Bye Bye Autumn Garden

After a week into my busy quarter I got home at a decent hour and the sun was shining. I decided to take a looksy into my garden and to my surprise, I had so much beautiful produce!!

This huge zucchini I didn't even know was growing until I peered through some poky zucchini leaves and saw this monster sitting there in the dirt waiting to be picked. I had to compare it to something to show its size; this is one big, healthy, organic zucchini!

A few weeks after these photos were taken, and a few weeks ago, I decided to rip up my rotting tomato plants and all the not-so-healthy looking kale, leaving only some zucchini plants. Goodbye autumn garden!

Hummus Recipe

Hummus (also spelled hamos, homos, houmous, hommos, hommus, hummos or hummous) is one of my FAVORITE snacks of all time. It's an amazing veggie dip, great with pitas, amazing in a falafel or a sandwich, and pretty darn good on the tip of a finger! Although this specific hummus concoction I made in April, the photos are still good and I figured I should share.



Ingredients needed are as shown above: Garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas; they truly are better if you have the time to soak them the night before then cook them), tahini (this specific one I get from Trader Joe's; it has the perfect mixture of lemon and garlic already in it... other brands tend to be bland and difficult to season up correctly), olive oil, cumin, lemon, salt (not pictured) and beloved garlic.

Although I do not normally measure the ingredients I put in my hummus, I've made it enough that now I use the guess-and-taste method, for the purpose of posting this I am going to post the measurements as suggested by one of my favorite hummus recipes. This one is adapted from Vegan Planet, by Robin Robertson.

1 1/2 cups cooked or one 15-ounce can chickpeas, draining and rinsed
1/4 cup tahini (sesame paste)
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt



Put all the ingredients into a food processor and go crazy! Spoon into a bowl and enjoy!



YUM!

A Day of Celebrations!

Today is the day to say goodbye to summer and hello to autumn. And what a better way to celebrate than with a MyEternal show at Hell's Kitchen!

And a cake too, of course.

It didn't turn out quite like I expected, but then again, I wasn't sure what I was expecting.



Good luck, MyEternal, with your show tonight. Finally they're playing again after two and half years! I just spent an hour looking through photos to find some band photos to attach, and well, there's just been two much rearranging of band members that I gave up on that.

Vegetarians Rock!

"The health benefits of a vegetarian diet are directly linked to the fact that plant-based foods tend to be rich in dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals and cancer-fighting antioxidants and don’t contain the cholesterol, saturated fat and toxins found in animal flesh."

~Jason Baker

‎"One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race." — Wendell Berry

Le Jardin d'Automne

My garden is loving all the rain and sunshine! Here she is a week before Autumn Equinox.

Oh how my little seeds have grown!

Lush and beautiful.


Zucchini, kale, and green peppers.


Dinosaur kale.


I have A LOT of tomatoes!


Here's the big mama.


A pretty little zucchini.


We let the chickens run loose in the yard for some fresh grass, worms and fresh air.


They picked on Leo. He was confused.


Pretty Michelangelo and Raphael.

I love my autumn garden... and I really love that I barely have to water
it because Mother Nature has been doing that for me. She's great.

Beauty in All Things

Today while reading my Yoga Journal I stumbled upon this and thought I should share, as it is too wonderful to not.

"In classical Tantric philosophy, the yogi seeks to perceive all things as they really are: a manifestation of the Divine Light of Consciousness. In this process, you learn to go beyond the artificial preferences of your mind and gradually come to see all things as equally beautiful. This sense of wonder, a kind of aesthetic rapture, derives from a profound inner realization of the miracle by which the one Light expresses its innate beauty in an infinity of different ways while never relinquishing its essential nature in any of them.

You can cultivate your capacity to see yourself and all of reality in this way by holding the awareness of innate beauty shining through all that you do. As you go about your day, silently repeat to yourself with everything you see, "Beauty is seeing beauty"; with everyone you meet, "Beauty is greeting beauty"; with everything you touch, "Beauty is touching beauty"; and so on. In this way, you will expand your capacity to see all things as beautiful."

Embrace beauty, my friends!