I recently received this cookbook in the mail. It is truly awesome for a few reasons if you ever plan to live out of your garden.
1) The recipes uses only one or 2 of anything:
I don't know about you, but since my yard is pretty tiny, I don't have 3 pounds of any one thing lying around. If a recipe calls for 2 carrots, 2 beets, and 2 rutabagas, that is more in line with what is ready to be picked at my place at any one time.
2) The recipes are more method than masterpiece:
Improvising. Improvising is exactly what you need to do when trying to eat what you grow. You might have an awesome recipe you just love, but unless you can adapt it to what you actually have on hand in a tasty way, it does you no good. The book talks about substitutions, and offers similar recipes using different veggies you might have on hand.
3) There are a lot of vegetarian recipes that are NOT COVERED IN CHEESE.
This might not mean a lot to you, but it does to me. I LOVE the fact that there is a maple-balsamic vinegar root vegetable recipe, a coconut-jalapeno butternut squash recipe, and 100 more recipes that are flavorful and reasonable enough in calories and nutrition to use on a daily basis. The number of vegetarian recipes that are put out there that are 1000+ calories per serving are as offensive as they are uncreative and unoriginal. Anyone can take a piece of zucchini, slather it in cheese and spices, and make it taste good. To take vegetables and flavor them in a way that is different and interesting without taking the easy way out and covering them with fat, salt, and cheese shows a great amount of creative effort. I would like to give a big finger wag of shame to those of you (and you know who you are) who throw a cheese covered veggie casserole or lasagna into you cookbook or on to your website and think that is good enough to widen your audience.
The number of unhealthy pizza-tarians out there is offensive and insulting, not to mention confusing to the omnivore population when they are trying to make a suitable menu item for the "other people" tagging along in a group at a restaurant. And no, I am not claiming to be a vegetarian again. My previous dietary post is still accurate. However, subbing mass quantities of cheese in lieu of meat is unacceptable and unhealthy. If you don't want to eat animals that is fine. If you think food is unpalatable unless it is covered with butter and cheese, you shouldn't call yourself a vegetarian, because you don't actually like vegetables. You like cheese and butter. Pick a new title.
Enough with that rant.
4) There are TONS of recipes. This isn't one of those cookbooks with a dozen or so recipes with stories, pictures, and anecdotes filling the rest of the pages. There are so many recipes, it is almost guaranteed that there will be more than a few you will want to immediately try.
I recommend this book to ANYONE AND EVERYONE who gardens, forages, eats seasonally or would just like to start paying less taxes into the machine by becoming more self sufficient or buying less processed foods.
In the name of truly free speech and a free and interesting internet that hopefully never comes to bite me at my place of employment or elsewhere, I try to remain about as anonymous as necessary for the application at hand.
To that end, for those of you who have not become quite as paranoid as I have yet, I would like to point out a few reasons to use a proxy/ VPN and use an alias if your blog contains or may contain anything more than mindless drivel and everyday ho-hum.
1) Go0--gle User data Requests: Notice that the percentage of data requests fully or partially complied with is 93% in the United States, which is the highest percentage on the list as of this post. That tells me that any privacy you do not create for yourself is most certainly not afforded to you nor even considered if you live in the US.
2) Go0---glee Search logs: So you say to yourself: Well, what information could they really hand out anyway. Well, you may want to know that unlike many search engines that save previous searches via cookies on your computer, where you can delete them at will, the good old people at the Goog store the time, date, IP address and search data on their computers where they can recall the information with precise detail for up to 9 months, and in less detail after that (Until they change their TOS).
How creepy is that? And that's when they aren't cruising down the street taking pictures of your house and neighborhood.
The information is tied to your email or blogger account, so any searching you do while logged in is both tied to you and compiled in the database. Don't worry, if there was a request for data about your internet life, there is only a 93% chance Goog will hand over the information.
With stats like that, one can almost be certain the requests are not all tied to warrants like they should be.
3) If you aren't anonymous, surprise, YOU AREN'T ANONYMOUS! You would be shocked at how many people use similar monikers for their everyday lives as they do for their "secretly complaining about their husband account" or whatever. Just about anyone with enough time on their hands can put the pieces together and read all you dirty little secrets. I know I read them!
Protect yourself, your friends, and you public image. What passes for free speech today may have you placed in a giant electronic file folder tomorrow.
Admittedly, I did not know there was going to be an upcoming Minecon. I don't live near close enough to go anyway. Mojang, WHY, I ask, would the most open and free spirited game on the planet, with possibly the most reasonable and unoffensive or privacy invasive TOS I have ever read, have it's Con at DISNEYLAND. Disney is a copyright hoarding, lawsuit-mongering, child-brainwashing machine of a company, that rolls down the road of entertainment, attempting to absorb anything of trend and value and pervert it into its own brand of escape-proof and over marketed, over trademarked entertainment.
I started playing Minecraft perhaps about 6 months ago, after getting the impression that EVERYONE on the bitcoin forums was playing, and not understanding the true genius and potential of the game. Everyone else seemed addicted, but the screenshots seemed so cheesy. There had to be more to the game than was visible from the surface.
Now that I have given it a fair chance, I really feel that it is one of the best games ever in terms of letting you express your inner creativity, inventiveness, and personality, all while scaring the poop out of you with creepy noises that exceed the graphics by about 100 fold. There is plenty of hoarding for the hoarders, and no backlog of missions on your to do list preventing you from having fun in life.
I would like to add a mini-boo to Threadless.com They are running a contest, with the top 3 artists winning a trip to Minecon. Aside from the Disney factor, I have vowed never to travel via airplane again anyway because of the TSA.
That aside: Threadless, why does the winner win ONE ticket and airfare to Minecon? Don't most contests let you win A PAIR of tickets? Are you assuming people who play Minecraft have no girlfriend, boyfriend, or anyone that would be pissed if you won and went to Paris by yourself? I understand intercontinental airfare is expensive, but alternatively you could have offered fewer winners that could have brought their significant other instead of facing their wrath.
Boo. You just lost 2 points.
I suppose you can have one back for this though.
While still on the topic of Minecraft, I just gotta get me one of these necklaces.
