Our garden is really giving us the fruits of our planting these days. There is a distinct pleasure in eating homegrown vegetables. Everything seems tastier. The other day we had a spinach salad with marconi peppers. These are long tapered sweet peppers. We didn't know about these until we planted them. They taste very good when they are green and are super sweet when they are red. We haven't waited till they turned red but green ones are really yummy!
Our tomato plants have been quite prolific, but the tomatoes are still green. One of my friends told me to pluck the really huge greeen ones and let them turn red inside the house by letting them absorb the sun by the window. Otherwise they bruise because of insects and animals on the plant. We experimented this with a couple of tomatoes and it indeed turned red! Jamie says she likes a tomato when its all red from the inside and it was. So today was a tomato rich dinner. Jamie made bruschetta and I made tomato basil pasta with linguini noodles. I think linguini is my favorite noodle.
We had brought nice thyme bread from the farmer's market. Slice em and toast em and when hot rub some garlic on it. The aroma is simply amazing! Then place fine chopped tomato and basil, parmesan cheese on top and melt the cheese. This is simple and quite tasty. I think my next topping for bruschetta would be red marconi peppers. I have a feeling that will taste great too.
My dish- pasta- it was okay because we were impatient for the sauce to be done. So the sauce was a bit raw tomatoey. I think I would want to cook it more. I put 3 tbsp of olive oil, 4 cloves of garlic, tomatoes- a can of crushed tomatoes and one large diced tomato and towards the end a handful of basil. We grew basil too this time. One of these days maybe we'll make a basil pesto. Pour over al dente linguini pasta and, some moz cheese and voila!
For quite sometime, Jamie had been craving zucchini bread. We decided to make some and got a humungous zucchini from the farmer's market. It was a good size for 2 dollars. We wanted to make it healthy because this bread was gonna be our breakfast. So to lower the fat content, we used homemade applesauce and instead of all purpose flour we mixed one cup of wheat flour with half a cup of flaxseed powder. It's quite easy to make-
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup flaxseed powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 egg
1/3 cup canola oil
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
2 tbsp plain non fat yoghurt
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup grated zucchini
1/3 cup fine chopped walnuts
Preheat oven to 325 degrees farenheit. Mix the dry ingredients (flour, flaxseed, spices, baking soda and powder, cinnamon) and wet ingredients (applesauce, yoghurt, oil, egg, vanilla, sugar) separately. Mix both wet and dry ingredients and finally fold in the zucchini and walnuts. Bake for 50-60 minutes.
We made homemade applesauce. It was really really sweet- we didn't add any sugar
Peel and dice two apples (we used gala apples), cover it with water and cook covered. Remove when apples are soft. Mash.
Here's the finished product.
Quite moist and tasty. But I have to admit, I did not taste the zucchini flavor. Next time, I'll add more than a cup.
Jamie also wanted to make granola. She mixed 3 cups of rolled oats with half a cup of maple syrup, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp salt, 2 tbsp canola oil, and 1 cup nuts (peanuts and almonds). Mix and place in a preheated oven at 325 F and cook for 30-45 minutes. This was the base. After this was done, she divided it into 3 and first third with raisins, second with chocolate chips and third with both. Very nicely toasted oats and nuts. Mighty good it turned out to be!
I remember I told you about a garden burger from the farmers market. This had interesting ingredients like spelt berries, kale, balsamic vinegar, thyme, ginger, apples, carrots, garlic, onion, black beans oats, salt and pepper (writing this is like a memory test for me- how many ingredients can I remember? umm...I remember half and remaining I cheated). We had this with green beans and bread with sweet mustard salsa
Interesting cancer facts for the day: I met a cancer researcher at RPAC. He told me that within the digestive tract, previously like in 1930's-70's the predominant cancer used to be stomach cancer, but now it has shifted to colon cancer. I asked why? He said because the chemicals we are using these days in foods are different. I never noticed this trend, so it was interesting for me.
Then I'd read about how some cancer researchers believe that there will never be a cure for cancer. He said he was one of those folks and explained why. This is what I understand. At the most basic level, cancer is a disease when cells divide and multiply but do not die. For this to happen mutations need to accumulate (~15-20). For instance, take apoptosis, there are multiple gene products in the pathway of apoptosis. Mutation in one or more than one gene can impair the process and the cell does not die. For two people with the same cancer, the mutations can be in totally different genes. So, in majority of cases, no two people have the same cancer. A question occurred to me as I was typing this, can apoptosis be impaired and oncogenes be activated at the same time? I guess that will be a really rapid spread of cancer. I hope I am clear in my explantion. I really try hard to have clarity in my explanations. Feel free to ask any questions and I can bug this guy.
Researchers/professors I have noticed are very precise and accurate in their conversation. I like this. This guy is a freak though. He has run 20 marathons, broken his knee ligaments thrice, ankle ligament once and got them repaired and still keeps running. He said I should run outside too. I think I have a block against running on a hard surface like roads bacause the impact from it is hard. He said one of his favorite surfaces was snow. I said aha! he is one of the persons whom one sees running in winter and thinks 'what a jerk!'Golly! the things that pop out of my mouth!
I'll end here. Have a great day!
