A Little Spring Weather Would Help

One Flippin' Trillium

Is it just me, or do gray skies, freezing temperatures and precipitation suck massively? We're using our quickly diminishing trove of firewood at nearly the rate we did in the dark winter months.

OK, the rant's over. The appearance of our single trillium generally coordinates with a period of increasing warmth, but this little flower must have a better calendar than sensory system, because it showed up at the appointed pre-Easter time. Don't worry, we didn't eat it.

The chickens are laying heavily now. They too seem to be slaves of dates rather than weather clues. Our friends are happy to be receiving gifts of orange-yolked, brown eggs from happy, organically sustained chickens. The serene hens' delicious cackleberries will be one of the non-Engine 2 Diet foods we're likely to add into our diets once the first 4 week period is completed. In the mean time, their ongoing care is based on appreciation for past performance and future contributions.

Last night we had a great dinner of quinoa salad with roasted mushrooms, fresh spinach, green onions and tasty no-oil vinaigrette. LG found the recipe on the Whole Foods Markets web site. If you haven't already done so, check out their vast library of recipes. They're not all vegan - or even vegetarian - and all are reviewed by real people who've actually prepared them, created variations and given honest evaluations.

Quinoa, roasted mushroom salad with fresh beets

If you've read the previous blog posts, you know we purchased a nifty Japanese kitchen tool that makes shoestring spirals out of just about any firm vegetable or fruit. As you can see, we whipped out some fresh beet garnish for the salad. It's colorful - obviously - but it was also darned tasty. I'm usually not big fan of beets - they taste like dirt...and not in a good way. But this fresh organic beet was sweet and crunchy, not to mention chock full of nutritional good stuff. We ate about half of this salad for dinner. I had 2/3 of that amount all by myself. What's cool is that my massive double portion contained only about 400 calories, a little fat from toasted almonds and over 20 grams of protein with enough fiber to keep an army hitting the latrine with appropriate regularly.

To me, the very best part of the dish was the roasted mushroom. We de-gilled and cut up some portabella shrooms and tossed them with a part of the dressing, then baked them for about a half hour. The chunks of mushroom were very "meaty" in both texture and flavor. We ate early - around 5:30 - and were both hungry later in the evening. I persuaded LG to whip up a batch of her chai/spinach/date/almond milk smoothies. That brought my total calorie count for an afternoon and evening of satisfying eating to about 500-600 calories, with every bit of protein I need.

I spent yesterday afternoon working on our wine room. The addition of a front wall, a door and cladding for the entire exterior brings the room to near completion. I'll install some insulation in the walls and ceiling and the room should keep our collection at a nice cool, consistent temperature, year round. Working around all those bottles of wonderful flavors made me once again lust for a nice glass of dark red wine. I can wait.

One of my traditions relating to any kind of home improvement project is to commemorate the event with a small physical token by which I'll remember the experience.

Memorial Construction Tokens

The token on the left hand was in honor of yesterday's activities. Yes, it is a duplicate laceration, both procured in the same fashion within a 60 second time frame. It takes precision and care to accomplish such a a feat. The right hand memorial is from a project a month or two ago. LG is beginning to think that every piece of building material comes with red smears already in place and can't be utilized properly without the accompaniment of a couple loud epithets. At least that's what I told her.

A future post will feature the wine room once its moved from the nearly-complete column (lengthy list) to the finished side of the list (much shorter.) In the mean time, we'll be continuing our Engine 2 Diet adventure and passing on the best parts to you.