Monday. Five days of eating eggs, cheese, and tomatoes. Mostly. Although I haven’t forgotten how lucky I am to have food in the first place, I sure am sick of eggs, cheese, and tomatoes. When this is over, I don’t think I’ll eggs eat again for a very long time. Of course, I generally don’t eat many eggs to begin with, but that’s beside the point. The point is, almost 30 eggs in five days is just too much.
Anyway, for breakfast I had an apple. For lunch, tomato soup and leftover mashed potatoes, which, by the way, were just as good as they were the day before. I got lucky for dinner.
On Monday afternoon I visited Mason’s (non-certified) organic vegetable garden to do a little work. For those of those that haven’t heard, the garden suffered a minor catastrophe last month when almost all of vegetables died. In any case, when I was digging around where the potato plants used to be, I came across four good-sized potatoes. There were in pretty poor shape, rather wrinkly and soft, but I decided to give them a good home in my stomach none-the-less.
When, I got home a sliced all four of my potatoes into small wedges and fried them in butter. And although I was saving it until Tuesday (so I could celebrate) I decided to use the one small onion that I had. Instead of cooking it along with the potatoes, I chose to eat it raw so as to savor the full flavor. So, for dinner I had fried potatoes, more fried eggs, slices of a raw onion and the rest of a green pepper that I had the day before. It was the best meal that I have had this week. I honestly think that it was the onion that tied the whole thing together.
Tomorrow is Tuesday, my last full day of this experiment. I don’t have too much variety to look forward to, not that I had variety to begin with, so I can’t say that I’ll be sorry when it’s over. Among all the things that I’m looking forward to the most: garlic. And bread. And of course, hot sauce. Sriacha hot sauce.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Eating Locally- Days 4 and 5
Writing about essentially the same thing for five days is difficult. At least for me. How many things am I eating? 16, I think. Eggs, tomatoes, cheese, apples, peaches, butter, basil. Those are the main items. Throw in some potatoes, yogurt, two peppers, an eggplant and onion (both yet to be eaten) honey, rosemary and thyme and you have my diet for the week. Of course, if you’ve been following my progress, you already know that. I also have some beets, but I doubt that I’ll end up harvesting them for this experiment. Trying to take those 16 items and make three meals a day for seven consecutive days with them is not easy. Well, it’s not easy to make interesting anyway.
Since I stayed up late at the movies on Friday night, I took advantage of a rare day off and slept late on Saturday, therefore missing breakfast. For lunch, I decided to try something different. Since I still had an abundance of eggs I tried mixing two of my hardboiled eggs with yogurt (instead of mayonnaise) to make an egg salad of sorts. I also fried a few eggs with cheese and made some more tomato ‘soup’. The egg salad definitely was not very good, but it wasn’t terrible. The tomato soup and the fried eggs were decent but I could already tell that I would be sick of them before too long. For dinner: more fried eggs.
Sunday was a different story, at least it ended differently. I started with just an apple for breakfast, mostly because I wasn’t particularly hungry. Since I felt that I had been doing exceeding well so far, especially in the name of overwhelming temptation (the Sriacha hot sauce lurking in my cabinet was calling my name) I figured I deserved a treat. I went into front yard to dig up what few potatoes I could. The actual potato plants had long since been removed due to the inane and idiotic rules of the homeowners association that governed my townhouse but I knew that at least a few potatoes lay just beneath the surface. To my delight, I actually found over a dozen of them, some as small as ping pong balls, others as large as my fist. Apparently my plants had been exceedingly productive in the few short weeks that they were able to photosynthesize. In any case, I’m a big fan of anticipation, so I decided to wait until dinner to enjoy my spuds. So for lunch I had…wait for it… yup, you guessed it: eggs.
I started preparing dinner much earlier than I needed to, partly because I was hungry but mostly because I was simply so excited to eat my homegrown potatoes. Since I had so many to work with, I decided to use about half of them to make fried potatoes and the other half to make mashed potatoes (my favorite). For frying, I sliced the potatoes similar to the way potato chips (another one of my favorites) are sliced and placed them, one-by-one, into hot butter. Although I have a propensity to burn things that I try to fry, I was exceedingly careful with my precious potatoes. In the end, I only had two or three slices that were too burnt to eat. The rest were delicious, even sans Sriacha, and I ate all of them.
As for the mashed potatoes, since milk, or more appropriately, soymilk, was not part of my diet this week, I had to add three times as much butter as I normally would in order to try to make the potatoes creamy enough, but even that wasn’t enough. In lieu of milk I ended up adding water to the potatoes to make them creamier. It reminded me of when I was kid and had to use water for my cereal when we ran out of cow’s milk. Luckily, after a thorough mixing, I couldn’t tell the difference and the mashed potatoes ended up being delicious as well, even without the hot sauce.
Like I already said, I had decided to treat myself and that included desert. I really don’t like plain yogurt, so I chopped up one of my remaining peaches and mixed it with a bowlful of yogurt. It probably would have been good if I had used a blender, but instead I decided to mix in some honey. The result was quite good. Not quite delicious, but close enough.
I went to sleep that night satiated and fully satisfied.
Since I stayed up late at the movies on Friday night, I took advantage of a rare day off and slept late on Saturday, therefore missing breakfast. For lunch, I decided to try something different. Since I still had an abundance of eggs I tried mixing two of my hardboiled eggs with yogurt (instead of mayonnaise) to make an egg salad of sorts. I also fried a few eggs with cheese and made some more tomato ‘soup’. The egg salad definitely was not very good, but it wasn’t terrible. The tomato soup and the fried eggs were decent but I could already tell that I would be sick of them before too long. For dinner: more fried eggs.
Sunday was a different story, at least it ended differently. I started with just an apple for breakfast, mostly because I wasn’t particularly hungry. Since I felt that I had been doing exceeding well so far, especially in the name of overwhelming temptation (the Sriacha hot sauce lurking in my cabinet was calling my name) I figured I deserved a treat. I went into front yard to dig up what few potatoes I could. The actual potato plants had long since been removed due to the inane and idiotic rules of the homeowners association that governed my townhouse but I knew that at least a few potatoes lay just beneath the surface. To my delight, I actually found over a dozen of them, some as small as ping pong balls, others as large as my fist. Apparently my plants had been exceedingly productive in the few short weeks that they were able to photosynthesize. In any case, I’m a big fan of anticipation, so I decided to wait until dinner to enjoy my spuds. So for lunch I had…wait for it… yup, you guessed it: eggs.
I started preparing dinner much earlier than I needed to, partly because I was hungry but mostly because I was simply so excited to eat my homegrown potatoes. Since I had so many to work with, I decided to use about half of them to make fried potatoes and the other half to make mashed potatoes (my favorite). For frying, I sliced the potatoes similar to the way potato chips (another one of my favorites) are sliced and placed them, one-by-one, into hot butter. Although I have a propensity to burn things that I try to fry, I was exceedingly careful with my precious potatoes. In the end, I only had two or three slices that were too burnt to eat. The rest were delicious, even sans Sriacha, and I ate all of them.
As for the mashed potatoes, since milk, or more appropriately, soymilk, was not part of my diet this week, I had to add three times as much butter as I normally would in order to try to make the potatoes creamy enough, but even that wasn’t enough. In lieu of milk I ended up adding water to the potatoes to make them creamier. It reminded me of when I was kid and had to use water for my cereal when we ran out of cow’s milk. Luckily, after a thorough mixing, I couldn’t tell the difference and the mashed potatoes ended up being delicious as well, even without the hot sauce.
Like I already said, I had decided to treat myself and that included desert. I really don’t like plain yogurt, so I chopped up one of my remaining peaches and mixed it with a bowlful of yogurt. It probably would have been good if I had used a blender, but instead I decided to mix in some honey. The result was quite good. Not quite delicious, but close enough.
I went to sleep that night satiated and fully satisfied.
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