This blogger is in a state of blogging indecision.

I was informed by a very trusted source that I have showed up on the legal radar of a certain industrial food giant with a long litigious history. Believe it or not, I don't have the funds to match them in court. While an official cease and desist order has not been filed, it has made me painfully aware that my message is getting out. Just to the wrong people first.

Someone I turn to regularly for sage advice when I'm dealing with just about anything out of my scope offered this morsel of wisdom: "Fuck 'em. It will hurt them more than you if they shut you down". I agree. But this has required a lot of soul searching. Maybe some balls searching, too.

I'm not certain that I am done searching, but here's a brief update on my humble homestead:

• I made the ultimatum with my wonderful wife that any junk food (save for milk chocolate once a month) must be made in-house with quality ingredients. I am munching on a from-scratch sugar cookie as we speak.
• Our 2011 garden was a booming success and is now kind of a disappointing fizzle. We took squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and heirloom cherry tomatoes in droves. We gave away as much as we kept. Then it all kind of went to hell. The oppressive heat made keeping water on the garden nearly impossible and made weeding a far less appealing chore. We still have peppers in abundance and our brandywine tomatoes should produce some. The cherry tomatoes are still pretty strong. I am still giving the musk melon the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not betting money that they will produce. Overall, Garden 2011 was grossly more successful than Garden 2010. I'm marking this in the win column.
• Preserving is the new fad of the house. I canned home grown dill pickles again this year for Punkin'. Also I pickled some home grown sweet banana peppers for pizza making this winter. We bought a box of ding and dent West Virginia grown peaches. Wife and I dispatched those into a ton of half-pint preserves. I lost count. Really I did. Who knew that a single peach makes ALMOST a half-pint of preserves. Still on the docket is strawberry jam (maybe freezer jam) and probably some canned tomatoes.
• Another green step that we have been forced to make is living without air conditioning. Ours has been dying for years. As our home has casement style windows, a new unit runs in the neighborhood of the national debt. This year, we just turned it off. Here's how it went: HELL-LIKE! Don't do it! If you can help it, don't do it!

Because the FDA protects us. Right?

FDA finally admits chicken meat contains cancer-causing arsenic (but keep eating it, yo!)

My first denunciation of shit food  came unrighteously. It was years ago when I stood firmly in my home and demanded that I would not eat Macaroni and Cheese out of that damnable box anymore. My wife can live on the stuff. I was foundered in it. It's cheap, easy, and convenient. It felt like we ate it as a side three nights a week and as a lunch equally as often. I was done with it. I knew that it couldn't be doing my health any favors and I was so damn sick of even looking at it. It led to a lot of domestic strife. The strife really did not end. Occasionally I would find an empty blue box in the garbage. I would grill her about her gastronomical infidelity. There would be a small quarrel and I always came out feeling like the dickface in the matter. But I stuck to my guns.

Then Kroger put this stuff on sale.

I don't yet know how I feel about it. It's been about 7 years since I boycotted boxed mac and cheese. I no longer fly into a homicidal rage when I see it prepared. I read labels so I can appreciate that the Annie's variety is probably healthier to put in my body as it's ingredients list doesn't look like an inventory of a collegiate chemistry lab. It tastes almost exactly like the crafty name brand. So we do have it, occasionally, as a side dish now. Everything in moderation, including moderation, right?

I guess this is how we reach Joe Sixpack? Cleverly replace his favorite shit food addictions with alternatives that look and taste the same? I don't know that I agree with the philosophy, but it makes things a bit less tense in my house.

Sandwiches are my kind of grub. I'll eat damn near anything if it's wedged between two slices of bread. In fact, bread makes up a HUGE portion of my diet. The past year and a half has brought major changes to the way my family eats. In baby steps. Bread was a impenetrable steel fortress. We MUST have bread. But bread has industrialized chemicals in it. Don't believe me? Just look for yourself:

Whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, high fructose corn syrup, contains 2% of less of: soybean oil, salt, molasses, yeast, mono and diglycerides, exthoxylated mono and diglycerides, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide), datem, calcium sulfate, vinegar, yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate), extracts of malted barley and corn, dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, calcium propionate (to retain freshness).

This is the ingredient list for a popular brand of bread straight from the supermarket shelf. We'll call it Blunderbread. When was the last time you went out to the garden and ate dicalcium phosphate off the vine? And look! There's our old friend high fructose corn syrup! See my predicament?

So what's a guy to do? Bake my own bread? Are you crazy? Nobody does that shit anymore. Right?

After a long talk with my loving wife explaining the problem and trying to find a non-hypocritical solution to get my bread fix, she agreed to the unthinkable. She would bake all of the sandwich bread consumed in our house. And she has. Since November, 100% of our loafed bread has been produced by my wife and daughter. Roughly two loaves a week. It's all made by hand, from scratch with organic unbleached flours. She's recently even got the knack for making whole wheat bread. I am ecstatic. Scratch made bread tastes so much better. Hell, it tastes. It must be healthier. It can be done. Really, it can. Bread is such a convenience food. But at the cost of nutrition, industrialization, and most important (to me, at least), taste.

We are still occasionally buying specific purpose breads. Namely burger/hot dog buns. However, my genius love of my life crafted buns in the form of homemade soft pretzels. Please follow me. Bacon cheddar burgers (grass fed, free range, organic) on homemade pretzel buns. This was one of the most amazing meals of my entire fucking life. I had the 'Itis immediately after. Took fifteen minutes to sleep it off. It was a truly spiritual experience.

Go bake bread.

The lastest candidate that Netflix has offered up for my viewing pleasure is titled To Market To Market To Buy A Fat Pig.
To Market details the journeys of Rick Sebak as he visits some of Americas best farmers and city markets and the people that bring goods to sell. He spends a lot of time talking to the people manning booths and visiting the farms that stock the shelves of the market. It really focuses on the sense of community and family that creates a unique shopping experience at these types of places. I identified with much of the theme of the film. Shopping at a market, Charleston's Capitol Market for example, feels different than Kroger's or Foodland. You get to know who you're buying your food from. And in the summer months, the difference in quality is astounding. When the outdoor market is in full swing, you benefit from the competition of the growers. They race to bring you the highest quality produce at prices lower than the other guy in the next booth. I really didn't learn much from this film but I certainly appreciated it. It spoke of all of the reasons why I love shopping at farmers markets and I felt it adequately portrayed what makes them special.

Definitely a feel good piece of film.

Emergency! Pathogen New to Science Found in Roundup Ready GM Crops?

After watching Food, Inc I really was motivated to change how I live. I am seriously lacking motivation right now, even though I'm doing much better since my holiday decline. I'm just not excited about it. So I set out on Netflix to find that next Food, Inc. My choices are sorely limited, frankly, but I found a couple of contenders. This weeks flick is called Food Matters.

There is a great message here. There are some really bright people with a really great message. But you have to wade past the vegetarian/raw foods propaganda to get to it. At one hour and seventeen minutes, the film could nearly be divided into three unequal parts: 1) Bashing big medicine (YAY!), 2) Bashing Americans diets and industrialized foods (YAY!), and 3) Explaining why you'll go to hell for eating meat. Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad. But I, like a lot of other people, hear just those words when the vegetarian zealots come to give us our sermon. I do believe that most avid omnivores are just tired of being brow beaten and messages involving food and nutrition could be better communicated without telling us how wrong we are. Maybe I'm biased because I adore great meats, but humans are scientifically classified as omnivores. Meaning we're not wrong for loving animal carcass. We may be wrong for eating obscene quantities of deep fried, fat-laden, heavily processed animal carcasses. I am being more aware of where my meat comes from these days and how much of it I shovel in my pie hole.

The other thing that this film seems to miss is that people want to eat food that tastes good. Spirulina, by and large, does not taste good. It's not a meal. You can't sit with your family over a glass of spirulina and recap where the day took you. Eating well does not have to taste terrible. It's not about "health food" but it is about healthy food. This is a point that the film touches on. Depletion of nutrients in the soil from industrial, unnatural overfarming leads to reduced crops that cannot fend off disease on their own. So farmers pump the soil with chemical nutrients. Plants are sprayed with chemicals to keep pests and disease from claiming them. All of that shit ends up in our bodies. I honestly do not know just how efficient or inscrutable our nations bureaucracy is for determining what is "Certified Organic", but I will try to believe that by buying foods with this label, I am at least helping encourage farmers to not treat their crops in this manner. I also buy local organic as much as absolutely possible and have my own organic garden. I would like to think that my intake of poison has drastically decreased over the last two years.

My final word here is that this is a decent flick with some good information. It talks ad infinitum about the need for less prescriptions and more nutrition. About the healing power of food and vitamins. About the evils of industrialized, processed foods. And about the culture of poor health that we've all been lulled into being a part of. It is not the inspiration that Food, Inc. was, but Food, Inc. was a truly visionary, remarkable film. I was nearly turned off by the non-science that is presented in the film, but its worth the time spent. Give it a look.

Oh yeah, I really dig the theme song too!

Please click this link if you've enjoyed fast food recently.

I'm not going to say that I don't indulge on the run in some grease-bomb drive through activity. It happens. It happens to everyone. But before you take that bite, do you ever stop to acknowledge what you're about to ingest? And that doesn't just go for the worst of the worst comestibles. I know I am guilty of going on eating autopilot. That's the reason that I can only have good foods in my house. See, good food usually isn't as convenient as shit food. There is an argument for raw plain veggies and fruits but it's hard for them to compete with HFCS laden, individually wrapped, chemically preserved, industrially processed shit food. Why? Because we've engineered this shit to be convenient. And taste good? Well, that's debatable. There are people who think that we've fooled ourselves into believing shit food is tasty. Some believe that we've evolved to enjoy the taste of industrially processed chemical. Regardless, most of us do have a dark side of our palette for shit food. And because shit food is easy to prepare, cheap to buy, and highly profitable to the corporations, everyone eats it. The only downside is potentially what it does to our insides and, hell, that's not all that important. Right?

My good friend Erin posted this on Facebook and it speaks volumes to me.

I'm over my Jim Bakker moment.

What the fuck are we thinking? Cheese. It's fucking cheese. That's all. You wanna know who ruined cheese and, somewhat dairy, for every US citizen?

This Asshole!

It's humbling.

When you eat crow, it doesn't much matter if it's organic, cage free, and without hormones. It always tastes like shit.

I have dreaded and avoided this blog as if it were plagued by the worst contagious hells the human mind could conjure. The only thing I've had to blog about as of late is how I cannot seem to practice what I preach. Sure, I can sit here and wax on about how busy the holidays are and when money is tight, garbage foods are cheap. And it would all be true. But I am still a hypocrite. And I hate it.

When you spend an entire spring and summer season eating as near to an entirely organic, locally produced diet as our region allows, funny things happen when you go back to gorging on shit food. You gain weight at an alarming rate? Check. About 10 pounds in 3 months. Your digestive system hates you. Always. Especially at 3am? Check. I have been so sick that I can't imagine how I gained the 10 fucking pounds.  Insomnia owns your ass? Check. If I wasn't up all night stress testing our plumbing and septic technologies, I was up looking at pointless websites, or reading comics that would be there tomorrow, or watching the most inane things on NetFlix. I don't know if it was the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS from here on) or some other chemical nonsense that has no business in my body, but I know I wasn't sleeping. And I'm still not. I cannot accept that this is all coincidental. This is my body revolting against my habits. It was given the good life then thrown back to the shit pile.

It's not all been $5 pizzas and terrible drive through tacos.

My wonderful wife has been making 100% of our sandwich bread since just after Thanksgiving. Making a grilled cheese sandwich from this and some great colby jack and real butter was a wonderful idea.

Thanksgiving brought us a family meal that was awesome as always.

Christmas Eve was truly amazing. Our extended family did something for us that I hadn't experienced since high school. They made The Feast of Seven Fishes, an Italian Christmas tradition that I have enjoyed nearly all of my life until moving to a place where Italian heritage is strangely absent. It was an amazing meal and it really felt like home. I can't thank them enough.

On this holiday shrine of comestibles, I want to take this moment to wish everyone a happy day of thanks. Blogging will resume soon.
Thanks for hanging tight with me.
Corey

My garden is done for the year. All in all, I think it was an overwhelming success. I grew 100% organic vegetables. No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or genetic fucking around. Just plants, water, and various vegetarian animal shit. It served us well. We had tomatoes for the bulk of the late summer. We had peppers we didn't entirely know what to do with. We ate a smattering of what surely was the broccoli of the gods. We claimed some zucchini and squash for the grill. We even got a jar of pickles out of there.
I learned some hard lessons.

Soil prep never stops. I don't think a pet cow can shit enough in a year to turn bad soil into great soil. But I am confident that I will get there eventually.

Plant early. I took a risk. Every old-timer in the neighborhood thought that I was crazy putting my wee plants in the ground in early May. Whatever. I got harvest way earlier than they did. And really, what's the worst that can happen? They all die from frost damage and I have to replant. Pffffft. If you don't like me planting my garden pre-June, hide and watch. I still think this is a great idea with some acceptable risk.

Composting is harder than it should be. Containers, aerating, the unholy stench, doing ratios of green/brown waste, drainage, and pH all suck! But I believe it's necessary. I know that it has to get easier as we go along.

Check pH often. I got Blossom End Rot that entirely wiped through all of my squash. Killed every plant in under a week. BER has several contributing factors and apparently one of them is bad luck, which I have for days. But ammonia content in the soil is one that can be remedied.

I am planting a plot twice as big next year with more variety. I kinda dig this organic gardening for food thing.

I often talk a lot about what I don't eat. Occasionally I'll share what I do eat. But I think it's come time to share what I truly love to eat. The foods that inspire passion in me. The foods that make life truly marvelous and amazing. The foods that make me want to write a blog.
Anyway, this is just a short list of what's on my mind right now.
My favorite:
Vegetable - Fresh heirloom tomatoes. I know that they are technically a fruit, but that spot is already taken.
Fish - Toro Sashimi. This fatty belly meat of the tuna comes in season near my birthday. It literally melts on your tongue.
Soup - My wife's chicken noodle. It's essentially my own recipe, but there's something special about it. It tastes of warmth, love, caring. When you're sick you get the undertones of concern and hope. This is more than a meal. It's an expression of what home really is.
Fruit - Pawpaw. The pawpaw is a most curious fruit. It is indigenous and native to the hills of West Virginia. It tastes familiarly of apple, banana, mango, and some say pear. But it's still so exotic. I grew up eating them and its been so long since I've had one. If I could pay a fortune for one, I would.
Breakfast - Most develop their love or loathing of eating cold pizza for a morning meal in college. I think I developed my taste for it in elementary school. Chewing cold pizza allows time for reflection on the evening before. Which brings me to...
Beer - Beer is the nectar of the gods. Beer is there for you. In good times and bad. It refreshes you when you're thirsty and it can drown out the pain of a bad day. Beer is glorious and my flavor of choice for some time now has been Newcastle brown ale. Not as heavy as a stout, but plenty of bitter to chase away the domestic piss drinkers.
Charleston Area Restaurant - This is a tie at the moment. Murad's has been a favorite for a long time. Great pub food all made in house and a great wait staff. It's completely non-pretentious atmosphere and menu  is art in simplicity
The Vandalia Grill is a fairly recently found treasure. I love the atmosphere. The menu is creative and modestly priced. The preparation is spot on. I totally dig this place!
Sandwich - Toasted artisan bread, thick-sliced heirloom tomato, mayonnaise, salt and pepper. I've always said that if I was a restaurateur this would be the centerpiece of my menu. It's proof positive that spectacular ingredients make for spectacular results.
Dessert - Key Lime Pie. There can be no other.

These are just a few of my favorites. I'm sure I will revisit this topic from time to time. Please, share what foods you can't get enough of.

Dragon*Con.
It's the dork Mecca of the east coast. Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, comic fans, vampires of all sorts, gamers, goths, BDSM'ers, and everyone and everything else under the sun is represented. Put 60,000 of them into a blender, add copious amounts of booze and drugs, remove all morality and dignity and set them upon downtown Atlanta. That's the best description of Dcon I can give.

It's Sodom and Gamorrah with lightsabers.

The stories I could tell here would make a sailor repent, but we're here to talk about food. Right? Right? Who's with me? Well.. I'm going to talk food anyway.

There's something that I learned a long time ago about convention survival. Hot dogs are $6, sodas are $5. If you want to pay to eat, you're going to pay a lot. I treat going to a con much like camping. I pack in breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and drinks. I usually do eat my dinners in a nice sit down restaurant. So we took with us poptarts, cold cereal, oatmeal for the coffee maker, and plenty of sandwich fixin's. We took very little soda and tons of bottled water. And booze. We took more booze than anything else. Nothing exciting there at all. But Max Lager's was exciting indeed.

Max Lager's is a wood fired grill and brewpub at the corner of Peachtree St and West Peachtree. I shit you not. We decided on Max's because we were standing on the street corner across from it arguing on where to dine. We noticed it and gave it a go. The first night, I ate grilled trout topped with roasted pecans. It was served with black truffle grits and wild mushrooms with spinach. Fucking phenomenal! It was the best food I had eaten in a restaurant in YEARS! Everything was fresh and prepared to absolute perfection. My wife's bacon bison cheeseburger was also a work of art, but it didn't hold a candle to the trout. The in-house brew I had to accompany my fish was an american brown ale. Perfect bitterness, plenty of body. More flavor than any American dark beer I'd tasted in some time. Spectacular meal. So we went back the next night!

I'm climbing onto my soapbox.

Where do you get your eggs? Wal*Mart? Some other faceless corporate food empire? I know where I get my eggs. Every week Breezy Knoll Farms in Gap Mills, West Virginia provides me with one dozen of the most perfect, enormous, ultra-fresh, vegetarian fed, truly free range chicken eggs I have ever had the delight of  shoveling down my gullet. If I ever get sick from eggs they sell me, I can drive down there and beat the ever loving shit out of someone. More likely they would apologize all over themselves and happily refund my paltry $3 for the bad carton (they even recycle their own cartons). Can you do that? It takes something fairly special to fuck up one of natures perfect foods. Eggs are packed with protein and some yummy bad fats all encapsulated in protective nearly impenetrable hard white shell. It took the laziness and greed of corporate foods to find a way to give us disease from this delicious bounty. There are 2,000 of us seriously ill with salmonella RIGHT NOW because they don't have the luxury of keeping their egg farmer honest with threats of physical violence.

It's past time that I pimp a film that changed my life. Food Inc is the movie that pushed this lifestyle shift into overdrive. It is not a grotesque look at the meat industry trying to sway you to veganism. It is not a commie film telling you to live on a commune and save the environment. It is a very clever film that did it's homework on corporate foods. And if you care about your body, your children's bodies, it will scare the fuck out of you.

So work sends me off to Chicago for a few days on a quest for big sales and lots of hand shaking. They do this once in a while. I have to dress up and speak well, in exchange, myself and my family get to see cities we normally wouldn't. Chicago has so much to offer a foodie. I focused on three things. A steak, a deep dish, and a hot dog. All three are foods that Chi-Town is renowned for.

The Steak
It didn't happen. Money, time, exhaustion from a long day, and other factors all kept me out of the steakhouse. Chicago is known for the stockyards there and the superior steaks that come from them. Beef is manna from the heavens, but it wasn't in the cards. We did, however, eat at an Indian diner called Chutney Joe's. They assured me it was the only location, but it had that franchise feel. Whatever. The lamb was good, the naan was exceptional, the rice pudding was too small, but tasty. The prices were on par with McDonalds garbage. It was a win!

The Dog
From Wikipedia: A Chicago-style hot dog is a steamed or water-simmered, kosher-style, all-beef frankfurter^[1][3] on a poppy seed bun,^[4] originating from the city of Chicago, Illinois. The hot dog is topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, sweet pickle relish (often a dyed neon-green variety, sometimes called piccalilli^[5]), a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.
Yup. It's all of that and a bag of chips. My wife was kind enough to trek 5 blocks while I was working to bring me back this Frankenstein of a frankfurter. They really don't travel well. With all that shit atop them, they fall apart and crumble rather easily and then everything falls off. Or maybe they just look like that all the time. I ate mine with a fork and knife. It was really, really good. Not the hot dog experience I'm used to. Definitely more of a deli sandwich experience. It was awesome.


The Pie
I have had deep dish pizza before. We had a Pizzeria Uno's franchise locally and it was pretty good stuff. We ate at Lou Manalti's, a place that finds it's way to the Travel Channel and Food Network regularly. It was close to the hotel and had a great reputation. I understand why. It was terrific. The crust was crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and buttery. The sausage could've used some more pizazz, but the mozzarella was fresh and the tomatoes were phenomenal. I'm also fairly certain that Buddy Guy was sitting at the next table just 5 feet from me. Maybe his aura seasoned my meal. No matter, I want to go back.


Chicago is foodie town. I want to spend a week eating on it. So much to experience and so little time.

I FUCKING HATE WAL*MART!!


Now that we got that out of the way, I'll tell you why. I so wish there was some noble GeoSocioPolitical reason.

There's not.

It has nothing to do with how they treat their employees. Yeah, I'm certain it blows rotting goat dick to work there. There's a lot worse jobs for worse pay out there, I assure you. I've worked a couple of them. WalMart would've been a few steps up from what I've done for a paycheck. WalMart employs some people that just could not work anywhere else. This is benevolent. They have systematically made it so easy to mindlessly work for them, nearly every warm body can do it. I applaud that effort.

WalMart is accessible and convenient in todays 24/7 society. It's comforting to know that if I run out of rifle shells AND shit-paper at 3am, WalMart has my back. There are other 24 hour locations, but none with such a varying degree of goods. This has its drawbacks, however. If you choose to shop at 3am when the store is 20% less suck than normal, they will punish you by closing large portions of the store to clean the floors. You will feel like a rat in a maze. Sorry. Shop during peak hours or feel the wrath of the Floor Lords.

WalMarts give money hand over fist to educational institutions. It's true. But it's kinda like they're buying good press. Oh well, it's a mean to an end.

WalMart, for being such an ENORMOUS company, is fairly environmentally conscious. They have box recycling within the logistics of their shipping and supplying. They carry many "green" and organic products. They almost always offer recycling facilities onsite for customer use. Frankly, WalMart may be the only source of environmentally friendly education that some of their customers will ever get. Chalk this one up as a win.

I hate them because when I'm there I loathe myself and all of humanity. I want the entire planet to burn to ash the moment I walk through the doors. This temple of convenience and indulgence brings out every terrible, disgusting demon that us as homo sapiens have to offer. From the assholes in the parking lot to the degrading experience that is checking out, the store is a pox on the world.

I stopped shopping there when I realized that, while within WalMart's confines, I treat my family different. I am shorter. Quicker to anger. I realized that I was compromising on goods that I normally buy because WalMart no longer carries them. I was settling for inferior, chemical grade foods because that's what WalMart says we should be eating. I was buying clothing that I normally wouldn't wear and I looked like EVERYONE ELSE because we all fucking shop at WalMart. WalMart, at one time, was great. It was a manifestation of freedom. I could buy that paintball gun at midnight with the intent to get drunk and shoot up some poor asshole's garbage cans. Somewhere along the way, they did some dark sorcery and turned that freedom into chains. People believe that they must shop there. That it's normal to feel that way. To compromise your integrity of goods and the quality of food. I get dirty looks when I say things like, "I wouldn't know. I haven't been to WalMart in months".

Look. I'm not calling anyone out as a bad person because they shop there. Just ask yourself when the last time you were truly happy standing in the infinitely long checkout to buy a bunch of shit you really don't need or want. I'm probably preaching to the choir here. I know that. So I ask the handful of readers that I have a favor. If you enjoyed this post and agree with me, pass it along. Send it to someone you know who is a WalMart regular. I can take the hate mail. I promise.

I don't want to shut down one of the single most powerful economic forces in our country. I just want them, and their customers, to give a fuck about each other.

I'm always a busy fella. I stay that way. I always say that I'm going to slow down and enjoy what I have, but it's just not my nature. I can't do it. July through the end of August is always hell on earth for me. The day job is as busy as it can possibly be.  The convention season starts winding up. The out of town family starts  making noise for us to come visit. Everything always seems to hit all at once.
This is when laziness sets in. Wendy's or Burger King beckons for the quick, easy, cheap meal. This year my wife and I are taking our first grown-up adult vacation together since we had our daughter. Due to some unforeseen events, our budgeting for this adventure got off track. This actually works in our favor. By examining every single dollar we spend, we are forced to cook at home. Good food, even unintentionally, is still good food.

Yesterday I pulled a total of 5 tomatoes, 7 Anaheim chilies, 4 green bell peppers out of my garden. It was the first time that I needed a bag to haul in the bounty. I was proud. This was food that I grew without chemicals at my home for my family. This was my penultimate stab at a great big "Fuck you!" to industrialized food. And it worked. One of my crazy, hair-brained schemes actually paid off. It's a lot of hard work raising a garden organically. A friend asked, "How do you keep the weeds out?". Well, you weed or hoe almost every single day. We don't use any kind of weed inhibitor or chemical based plant foods. It's just elbow grease and animal shit. Vegetarian chicken and bovine to be exact. Thus far, I figure we're still in the hole monetarily but things are looking promising and it felt good to bring food into the house.

As for what's happening in the rest of the garden, not a lot. I did take king zucchini out. He tasted okay. I grabbed him a little late. The seeds were big and tough. We now have another white zuke growing in his stead. I don't get why they're white. It's a genetic mutation and it's rare. I understand that. But can I please just have one green one?

I have taken two squash. They were yummy on the grill. I took 8 pickling cucumbers and jarred them. I got one good meals worth of broccoli and not much since. I have to be doing something wrong there. The handful of red onions seem to be doing awesome.

The modicum of success we have enjoyed has inspired us to expand next year to nearly double the length. It will be a tremendous amount of work, but we want to do corn, carrots, asparagus, and some leafy greens. Also, we intend to grow sunchokes next in 2011. We will definitely plant garlic in the fall. There are lots of other possibilities rattling around my skull.

E-I-E-I-Oh!