Watering the garden, nutso?

Came home early to water the spinach and lettuce seeds.  It's supposed to get down to23 tonight--are you even supposed to water seeds when there's a heavy frost coming?  The cold water didn't do my hands any good, that's for sure.

Recipe #7 from The China Study Cookbook was



Breakfast Home-Fry Hash.



Minus the garnishes.  I don't top ordinary hash with cherry tomatoes and green onions and I'm not doing it with this one, either.

And the verdict?



It wasn't half bad.  Which is another way of saying that it wasn't all good.  It was just cubed fried potatoes with bell pepper and onion--same as what my mom made sometimes except she fried everything in oil.  This was "fried" in vegetable broth and it didn't develop the right flavor or color.  I'd make it again, especially for a group breakfast at work, but I'd turn up the heat and brown everything nice and dark.  .

I can't even begin

When I start to read a book, I usually weigh the volume in my hands, look at the back cover blurb, and flip through pages to the beginning. I'm reading them yet, just assessing the font size and word count. It kind of gives me a clue about what to expect.

With an audiobook, I do none of that. I just copy it to the Ipod, navigate to Chapter 1 and press Start.


And thus began London Calling, by Edward Bloor...
and I still don't know how I could have been forewarned.   It was so unexpected and so unexpectedly good, I'm having trouble deciding between a 4-star rating and a 5.  But my mouse pointer is hovering over the 5.

A lot of times a book with an obvious religious message is just plain propaganda, but I can't say it of this one.  There's no more propaganda here than in the TV series Supernatural.  It's as if the author "what if'ed"  angels and spirituality and life beyond death, and came up with something beautiful.  I have no doubt the author is a strong Catholic, but that didn't keep me from loving this book.

Bear in mind, it's a teen book.  Minor details such as the inevitable arrest and subsequent prosecution when the bad guy gets his due aren't included.  I didn't care--I just cheer for it and went on to the good stuff--the unsolved murder; the unanswered question...I can't tell more.  Sorry.

Recipe #6 from The China Study Cookbook

Spinache Chickpea Burgers.  


The only resemblance to a burger is the shape--round and flat.  They'd fit a normal hamburger bun nicely, but of course I had to buy the fancy whole-grain buns that are 20% bigger than normal.   I tried to make the patties a little bigger, to fit the bun, but they tried to fall apart so I gave up.


All that said, they're good.  Especially when topped with a slathering of caramelized onion and mushroom and drenched in tomato ketchup.  (Veggie mayo or avocado slices would have been healthier, I admit, but the whole reason for making veggie "burgers" was to give me an excuse to eat ketchup.)

This recipe also took care of the  Ingredient of the week:

Flaxseeds.  Or rather, flaxseed meal.  Mixed with water and set aside for twenty minutes, it gets gooier than eggs.  I didn't think to taste it, but as a binding agent it's supreme.

Flaxseeds are high in omega-3 fatty acids, in fact, their omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 0.26:1.  If that looks funny, it is--it's backwards from the typical ratio--tofu 7:1; canola oil 2:1; olive oil 11:1.  It's nowhere near as good as Pacific salmon  (0.2:1), but then it's nowhere near as expensive.

The cultivation of flax for fiber has an ancient history, but the mass-production of flaxseed meal or flaxseed oil seems to be a modern invention.  Wikipedia has an uncited report of its consumption--roasted, with rice-- in northern India.  I find it to be an amusing aberration of my brain that it is prejudiced in favor of foods that have been in cultivation for a long time.  Why should "people have been eating this for centuries" have any weight in my food choices?   People have been stupid for centuries, too.  But I'm still a sucker for the "ancient wisdom fallacy."

Everything i like in a memoir

                 Born Round
               by Frank Bruni. 


No, it wasn't on the list--it was an impulse read.  I got so frustrated during last week's "vacation," that the second day I had to work I got on the library catalog and found a couple of books to read, just as a reward for being out on the road yet again.

Born Round was a New York Times Notable Book and it deserved to be.  Mr. Bruni is the best kind of memoir writer--funny, kind to himself, and forgiving of others.  Growing up in a big family of Italian cooks and Italian eaters; cursed with some mixture of genes and personality that made food his drug of choice, you'd think Mr. Bruni was doomed to become the 300-pound, 50-year-old heart attack victim in the Cadillac-sized coffin.  And he probably thought so, too.

I devoured this book.  All I could wish for was more--toward the end, especially.  He artfully describes his strategies for sneaking into a restaurant multiple times and sampling a multitude of courses, trying to remain unrecognized as "The Critic"; and he humorously relates the ways his dining companions sabotage his strategy.  I just wanted to know a little more about the restaurants he visited--the good and the bad and in the case of Wild Salmon, the ugly.

A bit of the Wild Salmon review was quoted and it made me want more.

(Never mind--I just found a bunch of them online.)

The Onions

I was supposed to fix Spinache Chickpea burgers today but I ran out of steam after working most of the day and then trying to squeeze in some garden tilling before supper.  So instead I made

           Baked and Breaded Avocado Bites


                             from the PETA website.


The recipe said to serve them on top of a salad or with a favorite dipping sauce and I ignored that.  Duh, me--they were bland.  Wholesome, but bland.  Some lemon juice or a spicy dipping sauce would have made them good.  Or they would have made excellent croutons for a hearty salad...in fact, if there any left later and if I get up the energy to assemble myself a salad, I'll use them.

Planting date: 2/20/2014 and already behind schedule

Onions planted today!  Thousands and thousands.  There were supposed to be 80 slips--two packs of 40 each--but after I measured out the space required for four rows of 80 plans 6 inches apart, and then started planting, my space had to be extended by at least 18 inches.  I could do the math on that but I'm too tired.

I also planted peas and part of the lettuce, radishes, and spinach.  It's against folk wisdom to plant all of a garden crop on the same day.  Technically I should wait until next week to plant the rest, but I'll probably go ahead with the spinach.

I'll get a picture tomorrow, but there's not much to see except faintly greenish stems poking jaggedly out of clumps of clay.

This is going to be a hard one.

Polio: An American Story

by David M. Oshinsky



My verdict: it's strong in the beginning, okay at the end, weak in the middle.  In the beginning there was the disease and the crusade--Franklin Roosevelt, Hollywood studios, the March of Dimes, the Mothers' March--all joined to raise the money to develop a vaccine and test it.   The tests of the killed-virus vaccine, Salk's, were called the "biggest public health experiment ever."  The sheer amount of paperwork involved in tracking the results seem darn near impossible to me now.  Remember:  1955 = no integrated circuits.

In the middle, the book seemed to disintegrate into a morass of conflicting personalities as Salk's killed-virus vaccine fought against Sabin's live-virus one.  And we all know the ending...but did we know that after 1980, when the percentage of polio cases has dropped to about a dozen a year, almost all cases would be attributed to the live vaccine?  Do we know of the many cases where live monkey viruses (not polio!) could be found in the supposedly inactive vaccination doses?  Will we someday discover that the polio vaccine brought AIDS to the world?

Maybe not, but it's still scary.  I also learned about Post-Polio syndrome, a partial recurrence of the symptoms in the later years of life, even among those who had fully recovered.

My only disappointment in the book, other than the confusion of the middle part, was its concentration more on social history than medical history.  Others might disagree with me on this, but I didn't get enough science.  For example, did we ever find out why it strikes mostly children?  Did we ever get a grip on the apparent link between improved sanitation and increased polio?  The author kept his story firmly in its time, never giving away the future.  But...I would have enjoyed a second epilogue called "What we know now."