Keira Knightley in Italian Vogue.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:

Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.



And Blackie.

When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...

Eating is an agricultural act.

I spent a few minutes last night appreciating a red onion grown and handled with exquisite care: the weight of it in my palm, the way the skin crackles as it parts from the firm moist flesh, the crispness of the layers sliced by a sharpened knife in a steady hand. Incredible that something you can select for yourself at your neighborhood co-operative at $2.79 a pound can be as magnificent in its own way as an old cathedral.

The miracles of endurance and ingenuity.

They have lost sight of the importance of process; they have forgotten that everything which is not natural is artificial and that artifice is painful and difficult, that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize the miracles of endurance and ingenuity that had to be performed before the wheat grew, and the mill ground, and the oven baked. This condition can be brought about by several causes: one is successful imperialism, where the conquering people has the loaf built for it from the wheat ear up by its conquered subjects; another is modern machine civilization, where a small but influential proportion of the population lives in towns in such artificial conditions that a load of bread comes to them in a cellophane wrapper with its origins as unvisualized as the begetting and birth of a friend’s baby.

REBECCA WEST.
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

Spicy Egyptian lentil pot.

Chop in large chunks:
2 carrots
1 green pepper
1 red onion
2 tomatoes

Place vegetables in a large soup pot with
5-8 cloves of garlic, peeled and left whole
1 1/2 c. red lentils
5-6 c. water
1 chicken bouillon cube

Cover and boil 20-30 minutes without stirring. Cool slightly and strain or puree.

Return to pot and add:
2 tsp. cumin (more)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground black pepper
Red pepper flakes to taste

Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, to blend flavors.

Serve with lemon wedges to bring out flavor. (Haven't tried this.)



From Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook.

Indian curried mashed potatoes.

Boil 8 potatoes, peeled.
Cool slightly and mash.

Saute 1 onion and 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes in olive oil.

Mix with mashed potatoes and add 1/2 tsp. tumeric and salt to taste.




I halved the onions... the first time, it was onion overload. This tastes awesome inside a spinach wrap.

Skeeter.

He looks like a less good-spirited ogre.