Cliché, I know:

but I love it anyway:

"live with intention. walk to the edge. listen hard. laugh. practice wellness. play with abandon. continue to learn. appreciate your friends. choose with no regret. do what you love. live as if this is all there is."
-Mary Anne Radmacher

So true, since this is, indeed, all there is. Every day.

More blogging to come. Gotta get some graphic design done first.

Second root canal

in as many weeks. Dental insurance benefit for 2011 already maxed out. Coming out of pocket. Boo.

Moral of the story: don't use Squirt as combination toothpaste and mouthwash when you're 15.

Food porn: special West Virginia edition!

I'm uploading the below images at a way smaller size than usual to conserve limited bandwidth (satellite internetz here in rural WV.)

If anyone wants full-sized images, like A wants the onion images to blow up to 18x24 and hang on his walls, just let me know and I'll email them to you when back in the ATL.

Staying with a bunch of wonderful people, and did some cooking, and some prep. Here are a bunch of delicious dumpstered onions.

How about another gratuitous shot of ONIONS?

Turnip greens, kale (I think that was kale anyway), and mushrooms.

And these were soup ingredients: dumpstered corn, mushrooms, fresh jalapenos, and bell peppers.

We didn't just cook: we also drove a bunch around rural WV. This trailer sign kind of says it all. yeah, the Big Coal River runs right behind it, but it's not called the "Big Coal River Detachment", is it?

And surprisingly good vegan Mexican food was had in Logan, WV.

Back in the ATL sometime tomorrow. Busy busy!

food, food food! (and squirrels)

I'm going through a bunch of images from the last couple weeks, and the cries of the people will be heeded. I will not fight to the death, but I will also not step down from the exalted dangr-us thoughts throne in November. No, my friends, this will remain a benevolent dictatorship, and I will lavish you, my loyal subjects with food porn to keep you happy!

This is the incredibly greasy, yet still delicious, "Twice Cooked Soy Slices" from Lotus Garden in Eugene, Oregon. At the bottom center, you can see the standing pool of oil that covered the bottom of the plate. With a name like that, though, I suppose you know what you're in for:

*Twice Cooked Soy Slices………………………………...................9.50
( Veggie pork, cabbage, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli, bamboo shoots)

Back at home now, that's a Whole Lotta Tofu!

And who doesn't love some ONIONS!?!? These got caramelized, and were just damned delicious.

Some artichokes hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, about to get flash fried.

And the completed cast, clockwise from top: fried tofu, caramelized ONIONS, organic whole wheat penne pasta, and the flash-fried sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts.

Not super creative, and something that I have long used as a fallback dish when we don't have much in the fridge, and I don't feel like going to the store (before my 7pm meeting) and it worked out juuuuuust fine.

It. Was. Tasty.

Dinner also included squirrel stew. No, silly: we didn't try to create some sort of weird vegan squirrel stew. We ate dinner while watching Winter's Bone, the excellent if gut-wrenching Oscar nominated drama about the brutalities of life in the meth-cookin' Ozarks. Excellent, well done, kinda downbeat. Normally J and I have a pretty strict policy of not watching depressing movies: we have enough difficult stuff in our day to day work lives that we don't really need to add to it. But we're on a netfl!x route of watching as many of the 0scar best picture nominees as we can, so, squirrel stew it was!