Garbage, breakfast and dogs

We found a limp, nine-day-old sprig of green garlic at the bottom of the crisper drawer Saturday morning. Hrrrmm. The bulb was still pretty firm, so Patrick chopped it up for our pepper-garlic scape tofu scramble. Then he threw the stalk and leaves in the garbage. I got kind of sentimental about our first bit of CSA waste, so I dug it out of the trash, photographed it, weighed it and threw it away again. It was too light for our crappy plastic kitchen scale to accurately measure, but the wildly divergent readings averaged about an ounce.

By the way, here's the scramble.



Everyone keeps telling me how great garlic scapes are (that they have a mild, fresh, subtle garlic flavor), but I honestly haven't really tasted them in the dishes we've made. I'm the type of cook who puts five cloves of garlic in a dish meant for two servings--I absolutely love it, but I'm starting to think I have some sort of debilitating tolerance for its taste.

Patrick's in the kitchen right now making a garlic scape pasta salad. I'm going to grab a stalk and just eat some of it.

...

Wow. I don't know how I missed that. The tip tastes like garlic. The thick end, I'd call garsparagus. Nice. I wonder if my coworkers would be offended if I snacked on this at my desk like carrots. We'll see who's laughing when the vampires come.

And now for the least photogenic meal ever: pepper-red scallion hot dogs!



I recently started (rarely) eating meat again after seven years of pescatarianism. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" made me change my tack. We're members at the Wedge food coop in Minneapolis. Most of their meat is clean by my standards (local, sustainably raised), so we got these Thousand Hills hot dogs there. Let me tell you, when you're about to eat your first hot dog in seven years, you don't waste time with presentation. How satisfying!