Winter Garden

Citrus and leeks does a happy tummy make.  This bounty went into a potato leek soup and fresh orange grapefruit juice.  Both were delicious, made even more so from knowing where they were picked.

Small Home

Love this home of Jessica Helgerson.  Only 540 square feet and with a great history too!  It's very cool what the owners are doing with trying to live as self-sufficient as possible.  Check out the link for more pictures!

Fresh Eats

Our first heirloom tomato this season - A Striped German!

Veggie wraps with the siblings - colorful and full of flavor!  Definitely worthy of a more permanent place in our meal rotation.  Components: tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts, lettuce, onions, green peppers, carrots, green hummus, vegan cheese sauce, and spinach wraps!

Gifted quail eggs (Thanks Maribel!).  They became a delicious mini omelet that we used as the first course of our date night meal :)

Garden Meals

Just a few pictures from what we've been cooking lately.  As you can see, there have been lots of tomatoes around here these days!  Also pictured are plums (which were quickly made into plum jam), leeks, peaches, and fresh herbs being made into a yummy lasagna.  The garlic sauce on top of both the lasagna and the pizza is the same incredible stuff that I posted about last week - what a revolutionary sauce it has been!

Lasagna in the making

A new backyard friend!

A cute slipper tomato!

Tomato hats!

Four pounds of backyard produce about to be roasted and made into tomato sauce!

"To Live Content"

“To live content with small means: to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.”

-William Henry Channing

Garlic Cream Sauce (Vegan)

I have a confession to make.  I've been holding out on you.  I haven't yet shared this incredible, amazing, delicious, over-the-top garlic cream sauce that I found.  I first described it as akin to an alfredo sauce - but I think it's better than that because it's vegan and doesn't feel as heavy.  We've eaten it in some form or another almost every week since I found it!  It has showed it's creamy self on many things: pizza's, lasagna's and more.  But this baked pasta dish takes the prize.  Mixed with sun-dried tomatoes (my favorite!), spinach or peas, and pasta, this vegan cream sauce almost makes me want to become an opera star so that I could sing it's glories to the world!

Creamy Garlic Sauce

Adapted from Sweet Beet and Green Bean

2 whole heads of garlic, roasted

1 block silken tofu*

1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil

1 tsp salt

onion powder, cayenne, paprika, pepper, etc to taste

Breadcrumb Topping

2 pieces stale, hardened bread

1/4 cup flax seed meal

1/4 cup sunflower seeds

1-2 TBSP McKay's Chicken seasoning

1-2 TBSP Brewer's yeast

1 TBSP garlic herb seasoning

Directions

-Roast the garlic as follows: wrap the whole head (unpeeled) in tin foil and then bake at 400 F for 30 minutes.  Remove and open the tin foil package.  Once cool, the individual bulbs of garlic squeeze out very easily.
-Blend garlic, tofu, oil, and seasonings until smooth.
-Mix with pasta, sun-dried tomatoes, and greens (spinach, peas, etc).  Place in baking dish.
-Coarsely blend all breadcrumb topping ingredients.  Sprinkle on top of pasta dish.
-Bake at 350 F just until top is slightly browned.

A few notes:
*I've used regular tofu and it works well, just not quite as creamy
** This sauce is endlessly versatile - I've added tomato paste, sundried tomatoes and the oil they come in to the sauce before blending (in lieu of the canola oi) and it makes the sauce into a delicious tomato garlic cream sauce.
***The pasta will absorb quite a bit of the sauce while baking.  To counter this, I only bake it for a short amount of time and, if making a large dish, I'll double the sauce.  It's also handy to save aside a little extra for spooning on top if things get too dry.

Beauty

Studying for my Step 1 board exam unduly consumes me at times. Even when I'm not studying, the mass of accumulated information continues to bang about in my head, producing previously unimaginable associations. To me, for instance "blueberry muffin" is not a tasty breakfast treat; it's a buzzword for congenital Rubella. Butterflies may be delightfully delicate and beautiful creatures, but they only remind me of the classic facial rash of Lupus (a "butterfly" distribution over the nose and cheeks).

Thankfully, Christy makes regular forays into my brain's cyclone of medical facts. One of her more effective techniques is to come into the study and sit on my lap. This treatment methodology has a remarkably rapid onset of action. With a beautiful woman sitting on my lap, concentrating on the pathophysiology of congestive heart failure becomes a singularly irrelevant pursuit. Other matters of the heart become overwhelmingly more compelling.

God certainly brought Christy into my life for many reasons. One of those reasons was balance. I was unbalanced before marrying Christy. Workaholism was real in my life. Everything I did seemed to center around maximizing my personal productivity, squeezing the maximum amount of work out of each day. Beauty was important to me, but I refused to soak it in. There was too much work to do.

With Christy in my life, I can't help but stop to appreciate beauty. Not only is she beautiful, but Christy has an eye for beauty and a heart with the depth and capacity to receive it. This explains why Christy brings so much beauty into my tired brain when she interrupts my frenzy of study by sitting on my lap. I notice first her own beauty but she will then talk to me and point my thoughts to other beauties in the world.

My experience with Christy in medical school has led me to conclude that beauty is an essential ingredient in the simple life lived well. Life is, after all, about producing beauty through a cycle of creative relationships with the natural world, each other, and God. This reality is both simple and beautiful.