I love summer so hard. Eventually I will start bitching about the heat and refusing to leave the house unless there’s a pre-air conditioned car waiting for me, but even the hottest part of summer beats the crap out of winter. Things are happening in the summer months. Plants are growing and vegetables are ripening. The riding lawn mower comes out of retirement. My freckles start sprouting (freckle pride, represent!). The dogs will actually stay outside for more than five minutes at a time. Oh, and grilling because the preferred method of cooking.
I don’t eat frozen meat analogs very often, but when I do it’s usually a boca burger. They remind me of the hamburgers we used to get in the cafeteria in junior high, probably because those things didn’t have a lick of meat in them either! Also, this is one of the last pictures taken with my 50mm lens before I bounced my camera off of the bed and it broke in two. Pour one out and hope that its replacement arrives post haste.
I started off this year by making a list on 43things.com…of 43 things I wanted to accomplish this year (big shock). A lot of them went south when I found out my mother-in-law had breast cancer (like having a movie night every Sunday, hard for Brian and I to do when we weren’t in the same state!), but I have gotten a handful of the goals accomplished already.
A big one was to join a CSA. There are plenty of CSA’s located in Nashville, but I could only find one that delivers to Clarksville. I opted for a half share, and for this particular CSA that means a pick up every other week, not a half-box every week. My first pick up was the day before I came home, so Brian went and picked up my ‘box of green crap’. I was pretty excited to come home and see it!
I had already eaten half of the strawberries at this point. There’s also radishes, onions, two english cucumbers, kale, collards, swiss chard, and that bag is an assortment of lettuces. I’m not the biggest fan of leafy greens outside of spinach, but i’m eating them! The first thing I made was a salad. Way to perpetuate the vegan sterotype, Katie.
The dressing was made by me, with oregano from my garden (which I will take pictures of when it grows a little more). I ate two bowls for dinner and went to bed a very happy person. Don’t worry, I had a large pancake brunch with guests so I was not lacking in the ‘real’ food department that day.
I don’t think i’ve ever been so proud of a sandwich. The tempeh bacon was left over from the previous days brunch, the lettuce was from the CSA box, I biked to get the tomatoes (as mentioned in my previous post, this involves hills and crazy assholes almost hitting me), and I made the bread myself rather than wait for my husband to get home so I could go buy vegan bread (there’s no vegan bread at the Kroger I got tomatoes from). I don’t have any Veganaise so I used more of the dressing I made. I don’t think there’s even been a sandwich in the history of sandwiches that tasted as wonderful.
One of the other things on my list was to put up a clothes line. Just because. I doubt it’ll make a big impact on our electric bill, but Brian and I have been trying to shave off as much from our monthly expenses as possible. We got rid of our satellite dish, which costs as much (slightly more, even) as our car insurance, so that’s a big one. We can’t even get local stations which sucks, but there’s hulu and uh, unscrupulous methods for watching my favorite shows. Also we have more dvds and video games than you can shake a stick at, so even if I wanted to park my ass on the couch for five hours every night, I have lots of stuff to keep me entertained. Tangent.
Line dried clothes do end up stiff as hell, but I bring them inside and put them in the dryer with a dryer sheet for 20 minutes on low heat, and that softens them and gets all of the cat hair off (which you can see on all of the black stuff in the photo.) But i’m sure that’s still saving a lot more electricity than drying them for an hour on normal/high heat. It’s also less noisy so I can take afternoon naps in peace!
