pugs

I've mentioned in an earlier post that I visit a little pug puppy named Jack every weekday at noon. Jack makes me laugh. He does a lot of cute puppy things like bounding around after me and clambering all over me and taking great leaps at my face to lick me.

One of the weirdest things I've noticed about Jack, though, is that he seems to have no joints. Whenever I carry him, his front legs splay straight out to the side. And he likes to lie down with his hind legs spread just like the puppy in the photo above. (Which I found on the internet - the photo, that is - and it just goes to show that Jack is not unique in his double-jointedness.)

All I can say is, how does he do that?

croutons

Another really great way to use up stale bread is to make croutons. Years ago I became known in my immediate family as a great crouton maker. I spent a summer working for tree-planting camps - first as a planter in Northern Ontario, and then as an assistant cook in Northern Alberta. The head cook at both camps was a fantastic woman named Elizabeth Evans, who learned to make croutons at the knee of her Italian mama.

Elizabeth made croutons from any kind of bread - stale or not. She cut the bread up into long-ish pieces and then sauteed them in olive oil with chopped garlic until they were well-browned. They were liberally salted when they were done.

When I started playing around with making my own croutons, I stuck to hearty breads that were definitely stale. Lots of olive oil, but generally no garlic. A bit of salt, maybe. I served them in salads. (I was also known for my great salads.)

These days I've been making a lot of croutons again. When my bread gets stale, I break it into large-ish chunks (much bigger than those little cubed croutons you can buy in the grocery store, anyhow), and toss them around in a frying pan with a bunch of olive oil until things are nicely golden. No salt.

These taste AMAZING dipped into soups (which is how I've been eating them, lately).

gazpacho(-ish)

When Mom sent me home on the weekend with the fresh, home-grown produce, it included a bunch of tomatoes. Yum.

I've mentioned in an earlier post that I love to buy this really great rustic, whole wheat bread from the local grocery store. Well, because I'm single and I'm the only one eating it at my place, it often goes stale before it's all gone. Doesn't matter. I love stale bread. There are all sorts of wonderful ways to dress it up and make it edible.

If you break some stale bread into small pieces, and pour a bunch of juicy, chopped tomatoes over top, and then drizzle everything with olive oil and add a dash of salt, you have something that reminds me of the roots of the cold Spanish soup called gazpacho.

I love rustic cooking for its honesty and its practicality. In many parts of the world, grains - whether they be served plain, or in a more processed form such as bread - are precious foods. In other languages, the name of a favorite grain is often synonymous with the word for "food," and you can't consider yourself fed until you've had your daily serving of grain.

In the parts of the world where bread is the favorite way to eat grain, no part of the bread is wasted. (Unlike here in North America, where generations have grown up with the idea that bread = soft, fluffy, squishable white stuff with no soul - and your bread doesn't grow stale, it just starts to grow penicillin.)

Anyhow, I've been enjoying using up all my stale whole wheat bread as the base for a cold (which is really a misnomer, since I never refrigerate my tomatoes - really they're kind of room temperature, I guess) tomato "stew."

ginger squash soup

Mom sent me home this past weekend with a bunch of produce from my parents' garden, as well as a HUGE butternut squash from a farm where Dad keeps some of his bees. In previous years the squash from this farm has been AMAZING, so I was really happy to get it, even though it's not one of my absolute favorite vegetables.

I decided to make some soup, since I like to have a couple of different kinds of soup stored in individual servings in my freezer. I didn't have any leeks (my favorite onion base for soups) on hand, but I did have a mild spanish onion.

1 butternut squash
1 large spanish onion
4 tablespoons dried ginger
1/4 cup olive oil
salt to taste

Peeling the squash is the hardest part. You can avoid peeling the squash by baking it in the oven first, but that takes so long and is messy... I prefer to slice the squash into two-inch-thick rounds, and then cut the tough rind off each round with a paring knife.

After you've peeled the entire squash, cut up the flesh into uniform chunks.

Chop the onion, and saute it in a very large pot with the olive oil. Once the onion is soft, add the ginger and squash chunks, and enough water to cover everything.

Simmer over low heat until the squash is cooked.

Remove from heat and puree in small batches in a blender or food processor. Add salt to taste.

This soup has a LOT of ginger in it. I like a really gingery bite. Adjust the amount of ginger (or leave it out entirely) if you're not as fond of ginger as I am.

porridge

I love eating cooked grains for breakfast. It's an ayurvedic thing, I guess. Hot foods in the morning are supposed to stoke your digestive fire, or agni.

(Although don't tell my Scottish ancestors, but I hate oatmeal. It makes me gag.)

My favorite cooked grain is quinoa, but it's kind of pricey, so I often make do with brown rice. I cook it up into a porridge very similar to the mild, Asian rice porridges that are considered healing or "invalid" foods.

I add some quick-cooking lentils to the porridge to make the protein more complete, and I often add a little bit of curry powder for the healing properties of turmeric, which has become a popular herbal remedy touted for its anti-inflammatory benefits.

I make a large pot of the stuff, and then put it into glass jars in individual servings, to store in the fridge and eat over the course of a week or two.

3 cups brown rice
1 cup lentils (I like Indian black or yellow lentils)
9 cups water
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon curry powder

Put all the ingredients into a large pot, and cook over medium heat until the water begins to boil. Then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 40 minutes. Keep the pot lidded at all times. Stir occasionally. (Figure that one out!)

Take the pot off the heat at the end of the cooking time, and let it stand for five minutes before serving, or storing in containers in the fridge.

driving

One thing I will always be grateful to my ex-boyfriend for is the amount of time during our relationship that I got to spend driving on country roads to get back and forth between my place and his.

Today I made another trip - and it was a gorgeous day for a drive. The fall colours are just starting to turn, and the rolling hills between Toronto and Barrie were amazing.

There are two landscapes that tug at my soul: the flat fields of southwestern Ontario where I grew up, and the hillier version in central Ontario where my ancestors homesteaded.

wi-fi

Until I started blogging a year ago, I was a bit of a technophobe. Correction. Techno-ignoramus. It wasn't so much that I was afraid of technology, I just didn't know how it worked.

There's still a lot I don't know. I don't own an iPod, or a PDA, or a cell phone that takes pictures. (I think my cell phone can text, but I've never tried it. I'm allergic to phone bills that are more than $60 per month.)

I am loving Wi-Fi, though. Here I am, hundreds of miles from my home and my high-speed modem (I'm writing this while visiting my parents), and I'm posting a blog entry.

How cool is that?

I love laptops, too. Laptops with Wi-Fi.

My parents' cat is sitting beside me on the kitchen table, trying to figure out what this alien contraption on her "stage" is.

(I have the sneaking suspicion she's shedding lots of hair into my keyboard, too.)

I wonder what I'll know how to use 20 years from now?