Yoga with Cats

I'm not doing much Food Snobbery blogging lately, but I'm doing lots of yoga with my cats and taking pictures to prove it.  Check it out at www.tumblr.com/blog/yogawithcats  or find me on Instagram at @yogawithcats.  Of course, I can't help but post a few food snobbery pics on there, too.

Billie is the original yogacat, but Bess and Bell and even Hannah Dog join in, too.

I killed baby garlic

I don't usually till my garden beds, but this year my soil was looking a little compacted, so I turned it over with my trusty garden fork. Oops. I killed my baby garlic.

I re-planted some of it, but couldn't resist eating a little to celebrate my first day back in the garden after the longest winter ever. I puréed the baby garlic with olive oil, salt, and a bunch of cilantro. I tastes like springtime in heaven.

French Toast Factory

When life gives you a free loaf of pain de mie, you make a full loaf's worth of French toast for the week!! Freeze it on a cooling rack, then seal away until you pop it in the toaster oven and smother it in maple syrup.

Snack Packs

These snack packs are a lifesaver on busy mornings. It just takes a few minutes to make a bunch of these, and I mix and match flavors so I don't get bored with them during the week. I just pair up any dried fruit, nuts, seeds, sturdy cereal (like shredded wheat), or snacky foods (like wasabi peas or rice crackers). I label them so that everyone can choose their flavors.

This keeps us from buying quite so many packaged snacks, which can get so expensive!

Butter Bean & Arugula Pesto Pasta

Okay, assuming you made the same Cilantro Walnut Pesto that I did this week and have about a cup of it left over, here's what to do:

Cook up some bowtie pasta because it's the cutest.  As soon as it's done, run it under cold water to chill it.

Mix up lots of that pesto with a can of butter beans (I like the Bioitalia organic butter beans from my co-op, but any butter beans would do.  Lima beans or cannellini beans would be good, too).

Combine the beans & pesto with the pasta and a few giant handfuls of fresh arugula.

This pasta & bean salad is super fresh and green as it can be!  And I can tell you from experience that it's even better the next day for breakfast.

Cilantro Walnut Pesto on Snap Peas

I have a little problem with not being able to weed out useful plants from my garden, even when they're interfering with other useful plants.  Last year it was dill.  This year it's cilantro.

So I cut the tops off of a 4x4 garden bed FULL of cilantro and brought it inside to make something with.  Here's what happened:

• I peeled 3 cloves of garlic
• I soaked & washed the bundle of cilantro
• I zested and juiced an orange
• I threw the garlic, 1 cup of walnuts, a handful-sized hunk of Sartori parmesan, the cilantro, orange zest & juice, sea salt, and a long glug of olive oil into the food processor.  

• Then I tasted it and realized I was going to want to eat the entire container of this pesto tonight.  
• So I packed 1 cup of it away in a canning jar in the freezer.

• Then I thought about how good this pesto would be tossed with the snap peas in my fridge.  
• Then I ate a whole lot of snap peas.  

Cocoa Puff Day

Apologies to anyone looking for information about actual Cocoa Puffs (TM).  

In my head, I call today Cocoa Puff Day.  It's first day in spring that I go out into the garden to stir in all the little bunny poops into the soil.

I have mixed feelings about rabbits in my garden.  On one hand, they ate clear through the bark of my brand new honeycrisp apple tree, so I hate them.  On the other hand, they give me free fertilizer every year and seem to wait by my garage so that anytime I come home, they're hopping down the alley looking super cute.  So I love them.  (Cute + free fertilizer) > (Sad, doomed tree)

Do you see the little Cocoa Puffs?  

I've vacillated over the years in my "cleaning up the garden before winter" philosophy.  Some years I clear everything out at the end of fall so that I have nice, clean beds for spring.  I usually feel very accomplished and organized those years.

Other years I'll feel lazy and just leave all the tomato plants and broccoli stems to rot.  The downside to this is that when pulling soft, cold broccoli plants from the garden, it's hard to get a good enough grip to pull them out as their skin slips right off.  And I've watched enough CSI to imagine that this is what it would be like trying to pull a dead body out of the ground.  Ew.



The past few years I've found a happy medium between the two methods: I clear out the beds that get the most sun so that they're ready for early planting in spring.  But I leave some plants remaining in the shadier beds so that the bunnies will snack on my leftover collard stems all winter and leave behind their little poops.  Win, win!

The next step?  Not-so-patiently waiting until it might be safe to plant!  It feels like spring today, but it just snowed two days ago, so I'm trying not to plant any seeds just yet.