Random meat--The Comfy Chair!

It goes with our decor, but the real trick is keeping it clean.

Drying my own figs!



Although having my own fig trees in the back yard means I've grown to appreciate raw figs, we simply get too many. We have two trees and we get more fruit every year--and unfortunately, there just aren't too many people we know who also appreciate fresh figs.  That means we end up with a surplus--after all, you can only cram your face with so many figs! And of course, it's a shame to waste food!

This year,  we decided to get a food dehydrator. It's very easy to use--basically, you line the trays with figs and set the temperature, and the next day you have dried figs.  Dried figs keep longer and seem to be a little more popular with people we know than fresh ones. The result of our first try at drying figs are pictured above--they aren't beautiful, but they do taste pretty good. The dehydrator itself just sounds like a fan--that's pretty much what it is.   Now that I've done a batch of dried figs (and have another batch drying away right now), I'm thinking about what's next.  I'll probably make some raisins if we have too many grapes (although that doesn't look like a problem we'll be having this year).  But I'm also thinking about doing dried tomatoes and banana chips. I don't even really like banana chips--but I might do a batch to see how they turn out--and because I can!

Thinking About Things that Are Food, vs. Things You Can Eat

I've been thinking and reading a lot about food, lately.  I'm not dieting, per se, but I've been making changes (like not drinking alcohol, and eliminating a lot of "empty calorie" foods) to what I eat, and because of the way my mind works, once I start to be interested in anything, I think about sharing what I'm thinking and reading about.

Some of what I've been reading lately goes against "conventional wisdom" regarding nutrition and health--books like Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and Sally Fallon and Mary D. Enig's Nourishing Traditions have given me food for thought about what's eating most of us, health-wise. It's made me more aware of how many things we can find in stores and our own kitchens that just wouldn't have been recognized as "food" to our great-grandparents, let alone our distant ancestors. And once we get down to analyzing labels--it gets a little hard for us to see them as food, either.