being that it's already wednesday, i had to decide what to make for dinner for the remainder of the week. i had a few recipes swimming in my head but none seem very appealing. maybe i should just get a few more boxes of stouffer's french bread pizza and capitulate to mediocrity? breakfasts are easy (or in my case lunch, since that's normally when i eat my breakfast): there are only so many options for breakfast. dinner is hard because the choices are endless. i kind of want to try something new, but with my sudden busy schedule, now is not the time to go experimenting. ricotta spinach pie kept popping in my head. instead of bacon, i'll substitute some kielbasa sausage that's been sitting in my fridge for over 2 weeks now.
checking my fridge to see what ingredients i needed to buy, that's when i saw the dozen tomatoes. ricotta spinach pie will have to wait, because whatever i eat this week will have fresh tomato sauce in it, since i need to use up all these tomatoes before they go bad. i briefly considered remaking a spinach lasagna before finally deciding on the classic spaghetti with meat sauce.
although i went to market basket a week ago, it wasn't to buy groceries for myself (it was to get barbecue supplies), so it feels like it's been forever since i went food shopping for the house. i also took the opportunity to return nearly $2 worth of depositable bottles and cans. besides spaghetti ingredients, i also got ricotta pie ingredients (for next week).
all this talk of cooking turned out to be irrelevant when i bicycled to belmont for dinner. i set up the laptop in my room before i left, to continue deep scanning my broken hard drive.
when my parents returned home from the cafe, i went with my father to victory garden to do some watering.
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i was just at the garden last sunday, while my father hasn't visited in about a week. disease has taken over the plot: bacterial wilt on the cucumbers and melons, powdery mildew on the zucchini and cocozelle, and god-knows-what slowly killing the tomato plant. we took solace in knowing that it wasn't just us that was affected, but the entire community garden. it made me realize what a dirty place a community garden can be; when one plot gets infected, the disease eventually spreads to all the other plots. in that respect a little backyard garden - isolated from other gardens - might actually be better.
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our most important crop were the korean melons. maybe in another week they will completely succumb to wilt, with melons in various stages of development. i think we may have a few good ones, we won't be able to tell until we harvest them.
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besides striped cucumber beetles, the garden also has spotted cucumber beetles. did the cucumbers/melons even have a fighting chance to survive?
we cleared out some dead plants and planted some asparagus beans and radishes in the empty spots. i've never really planted late season crops. once the bulk of the garden plants begin dying, i think about wrapping up for the season instead of trying to grow more things.
afterwards we meandered through the rest of the community garden, checking out what other gardeners were growing in their plots:
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dinner:
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back in cambridge, i checked on the status of my deep scan. even though it managed to scan over 500GB of data (more than what i had saved on the drive), it was still telling me it was only 9% done with scanning. i stopped the scanning, to be resumed at another time.