and fewer films will be shown. I don't know if that means fewer unsolicited films will be shown. It used to be about 30% were submissions but I suspect it will be fewer this year. So far, I'd say the quality of the films is up. Though that doesn't automatically mean they are good, just that you can easily see and hear them! Which is a plus. The short ones are fun because I'm not stuck watching a feature length film that never gets better and wasn't good to begin with. I feel compelled to watch the whole thing even if I don't like it.

What a cool job -- previewing submissions for the Santa Fe Film Festival. I would enjoy that. Do you do it at home in video or do you do it at a theater with a big fancy projector?

Yes, it is good to watch out for processed foods and foods with trans-fats. It is also good to watch out for things with too much sugar -- like juices. I guess those fall into the catagory of processed, though many people may not think of juice as a processed food. And bread and potatoes tend to have a lot of sugar, though they are yummy. Still I try not to eat too much bread or too many potatoes. French fries are completely vegan but that doesn't make them healthy. They are potatoes and they are usually fried in trans-fats which makes them a double no-no. I do eat them though but once every 3 to 6 months or so. I try to make sure I eat them at a place with really top notch ones so I won't be disappointed.

At home on t.v., Paja. It is fun most of the time. It is not a paying job although it used to be a nice trade for tickets. This year I think they want to give us a cheap lunch.Or a tote bag or some such. Occasionally films I like make it in to the festival and many do not.
Anyone can preview if they contact the film festival around July, when the films start coming in. There is a lot of volunteer work, too, that used to be worthwhile. As you can tell, I'm not thrilled with the new administration. However, I do agree with them on some issues. Not a big deal. I'm glad we will have some good entertainment this fall.

Yes, it sounds fascinating to be on the inside of this fair.

As for vegetables...I admire the couch potato. So placid and reliable. So many of them, too.

Me too pajarito. Don't want food to get boring.

Thanks paj. Fun job reviewing films roybird.

It can be. I like it much better than watching re-runs on t.v.

Healthy eating is very dependent on being informed. Very few people are aware of this, for example:
http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html

Sprouted grain bread is a nice alternative to flour bread. But it's still more processed than sprouting the grains at home and baking your loaves at low temps. The result is dense and gooey and delicious.

I just looked up "couch potato" in French. It's "téléphage".

So does that mean my mother cannot be a couch potato, since she doesn't watch TV, but reads, reads, reads?

Maybe she is a livrephage. But I am not sure how that would translate to English. Perhaps a divan potato?

I quit worrying about MSG when I found out it was naturally occurring. I began to quit worrying about it when a health conscious Taiwanese friend of mine said she couldn't see what the problem was -- she grew up on it. MSG occurs naturally in seaweed and fermented stuff that are common in Asian diets. It was only synthesized at the turn of the century. Did I read that here on DG or somewhere else?

As for making my own healthy bread, I have had to cut my bread consumption to almost nothing because I need am pre-diabetic and even whole wheat bread isn't great for people prone to diabetes. So I am not going to be baking any bread because I couldn't consume a loaf before it went bad. DH doesn't eat bread either. Talk about little known facts, apparently, from what I have read, if you get your carbs from pasta it doesn't have such an impact on your blood sugar as bread because the grain in pasta is more coarsely ground than that in bread, therefore moves more slowly into the bloodstream.

There is really a lot to know about nutrition.

I think the seaweed thickener is called agar-agar or something like that. People still use it instead of MSG. I don't know, but I would be more inclined to use the seaweed than the synthetic. Some people get migranes from eating MSG. Just like some people can't digest gluten. I'm just thankful that so far I can eat pretty much anything with no problem! I do find coffee to be kind of hard on my stomach if I have more than one cup. Tea seems much easier.

PJ, MSG was traditionally made from boiled seaweed. Now that it is made by hydrolysis and bacterial fermentation (using GM bacteria often), people are getting sick from it. I think it is partly due to there being more unbound glutamic acid in it, which is an excitotoxin.

http://www.truthinlabeling.org/HowIsItManufactured.html

It's a bit like thinking that highly processed GM corn derivatives (like high fructose corn syrup) are the same as organic corn meal. The actions of HFCS and MSG in the body are more drug-like than food-like, according to Russell Blaylock. He is a neurosurgeon who has looked at the effects on the brain.

That is interesting about pasta. My digestion doesn't have a very high opinion of pasta for some reason. I get painfully bloated sometimes from it.

Possibly your stomach doesn't digest semolina well? That's a different variety of wheat than the usual bread wheats and as I said, it isn't ground as fine. Can you digest other kinds of wheat and grains like bulgur and both hard and soft wheats?

I don't add MSG to anything, but I do use seaweed in my miso soup, and I use lots of fermented products like soy sauce, fish sauce ( even though I am mostly vegan) and miso -- all of which have their own natural MSG.

One thing I don't do is use very much in the way of processed foods which is where the use of synthetic MSG is so abundant. But I have never had a reaction to MSG and like I said, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans live on it and seem to do okay. Here are two excellent articles on umami, MSG and human health.

See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/dining/05glute.html?scp=13&sq=umami&st=nyt
http://www.jpo.go.jp/seido_e/rekishi_e/kikunae_ikeda.htm

I no longer fear MSG.

The petites tomates are sungolds, all right.

Beautitul veggies and beautiful plate as well.

Very pretty!

Beautiful harvest! I bought one of those patty-pan summer squashes today at the local farmer's produce place, I've never had one nor cooked one. What do you recommend?