Ballooning in Napa

Since I insist on calling my blog a "vlog" as if there is a bunch of video content here, I thought I'd add the video I made of our recent balloon ride in Napa. It was so much fun making the video I was really excited to make another one, but filming stuff and taking pictures of xmas and xmas eve made me realize how fortunate I was to have that ballooning footage to work with...most of the time things are just not that exciting or picturesque.



and then I found this...



Probably just as well I didn't watch that BEFORE we went.

Veggie Pr0n

Fact...Ladies in the orient used to make dye from the skin of eggplants, which they then used to stain their teeth gray, because it was thought to be very stylish.

Today I thought I'd FINALLY inoculate and sow my lady peas, which should have been done about two months ago when the fava beans were transplanted into the raised beds freeing up my grow lights. Not sure why I procrastinated so long, but while the peas were soaking in some water and inoculant for a bit I checked the mail and found my box stuffed FULL of big, glossy vegetable pr0n catalogs.

I guess it's that time of year...the time when you start going through these things, dreaming, planning, circling stuff, figuring out how much you can spend, where you'll put it all. I'm trying to be annoyed that these places would so wastefully send me these big, gorgeous color catalogs full of exquisite vegetable (and and fruit and flower) pictures and luscious descriptions claiming each hairloom tomato, french melon hybrid and Thai eggplant is better than the last, especially when this is all available online, but I have to admit I really enjoy getting these stunning catalogs.

I was trying to pick my favorite, but it's hard...

There's Johnny's Selected Seeds, which has a huge selection and allows you to buy seeds by the pound (I figured out from their catalog that 1 pound of lettuce seeds is aprox. 232,000 seeds, which MIGHT be a few more than I need, since so far my bf has only allowed me to plant lettuce in one small windowbox.) Despite the quantity and selection, the pics are small and the descriptions terse. Also, I was excited to see they have sweet potato slips but it seems they can't/won't ship them to California.

Then there is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Their catalog has some HUGE and gorgeous vegetable pictures, and some other funky pictures, too. This place tries to preserve rare and heirloom seeds and they are located in Mansfield, MO. a kind of historic town where they have "Heritage Day" festivals all year round and you can listen to people wearing straw hats and overalls or long dresses and bonnets singing bluegrass and yodeling, when they aren't churning butter or something. I was inspired to buy the book, "Good Bug, Bad Bug
" after seeing it mentioned in their catalog, and the only thing I didn't like was that they don't have a picture of every item. I definitely want to order some stuff from them again, especially the "Moonshadow Hyacinth Bean" which says this in the description: Pick when small and tender, as old pods and dry beans may be poisonous!

Last but not least today was Territorial Seed Company, a place in Oregon which also won't ship sweet potato slips to California but at least they print their catalog on non-glossy paper, and they have an interesting variety of stuff that goes way beyond vegetables, like mushroom growing kits and vegan fertilizer mix. Oh, and they have an INDEX, which is one thing that was quite lacking in the other two catalogs.

All this has served to be quite inspiring to me today. I'm not placing an order (yet) but besides the lady peas I now plan to start germinating a few other things tomorrow (like some pepper seeds I got from Australia a few months ago!)

I'm really missing all that fresh produce we had in August/September, but we should be eating our own lettuce any day now, and it won't be too long before we have fava beans, garlic, and shallots. I wish I'd planned the winter garden better (or hadn't basically forgotten about it for a month or so) but I'm back on track.

Wavy Gravy and the Ultimate Citrus Juicer

I couldn't let the whole month of December go by without updating my blog even once, so to try to get back into the swing of things I'm posting something I realized about myself...

Yesterday I realized I only like ice cream with chunks of stuff in it. Well, or floating in alcohol sometimes maybe. The thing is...I'm vegan and there isn't much of any vegan ice cream with GOOD BIG chunks of stuff in it. I want like, Chunky Monkey, Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, the one with the giant chunks of Heath bar in it, Chubby Hubby with its huge chunks of peanut butter filled pretzels.

Not for me though. Vegans do get a selection of different rice, soy and coconut ice creams but at best they maybe have anemic little flecks of chocolate or microscopic and dissolved bits of cookie that you wouldn't know were there if they weren't on the label. I guess I could make some cookie dough or maybe chop up some vegan sandwich cookies and mix them in myself, but for the most part I'm thinking I probably will eat less ice cream. If this prevents me from just grabbing, from the store or my home freezer, and downing a whole pint of Wavy Gravy in the future (actually, they don't make Wavy Gravy any more...which is nice of them because it makes becoming vegan sooooo much easier) then it's probably a good thing.

Of course they still make tasty vegan ice cream sandwiches, like mocha ice cream between two oatmeal cookies that has all been dipped in chocolate, or the classic Tofuti Cutie. Yum. So I guess it shouldn't be too hard to be vegan and still eat junk.

In other news, I make myself some fresh citrus juice almost every morning. Lately it's pretty much always been grapefruit, but I do use fresh orange juice when making a post-workout smoothie for my bf and I after the gym. Why am I telling you this? Because my juicer, my second cheapie $20 juicer in six months, has really been limping along and annoying me with its design flaws but for x-mas, I got the Breville 800CPXL Die-Cast Stainless-Steel Motorized Citrus Press. That thing is like, the Cadillac of citrus juicers. It's supposed to be so efficient at extracting the juice that you end up with a totally cleaned out peel that is all prepped and ready to use as a bowl for some frozen fruit sorbet. I'm not going to do THAT today, but I AM going to try my new juicer (wooohooooo!) today and then I'll be sure to report back.