Tereza Okava

My husband makes a big batch of beans and brown rice on Sundays and takes beans-and-rice every day with whatever appetizing leftover we have on top. Has for the nearly 30 years I know him. If there's nothing, he'll fry an egg and throw it on top.

Years ago when we lived in the US he worked in a place where a food truck came around at lunchtime. Most of the guys he worked with would buy meatball subs and other delicious goodies every day, but a friend decided he was spending too much money with a new baby on the way and that he would also bring lunch. Made two peanut butter sandwiches every day. The man lost over 100 pounds ultimately, because he felt so good he started running road races, and apparently saved big money.

For years I lived in a place where I either had a cafeteria onsite with free food or a convenience store around the corner where it was cheaper to buy food than make it at home. But I also worked for years in a program delivering lunches to the homeless when I lived in Japan and that lunch, what we made every morning and delivered at lunchtime, is probably my favorite lunch to bring if I need to go somewhere, and I could eat it every day-- two rice balls with a boiled egg. The type of rice can vary, the balls can have filling or not, there can be nori (or cabbage, or collards, or spinach) to wrap them in or not, there can be stuff to dip the egg and rice balls in or not, it's all good. And if you have an apple for dessert it's bliss.

Dude Gir, what CAN'T bacon go on???

My favorite eggplant recipe involves bacon. I've put bacon (or at least Bac-Os) in brownies, and it was quite nice. Bacon bits on ice cream also works really well, especially if there is caramel....

I start mine by taking a tuber and putting it in a milk carton, laying down, with a bit of soil, and then flooding it every so often. I do this outside== no mats or lights. if it were cold, I'd probably do it under a grow light in my office.
Just letting it sprout "au naturel" doesn't give you a lot of leaves, just leggy stem.

S Tonin wrote:commercial miso doesn't taste right to me.

This is what my mother in law says!!! hahaha. Different strokes....

I also just want to point out that the smell of dog paws is nothing to disparage!!! I would absolutely consider "smells like dog paws" a selling point, although I suppose some dogs must have smellier feet than others.

my mother always had a garden, but since she worked and was busy taking care of siblings/my bedridden aunt it was often more decorative than productive....

She always says now she can't believe I do so much in my own garden, "you never were interested in plants..." I told her, the thing she doesn't know is that when I was little and she threw me out in the yard to go play my own (as mothers did back in the late 70s and early 80s to get some peace), my favorite place to play as a small kid was the *compost pile*!! I would excavate archaeological remains and search for clues. To this day the smell of a rotten onion doesn't send me gagging but instead has me remembering that yard, where every once in a while a deer would appear under the willow trees that marked the boundary. Good times!

funny this popped up today. my mother in law just made something like 15kg of miso recently, I made the koji with her. I have made miso a number of times (the salt, which I asked about above, never seemed to be a problem) but with the homemade koji it just has a funky stink to it that I don't like. Boughten miso (whether imported or commercially made here) does not have the stink.
I think it's something that grows in the koji here (maybe because we're capturing wild yeast but not off rice straw?) because other people's homemade miso also has "the taste". I also can taste something off in local wine, so I suspect it's yeast. Frankly I would much rather eat the purchased miso, it tastes more like what I ate in Japan (a recurring theme, since the "family japanese food" often has nothing to do with what I learned to cook/eat in Japan. I keep these thoughts to myself, generally, to avoid strife).
I have at least 5kg of homemade miso outside on my porch. I'm using it to pickle vegetables and maybe in some veggie stirfries, but you can bet if I make miso soup I'm using boughten miso. Don't tell my mother in law!

Thank you Judith!
Long beans are such a great crop, aren't they?  I don't know how I lived without them!! They are so hardy and resist the pests that take out my pole beans, they produce huge yields, the season is loooooong and they stand up really well to pickling and long simmering too. Plus they have that tiny taste of asparagus, I think, which is pleasant.

Christopher Weeks wrote:A perpetual pickle crock might work out fine at 80F because you only have to leave the produce in for a day or two once the brine is mature. Anyway I think your 70F is fine, but later in the summer if your cooling system doesn't keep up, it could be a thing to watch out for.

Here when it's above about 73F, I keep stuff in my Sichuan pickle perpetual gig overnight on the counter (11pm to 7AM) , then it has to go in the fridge. This for hard veg like chayote, carrots, and maybe cabbage-- anything else and it takes even less, and will quickly veer into mushy-and-squishy. Things like cucumber pickles, forgetaboutit, I don't even try to do them outside the winter because it's impossible. Even my sourdough bread, during summer it doesn't come out of the fridge.
If it's warm where you are, seek out a cool place in your house and keep a close eye out to avoid disaster.

Last night I made chicken yassa and used up ALL THE FROZEN CARAMELIZED ONIONS!!! (Pardon the all caps but this is a big deal, those onions took up so much space for so long....) threw in the obligatory long beans (garden is still producing though fall is here) and we ate the last of the cabbage curtido from last week.

i also use cloth exclusively. when I have had illness that I'm worried about sharing, I keep my hankies/towel/toothbrush somewhere apart (usually in my office) and go in there to blow my nose and wash my hands after.
For normal sniffles or whatever I have cotton hankerchiefs (bandannas, although it's gotten much harder to find real cotton-- I've recently bought ones that say 100% cotton on them but are definitely part poly). If I have something that involves nose blowing, I use soft washcloths (like for babies). I have a few cotton and a few microfiber, and when they get nasty they go in a bucket with vinegar and water.
I don't feel bad about using toilet paper if need be, but I really prefer to use cloth for this purpose.