Footprints: Carbon and otherwise

I'm at war with myself today (and yesterday and the day before and the day before that). If you've read the last few posts you know that I'm super excited about my entrance into the world of sustainablility, home gardening and slightly greener living, through my Meatless Monday experiment. I'm like a debutante at an eco-friendly ball and I'm really starting to enjoy the process. For instance, I moved the veggies that I've got so far out of their little starter pots and into 8" containers (for now) over the weekend. And my wonderful husband built me a compost bin on Saturday morning, which I've spend the last few days adding leaves and kitchen waste to; kinda gross, mostly fun. I've picked out a spot in my front garden for a cherry tree and I think I want a blackberry bush as well. Things are coming along nicely. I've also found a super cute project for making a hanging tomato planter, out of a 2-liter bottle (of which I have two). Anything that grows on a vine can be grown upside down, so I can plant tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, peas and some peppers this way, not to mention strawberries. A few more bottles and I'll have a colorful row of hanging plants all ready to go. So I'm involving myself in learning more about the processes of growing my own fruits and veggies and finding ways to lessen the impact I'm having on my community (in a bad way). Why am I warring with me, then? Well, that comes down to that other kind of footprint. The real kind. That you make with your feet. Or, more specifically, your shoes. I want to join a shoe club. . . . This should make complete sense, seeing as I'm a girl, and shoes are what I live for. . . . Are you seeing the dilemma yet? I want to join a shoe club, which will deliver shoes TO MY DOOR each and every month, in all that not-so-eco-friendly packaging and using up all that fuel from being shipped TO MY DOOR from some place else, not to mention most of the shoes are synthetic or mostly synthetic which, while animal-friendly, is not nature friendly (what with emissions from factories, and the possibility - probability - that the product is made some where outside of the US, by people who are paid 27 cents a week or whatever) ... *Deep breath* How do I reconcile being green in my backyard garden-recycled project state, but still want to punch my credit card info into a few little spaces on a website to have shoes (beautiful, tall, amazing shoes) DELIVERED TO MY DOOR each and every month? Like I said. I'm at war.

Sustainability

I've been so super-duper excited about my garden that I've gone a little overboard on the internet research. But alas, all that knowledge will hopefully turn itself into useful know-how and I'll have myself a lovely little garden patch, cute as can be. In my travels across this world-wide web, I've discovered that on top of the absolute joy it's going to be to have my own small, containered garden to eat from, I can also (ALSO!) make my own fertilizer. Well, duh. People (hippies, pioneers, the ancients) have been doing this for years. It's nothing new. It's gonna put a hurtin' on the money I would have spent on Miracle Gro, but they're a big company; they'll get over it. Anyway, I plan to start moving my little plants from their tiny homes in the starter pots to new digs in larger pots this weekend (they'll be movin' on up to the East Side soon enough - well, as soon as they're large enough to warrant my big containers). That is, if the sun ever decides to rejoin the land of the living. It's been MIA for quite a while now. If the sun does, in fact, grace us with it's lovely shiny face, my little herbs and veggies will be snug as a bug and making my deck look so much less dreary. Project number two on the agenda is to make a composter. I have Have HAVE to do this, ASAP, because I've already started a little tiny bin in my kitchen to hold onto food scraps, etc. So, that's just gonna get gross if I don't do something with it. For those of you that are not aware of how silly easy it is to make a composter for home (albeit, one for a small garden like mine will be) here's the low down: I have a big rubbermaid storage container (it needs to be larger than 18 gallons, which this one is) with a lid. I'm going to drill lots of little holes all over, around and under this container so that my compost can breathe. Yes, it needs to do that. Then I'm going to lay in some dried leaves from my neighbor's backyard (thanks neighbor!), some shredded up newspapers and some of the stray puppy hair tumbleweeds floating around my house thanks to an early shedding this season (I realize this is gross, but I'll explain momentarily) and top it off with my starter concoction of random food bits. I've got the woody ends of asparagus all chopped up tiny, the inards of bell peppers, coffee grounds, the back end of a broccoli stalk minced to smithereens and some potato peels all ready to go. See, there's actually a science to this, and since I didn't do as well in science as say ... everyone else ... I'm not gonna pretend I know what it all means. But I do know you need a good mix of "green" (the "living" stuff - kitchen waste that doesn't include dairy or meat) and "brown" stuff (those leaves, the dog hair and all that newspaper) because the brown gives off nitrogen and the green gives off carbon and when they get together it's a love story like you've never seen before. I mean, it gets HOT, and a little stinky, but then it cools down again and the smell goes away. What I've learned is that once I have all those breathing holes drilled into my container, the brown and the green mixed in, and the lid on tight, all I've gotta do is give that bad boy a good shake a few times a week to keep things moving and airy and pretty soon (4-6 weeks) it'll all break down and create soil. Like, gourmet soil. Like I've just gone ahead and bought kobe beef and lobster for my plants. Sprinkling the garden with all that yummy dirt will be like that time I was treated for dehydration and the docs pumped me full of saline - woke me right up! In addition to the solid soil, I'll be able to make a fun little fertilizer for my lawn too - a shovelful of the good stuff dumped into a 5-gallon bucket, filled with water and steeped overnight. Raining that over my grass will make it green green green! And boy could it use a little color after this winter. Blech. Needless to say, I'm excited. I'll post pictures of my little ones after I've got the system up and running. Can't wait to be munching on my homegrown veggies in a few weeks! If you want to learn more about sustainability, you can find loads of info online. Happy Eating!

Home Grown

What? What is this? Two posts in the same day? I must be crazy. Not having a 6+ month gap between posts is just plain crazy. Ah, well. Let's not get used to it. So, anyway, I'm blogging (again!) about a quick trip to Walmart yesterday. I'm a big fan of budget shopping. I love the thrill of finding a great bargain. And Walmart is a warehouse full of them, so it's rare that I leave that beautiful place empty-handed. Of course, yesterday was no exception. I hit up the Garden Center to grab some gardening gloves and a watering can (did I tell you? I'm tackling a veggie garden this year. Wish me luck!) and wandered around checking out the herbage/veg options. I ended up picking up a great looking rosemary plant, some spinach, bibb lettuce and another fun leafy green I've never heard of. This, I have decided, will be the start of my garden. You see, last year I had herbs and I neglected to bring them inside for the winter, so ... now I don't have anymore. BUT! I loved having an herb garden! I adored being able to step outside of my kitchen and snip a bit of parsley here, and chives there. It was glorious. So I thought I'd try again, but add to it. By growing my own veggies! A small detail: I live in a town house with a lawn like a postage stamp. My back yard is on a hill and the flat part of our property is covered with a patio. Plus I have a huge curious dog. So an actual plot in the ground wasn't gonna fly. I'm going with the container garden approach, which will find it's happy home on my deck, which, conveniently, lies right off of my kitchen. It's warm and sunny and I can be picking and snipping just steps from my stove. The whole container thing was a bit off-putting at the start. But I did a little research and discovered that lots of veggies will grow really well in containers and most varieties will even dwarf themselves to fit their space. Which is lovely. My plan is to have a container of herbs, a container of lettuces and greens, and a container of other stuff - beans, cucumbers, peppers and the like. I'm debating one of those upside down tomato things too - that I can just hang off the side of the deck and pick from at my leisure. So we'll see. But at the moment, there are leafy green things in my possession that I cannot wait to tend to ... and then EAT! I love this time of year!

That whole meatless thing ...

Well, this is where Meatless Monday stands at present: It's become seafood Monday temporarily. My husband works alternating shifts - some weeks he's home for dinner, some weeks he isn't. The past two (and the next two, at least) he's been home for dinner on Monday. So, in an effort to feed his inner carnivore, but maintain my plan to go meatless at least once a week, I've adopted seafood as my Monday go-to. To make up for this, I am eating completely meatless at least two other days a week. Which, so far, is easy and not too fussy. I worried about that. As much as I love to cook, and try new things too, I seem to get into these culinary ruts on occasion. This being one of those occasions, I was a little worried about how difficult it would be to remove animal proteins from my diet and still feel full and satisfied - without having to do anything too weird or uncomfortable here at the beginning. But it's been breezy. Mostly I'm just loading up on fruits and veggies, low-cal snacks and lots of water during the day. Dinner I try to be more creative, but instead of freaking out over weird ingredients I'm pretty much just doing things like sauteeing veggies and adding them to a bowl of brown rice and black beans, mix in a little salsa and the slightest dab of fat-free sour cream or plain greek yogurt. *side note* I'm not approaching this from a vegan point of view. I'm attempting meatlessness, but I'm still very much eating dairy (minimally), eggs, and using chicken broths, etc. Since I'm not ready to embrace a completely vegetarian lifestyle. Possibly ever. But we'll see. Oh, and in an effort to up the ante in my kitchen I've been looking for fun recipes that aren't time consuming but are fresh and tasty despite the lack of meat. The site StumbleUpon is amazing. (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) Pretty much you just tell them your interests (mine: food/cooking) and they organize all these sites for you. Then you "stumble" your way from one to the next. You can mark it as being a favorite, which will be saved to your profile, or give it a thumbs down if you really can't dig it. I'm loving it - and I've already found some fabulous recipes I'm going to try. Okay, so maybe meatless isn't so bad after all ... Happy Eating!

Meatless Friday? And that vinegarette I was telling you about ...

It's clear to me that the whole meatless sensation is actually do-able. Yes, I know that today (Friday) is just 4 days after Monday (my meatless day) and so I still have 3 more days before I have to go meatless again, in keeping with that Meatless Monday thing. But it'll be just me for dinner tonight and both breakfast (Quaker Oatmeal Squares - how good are they??) and lunch (I grazed on low-cal snacks most of the afternoon, I'm sorry to say) were both meatless so I decided that tonight I'll give that vegetarian thing another go.

The reality, of course, is that I'm going to be having pasta.

I've been thinking about it for hours.

My thoughts are residing somewhere along the lines of a tomato cream sauce and penne or possibly angel hair if I just can't wait any longer. (This day feels like it's lasting forever, by the way.)

So, really, it's been easy to go meatless today. But still, score one for me! Two attempts in the SAME week at leaving the carnivore behind. Albeit temporarily.

So I'm pretty psyched about dinnertime and I really want Monday's spinach salad again, so here's the recipe for that warm vinegarette. As usual, I didn't measure anything. Just go by taste.

Olive oil and red wine (or apple cider) vinegar go in a saucepan. Add some dijon mustard. Salt. Pepper. I tossed in a pinch of brown sugar. Whisk it up. Put the pan over high heat. You want it to boil but once it does, turn the heat down fairly low. That vinegar is going to start giving off a stench that you don't want your face near, so stand back. After a minute or two of it sort of simmering, take it off the heat and whisk it well. It should be thick and glossy. Pour over spinach leaves, red onion slices, big chunks of hard boiled egg whites and top it with toasted chopped almonds and sesame seeds.

So good.

Meatless Mondays

I suppose I've been living under a rock because I'm just now hearing about Meatless Mondays. If you're not familiar with it, Meatless Mondays is a campaign to introduce one vegetarian day to your diet a week - every week - for several reasons. One is financial - families can save around $1000 a year just by going meatless one day a week. Another is healthful - you can lose weight and gain energy by replacing meat with fiberful fruits and veggies, plus whole grains, nuts, seeds and good-for-you oils. There's the environmental reason too - supporting your local farmers or co-ops will better your hometown community and lessen the footprint we each leave on the earth.

All of that is to say, I'm willing to try it. I am an omnivore (like most humans). I enjoy a nice meaty steak just as much as that giant salad, but I fear I cannot live on veggies alone. I do think, however, that I can leave meat off the menu one day a week and be the better for it. My husband, though, may not see the benefits behind it. But that's another story.

While researching Meatless Mondays, I came across lots of recipes (on the Meatless Mondays website, of course, as well as others) that I'd really like to try. Nothing too outlandish; baby steps are best I think. This past Monday I went for only seafood proteins (since my husband is still a 7-days-a-week meateater) so it wasn't completely meatless, but I tried. Breakfast was easy. I just ate a granola bar and some fruit before work. I had tuna salad on a slice of wheat bread, loaded with veggies, for lunch and dinner was a great spinach salad (with veggies, sliced egg, toasted almonds and sesame seeds and this fantastic warm vinegarette - which I'll post about later) topped with shrimp that I just tossed in some cornstarch and crisped up in a nonstick pan with about a tablespoon of olive oil. All in all, really filling, super satisfying and honestly delicious. All those veggies kept me full longer and I managed to curb my 9 PM snack cravings :o).

So, while Monday #1 was just shy of completely meatless, I think it went well and I'm willing to give it a go next week too. Perhaps this time I'll leave the meat off altogether and the husband won't even notice.

Try going meatless one day a week and see how creative you can get! Happy Eating!

A Nation of Many Steps

I have obviously not lived up to my promise to be a better blogger, but I will say the gap between this post and the last is not nearly as unforgiveable as the one between the last and that one in JULY of LAST YEAR! Ah, well ... I'm back for round two of my feeding frenzy in Italy.

I titled this post "A Nation of Many Steps" because all those great minds who had a part in engineering the construction of Italy's magnificent cities CLEARLY had never heard of a little thing I like to call a ramp. Nay, these brilliant scholars and builders, politicians and thinkers ... they all thought that STEPS would be the way to get from here to there, point A to point B, one place to another. And not just a few steps, or shallow ones, or even level ones ... no, they had it in mind to build a nation that would have to climb to get anywhere. In Rome, we enjoyed walking down the Spanish Steps (a very famous place to hang out and people watch). In Florence, we climbed about 35 million steps to reach Piazzale Michaelangelo, a park situated above the city, where lots of people watch the sun set over the Arno River. In Venice, you have to climb up and down steps every time you cross one of those cute bridges to the opposite side of the Grand Canal, or any other canal for that matter. The amount of steps in this country is astronomical. And ridiculous.

But that's another topic for another day. I mention it only to point out that for all the eating I did in all of those cities, I still managed to lose a pant size, because we walked and CLIMBED everywhere! Anyway. Let's get back to the food. In Florence (a city that I didn't care for at the time, but has since grown on me - perhaps that whole distance making my heart grow fonder thing?) I had a few good meals. Only one to really write home about. That was at this little restaurant near our hotel, which was in the Santa Croce area. No clue what the name of it was, and it was a little awkward because we ate pretty early that night - we were the only ones there. I ordered asparagus risotto and my brother had "Nonna's Ravioli," which were divine. My risotto (which I have not been able to duplicate, no matter how hard I try) was creamy and cheesy and the prettiest pale green color, thanks to the asparagus. It was super filling as well, and I couldn't finish the whole dish. The ravioli were fresh, bright yellow and so rich!

Another meal was at a restaurant in a square not far from the Accadamia, where Michaelangelo's the David resides. The actual restaurant was part of a large building making up one of the sides of the square, but they had tables and umbrellas set out inside the square for outdoor dining, among the little carts and kiosks full of souveniers. It was like eating in the middle of a market in the park. I had orrichietti (little ear-shaped pasta) with mozzarella, tomato and basil. Sort of a warmed pasta caprese. Drizzled with golden green olive oil ... delicious!

As for the gelato (because we ate it so often it has to be mentioned), there was a fantastic little place about a block off the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio that had a flavor with a name I can't remember. Even if I could remember it I wouldn't be able to pronounce it, so it doesn't really matter anyway. It was chocolatey, and peanut buttery, and it had toasted sesame seeds in it ... which sounds weird but isn't. It was my favorite gelato of the whole trip and at the time the one redeeming quality of the city of Florence itself. (Now, when I watch David Rocco's Dolce Vita on the Cooking Channel I find myself actually missing Firenze ...)

Last on the trip was Venice. I have to start by saying that Venice is a city unlike ANY other. I haven't been a lot of places, but it's not hard to see that Venezia is truly unique. An entire city (and back a few hundred years, it's own small empire) built on the water. A city that is sinking, gradually, into the canals that have made it so famous. This place is postcard pretty, storybook unbelievable and the kind of town you want to go back to again and again because you just can't get enough of it. The food, however, is ... special. I say that because eating anywhere that is touristy, which is pretty much everywhere, is horrible. You have to go out of your way a little bit to find truly good food. Of course, once you do ... it's impossible to get it out of your head.

Our first meal in Venice was pizza! The only pizza we ate on the whole trip, actually. In a fantastic little place that was so much like a pizzaria in the States that it made me homesick. The music piped over the PA was all hip-hop and pop. The pizzas were numerous and varied. I had sweet peppers and tuna fish on mine (don't knock it till you've tried it!) and my brother had artichokes on his. The pizzas were massive. We couldn't finish either one of them. But we gave a valiant effort, don't you worry!

We also had the most amazing lambchops at this restaurant that seemed so unobtrusive until we started looking around at the decor. The name of the place translated in English was "Beelzebub's" and once we became aware of that it was all too easy to spot the dedication. "666" hanging from the ceiling, paintings of demons, newspaper articles about Satanism and devil worship. Needless to say we were a little freaked out and ate with much haste and abandon. We still enjoyed every morsel and we still talk about that meal (and the creepy establishment, lol) so it's definitely stuck with us.

I had the pleasure, on our last day in the city, of eating freshly roasted chestnuts as I strolled through the streets to the Rialto Market. They were toasty warm and it was cool and breezy that evening so the snack was perfect. It felt very special to be able to be included in the teeming mass of people walking along the Grand Canal that night and it was a picturesque ending to the most amazing trip. A truly life-changing trip and two weeks that my stomach will never, ever forget. I'll end my reminiscing with a comment about Italian hot chocolate. It is the very best thing you'll ever put into your mouth and your tastebuds will thank you. We drank it on cool mornings at the bar (in lieu of cappuccinos or espresso) in Venice and Siena, and it was thick and rich and so very chocolatey. You won't find anything quite like it here in the States (it's has that same elusiveness as gelato, of course) but the following recipe is a very close facsimile. It's phenomenal and the perfect thing to bring back some very sweet memories.

Cin! Cin!

Italian Hot Chocolate:

100 g of good dark chocolate (I use a bar of lindt 72% dark)
1 1/2 - 2 cups of whole milk (or cream or half & half)
2 tablespoons cornstarch
sugar to taste (you don't want more than a few tablespoons though)

Start with a rough 3 tablespoons of milk in a heavy saucepan over LOW heat. Add your chocolate, broken into pieces. Using a wooden spoon, stir the chocolate until it is COMPLETELY melted and smooth. Add the rest of the milk, slowly stirring until all the chocolate is well blended. Stir in the sugar, slowly, keeping the heat on LOW. Finally, whisk in the cornstarch making sure there are no lumps. Leave it on LOW heat and stir occasionally, allowing it to thicken. This could take anywhere from 10-30 minutes. When the chocolate coats the back of the wooden spoon, it's ready. Pour into mugs (a little goes a LONG way) and top with fresh whipped cream. Buon Appetito!