The Cleaner Plate Club

…to be ill. Not “what’s in your meat” ill. But, like, seriously ill.

It’s a shame. There’s so much to talk about. There’s President Bush advising people to eat locally grown foods as a creative solution to the world food crisis. There’s Expat’s scathing response to his comments, which is basically “hello? That’d be nice, but thanks to our agricultural policy only 4% of the farms in the U.S. even grow fruits and vegetables and meanwhile you’re pushing to convert even more farmland to corn production to boost dubious ethanol production…” There’s the absurd Cookie Diet (thanks to the Ethicurean for the link). There are parts II and III to the food crisis posts — how we can save money on groceries without resorting to total crap — which I’d really like to return to.

I can’t talk about any of that, though. I just don’t want to think about food at all. I’m sick as a dog. Nausea, abdominal pain, dry heaves, all of it. Some funky bug? Who knows. Actually, they thought it might be my gallbladder — they wanted to yank that sucker out of me, and yesterday morning, I even had an IV stuck in my arm in preparation for surgery — but then the ultrasound showed no stones.

(My gallbladder??? But I eat vegetables! I’m the only one I know who can eat a bowl of beets happily! I don’t go on cookie diets!)

So it’s a mystery. And hopefully it’s just something that clears, miraculously, on its own. Like, today. Voila! Poof! Gone! Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, here I am, not eating food, not writing about food, not thinking about food. I got me some apple juice, and that’s as much as I can handle.

A brief haiku for my body parts on this retch-filled Wednesday:

I like my organs.
I’d prefer to keep them, ‘kay?
(gallbladder too. Please).

Every winter, it feels the same. I hit a certain point — it starts in February most years — when I cease to believe that it will ever be warm again. I just stop believing in summer. My faith gets shattered. The endless gray, the sleet, the wind…I reach a point where that’s all I expect. Ever.

And then. And then. Suddenly my magnolia tree bursts into bloom:

It always seems like some kind of miracle. I suppose it is, really. This year, I’ve got another, more practical, reason to welcome spring: my grocery bill.

Man, those food prices hurt, don’t they? Of course, even as I say this, I feel guilty for whining. Truth is, I’m damned fortunate not to live in any of the dozens of countries who are at risk of upheaval because of rising food prices. But, yeah, sometimes it makes me cringe. Particularly when the cost of organic milk nears $7 a gallon.

(You might wonder who’s doing well amid all of this? It’s probably no surprise: big farm special interests, who are continuing to receive subsidies even though their net income — that’s net, not gross — is at an all-time high).

But back to your grocery bill. Alanna Kellogg over at Blogher has posted a long article filled with worthwhile tips save on food. I really love so many of her ideas — think food, not “groceries;” get the most out of everything you buy; cook more; limit packaging; pay for nutrition, not snacks; eat seasonally.

So many of her points feel so right — common-sense, frugal, humble, on target. Funny, too, how her tips for frugality are the same ones that promote better health.

There’s just one point with which I take issue: she says that most locally produced foods remain more expensive than their grocery-store counterparts. It’s not true — it’s just not true at all — if you’re shopping at farmer’s markets.

For proof, check out Leftover Queen’s analysis on farmers’ market costs vs. grocery store costs. She compares an array of items, and the farmers’ market prices are either less than, or on par with, grocery store costs. Get Rich Slowly did a similar analysis, concluding that “during the peak of the harvest, at least, the produce stand offers the best balance of quality and cost.” Becks and Posh came to the same conclusion. As have others.

There are other advantages to the farmers’ market, too. You get to meet the people who grew your food. You’re not tempted to plunk down your hard-earned cash on what Michael Pollan calls “edible food-like substances” and non-essentials. Plus, you get more of a community; sociologists have found that people have ten times more conversations at farmers’ markets than they do at grocery stores.

Plus, you’ll be helping your local economy, as well; in an era where less then 10 cents of every dollar you spend on food goes to the grower — the rest goes toward corporations involved with distribution, packaging, and reselling — this is a way to give 100% of the cash to the nearby farmers who grew the food.

We’re still a month away from farmers markets in the Northeast. But they’re coming, I know now that they’re really coming, and I can’t wait. Since spring greens are some of the first items that I’ll find, I’ll go armed with this roundup of great recipes from Apartment Therapy. They all feature spring greens, and they look phenomenal.

Perhaps your farmers’ market is in swing? If so, head over. While you’re there, do your own cost-analysis. Let me know what you find out.

Okay, omnivores. Here’s a great twist on an American staple, and a fantastic, foolproof dinnertime option: Expat Chef’s brilliant Meatloaf Florentine, which she posted last fall in honor of National Meatloaf Day. It’s awesome. And it’s easy. And it’s a flexible recipe.

But I don’t want to tell you about the meatloaf yet. First, please indulge me briefly while I tell you about the meat I used, and why I used what I did.

I don’t buy conventional beef anymore. I just can’t do it. Last year, thirty-three million pounds of beef were recalled during 20 different recalls. This year, we witnessed downer cows being forklifted so they could be processed for our food supply, after which the USDA recalled 143 million pounds of beef. All of which might make a person feel safer (I mean, the bad meat is recalled, right?), except that the majority of recalled meat is never recovered and likely eaten. And the downer cow scandal? The processing facility was picked at random by undercover investigators (from the Humane Society, mind you. Not from anyone who’s actually paid to be investigating this stuff). Just doesn’t make me feel reassured.

It’s tough to say ‘no’ to conventional beef, though, for one main reason: the pasture-raised stuff is much more expensive. Like most things, you do get what you pay for — grass-fed beef also has far less overall fat, less saturated fat, more of the good fats like omega-3s and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), and lots more vitamin A, vitamin E, and beta-carotene. The ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s is closer to 1:1, whereas in conventional beef, it’s as much as 20:1— an imbalance that is increasingly linked with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and depression, among other nasty things.

Still, I really can’t swing $12.99 per pound, particularly when I’m working with a recipe that calls for 3 lbs of meat. Thirty-nine dollars worth of meatloaf is just out of the question in our house.

So what to do? I did what so many people have already done on their journey toward Real Food: I went direct to the farmer. At nearby Cricket Creek Farm, pastured ground beef, from a facility that is exceedingly clean and lovely, and from cows that are some of the healthiest I’ve ever seen, goes for $4/lb. More expensive than grocery store? Yes. But in a more affordable range, particularly when the meal is stretched with veggies and lasts many, many days? You betcha’.

Here’s a nice photo of the farm, taken last summer (it’s not nearly so green in New England this time of year):

Besides, the experience of buying the meat was about as heart-warming as it gets. The kids got to pet friendly barnyard cats. They ate some fresh-baked cookies that sell alongside the meats and cheeses. They frolicked outdoors. Charlotte found herself enamored by the pigs:

Whereas Merrie discovered she was something of a chicken whisperer:

It was one of those gorgeous New England spring days, and it was an absolutely lovely way to pass the afternoon. The entire time, I just kept thinking how grateful I was to have a farm like this nearby, and a part of our lives.

Anyhow, the meatloaf. Yes, it’s great, and I like that Expat allows you to “stretch” your meat by sneaking in greens. My version was a variation of what’s on Expat’s site. To keep costs down, I used a can of tomato paste instead of ketchup (her suggestion).

But basically, I took all of these ingredients:

(that would be: 1 medium onion, finely diced; 1 large clove garlic, minced; 1 can tomato paste; 1.5 cups of fresh greens (spinach and chard, mixed), chopped; 1/2 cup of herbs (parsley, mostly, with a little fresh thyme and some dried basil); 2 eggs; 1 cup + 1 TBSP bread crumbs; a half-cup of grated parmesan; 1 tsp kosher sea salt; some black pepper; and a few sprinkles of red pepper flakes)

Then I sauteed the onion and garlic in olive oil first, then I combined it all — everything, all at once — with 3 lbs of grass-fed meat. Yes, with my hands. Which aren’t actually claws, despite how it may appear:

Then I stuck it in two loaf pans in a 350-degree oven for an hour, until my meat thermometer said that the meatloaf had reached 180-degrees:

And guys? It’s awesome. I mean, it’s a really nice meatloaf. Everyone ate it, and Blair kept saying, “what is it about this that’s so good? What’s the secret ingredient?” And I didn’t know the answer — maybe it’s the quality meat, maybe it’s Expat’s great touch, maybe something about the lovely afternoon we’d spent got absorbed right into those ingredients.

The recipe makes two loaves — it would have been plenty for a good-size dinner party; as is, we ate one over two different nights, plus a lunch. Then the rest of it we’ll be adding to other dishes, like pasta sauce, soup, and homemade pizza. I’m guessing that in the end, we’ll have gotten 4 family meals out of it, plus several lunches — not bad for $12 worth of meat.

When we first sat down at the table, Merrie turned her nose up at the meatloaf. “I don’t think I like this,” she said, grumpily, as soon as she saw it.

I ignored that comment, and then about 30 seconds later, I said “Hey, Merrie, this is made with the meat you helped me buy at Cricket Creek.”

Her eyes got bright for a moment, and she asked, “Mom, can we go back there again tomorrow?”

“Soon,” I promised.

Then I tried not to smile when I saw her lift her fork and start to eat.

Over the weekend, I took Merrie down to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. Yes, I know that Rockwell is the scourge of the art world. I know he is dismissed as saccharine, unchallenging, simplified, utterly corny. And I’ll admit that for decades, I myself have ever-so-slightly rolled my eyes every time I see a hokey Rockwell print hanging on a doctor’s wall, or adorning the hallway of some sentimental grandma. Something about him made my teeth hurt.

Still, I knew Merrie would enjoy his pictures, the way they tell a whole story in a single image. I knew she’d enjoy his images of happy children, and the safe, simple world in which they appear to live. So we packed ourselves into the car, armed with coffee (for mom) and a muffin (for daughter), and headed south.

As expected, Merrie dug the paintings. But here’s what surprised me: I was really moved by the visit.

It’s true: Rockwell’s world is relentlessly sweet. It’s a world of white picket fences and big-hearted grannies. It’s a world of backyard baseball games, humble prayer, and drug store soda fountains. The freckled, apple-cheeked kids are always smiling. Adults are all hard-working, earnest. In Rockwell’s world, the worst trouble a child can get into is to ignore a “No Swimming” sign only to be chased, naked, from the pond. In Rockwell’s world, every runaway child will be discovered by a gentle police officer, then taken out for ice cream. It’s Pleasantville, plain and simple.

Insipid? I’d always thought so. But while I was there, I began thinking about the historic context in which he painted — the Great Depression. The rise of Hitler, World War II. I tried to imagine what it would be like to learn for the first time about the horrors of the Holocaust.

I tried explaining some of these events to Merrie. I tried explaining that the world can be dark and depraved, and Rockwell’s freckled faces — even his goofy hobos and heroic returning soldiers — were a kind of antidote to this, a call to Americans to cling to our own goodness even as we lost our own innocence.

It is a difficult thing, explaining Hitler to a 6-year-old. It is equally hard to look at Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, the ones inspired by FDR’s 1941 speech to Congress, and to try to explain that they are just as relevant today as they were in 1943. That even today, people are still hungry, they are still oppressed, they are still fearful, and they can’t always worship as they wish.

I’m frankly embarrassed to admit it. But I was moved.

The next evening, I baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies — I typically make up a batch of cookies, then freeze them and take out a couple at a time for Merrie’s lunches. I’d been reading about natural sweeteners, and so I tried using sucanat — which is sort of like a grainy brown sugar that has more nutrients than most refined stuff — which I had bought in bulk, alongside my organic rolled oats, which I’d also purchased in bulk. The girls were tucked in their beds, the kitchen smelled fabulous, and I was feeling frugal and wholesome, filling up plates with fresh-baked goodness.

And that’s when it hit me — I was doing a Norman Rockwell.

Not just the cookies, either. I mean this whole thing, this whole return-to-the-table, go natural, make-it-pure, buy-from-a-farmer thing. It’s very, very Rockwell-esque. And not only because it looks picturesque to go to a farmer’s market, or to serve a fresh-from-the-oven family dinner. I mean because it requires turning toward goodness, toward something wholesome, in a world that is still, and may always be, dark and depraved.

Sometimes I wonder about what I’m doing here, on this blog, talking about food when there are so many important things to talk about. It’s not like I don’t know that there’s a war on. It’s not like I’m unaware that close to a thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed since I started this blog, or that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, or that that global warming is increasing the virulence of existing diseases and may very likely release some terrifying new diseases, or that today alone close to 22,000 children will die from a preventable cause.

I know all of these things, and you do, too. These things are always looming, always hovering in the shadows. They are there as I write funny stories about getting my kids to eat vegetables, and they are there as we talk about sippy cups and meat recalls and brussels sprouts.

It’s true that I deeply believe that changing how we eat is one tangible thing we can do to change some of the world’s horrors — check out the UN report if you want to learn more about that. We eat over, and over, and over again. We do it many times, every day — it is one of the only things we do with such frequency — and if we can make some of our eating choices with an eye toward how those choices impact the world around us, I do genuinely believe that we can improve that world.

Still, there is something else at work, too. For me, at least, food gives me something I can retreat into, some kind of escape from the world’s many nightmares. Food — real food — is nourishing, food is beautiful, food is grounding, food brings people together. And when I connect my food to the farm where it was grown, it is even more of these things.

I suspect I’m not alone here, that the eat-local movement, the anti-fast food movement reflects some kind of national zeitgeist that is in some way related to the fear and anxiety that exists elsewhere.

Take farmer’s markets, for example. Since 1994, farmers’ markets have increased by 150%; since 2000 alone, they’ve nearly doubled. Go to a farmer’s market, and you’ll wind up chatting with neighbors. Then you’ll take your produce home, and you’ll put on an apron, and you’ll chop and peel and then make a meal that reminds you of one that you once had at grandma’s. And it feels good. Not just right, but good, the way Norman Rockwell’s families appear invariably, undeniably, good.

Invite people over to dinner, and you’ll wind up around a table laughing. Stop by a U-Pick farm for Berries, and your kids’ faces will soon be smeared with berry juice. All of it, so Norman Rockwell.

High-art types be damned. It turns out that Norman and I have more in common than I ever imagined.

If you want to bring a little more Rockwell into your world, but you aren’t quite ready to hang a print on your wall, I offer you my recipe for Norman Rockwell-esque sucanat-based oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. They’re not just tasty. They’re good.

Ingredients:
Half pound (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup sucanat (buy it in bulk or it’s too expensive)
Half-cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 and a half cups unbleached flour
3 cups rolled oats (buy in bulk for best price, least packaging)
1 teaspoon baking soda
Half-teaspoon salt
Half a pound chocolate chips (again…go bulk!)

Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix softened butter, sucanat, and sugar together. Add vanilla and eggs. In separate bowl, combine flour, oats, baking soda, and salt - mix these well. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the butter-egg mix. Blend in chocolate chips. Drop in small spoonfuls onto your baking pan, then Bake in oven for about 9-10 minutes. Note that because you’re using succanat, it’s hard to tell when the cookies are “browned.” You want to remove them when they’re formed, but still soft.

Set up the DVR; King Corn is on PBS this week. Might even be tonight on your local station; check here to find out when it’s showing in your neck of the woods.

The short story behind this film: a couple of cutie-pie Yale grads move to Iowa to plant an acre of corn. As they watch it grow, they learn about American food — what it is, and why it is what it is. The film is more fun than shrill, even if it did tick off the National Corn Growers Association.

Here’s my review, haiku-style:

The story? Not new,
But these fellas make it fresh;
Corn’s king. They’re dumplings.

photo credit: Curt Ellis.

I know, I’m all like “Blah blah blahbity blah blah Monsanto blah blah blahbity Additives blahbity blahbity blah blah More vegetables blahbity blah blah My house is a mess blah blah blah Cook more blah.”

But as long as I’m on a roll….

Over in Britain, they’re phasing out a bunch of food additives that are damaging childrens brains. Apparently the damage to children’s brains caused by these additives (about 5.5 IQ points) is as bad as the damage caused by lead in gasoline before they phased it out. They’re thinking that this move will cut the number of hyperactive children by a third.

Over there, the suspect additives are food colors: tartrazine (E102); quinoline yellow (E104); sunset yellow (E110); carmoisine (E122); ponceau 4R (E124); and allura red (E129).

Don’t recognize them? Don’t feel reassured. Three of the banned additives are approved and widely used in the U.S. — their more familiar names to us Yanks include: FD&C Yellow 5; Yellow 6; and Red #40. Now you recognize ‘em, right?  Sigh.

Just another reminder to blah blah blahbity buy foods that are as whole as possible blah blah blah blah stay away from foods with ingredients that you don’t recognize blahbity blah blah farmers’ markets blah blah nutrition blah blah blah.

Many thanks to Jack from Fork and Bottle for the link.

It’s no secret that I think that Monsanto, the fat-@$s agricultural giant and GMO-maker, is kind of…um… suck-worthy.

They are suck-worthy because they work so hard to deny me information about my food.

They are suck-worthy because they earned almost $4 billion in the first quarter of this year alone and yet they still take time out of their busy schedule to sue small farmers.

They are suck-worthy because they engage in flip-floppery that puts even the most audacious politicians to shame. Like “oh, hey, we believe in local laws!“ and also “local laws! Yeah, that’s a bad idea!“ depending on whatever works for them at the moment.

They are suck-worthy because every time I hear the tune from the Sound of Music that goes How do you solve a problem like Ma-ri-a? How do you catch a cloud and pin it dowwwwn? I now reflexively think How do you solve a problem like Mon-san-to….Taking away our right to know our foooood? Which pretty much ruins a classic show tune for me (and — still — no one is paying me to write the Real Food Rock Opera, which I’m quite certain would be a cult off-Broadway hit).

And they are suck-worthy because I have way burned too many meals because I got distracted reading about all of their nasty deeds.

Yeah, yeah. I know all about what GMOs could do — like vitamin-enriched rice for developing countries. But even if I were convinced that poor farmers in the developing world could be lifted out of poverty and hunger by purchasing patented seeds from a multi-national giant, that’s just not the reality of how GMO’s are being used. Check out this UNESCO map to see the difference between where the technology is planted, and where hunger really lies.

With that as an introduction, I invite you to a little light weekend reading — this great piece in Vanity Fair that might just make you think that I’m being gentle when I use the word “suck-worthy.” (or is “suck-worthy” two words?). While you’re over there, be sure to check out Madonna’s photo spread. It will make you say, “wow, that almost-fifty year old sure has a rockin’ bod” It will also make you wonder, “why does she look like a completely different in every photo she takes? What does she actually look like? And if she showed up at my doorstep today, would I even recognize her?

Happy weekend, my un-suck-worthy pals.

Meet Pliny. Do you have a Pliny in your life? You should have one. Pliny is an aloe plant, which I picked up about a month ago for $4. Pliny had been neglected in the back room of a nearby florist, and he was a sad, shriveled little specimen. I took Pliny home, and nurtured him with a little water and sunlight, and now he’s back on the road to health.

You should get a Pliny, and you should keep it on a sunny windowsill in your kitchen. And then when you burn yourself pulling a pan out of the oven, you can do more than just curse loudly and hope that the children don’t notice. You can snip off an inch of one of Pliny’s spiny leaves, and drop some of the clear aloe gel onto your burn and feel better (some recommend running cool water over the burn first). But it’s got other uses, too; when you get a runny nose and break out in one of those nasty cold sores, rubbing some aloe gel on will help. Got other skin conditions, like psoriasis? Yeah, it’ll help there, too.

Apparently it’s been used by Everybody Who’s Anybody throughout history —from the Ancient Egyptians to Marco Polo to Roman gladiators to King Solomon to Aristotle to Christopher Columbus. Christ himself was embalmed with the help of aloe. Seriously, it shows up in a veritable Who’s Who of Folks That Matter (indeed, I chose the name Pliny after reading that Pliny the Elder created the world’s first anti-perspirant from aloe. All of us should be grateful for that. Besides, it didn’t seem right to name a plant Jesus).

But here’s the thing: nobody owns a patent on the aloe vera plant itself, so there’s not a whole lot of incentive to do controlled, peer-reviewed, double-blinded studies on the plant. As a result, when you start really looking for scientific evidence, you’ll find that there aren’t many scientific studies either way, and many of them are small or otherwise problematic. Though I suspect that if someone did own the patent on the plant, that would be remedied very quickly; as is, plenty of people are patenting everything aloe that they can — transgenic aloe plants, ointments from the plant, methods of purifying extracts from the plant, and many more. But the raw gel from the plant itself? Not much incentive there.

Here’s what I can tell you: I’ve used it with burns, and it makes me feel better. Also: every time I get a cold, I break out in a very pretty cold sore on my right nostril (lovely right?). The aloe gel is not only soothing, it also heals the sore faster than anything else I’ve tried, including prescription ointments.

Plus, I kill plants easily, and this one somehow is managing to thrive in my care. All it needs is sun, and water, and good drainage. You want to make sure the soil is totally dry before watering again, which is great for folks like me who can forget to water plants for endless amounts of time. When I want another, I will simply take one of the leaves off of Pliny, and drop it in another pot filled with succulent mix. And then I will have a Pliny the Elder, and a Pliny the Younger.

And that, friends, is why Pliney is one of my favorite kitchen things.

Perhaps you have a loaf of old cheddar bread sitting on your counter in a ziplock bag, right next to the economy bag of dog rawhides and the box of coffee-filters-that-are-the-wrong-size (anyone need any size 4 unbleached filters?):

Perhaps you bought this bread on a whim when you tasted a sample in the bakery section of your food co-op or grocery store. Perhaps you promptly forgot about it. And perhaps it now has a consistency rather like this:

What to do with this bread? You already have a place to live, so you don’t actually need to use it to build shelter. But it hasn’t begun to grow fuzz yet, and you spent three whole dollars on it, so you hate to throw it away.

Culinate’s got some ideas about what to do. So does Real Simple. WikiHow tells me that I can turn old bread into flowers, but even after I read the article, I still didn’t understand what in the world they were talking about (a photo, guys. Paste a photo. Without it, you’re talking nonsense). Me? I decided to make a Cheddar Bread Pudding. Not a desserty bread pudding, mind you. An entree. A one-dish dinner sort of entree.

Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:
Stale cheddar bread, about half a smallish loaf
Bunch of vegetables (in my case, broccoli and chard), chopped
2 cups milk or milk alternative (I did half whole cows milk, half rice milk)
6 eggs
Quarter tablespoon dried thyme
Few shakes o’ dill
Kosher sea salt
Pepper
1 cup grated cheddar cheese (if you’re making this with plain-old bread, not cheddar bread, I’d add a quarter-cup more).

Directions: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter a baking pan. Cut the crust off of your loaf of bread so that it looks naked and you feel slightly embarassed for it:

Chop bread into chunks, about this much:

(that’s a 2-cup pyrex measuring cup, filled to the tippy top, at least 2.5 cups worth, possibly more).

Set aside the remaining bread for bread crumbs, or freeze it for the next time you make this meal. Or, if you’re like me, you can forget about it until the bread does start growing fuzzy things, at which point you throw it out.

Meanwhile, stir up the eggs:

And steam your veggies (what quantity of veggies, you ask? About this many):

Add your two 2 cups of milk, plus your 1 cup of grated cheese to the eggs, then mix in your steamed-but-not-dripping veggies, as well as your bread crumbs, and your spices. Stir it all up, until the bread is all wet:

Pour into your baking pan, and bake until you can insert a fork into the middle and it comes out clean. For me, this was about 23 minutes:

Isn’t it pretty? But more important: doesn’t placing it on that plaid dishtowel just make it look like I’m a farm wife of sorts? Like I’ve got it all together in a modern-day Ma Ingalls kind of way? Don’t you just want to come over and sit on my front porch rocker and watch my kids play merrily in the yard? Don’t I just seem like I’d serve you homemade lemonade on a tray? And that I’d already have casually placed fresh flowers from the garden on that tray?

Ah, what a dishtowel can do.

Because when you arrive at the door, I might just answer looking something like this:

Perhaps not, but you never know.

But how does this recipe taste? Overall, it was a hit. Very quiche-like, but with a lighter, more souffle-like consistency. Tasty, though I hadn’t added enough salt before baking, so we all had to sprinkle some more on the actual meal. Blair especially loved it. Which is funny, because he actually doesn’t care for quiche (I’ll refrain from the Real Man jokes at this point). After we added all the extra salt (and yes, we use Kosher sea salt, because it brings out happy flavors way more than table salt does I swear it does), he volunteered “Hey, this is really good.” And the kids ate the vegetables without comment. And it was very Waste-Not, so it allowed me to feel both frugal and morally superior to the Me That Might Have Thrown That Same Loaf of Bread Away. That is, until I had to throw out the remaining half-loaf. But never mind that.

And for just a few moments, through the lens of my camera, I got to feel like a really good, Caroline Ingalls-worthy farm wife. That alone is worth it, friends. That alone is worth it.

Just a quick post to point you to the Daily Green’s Thirty Days to a Greener Diet page. From ditching high fructose corn syrup, to picking your own, to following the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list about which fruits and veggies are most important to buy organic, this page is gonna’ help you help you ditch the processed foods, and embrace real food, in a mere month. Nice pictures, good links, and I wish I’d thought of it first.

By the way, today — April 7 — is my favorite holiday of all: No Housework Day!

Wait. Every day is No Housework Day in my house. But maybe it’s a special day for you. To celebrate the occasion? You can send an e-card featuring some hunky fellas. Come on, you know you wanna’.