What's for Dinner? Ask Google

The dreaded question: "What should we have for dinner?"

I thought about what I had in the house. Off the top of my head:

• a bag of frozen okra (I try to always have one in the freezer)
  
• a bag of frozen corn (needed corn in the stuffed mushrooms I made last week)
  
• a container of grape tomatoes (soon to go bad)
• a scraggly basil plant that needed to be put out of its misery

I thought that could make a meal, along with some whole wheat rotini (we were out of rice and couscous) and a spicy black bean veggie burger (yum!).

I googled okra, corn, and tomatoes, and wouldn't you know, it's a very popular combination? If I had spent longer in the south, I guess I would have learned that. I tried to make it healthy by not adding bacon and multiple tablespoons of oil, and I think I succeeded.

It was almost ruined when the bottom fell out of the salt shaker. Luckily most of the salt landed next to the pan (whew!). Here's what ended up in my okra, corn, and tomato dish:

1 bag of okra
2 cups of frozen corn
3 cloves garlic
1 medium onion
2 tsp olive oil
1 pint grape tomatoes
2 cans of diced tomatoes
springs of basil
sprinkle of red pepper flakes
fresh ground pepper
salt
dash of chili powder

It turned out so well! And leftovers for days of lunches! To quote this week's guest on Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me, Paula Dean (I never heard of her before either):

"It is fabulous. It'll knock your socks clean off and into the washer!"

Would that I Could be a Garden Gnome

I love food. I looooooooooove food. And while I admit to loving things that are not good for me - buttery popcorn, pints of ice cream, sour cream & onion potato chips, and gobs of peanut butter - what I really, really love is food from my garden.

[Let me take a moment to talk to my garden: hurry up and ripen, tomatoes! Yellow squash, got growing! Beans, produce more!]

I'm still learning the ways of urban gardening, and learning tricks of the trade (I do not grow spinach and other greens very well, alas. And the squash boar moth is my mortal foe. Also, I am lazy and do not water or weed as much as I should.)

Anyway, I digress. I grew up with gardening and trips to pick-your-own farms/orchards for strawberries and apples. Grandpa Hibbard would harvest nuts from the trees on his land, grow grapes and make wine (alas, I never got to try any), and pick wild blackberries. And while I did not enjoy always finding the little green worms in my home-grown broccoli (still traumatized, thanks, Mom) it was damn good broccoli.

What am I saying? I don't know. It's 4:00 pm and it's summer and I really don't want to be in my basement office writing a newsletter that no one reads. I want to be outside, patrolling farmers markets, giving my tomato plants pep talks, and discovering new uses for the monster-chive plant (soon to be the star of its very own creature-feature! not really, but it could be) that's currently trying to shade out my bush beans.

If you haven't already figured out that it's not natural to get salmonella poisoning from a tomato, guess what: that's just wrong! And those tomatoes you buy at the grocery store give real tomatoes a bad name anyway.

Go to a farmers market, or better yet, start planning your own garden (be it one pot on your porch a whole acre ... or buy a local farm share - produced delivered weekly to you!).

And, here some new blogs I just found. Yum!

For those of you in Boston: Boston Localvores & Food in Boston

News ... !!!!!

OK, I should have published this earlier, but really, anybody who reads this already has heard it (let's be honest ... there are about 5 of you, and I talk with 4 1/2 of you on the phone regularly).

But because it's fun to say, I'll say it again:

I'm engaged. Jon and I are now planning our super-awesome-wedding-fest-apalooza (copyright 2007 Jennifer Hibbard).

The wedding will include:

1. me in a fabulous, Jenny-rific dress (magically inexpensive ... still working on that)
2. Jon looking down-right jaunty in snazzy formal attire
3. Jenny and Jon being disgustingly and publicly in love and telling everyone about it
4. Friends and family having a fabulous time
5. CAKE! (or possibly apple crisp and JP Licks ice cream ... or both)
6. At least one polka (I have to ... it's Wisconsin law - and I gotta represent)

The wedding will not include:

1. country music
2. Pachabel's Canon in D
3. a long drawn-out ceremony including praying for world leaders (so not wasting time on my wedding day praying that George Bush is given sense)
4. cheesy wedding favors that people don't know what to do with afterwards
5. an annoying DJ who thinks s/he is really entertaining, funny, and talented.
6. meat on meat action. There will be no scallops wrapped in bacon - or anything else for that matter. Nothing needs to be wrapped in bacon, ever.

Mmmm ... Chocolate

OK ... maybe I didn't want to know about fat free half-n-half.

Oh well, too late now. Why must I be so inquisitive? Why must I have friends who know all the answers?! (Actually, I love that. I have walking, talking, and just plain nice people who pretty much comprise a whole encyclopedia set from, Ancient Greek mythology to chemistry, knitting, politics, and zoology.)

I needed a walk after lunch, so I briskly made my way to Foodies Urban Market to buy soy milk. Mmmm, soy milk.

Anyway, I needed a little treat, but I'm really close to reaching one of my short-term weight--loss goals (10% of my original weight -- and no, I'm not yet ready to broadcast over the internet what that weight was) so it had to be a smart treat.

A little bit of good chocolate goes a long way to satisfying my cravings, and Foodies has lots of yummy gourmet chocolates, including organic, fair-trade and imported.

Thus, I have discovered: New Tree. Imported from Belgium, New Tree chocolates are a pairing of flavors (although you can get "plain" dark chocolate -- 73% Belgian chocolate goodness) such as dark chocolate and ginger, dark chocolate and black current, dark chocolate and coffee, and a tempting concoction of milk chocolate and cinnamon. Best of all, you can get a little box of mini-bars (each one .3 ozs) and each minibar is only 25 calories and less than 2 grams of fat. Rock on.

Heavenly.

Almost as good as chocolate - maybe better, really -- was the Manu Chao concert I went to Sunday night. Wow. Talk about energy. It was quite the experience. I sang along to songs I knew (or tried to, most of them are in Spanish -- not a language I know well), and jumped around and danced to songs I didn't know.

Who - what - is Manu Chao? His music is eclectic to say the least. "World music" in the sense that he borrows from styles all over the world, mixed with leftist/populist ideology, and spiced with punk. It's one thing to enjoy the albums. It's another experience entirely to be in a crowd of Manu followers. There was crowd surfing, pot smoking, dancing, and lots of jumping. They did 4 encores -- out-doing the last great concert I went to, Sondre Lerche.

Cannibal Potatoes

Why did I think buying a 5 lb bag of organic red potatoes is a good idea? I vaguely recall going through a potato-phase a couple of months ago when we had intermittent bursts of actual winter weather.

But then I stumbled across the joy of tortillas (with goat cheese and sauteed bell peppers) and forgot all about the red spuds.

Tuesday night, in a rare occurrences of "what do I want to eat?" (usually I know exactly what I want) I thought - oh yeah! potatoes!. I went to the pantry to get one out, and wouldn't you know, the whole bag had gone bad.

Really bad. Cannibal

Not just a few little eyes but entire alien creatures sprouting from my potatoes! In fact, the creatures had grown to such proportions that the potatoes themselves were significantly altered - soft and withered. One even had a hole as if the inside had been ingested.

I realized -- to my horror -- that my potatoes had cannibalized.

I disposed of them straight off. The carnage was more than I could bare.

Busy Volunteering - and, oh yeah, nudity

Happy Turkey Day's Eve, y'all.

I will be leaving shortly to create cranberry apricot relish/salad and also a Jenny creation of polenta, marinara sauce, and cheese (hmm, what's not to love?) for Thanksgiving with Jon's family in New Hampshire (including an uber-dog named Boomer ... and yes, he's as big as a dog named Boomer would be).

I might not be able to post much in the next few weeks, as I will be hard at work renovating the residence my organization is opening up. It will be fun! I'll use tools and order people around at eat lots of pizza. Excellent. Plus the site is only a few short blocks from home. I can sleep in! Righteous.

And how could I not blog about the closing performance of the Full Monty at the Footlight Theater? How full was the monty? Very full.

So full that poor Jon may be permanently scarred.

I thought our front row seats were delightful.