Archive for the ‘Plants’ Category

25.02.2010

Aloe Vera gel & juice: a favourite ingredient

Hello, dear, dear readers! If you’re seeing this sentence, that means you are still checking here for posts, and I thank you sincerely for that. I have been AWOL again, and I don’t even have a good excuse. I still think about and plan blog posts often, but have been having difficulty transforming those plans into actual, written entries.

In the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of reading, quite a bit of cooking, gone ice-skating twice, and drank a lot of tea. C & I spent Valentine’s Day in the Emergency room at the hospital (we are fine, just couldn’t get into a clinic!) which was interesting, but certainly not fun. We are not vegan (or even vegetarian) but we have been eating lots of vegan & vegetarian meals lately. Out of sheer laziness, we’ve also been eating out a few times a week. Since it has been raining and/or snowing all week here, I haven’t been buying as many groceries as I usually might. Consequently, we’ve just been using up the contents of our cupboards and fridge.

Various aloes: far left is a gel for topical use. The others are edible and delicious.

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27.01.2010

Pennywort juice: green goodness

Whenever I’m in Marche Oriental, our local (as in nearby, not Locavore) Vietnamese-owned Asian market, I’m always amazed by the fresh herb section. Most grocery stores always carry a few basic herbs, though they usually look somewhat wilted and abused. Marche Oriental’s herb section is another animal entirely. For one, most of their bagged herbs are filled with air (like herbed balloons!) so they don’t get squished or soggy. And the selection is wonderful. They have mint, cilantro, dill, tia to (perilla), holy basil, Vietnamese balm… the list goes on. Last week I picked up a package of pennywort, which I had heard of, but never tried.

Asiatic pennywort looks like this


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15.10.2009

Ready… set… sprout!

In an effort to: a) eat more organic produce, b) be thriftier, and c) simplify finding fresh produce during the colder months, I have started growing my own sprouts. Growing sprouts is likely ‘old hat’ to many of the wonderful food-centric folk out there, but it is new to me, and it has been a revelation. It is really very easy and satisfying to grow your own sprouts, and it’s also cost-effective (great for our seemingly-hostile economic climate) and at least a little entertaining. I love peering into a jar of seeds/sprouts to see how much they have grown overnight.

in the beginning, there were seeds

in the beginning, there were seeds


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26.05.2009

Food or flower?

a very humble flower

Or perhaps both?

This is what happens when Chinese broccoli sits in the fridge for so long that the florets stop being florets and start being flowers.

Cute!

And after another few days languishing beneath the snap peas and green onions, the very same Chinese broccoli is destined to meet its end tonight, in a pot of miso soup.

Yum!