Day 2.

Wednesday, day 2.
Breakfast: My usual double americano with a bit of steamed milk accompanied a nice bowl of strawberries sitting at my desk. By noon I was famished. As soon as the restaurant was calm, I drove home to prepare a midday garden feast.
Lunch/Dinner: My Food Diary is an online database designed for tracking calories and nutrition for healthy weight loss. It confirms my lack of protein and carbohydrate, so I decide to add 2 servings of grains. Dinner became long-grain brown rice, a steamed ear of corn with a bit of butter and salt, and green beans. While munching a carrot appetizer, I seared the beans in a hot pan with a little oil and salt, this being my favorite treatment with the addition of garlic. When I told my friend Amanda my plan, she pointed out that I would never make it because I didn't plant garlic and onions. The onions I can live without, but she could be correct that lack of garlic could very well be my demise. For now, so far, it was delicious.
A bedtime snack became imperative. 10:00, I took the flashlight out to the garden and picked 3 small zucchini, doing my best to ignore and avoid the slug population. Hate em, but can't stand the killing part. Slice the squash thin, heat a pan with a little butter and oil, and fry them fast and hot with some salt. Plate and eat immediately. Trust me that this is better than popcorn. Crazy, you're thinking. Try it, but don't even think about buying zucchini. Find someone with a plant or two, believe me they will be happy to give you some. When you get it, run home and cook it. Amazing.
Salt, you wonder? Yes, I've salted most of the vegetables I'm cooking. I'm using kosher salt, a wonderful flavor for less quantity sodium. And my liberal salting is tempered by the rest of the menu content. There is salt in almost everything you purchase at the grocery store, and that doesn't even touch the massive quantities in fast food. Did you know there is salt in the milk you buy? There is salt in every baked cookie, cake, bread, cracker, and cereal. As a pastry chef, I can tell you that salt is not instrumental to either taste or chemistry in any of these items with the exception of bread. (Note that my bakery does not use salt in any pastries that do not use yeast.)
Great flavors, my garden put to work, and Food Diary gives me a happy face for consuming 13,160 units of vitamin A. And yet, the last two tablespoons of almond butter somehow made their way onto a cracker and up the stairs with me. Good night.
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