It's What?

I found this very funny. One of my Facebook friends posted it.

But it got me thinking. How many people know this?

The botanical definition of a "fruit" is a structure which grows from a flowering plant. The flower needs to be pollinated in order to produce the item. Therefore, in a strict botanical definition, a tomato is a fruit, along with eggplants and peppers.

But, when you get to the culinary definition, a tomato is a vegetable. It's because we have grouped the sweet products of flowering as fruits and the savory tasting products, which include roots and stems and leaves, as vegetables. Because tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are savory, they were lumped into the vegetable category, never mind their botanical origins.

It's an American food, eaten by the Aztecs and imported to Europe. We all know that tomatoes used to be considered poisonous. Aristocrats who ate tomatoes in the 16th century would die mysteriously. They didn't know the high acidity of a tomato reacted with their pewter plates to produce lead poisoning. They didn't know that's what was causing the sickness and death. It HAD to be this tomato thing. Because of this, it was mainly grown as an ornamental plants until some enterprising chef in late 18th century Italy decided to try cooking with it. From there, knowledge of it spread across Europe and new varieties of the plant were brought to the US.

What I find really funny is this little nugget about the history of tomatoes in America. (The rest of the article can be found here.)

The fruit vs. vegetable debate can sometimes reach such a fever pitch that the law must step in.  In the 1893 United States Supreme Court case Nix. v. Hedden, the court ruled unanimously that an imported tomato should be taxed as a vegetable, rather than as a (less taxed) fruit. The court acknowledged that a tomato is a botanical fruit, but went with what they called the "ordinary" definitions of fruit and vegetable — the ones used in the kitchen.  

This case was not about someone trying to decide if the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable in the botanic sense. It was a tariff case that happened to involve tomatoes. Taxing them as fruit meant less money for the coffers.

I wonder what would happen if some chef decided to adhere to the botanical definition of fruits and add a tomato or a pepper to a fruit salad. The orange peppers are incredibly sweet and I eat those raw. Other than being non-standard to a fruit salad, I could see adding them for crunch, color and taste. But I think I'd draw the line at a tomato in with my melon and strawberries and blueberries.

Beverage:  Dunkin Donuts tea

Deb

Word Association

I went to the grocery a couple weeks ago and got fresh fruit and vegetables. Among the things purchased, were these two items.

When I got home and was emptying the bags, I just started laughing. Here's why.

Really, I didn't intend this. It just happened. When grocery shopping can get depressing because what you want isn't on sale, I'll take the silliness.

Beverage:  Huckleberry tea

Deb

I Resolve...Bah Humbug

Another year. Another New Year's Day to reflect on the old year passed and what I didn't get accomplished. Another New Year's Day to reflect on what I would like to accomplish in the upcoming year.

We all do this. It's kind of a default setting for New Year's. "I resolve to lose weight." "I resolve to get my financial house in order." "I resolve to give more to charity." [insert topical resolution here] You do it. I do it. And long about now, we discover whether our resolutions actually stick. Generally, they don't and you give yourself 40 mental lashes for failing. (Strike overly dramatic pose of defeat.)

When you've got a disease in which chronic fatigue is a major part, resolving to "be more active" or "lose weight" or even "get one project done at night after work" is wholly tied to whether you even have the energy to eat when you get home. Making resolutions is almost surely guaranteed to lead to self-bashing because you can't do what you've resolved to do. Even breaking a resolution, such as "exercise every day", down to simply adding 20 more steps and going in the front door instead of the back, can be fatal to keep if I am exhausted because of an RA flare. I knew I was setting myself up for failure. I know me. Calling them "resolutions" doesn't make these ideas better than any other idea I've ever cooked up. Give them a title and I'll feel that much worse when I can't keep them.

So, I'm trying something different this year. I looked over the span of last year and picked something I really want to improve on, eating better. I spent the last week of 2014 thinking about my diet. How can I improve it? Well, I could be cooking dinner when I get home. What is the reality of that? I'm often too tired to cook. That leads to skipping dinner altogether or eating something just because it's fast. I spent a week in December eating a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. That was it because I was too tired to cook. I spend way too much money on eating lunch out because I'm too tired to cook to make left overs of things that I enjoy eating. It's faster to just run over to Subway. What can I, realistically, do to eat better?

Step 1 was to go over the budget. Gad I hate this. I hate going backwards through the previous year and seeing, in black and yellow (since I was doing the tallying on a legal pad), what I already knew but had refused to acknowledge. Too much of my meager funds went into eating lunch out because I was too tired to cook. I decided that had to change. There are a lot of things I can't change in my budget, but that's one thing that could.

Step 2 was to decide what to add or take away from my diet. I decided to simplify lunch and add a fruit to every day's meals.

Step 3 was to divide the month in half. My company pays monthly. I realize some of you will go, "How can you live like that?" After 3-4 months, you get used to it. I, generally, buy all my groceries at the beginning of the month. The problem is that fresh fruits and vegetables don't keep for a month. You're lucky if you can keep them 2 weeks. We always joked that we don't have vegetable and fruit bins in the fridge. We have compost bins. I can, twice a month, go to the store for fresh produce and frozen dinners. I have wrapped meats and frozen veggies in the freezer. If I get ambitious and have the energy, I can make meals from scratch. But, lunches would be frozen dinners. The cost is the same, less, actually, than going out. Plus, I'm shouldn't be tossing as much moldy produce into the compost bins which equates to dollars thrown away.

Step 4. Stop calling them "resolutions" and call them "goals".

Step 5 Tic off, on the kitchen calendar, the days I don't eat lunch out and the days I add a fruit to what I eat.

How am I doing? So far, so good. Only one lunch out, so far, this month and that was because I was going to be out in the field at lunch without the opportunity to eat home prepared. Breakfast is a thornier issue as I can spring out of bed one day, full of vim and vigor and then next day sleep completely through the alarm and wake up with an hour to dress, feed the cats, eat breakfast and get to the office. I'm giving myself permission to not worry about breakfast so long as I eat it. No skipping. I am making a Dunkin' run only once per week and Panera every other week, circling the dates I visit each on the calendar so I am not tempted to go more than I can.

I'm told it takes a month of work to make something a habit or to change a behavior. This is all I'm doing right now, trying to change eating habits. I've tried some new to me frozen dinners, things I probably wouldn't have tried had I not set the goal of reducing money outlays for lunch. Some are clear winners. Some are, "Well, not eating that ever again." Today, I have the last banana and the last yogurt in addition to a shrimp alfredo that looked good on the box. Monday will be a new fruit, maybe apples, and there are still a week's worth of frozen dinners behind the bread.

I'll revisit this on February 1st and see how I've done.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

A New Year's Lunch

One of my anti-resolutions, listed below, is not to obsess about my weight, but neither will I neglect my health. Part of not neglecting my health is to change my diet. I'm so bad about grazing, the act of wandering through the kitchen and eating whatever I happen to find. I need to have food on hand that is reasonably easy to prepare and is good for me. When I'm tired from work or my RA is acting up, the last thing I want to do is cook and it shows in the lack of a decent diet. To help my RA meds do a good job of keeping me healthy, I have to eat better. Yeah, there needs to be exercise in there too, but let's start with one thing at a time.

I like to try new recipes. I wouldn't be a subscriber to Cooking Light if I didn't see the possibilities in some of the recipes they publish. I have manilla envelopes filled with recipes. Years ago, my mother sent me a box of recipes she'd been given and had collected from various aunts and cousins and herself over decades. And, while poking around in my Flickr account, looking for a photo for something else, I was reminded of all the times I tried something and posted photos of the results, both good and bad.

It's time for an anti-resolution. I'm not going to try to cook something new every day, but I'm not going to neglect these decades of collected recipes. I had high hopes at Christmas and purchased a number of items to have a unique food experience over that day. But I didn't feel well and Christmas is a blur of naps and cereal and cinnamon toast.

Having more energy on New Year's Day, I decided to look over the recipes I'd pulled to try at Christmas and make something. I forgot to buy chicken bouillon cubes so that recipe will have to wait, but here are two I made for my New Year's Day lunch.

NPR has, I think all year last year, trumpeted the "meatless" Monday. The raising of meat sources; poultry, beef and pork; puts an environmental strain on the planet. The idea is that going meatless, eating lower on the food chain, as it were, is less stressful and more sustainable. There is some debate about that claim, particularly as it involves pesticides and GMO grains.

For me, I'm not sure I can remember to go "meatless" once a week. It's a noble goal, but I'm not going to commit grandly and with much fanfare to a "meatless" Monday, let alone once a week. I'm going to try to fit in meatless and see how it goes. New Year's Day accidentally turned out meatless, with cereal for breakfast and this meal, which really came at 2:30. The evening's World of Warcraft playing was accompanied by popcorn.

I started with an acorn squash. I have no idea where I got the recipes from. They were in my "Salads" manilla envelope.

I love these. My dad used to grow them in the family garden. He would slice it in half, scoop out the seeds and fill the cavity with butter and honey, then bake the squash for 45 minutes. Oh, was it good. I've stumbled on a recipe I think I prefer. 

You still need to slice the squash in half and scoop out the seeds, but you put it face down in a baking dish and fill the dish with a half inch of hot water. 

This is baked, uncovered for half an hour at 350. I set the seeds and pulp aside. I'm going to let these dry out and put them on a paper plate on the deck for the squirrels. 

Once the squash was in the oven, I made another salad. This one is ridiculously easy. Take a half cup of vanilla yogurt and mix 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon into it. I just used a container of Yoplait regular vanilla yogurt. It's the version in the red trimmed container. It's 6 ounces, which is more than half a cup but it worked, I think. 

Into this mixture drop 2 cups of red and green grapes, halved. Stir thoroughly to get the yogurt to cover all the grapes, cover the bowl and put in the fridge while you finish up the squash. 

When the squash has cooked for a half hour, remove from the oven and pour out the water. There won't be a lot left. Flip the squash over and fill the cavity with a mix of three tablespoons melted butter mixed with one tablespoon brown sugar and 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon. Divide this evenly through both halves of the squash. 

Put these back in the oven and bake for another 15 minutes. The squash is already soft so you're infusing the pulp with the butter, brown sugar, cinnamon mix. The recipe said to baste the pulp often, but I didn't think it needed it. 

The other thing the recipe had me do was cook a small package of frozen peas during the time the squash was cooking. When the squash came out of the oven, 1/3 cup of cooked peas are added to the center well and the squash is served. What I discovered is that the squash halves are very soft at this point. I decided to scoop the pulp from the half and serve it next to the peas. 

The pulp comes out of the shell very nicely. 

Here was my mid-afternoon lunch. 

I'll eat peas with most anything. The salad had chilled nicely and the yogurt, cinnamon mixture complemented the cinnamon in the squash. The peas were Green Giant steam in the bag brand. As a rule, I don't really care for them. I prefer the Green Giant buttered peas in the bag, but I think this version went well with the butter in the squash. I actually noshed a bit on the salad later in the evening. 

These two recipes are keepers. The squash recipe was designed for a crowd so I had to do math (yikes) to figure out the amounts for one squash. The best part of all of this is that I have leftovers for lunch or dinner. 

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea

Deb

Only What You Can Carry

I decided to buy plants this weekend and get them in pots. The last frost free date is, technically, tomorrow, but there's slim chance we're going to have frost again until October. Time to hit the nursery.

Normally, when I want to buy quality plants, I head west to Planter's Palette. An area staple for upwards of 20 years, they have acres of plants which give you more ideas than sense sometimes; not that I'm speaking from experience, mind you. That was the plan. I got myself up early, showered, had breakfast and went outside to start pulling pots out of the shed.

The overwintered geraniums were slated to be repotted. My spindly little peppers and sunflower plants could come outside now. I think I might even put plants on the front steps, something I haven't done in years. This looks about right. Fill these and I'll be good.

With it slated to be a glorious weekend, I knew there would be dozens, scores, maybe even hundreds of people browsing the too narrow aisles and taking the too few carts. Carole's friend, Phillip, worked at PP for years, starting at age 16 and continuing through college. I've spent a lot of money there.

As I headed west, I drove right by Wheaton Nursery and Garden Center. They have, at best, a fifth of the area PP has. I've driven by them for all of the 31 years I've lived in Wheaton, but never stopped. I thought of the battle to find a parking place at PP, the quest to find a cart for the few things I wanted to buy and the wait time for checking out and I decided it was time to stop at Wheaton Nursery.

I was their first customer of the day and I got the most personal service I think I've had in years. I pulled out my list and the gal watering flowers pointed to places where I'd find things. She got me a red wagon and a couple of cardboard containers for the plants I was buying. Yes, I went with a list. I could go nuts at a nursery and I really didn't want to come home with three times more plants than I had room for or ambition to plant.

I wanted another geranium. I have white, red, light pink and salmon. What would go good with those colors? Sometimes choice is NOT a good thing.

I wanted to get more peppers to make sure I get something this year. They didn't have the orange peppers that I really want since I only got one plant to sprout. I did find a couple to bring home.

They have plants to encourage kids to garden.

I was sorely tempted to buy a couple pots of corn. I might still do that. I'm not sure how corn would do in a deck pot, but it's tempting. These pumpkin vines were also tempting. I could make a trellis off one corner of the deck and grow the pumpkin that way. Reality smacked me upside the head and wondered exactly where I thought I'd put this. The pumpkins stayed at the nursery.

Here's what came home with me.

3 sweet potato vines.
3 four packs of begonias
1 four pack of zinnias
2 four packs of alyssum
1 geranium
6 four packs of marigolds
1 four pack of salvia
1 four pack of nicotania
1 four pack of cosmos
1 four pack of snapdragons
2 pepper plants

Not bad. I did a fairly good job of resisting the siren song of a lot of different flowers. There's a nice variety this year with a wide spectrum of colors. That's all I want, really, variety. I still may go back for corn.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

Multiply

It doesn't look like much, some greenery in the shade with a splattering of white flowering plants amongst them. The white flowers belong to Chives and I have an incredible abundance this year for some reason.

The church to which I used to belong had a garden where they grew fresh vegetables for a local food pantry. Every year, they encouraged people to "plant an extra row" in their home gardens and bring that overflow to the church for the food pantry. As I have noticed, it is extremely hard to eat fresh on a budget. Fresh vegetables and fruits are extremely expensive when compared to frozen or canned. It's a conundrum that needs to be addressed in order to get people eating better.

Food pantries face this every day. It's much easier to provide cans of diced pears than to provide the real thing. But, around here, in the summer, they take donations of fresh vegetables and provide those to their clients. So, for a few years, we would take an extra plant or two and return with the produce in late August or September.

One year, they had excess herbs. I had something of an herb garden on the side of the house. I thought it might be neat to grow something different. We grabbed a pot of chives, found a place for it and rather left it. Sometimes, I would see it and remember it was there, but most of the time, it was just some green thing happily growing.

This year, it's everywhere behind the house. It's spread from the deck south along the area where I store the garbage cans. The photo above is only a third of the range in the back. I'm really not fond of chives but I like the flowers. At this time of year, there's not a lot blooming so these flowers are an exciting addition to the back. That being said, when I get around to clearing some of this brush, some of the chives will go too. It's just sort of inevitable.

Still, this was a pleasant surprise.

Beverage:  Edinburgh's Finest tea

Deb

Let The Summer Bounty Begin

Zeke stopped by last night. First of all, it was to check on the yard. While it doesn't crunch anymore when you walk across it, it's still brown. The rain we've had lately has caused the back to start to green up and it will probably need a mowing in another week. I've got all this Queen Anne's Lace everywhere but it's kind of neat.

The second reason was to see if I would like some of his excess produce.

He dropped off two cucumbers. Now, I'm not a real big fan of them, particularly when they get large. The smaller of the two, I sliced this morning and will dip in garlic dressing as a side with lunch. I like them when they are small. The larger one, I'll bring into the office tomorrow and see if someone wants it.

Zeke asked if I would take fresh tomatoes. Now, I love tomato sauce and tomato juice but raw tomatoes just aren't my fancy. The guys at work, however...

This has been a perfect summer for tomatoes, other than the need to water them every day due to the drought. Tomatoes love hot weather. Zeke said he's got dozens of green tomatoes on his plants so in the next week, he'll be bringing some over. Depending upon the kind, I can probably turn some of them into juice or sauce. The rest come to the office.

Handing me fresh picked produce makes me kind of long for a garden of my own again. I did that years ago. I grew all sorts of things. Not only were you guaranteed of fresh picked and organic produce, it reduced your food budget. I froze a lot of things. There's almost nothing to compare with fresh garden peas in January.

Wheaton has a rather large farmer's market on Saturdays just off the downtown. I've never been there. I should go see.

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea

Deb

This is Just Dumb

I've discovered there are photos I can take with my cell phone that I can't take with a regular camera. I'm quite mindful of how some places don't like photographs being taken. But, when you pretend to be answering a text on your cell phone, you can easily take a photo and email it to yourself and they aren't too much the wiser.

I've wanted to blog about this for some time, but my self-consciousness about photographing it overruled the collecting of the illustrative photo. But, lacking a camera right now, the cell phones camera is remarkably decent at capturing those photos I use for blog illustrations.

I have been puzzling about this for months. It's a potato. It's in plastic. It costs 3 times what the potatoes lying loose above it cost. The label on the potatoes says, "Perfect for the microwave. Just prick and cook for 45 minutes." And what do you want to bet someone buys one of these and just puts it in the microwave without poking it?

I guess there is a market for plastic shrink-wrapped potatoes. I guess this makes it easy to have a baker when you want it. I guess I come from a mind-set that taught me how to cook.

Bah. You don't shrink-wrap potatoes no matter the convenience. Now, if you will excuse me, I have cottage fries to make. Don't you dare shrink-wrap those.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

Fresh. Fresh. Fresh.

Oberweis Dairy added a new service last year, fresh fruits and vegetables. I hadn't really been tempted by the idea until I got the tax return and could squeeze a few pennies to set aside. They have prepared boxes or you can make your own. I decided a mix catering to my tastes was in order.

There are 5 gala apples, 3 comice pears, 2 yellow peppers, a bag of 4 large carrots and a box of strawberries. I had a discount coupon good on my first produce order so the total for the box wound up being less than if I'd purchased all this in the store.

The key factor here is convenience. They have a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables. I imagine this is comparable grocery quality, although the peppers are huge. I didn't see anything like that in the store. In between brick and mortar runs, I can have fresh delivered on a Thursday morning.

I have eaten one of the peppers, 2 apples and a pear. Very good flavor. I slice them and eat them raw. Although I did get a bag of peanut M&Ms at Target, I feel rather smug eating sliced apples and pears instead of M&Ms when playing World of Warcraft. Plus, the pepper slices were great for noshing as I was transcribing an inspection tape at the office yesterday. The carrots are going in soup. The strawberries are going in muffins.

So, was it a good value? I'm on the fence about that. The produce is certainly stellar. Having it delivered to me and in my face, so to speak means that I'm eating it instead of bread or thinking about chips or something else that I really don't need to be eating. I've mentioned this before. Good eating is expensive. It just is. Fresh fruits and vegetables are more expensive than a bag of Cheetos. That is, from my point of view, the biggest problem in getting people, myself included, to eat better. I love the apples. I love the pears, but my pocketbook doesn't love the cost. I'm not sure what can be done about that, however, and still provide a decent profit to the farmer who grows the pepper, the guy who picks it and the company that gets it from farm to grocery. If I watch the store sales, I can spend less for the same items.

I think the best part of this experiment was after I removed the produce and the cushioning.

The box is perfectly Pilchard size. She just loves it. She can rest her chin on the edge and sleep. She can curl up completely inside it but it's not so deep she can't see out. I was going to use it to ship some things to a friend but it's been commandeered. Mija sits in it, too but it's not her box. This belongs to Pilchard.

Beverage:  Darjeeling tea

Deb