Garden Notes

Notes for next year:

• Plant only about 4 tomato plants, not 6.


• Same for the jalapeños.


• MORE green peppers. Or maybe they were just shaded by the tomatoes?


• Plant the tall things in the back. Which is to say, the tomatoes.


• Tomato cages have very little resistance to bending from being overloaded. Stake them.


• The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook has a trillion good ways to use all the results. (By the time I re-read this next year, I should know if they are actually yummy.)


• I will also know if making my own crushed tomatoes worked.


• Add snap peas, basil, cilantro and possibly watermelons.

I Just Won The Nobel Prize In Sandwiches

A BLT, only instead of mayonnaise, guacamole.

I wonder if egg salad could also benefit.

Wooo

• I cracked 50 lb of weight loss today. I'm still on track (±ε) to reach my original goal by Christmas. It also happens to be, as of yesterday, 10 lbs in 100 days, or almost exactly 350 calories/day.
• Pursuant to that, I have made a breakthrough in food reduction technology. One of my favorite meals is...undocumented on this site?! WHAT. Anyway, it involves guacamole. The problem I've had is that I need to make enough to use up an entire avocado, which now that my metamabolism needs fewer calories is a little too much. Avocado turns brown if you look at it funny, so I can't put the excess in the fridge. I also can't throw it away because of the starving children in Africa. However, it turns out to freeze just fine. So now I can make M/Nths of a recipe which not only vastly reduces the hit points but also means I only use M avocados every N days.
• I'm trying to embed a microcontroller into a project that I'll describe more later. All I know is Arduino, so I'm going with that. (I guess I could just use the Atmega chip or however that works, but baby steps, people.) The basic Arduino is a little unwieldy for this, but last night I finished soldering and testing the Really Bare Bones Board. And besides being much smaller and breadboard-compatible, it's also much cheaper because it pushes some of the cost of the unit into a one-time-purchase cable.
• Number One Son, age 9, is trollering me. He just found out about HTML and has made a couple of pages. (With random size changes and font colors, naturally.) He keeps calling the .html file a "program".

How To Make Awesome Pizza

Until recently, my idea of awesome pizza was "lots of cheese, almost burnt". Also, there needed to be a way to hold the cheese without burning yourself, so I needed crust. I wasn't sure what the sauce is for, but tradition demanded its inclusion. Tradition definitely did not demand the inclusion of members of the plant kingdom.

However, I have changed my boring pizza ways. I now make gourmet pizza on a weekly basis. The secret....REVEALED!

Crust Ingredia

• 3 cups flour
• Between 1 cup and 1.25 cups water, depending on the weather
• A dash of olive oil
• Two pinches of basil
• A generous helping of yeast
• 1 bread machine with a "dough" setting
• 1.5 hours

Stir all these ingredia until you have a bunch of dough. Meanwhile, dice a couple sausage patties a 2.25 oz can of black olives (sliced) a tomato (The role of the tomato has been played by an understudy in tonight's performance due to a grocery malfunction.) And some pepperoncini: I think the rest of this recipe speaks for itself. I'm still using boring old Sauce in a Can, though. I need a good pizza sauce recipe.

Salsa & Guacamole

This is a very basic, simple recipe. It's 100x better than the canned stuff I used to eat (which I think is actually picante sauce, so I guess I'm comparing tomatoes to peppers there) but I'm sure there are homemade salsae out there that beat this to a pulp (GEDDIT??). Nevertheless, if you've never made salsa before this is an OK place to start and a good base for experimentation.

Salsa
2 green peppers
2 red onions (I like the taste vs the yellow/white)
some cilantro (you have to buy a whole bunch, but you only use a few chopped tablespoons)
several jalapeños/habañeros, to taste

Chop everything up and put it in sealable plastic bins. On Taco Night, I dice a tomato and add a few scoops of this salsa mix. The above lasts probably 3 months at the rate I use it. However, the quality seriously degrades so if you have more free time (for some reason it takes me like 45 minutes to put this together) I'd recommend making smaller batches more often.

The guacamole recipe is even dead simpler (deader simple?). The only reason I even mention it is that I never knew the awesomeness that is guacamole until recently. Here's the recipe:

Guacamole
An avocado
1/3 of a packet of guacamole powder

The only tricky part is choosing ripe, but not too ripe, avocados. A perfect avocado is just a little firmer than a perfect peach. If you squeeze it and it gives more than 1/16" clean off your hand and find another avocado. However, it must give at least somewhat or it is underripe. I've learned the hard way that an underripe avocado is a nightmare to get out of its skin. If that's all the store has go ahead and buy them, but store them on the counter for a couple days before enfridgerizing.

(Another way to identify avocados is by color: Black is too far gone, bright green is not far gone enough. You want a very dark green.)