After tennis I was ready to cook lunch, but too hungry to wait for the cooking to be done. I've been out of maple candies since Saturday, so I had a spoonful of maple sugar with a glass of milk to hold me over.
In answer to today's title, I made fried green tomatoes, so if you thought I spent my day performing illegal activities haphazardly, you guessed wrong.
To make these I picked two green tomatoes from my garden, sliced them, covered them with cornmeal, dipped them in an egg/milk mixture, then in breadcrumbs with salt and pepper. I have a tendency to blindly follow recipes because I always assume the author knows more than I do. So when this recipe called for two teaspoons of salt in the breading I paused, scowled, then put the salt in. These tomatoes were grossly over-salted. I tried peeling off one side of the breading and was able to eat a few slices (they would have been delicious if I had stood up to that bully of a recipe writer and went with my instincts), but I felt a little sick from all the salt that was still on them.
Speaking of blindly following things, a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Stephen Budiansky, Math Lessons for Locavores, questioned the reasoning behind eating local. It brought up a few good points, for example, the electricity required to grow a tomato in a greenhouse in New York is comparable to the energy required to ship a tomato from California. Then it gets off track, stating that more energy goes into refrigerating food than shipping it, which is neither here nor there because all food, local or distant, needs to be refrigerated.
A rebuttal, The Myth of the Rabid Locavore, was published by the Huffington Post. The author, Kerry Trueman, points out that Budiansky only focuses on energy costs and ignores other issues involved in food production like use of chemicals and fertilizers, soil erosion, pollution, antibiotic resistance, etc.
While frying briny tomatoes, I had new potatoes roasting in the oven. Ever wondered why they're called "new" potatoes? It's because they're harvested early in the spring before they're fully grown, making them smaller than full-grown potatoes. But, if potatoes are planted late then new potatoes can be harvested throughout the summer.
Once the tomatoes and potatoes were done, and the oven and stove were turned off, Leo felt it was safe for him come out from under the table.
After lunch I had a glass of Bully Hill's Goat White Wine, 7 out of 10.
A busy afternoon and evening left me feeling a touch peckish around 9 o'clock. I warmed up half a veggie burger with some smoked cheddar on it.
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