Hair Dye. the Fall Garden, and the Cruel March of Time

Note to readers: Many of you contacted me earlier today to say several photos on this post were blacked out. Maybe Blogger thinks it obscene to publish photos of a young person alongside her older self? Whatever. I hope the photos are there this time around. Thanks for letting me know. Mary K.

The corn is dead, rattling in the breeze. That sunflower on the left doesn't look too chipper either.
The birds have about finished it off.

Fall is a tough. I spend so much time in the garden that I identify with its cycles—not so different from human cycles, except the garden is on fast forward. You plant the seeds and get all excited when they emerge from the warming soil. You water and coax and soon they burst forth with flowers, roots, fruits, vegetables. They're good for a few months, but then senescence—natural aging and decline—takes over and it's quickly downhill. You can prop em up, water, fertilize and admire. But nothing stops the process. Before long, they'll form an involuntary vegetative-state support group and that'll be the end of it. 

Here's an Italia zucchini plant, ravaged by squash bugs but STILL producing fruit.
It'll cling to life until the first frost. But its huge-leafed youthful magnificence? Gone.

The perennials, such as the glorious rose bush, the faithful asparagus, the young berries and the aginig but reliable apple trees, will rest for the winter and surge forth in spring. They're amazing. I don't identify with them, however. I only feel kinship with those poor annual bastards facing imminent demise and they don't even know it. Maybe that's a good thing. Without knowing, there's no threat of being in denial or, heaven forbid, trying to hide the fact that you're approaching the inevitable. And that you aren't quite as fabulous looking as you once were. 

Which brings us to hair dye. I colored my hair for decades. (To younger readers: You reach a point when decades is the appropriate word when quantifying your past. You will not believe how quickly this happens.) I started in high school, took a few years off for being a hippie, and went back on the bottle in my 30s. In recent years, I've struggled with whether to continue my relationship with Clairol. I'll go without for a few months and then can't stand the grey and do another treatment. PK says, No, no no! Get over it! But I'm not quite there yet.

The juicy July garden bursting with life.

More July juiciness. It is difficult to go out there without being overcome. It isn't just the colors and the vitality, it's the birds and insects and the wonderful promise of so much botanical exuberance. And it smells so great.

Me in the summer of my life, high school grad on the left, college grad on the right. Bottle blonde and proud of it.
Juicy! Let it be known that my hair for the college photo is the best it ever looked in my entire life.

Here we come to fall with the crone look, uncombed(but colored!) hair.
Almost 50 years since high school graduation. 

I'm wise enough to acknowledge the inevitability of my personal "garden cycle." But I'm not strong enough  to at least try to postpone the drooping, the sagging, the furrowing, and the greying. Hence yoga, bicycling, careful eating, mirror avoidance—and hair dye.  I won't be botoxing and I am repelled by the idea of draining thousands into "having work done." But I'm still vain enough to deny grey.

So I'm back on the bottle. Not that most people would even notice.  My hair is naturally grey/white.  With coloring, it is white/blond. It's weak and silly, I know. But next time you see me, how about keep quiet if you think I look brassy, OK?  If you'd like to talk about the cruel march of time, however, I'm here for you. More garden photos and musings follow, if you like. 

Eggplant Parmesan + Low-carb notes

Revised August 23, 2015
Email subscribers, please click on the blog title to get to the website where photos look better and text is easier to read. 

Most everything you need for eggplant Parmesan is right here. Jalapenos optional.

This time of year all our dinners look the same—red and green—mostly red. That's because of tomato bounty, tomato beauty, and so many greens and eggplants and onions and garlic and basil and on and on. Truly an embarrassment of dishes/riches from kitchen bitches. Of which I am apparently one. I'm a little bossy about diet and cooking. An eggplant Parmesan recipe follows, pictures first. This year I have had to beg or buy eggplants as we had a mysterious eggplant crop failure.

I published an earlier eggplant Parmesan recipe that included this step: slice and salt the eggplant. Let drain then rinse and dry before proceeding. The next time I opined about how to make it, I said this:

Eggplant Parmesan is so much easier when you skip the salting-the-sliced-eggplant-then-rinsing-and-drying steps and also the dredging-in- flour-or-crumbs part. I omitted the flour/crumbs step because of my carb-avoidance behavior, but discovered that dipping the slices in a beaten egg and frying in olive oil is just as good, if not better, than the carb-dredging routine. Oh joy! I left out the salting part when I was in a big rush and discovered THAT doesn't matter either. So right there you lop off another 15 or 20 minutes.

I am sticking with the no-salting method. Anything that saves prep time is good, especially when you can't tell the difference with the finished product. 

Most eggplant Parmesan recipes direct you to dredge  the eggplant in a seasoned flour mixture before frying or baking. No, no, no. Not at all necessary. Some suggest you bake the eggplant after dredging in flour mix, ostensibly to save you from fat. No, no, no. No need to be saved from olive oil! The need to be saved from flour is, however, compelling.

Layered egg-batter fried eggplant. Full recipe below.

This is the deluxe eggplant Parmesan, which means I needed to use sweet onions and peppers, which are undulating toward the kitchen from our crazy pumped- up garden. A very aggressive garden indeed. Onions and peppers are optional.

More layering. Did we talk about the homemade marinara sauce?  Only if you have time and tomatoes to spare.

Eggplant Parmesan

Let's make some assumptions. You have fresh tomatoes and nice firm glossy eggplants. You have time. (The biggest assumption of all.) But listen. If you don't have time to make your own marinara from fresh tomatoes, but still want to make a fabulous eggplant Parmesan, buy a good marinara sauce and pump it up with garlic, a little pesto, some pepper flakes, and your desire to make yourself and others glow at the dinner table.

Do what you can do. Good cheese helps no matter what.

This makes enough for 6-8 servings in a 9X13 inch pan. It freezes well, and keeps for several days refrigerated.

Ingredients
2-3 medium to large fresh eggplants
1.5 to 2 quarts marinara sauce, more or less, homemade preferable
8 - 10 ounces grated Parmesan cheese
12-16 ounces shredded mozzarella, jack, cheddar cheeses, mixed
salt and pepper to taste
salt for treating eggplant slices
2-3 medium eggs
2-4 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup thinly sliced sweet red pepper or jalapeno pepper or combination—deluxe version  
1 cup thinly sliced sweet onion—deluxe version.
   
Directions
1. Slice the eggplants into 1/2 - 3/4  inch rounds.

2. Beat the eggs in a small bowl. In the meantime, heat half the olive oil  over medium heat in a non-stick pan. When the oil is hot, but not smoking, coat the eggplant slices in beaten eggs and fry in olive oil until lightly browned on both sides. Add more oil as necessary. (May be more than 4 tablespoons.) Set aside fried eggplant slices on a grate to cool. Blot with paper towels, if you're weird about oil. If you have leftover egg, fry quickly, chop, and add to casserole. It's a sin to waste food.

3. When all eggplant slices are fried, spoon a layer of marinara on the bottom of your casserole dish. Add a layer of eggplant, sprinkle with cheeses.

4. If you're using sliced sweet onions and/or peppers, spread some atop the cheeses
.
5. Add another layer of eggplant topped by more "deluxe" items, if using, then cover with marinara.

If you have leftover eggplant slices, place a piece of waxed paper between slices and freeze for later use. 

Pop uncovered into preheated 350 degree oven. Bake for 35 - 45
minutes, or whenever sauce is bubbling around the edges. Remove from oven and apply the final layer of mixed cheeses plus a few fresh pepper/onions, if you like.  Return to oven and turn off the heat. Allow the cheese to melt for five to seven minutes. Remove from oven and let it rest for about 10 minutes before serving.

Low-carb notes
Eggplant is low-carb to the max. One medium unpeeled eggplant has about 13 grams of carbs plus 19 grams of fiber. Which, with fiber grams subtracted, is a minus-carb count.

Peppers are also very low in carbs, but onions are not, and fresh tomatoes, depending upon sugar content, may be high in carbs. However, they also have a lot of fiber, especially if you follow my directions for using the entire tomato, skins included, to make homemade marinara.

Do you know about subtracting the fiber content from carb content to figure out how many carbs you're consuming? Example: a half cup of chopped raw tomato has 4.2 grams of carbs and 1 gram of fiber. Subtract the fiber gram and you get carb 3.2 grams. (The Complete Book of Food Counts by Corinne T. Netzer)

People who are serious about losing weight with low-carb diets count every carb and most try to keep their carb consumption at 30 per day or fewer. That's roughly the equivalent of two thin slices of bread, One large baked potato with skin has about 50 carbs and just 4.8 grams fiber. You could run on that thing for two days! Except that after eating that many unbuffered-by-fiber carbs, you're likely to feel hungry a couple hours after eating.

BLT into BBT - Sandwiches without bread

I gotta admit, I seriously miss bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. No bread? No wheat? No BLTs!
Damn. I'm sacrificing here. Whoever said giving up bread/grains would be easy?

But WAIT! Here's a tasty solution—the bacon, basil, cheese and tomato salad, a variation of the popular  Caprese salad which can be tweaked in so many ways. Adding bacon? Well, you decide.

You can't pick it up, but you can relish that bacon/basil/tomato delectability. I guess you could use lettuce instead of basil, but at the expense of flavor. I'll be planting winter crops soon, and have literally hundreds of lettuce volunteers sprouting right now. I'm debating whether to save any. I much prefer spinach, chard, and kale—for BLTs as well as winter salads. For now, though, I prefer tangy basil, while it lasts, on my BBTs.

Note: I've spent a half hour trying to download a photo of the Caprese salad with crispy bacon strips atop. The computer won't do it. Perhaps my Mac is sensitive to the cringing and crying some may experience regarding BACON debauching the iconic Caprese. Whatever. Just imagine how delicious! Delicious. A word is worth a thousand pictures.

In the absence of a bacon-enhanced Caprese, here's a no-bread sandwich made with a huge chard leaf wrapped around sliced cheese, sweet onions, tomatoes, chicken and a bit of deli ham.
Caveat: Best to eat this outside to accommodate the drip factor. 

Writer's Block de-Construction Project

Writer's block. I have it, thank you very much.

Thanks to those who have inquired about the lack of recent posts. (Few, but much-appreciated, inquiries, by the way.)

Things that contribute to writer's block:
1. Starting a post and thinking it's crap. And I don't know how to fix it.
2. Worrying about kayaking son, at this moment likely pitching camp beside a wild-ride Greenland river, hundreds of miles from civilization but close, probably, to polar bears and with hypothermia hovering.
3. Obligations looming with various nonprofits.
4. Mountains of tomatoes to process. Also peppers, eggplants, onions etc. Then come apples.
5. Looking back on fifty-some blog starts that are mostly outdated.(See below)
6. Thinking my blogged words sink into a sea of too much communication. Anybody out there need more words?
7. Inability, so far, to write meaningfully about my now-ancient (almost 97--year-old) mother. She is always on my mind and in my heart. I guess I'm still processing how I feel about her and the inevitability she represents.
8. Weak character that sometimes leads me to watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rather than toil over uncompleted blog posts.
9. Inability to treat blog writing like real work. I wrote for a living and stood (yes, stood) before my computer for several hours a day writing for money. I rarely stand when I write anymore, and blog only in my "spare" time, which is usually after 8 p.m.
10. Adherence to ridiculous expectations that hinder creativity. Any self-respecting list needs 10 points.

Blog posts in draft include:

• life is but a dream, parts 1 and 2
• aging and death
• garden variety volunteers
• a box of baby teeth
• low carb on the road
• smiling for real
• might as well dance
• taking on hard stuff....why?
• old people doing splits
• pepper Paul picked a peck
• the 90s - decade of loss
• no matter your age, you might be old

Wow! So many uplifting topics! Let me know if you see anything of interest.

Season of Tomato-Love Casserole + Low-carb Notes

Here it is—Summer's Best Baked Tomato dish. 

It's tomato love time, and if you have the love, and are almost tired of Caprese and other raw tomato dishes, give this baked tomato casserole a whirl. I first tasted it at a potluck, where several people were drooling and swooning and smacking their lips and talking gibberish.

I think my friends Kelly and Dave brought it, made from their fresh Grants Pass, OR tomatoes. Anyway, it has become a summer highlight for PK and me. PK loves tomatoes so much that he eats them for lunch with mayo and maybe some cheese and then he's good until dinner, when tomato-something is the main dish. As of today, our first major harvest, tomatoes have taken over the kitchen and the back porch. Soon they will occupy the freezer and the pantry. And, of course, a top spot in our culinary hearts.

The morning's harvest. The tomatoes are mostly HUGE Brandywines, as large as the sizable cantaloupe on the upper left and the spaghetti squash on the lower left. A few of these giants are also split, meaning they need to be used pronto.  No problem! The basis for my fave tomato dish is right here—fresh, sweet, juicy heritage tomatoes.

Summer's BEST Tomato Casserole

Ingredients
3-4 large ripe tomatoes, more if tomatoes aren't notably large. I used 3 hyper Brandywines.
1/2 large onion
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 cups grated cheddar/jack or other cheeses
3/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh basil, plus whole leaves for topping beauty
salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Preheat oven to 375
Use a 9X13 casserole dish, not aluminum. No need to grease the pan.
Trim and slice tomatoes and place in a colander to drain while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
Thinly slice the onion. Use a cooking onion, not a sweet one such as Walla Walla.
Combine the cheeses with the mayo and chopped basil.

Everything but the tomatoes.....before mixing. 

Don't freak out about the fat! This is basically a low-carb dish, so you're doing all right.

Layer the tomatoes and the sliced onion.

At this stage, salt and pepper to taste. Next, add half the cheese/mayo/basil mixture. 

Ready to pop into the oven with the second layer plus the basil-for-beauty effect.
 The chopped basil-for-flavor is mixed into the cheese/mayo combo.
Those big leaves are for show, which means they're  optional.

Bake for 30 minutes at 375 degrees in a pre-heated oven. Casserole will be slightly browned and bubbly. It is SO good. Get out your bib!

The entire dinner, left to right: heavenly baked tomato casserole; sauteed mixed veggies and chicken  topped with chipotle sauce; fresh melon with diced spearmint; marinated cukes and onions. I love summer!!!

In the wings, the first of a 6-week tomato harvest ready for processing. 

Low Carb Notes

A fat-phobic vegetarian friend (I love her!) asked about vegetables and carbs. She said (something like) Don't all vegetables have carbs? If you're eating low carb, how can you eat so many vegetables?

Yes,  of course all veggies have carbs, but in varying proportions. Corn and potatoes explode with carbs, onions are kinda dangerous, and parsnips, turnips, beets, sweet potatoes, winter squash and others are to be consumed in moderation. But chard, broccoli, kale, zucchini, lettuces, and many other greenish veggies  are low in carbs and can be heaped on the plate with lots of butter and/or salad dressing and consumed without guilt.
This is the low-fat/low-carb divide. You can eat a thick slice of bread or a baked potato without butter or sour cream or anything  else to make it taste good. You will get a butt-load of carbs and a couple hours later, depending upon what else you ate, you'll get slammed with a blood sugar dive. And then you'll be hungry for more carbs. You may even get the shakes.
Conversely, you can load a plate with a mountain of greens, cooked or not, pile on cheese and/or meat, salad dressing, mayo, butter or other fat, and two hours later, you won't be hungry at all. In fact, it'll likely be five or six hours before you feel compelled to eat. The blood sugar highs and lows don't run the diet program, and they don't run your life.
As for tomatoes.....they seem to occupy the middle ground in carbiness. (thank you, Stephen Colbert, Mr. Truthiness)  A small tomato, according to the Atkins chart has about 4.5 carbs. I'd guess the large Brandywines have at least 15 carbs - roughly equivalent to a slice of bread, minus the fiber in the tomatoes.

I'm not an expert, but have read a lot and done this low-carb thing for 10 years. This much I know. I will feel better and more satisfied (and weigh less) eating a huge tomato with a generous hunk of cheese or other fat  than a sandwich of nearly any sort.