Give the people what they want!

And I know what you want, right? FOOD PORN!

These are all from prep and cooking the night before I flew to San Francisco. As I explained in an earlier post, I have an irrational concern that J won't eat well when I'm out of town, so I try to leave a fridge full of leftovers to ensure she doesn't need to scavenge in the dumpsters of midtown Atlanta. (Though that would probably be pretty fruitful.)

Prepping some garlic with the crazy sharp ceramic paring knife my mom bought me. I mentioned the chef's knife from the same series in another post; I was recently washing that knife with a dish sponge in the sink and it was sharp enough to slice right through about half of the sponge. Note to self: exercise caution when operating heavy equipment, and washing knives.

Who doesn't love some ONIONS?

Here's a couple secrets, don't tell anyone, since only five of us witnessed each: A ate an onion at dinner the other night in San Francisco! And L ate mushrooms, and LIKED THEM! ¡qué horror!

More onions!

Cleaning fresh jalapeños with the shortcut K taught me.

All the clean little jalapeños. Setting 'em up, and knocking em down:

Intentionally random and fast, since I was just throwing them all in the:

food processor, to make a marinade/sauce from page 218 of 500 Vegan Recipes. Basically, it's all of the above with some soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, and cumin.

The tempeh and tofu, waiting for a bath.

Sleeping with the peppers.


Some frying tofu.

A cut up portobello mushroom cap, soon to look much more appetizing:


My own enchanted broccoli forest.

Enchanted broccoli forest after a clearcut.

Enchanted broccoli forest and crowns, quick frying.

Deep red,

with a splash of char. Yum!

Some pretty pedestrian zucchini, no? Hold tight:

With some olive oil and time in the pan, and:

then some of the marinade added.

I make sure to leave base starches for J so she can easily throw them in tupperware and take them to work for lunch. Here is some organic whole wheat penne boiling.

Continuing a theme, here is polenta before, and:

polenta after.

Here is the tempeh after marinating and baking.

This is what just one shelf of the fridge looked like, with convenient labels. One reader of this blog can earn some bonus points by identifying the bottle in the upper right (EDIT! LEFT!) hand corner. Bueller? Bueller?

My new favorite baseball player, and San Francisco

With credit to BikeHacks, I'm doing a straight rip-off re-blog sort of post. To quote almost verbatim, It's official, Dave Racaniello is ALSO my favorite Major League Baseball Player. [My only addition is in bold.]

Carefully edited details and images of my recent, extremely raucous trip to San Francisco may follow soon.

Taxes and turbotax

Got the taxes done a little after midnight last night, in a mostly painless process. I didn't even start until after dinner, and I was just going to get the paperwork all in order, and do them today. I normally do our taxes in early February, but a certain employer who shall remain unnamed was being a total pain in the ass about sending me my W-2, to the point where, after two letters and a phone call, I finally had to involve the IRS. Go figure: it showed up a week later. (They had sent it to my prior address in Anchorage, despite my having sent a letter last October updating my address, and then claimed to already have re-sent it to my Atlanta address, which was pretty much a lie.)

The main time-consuming thing I needed to do was assign values to the many, many piles and bike loads and car loads of stuff we donated to the Starvation Army, Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters when we were moving from Alaska.

Moving is good like that: sorta forces you to go through your stuff, identify what is crap and needs to be tossed, what can be freecycled, sold, ebayed, and what someone at a thrift store will pounce on, even when you haven't used it in months or years. We literally had about ten major dropoffs where it was worth it to itemize and get a receipt from the thrift store, and probably another couple dozen which were a few items at a time, and I would just drop them off on my ride to work and not bother with receipts (or deducting them later. Note to self in the future: bother with the receipts.)

So anyway, Turbotax has a built-in donation value tool called Itsdeductible, which can make the whole process much easier than guessing, or trying to use the limited guides various Goodwills and Salvation Army stores make available on the internetz. Problem is, you can't use it until you've proceeded to that point in your taxes, so I actually had to start our return, and get through the income, to the deductions part. And by the time I'd spent literally about 2.5 hours inputting all of the donations, item by item, and valuing them, there wasn't much left to do on the taxes, so I figured I might as well finish them.

The other problem is that some of the values Itsdeductible gives are absurd: household items like bowls and cups and plates, which most thrift stores sell for $0.99 unless they are a matching set, valued at $6? Hell, no. Now, I'm fine with taking a reasonable deduction, but I couldn't in good faith submit a return taking $4 for a bowl that I myself paid $1.50 for at a thrift store. So I had to spend a lot of time manually entering things like individual cups for $0.25, and individual bowls for $0.50. And books! Nonsense! They value donated hardcovers at something like $4, and paperbacks at $3! Preposterous! (I valued them at $0.50 hardcover, and $0.25 paperback.)

Overall, I was once again perfectly happy with Turbotax, and got a pretty good price on it. Note: anyone who doesn't search the web for Turbotax discounts is a sucker! Anyone can get 35% off, making the Deluxe version $32 and change, through Bank of America, customer or not. Just search it. There will be a little thing in the top of each screen that says "Presented by [BofA logo]" but it's not intrusive, and I barely noticed it. It's also nice that you can get all the way through your taxes before paying for Turbotax, so if you start them and then realize you actually need a more robust version (e.g., you have a small business and really needed to use the Premier version) you can do that.

What I did HATE about Turbotax, and I really think it was worse this year, was the number of sillyass add-ons they try to sell in the end of the process. I mean, you just told me my "audit risk" was about as low as can be, and now you want me to buy audit insurance for $40? I can have the convenience of paying for Turbotax through my refund, rather than with a pesky credit card, for an added fee of $30? Are y'all out of your damn minds?

I definitely don't miss my pennywise/pound foolish days when I would sit down and do all of our taxes on paper, triple checking all of the calculations, doing endless unnecessary worksheets only to confirm we don't get a particular credit, and mail them in.

Now to go ride my bike! Woo!

Identity revealed!

I'm going through my digital images for a friend, and I've decided to come out from my pseudo-anonymous hiding on this blog. I hereby offer this clear, totally revealing picture of me:

NEW BIKE DAY! WOO WOO WOO!

I picked up my new bike yesterday, and am totally in love with it. I actually sat on the floor last night and admired it. Yes, I'm a big ol' bike geek. Here's my new Surly Long Haul Trucker:

Not a fantastic picture, but many, many more will follow. I took some pictures for insurance purposes, before I start to put all sorts of crap on it. Now today I need to put all sorts of crap on it. It's a 62cm frame, with 700c tires, a beautiful Tubus Cargo rear rack, and just all around nice.

And in honor of New Bike Day, you should go check out this Dinosaur Comic. It's just a damn shame that "Sexual Intercourse: The Bike" is already taken.

And now, I need to fund the military industrial complex. Oops, I meant to say, do our taxes.

BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE!

My bike is in, and the bike shop is building it up now. I'm about to jump on the MARTA to to go pick it up. WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO!

Tonight's weather forecast is for winds of 20-25mph. Should be a lovely ride home!

WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO!

Banana panorama!

Okay, I'm arguably conflating bananas and panoramas, rather than posting a panoama of bananas. But hey, they rhyme, and I have images of both. Good times!

This is what I like my bananas to look like. Ripe and brown and ready. Yum!

And this is, as panoramas from my balcony go, a perfectly good one:

Horizontal (not rotating the camera)

Vertical (camera rotated 90 degrees.)

Generating panoramas definitely works better when I used a tripod, and using the vertical shooting format (at least when I want to highlight the sky.) We'll see if I remember that in the future.

Onions, Part 73

In my continuing demonstration of my love of onions, here is a play by play:

Organic yellow onions, waiting for the chop.

The chop.

The dice (for the guacamole.)

The thick slice: waiting for another dish.

The gratuitous bowl full o' onions shot.

Slicing up a fresh jalapeno, with the time-saving method K taught me, for the peanut sauce onion jalapeno pasta.

More onions!

Fresh jalapenos. Yum!

Dinner: whole wheat pasta with J's spicy Thai peanut sauce, fried onions, and fried fresh jalapenos. It was delicious!

GARDENING PORN!

Okay, okay: I have heard the cries of the assembled masses, readying to storm the Food Porn Palace gates. Happily, it's springtime in ATL, and time to mix it up a little bit with the old standby that has bored so many of you in the past: GARDENING PORN!

Last year's gardening continued producing tomatoes all the way through February, though the herb gardening didn't last so long. Check out this post for a reminder of how the tomato plant was doing in January.) But it was all looking pretty haggard after we finally pulled out the bulk of the old plants:

Note the volunteer weed in the right-hand side of the brown herb garden pot. Kind of impressive, how effective weeds can be, since this pot has lived indoors since at least last October.

So I went to my local nursery, Pike, yesterday and, while they aren't amazing, and are a small chain, they certainly beat the hell out of buying plants and seeds at the gardening industrial complex of Home Despot or Lowe's. I bought a milk crate's worth of organic plants.

I got four kinds of TOMATOES!

Red Strawberry (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Cherokee Purple (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Celebrity: determinate, 70 days, 24-36"
Juliet: indeterminate, 60 days, 48-72"


Two tomato varieties got planted on opposite sides of five gallon buckets, and I'll thin or transplant as necessary as one or the other does better.

I was tempted to go with some good looking Early Girl and Better Boy plantings, since I've had good luck with them in the past, but (A) that was in Utah with constant sunlight and crazy amounts of water, and (B) consistency is the hobgoblin of small-minded gardening porn. And while I've had so-so luck with heirloom varieties in the past, I like a little bit of a challenge in my gardening. Which must be why I do it in five gallons buckets and pots in a high-rise condo.

Oh, but for the good ol' days when my tomato gardening looked like this:
This was June 15, 2006, in the back yard in Salt Lake City. With raised beds, tons of sunlight, hundreds of dollars of water going through buried soaker irrigation, and endless hours of delight spent in the back yard maintaining plants.

At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, as any of you who are also gardeners know, a lot of good gardening is love. And I loved those plants. I derived so much pleasure out of going out there in the morning before work, picking a tomato from the vine, and eating it sliced on toast within minutes. I loved being able to give away huge bags of tomatoes and squash to my co-workers, and later, when they'd had enough, on freecycle. I love the ways my hands smell after I've been working with tomatoes. I love picking up $7/pound organic tomatoes at Whole Paycheck, smelling them, and smugly knowing mine smell better.

Back to the current reality, though...

Here are the buckets after planting them. I'll move them out to the balcony soon, as we're supposed to start getting daytime highs near 80 on April Fool's Day, but we're still getting overnight lows in the low 40s and high 30s.

Juliet in front, Celebrity in the rear.

Herb plantings closeup. Clockwise from left: rosemary, garlic chives, spearmint.

Cherokee Purple up front, Red Strawberry in the rear.

More herbs to come as the seasons continues, and Pike gets more choices in. I might do another entire herb planting, since J and I really love to have fresh basil and sage available for cooking.

I was smart enough to cage the tomatoes immediately. Last year when we moved to ATL, I actually didn't necessarily expect them to do so well as to require caging, and J and I had a hell of a time putting cages on the boisterous plants on mid-season.

I did make a good decision, to only plant stuff I really want to eat/cook with. Too often in the past I have been enticed by random shit at the nursery that looked fun or smelled good, like lemon balm, but then which I have almost no use for when it does grow. So this year, it's all stuff we want to cook with. And I did continue my practice of only planting stuff I can't buy for far less, organic, at Whole Paycheck (or even the local Publix.) Except as experiments in Alaska, I can't understand taking up gardening space that I can buy for less at the supermarket.

Who's excited for a long season of blog gardening porn? ME!

A brief respite

From all the arduous food porn I've been engaging in. While I was typing that last post, this seriously hilarious spoof of a favorite Schoolhouse Rock song was on On the Media, one of my favorite public radio shows.

How a Bill Becomes a Law... These Days. Even if you didn't love Schoolhouse Rock, while this might indicate there is something really far more wrong with you than a food porn obsession, you should go listen to this immediately. Like: now.

You've been a bad, bad boy/girl! (Or, more food porn)

You just can't get enough of the food porn, can you? Has it occurred to you this might be unhealthy? Or unnatural? You know, we could talk about this.

But it would be much more fun to just feed the addiction, wouldn't it? We can always quit tomorrow, right? Whatever: that's between you and your therapist. Personally, I can quit any time I want. It just takes the edge off, okay?

I just like the way it makes me feel. Especially after a long day.

NO, I DO NOT NEED TO BE PROFILED ON INTERVENTION.

BACK OFF.

Uhhhh, please pay no attention to all that. I've shoved my inner demons back under the stairs, and put a more stout lock on. Anyway, the other night a friend and I were going to go out to dinner. But I was coming down with a slight cold, and so didn't much feel like riding to Little Five Points, where we'd planned to go to Java Vino, a coffeehouse/cafe/wine bar I love. So we played the "what do I have in the fridge" game, and came up with a favorite fallback dinner of J and mine, fried veggies with tofu over pasta, and my friend N decided to test-run the shredded fried brussels sprout recipe he was planning on making the next night for a dinner party.

Prepping one of each: a yellow pepper, a carrot, a zucchini, a red onion, and a bunch of green onions.

Knocking out some flash fried tofu.

N's brussels sprouts. He started out trying to grate them, but on my recommendation switched to thin slicing instead.

ONIONS! WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO! (You KNOW who you are. And you KNOW you are a closeted onion lover. Look, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I'll help. I have decades of experience.)

Much less attractive than the onions, here is some organic whole wheat penne boiling.

The fried zucchini getting it on with the tofu and peppers.

Gently frying the green onions and carrots.

Tragically, no images of the plated product were taken: we were too damn hungry, and dove in, washing it down with Rhum Barbancourt, which J brought back from Haiti. Yeah: she loves me.