Our Salad Days

A household innovation story:

My dear, handsome Husbo came home from a working week away with big plans for our fridge. See, while visiting the land of Academia he spent all his lunch money at a cafeteria with a nice salad bar and now he wanted that salad-fixin'-luxury at home. 

So, off to the container store we went this weekend (I didn't even know there were whole stores dedicated to containers until very recently). 

Now we have a big box 'o salad stuff in our fridge from which we can throw together delicious, nutritious salads very easily and quickly (because of course the hassle of eating salad is all the annoying chopping, chopping, forever chopping). 

So far, I like it... we'll see if it helps us eat more salad in the long run. I think it will. 

I share this story in case you too have been harbouring secret-salad-bar-fantasies. It can be so!

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It takes up a whole shelf of the fridge - but it basically stores all our veg in an orderly fashion. The actual veg crisper is full of beer and bubbly water. I don't like keeping plant matter in the crisper drawer because it's not see-thru and therefore too easy to forget about... (but I never forget about beer or bubbly water so that's safe).

Easy to take everything out of the fridge in one smooth motion. Lift with your knees!

See!? Orderly!

Look at all that easily accessible nutrition! (The challenge is to eat it all before it goes bad!)

Salad-makin'

Yum! (That was easy!)

The End

Boogie, It's Cold Outside...

This winter is starting to feel grubby. No longer enjoying it.

Outside my bedroom window an odd snow sculpture's been forming for days. It began to look too much like the Oogie Boogie Man so it had to be toppled this morning - to avoid anymore nightmares before Christmas...

(ba dum dum)

Moving on, below is a recent innovation I've been working on for a few weeks and finally got some good-lookin' results.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce "Sour Nickle", part Pumpernickle, part Sour Dough.

I'm pretty sure it must already exist but I'm very purposely choosing NOT to google it because I always google every idea I have and am always disappointed to find out that someone else has already invented that thing, coined that term, made that corny pun, done there, been that... y'know? So I'm just pretending I invented this for a little while.

(My sour dough starter has been "living" for about three years now and I'm pretty proud of that.)

Anyway, this bread's not burnt... that's just its "pumpery" colour from the cocoa, molasses, and rye flour I put in it.

Another cooking experiment didn't go quite as well...

Well, it tasted great but looked weird...

I put this dark-coloured, "heritage" carrot in my chicken soup and it dyed everything purple. It doesn't look too bad here yet because this was right after I put it in... but later all the onion, noodles, and worst, the chicken took on a blue-purple hue. Not especially appetizing to look at.

My husband actually said later that if he hadn't known I made it, he wouldn't have eaten it!

I should've know that carrot would behave like a beet but I wasn't using my brain... serves me right for trying to fancy-up the simple comfort of chicken-noodle soup!

Looks bad but still tasted "yum".