Woman in Real Life

I'm not sure what the weather's doing at the moment. One day warm sun, the next cold rain. That's September around here, I guess.

Anyway, for today's What I Ate Wednesday, I am looking back at a week of eating that included a lovely end-of-summer barbecue. Maybe we will get a few more barbecues in (with my husband wearing a coat out on the deck and me watching from inside).



For this barbecue, we decided to try cauliflower. It was still kind of firm, but I enjoyed it anyway.


Then we went from summer bbq to fall soup again. I made some more homemade spelt bread in the breadmaker and served it with veggie and rice soup.


My husband felt like canning some relish this past weekend.

Have you ever noticed the ingredients in relish at the store? That lovely yellow tint comes from tartrazine. Wikipedia tells us that a university study suggested that children previously identified as hyperactive may exhibit an increase in irritability, restlessness, and sleep disturbance after ingesting tartrazine. It also says that a variety of immunologic responses have been attributed to tartrazine ingestion, including anxiety, migraine, clinical depression, blurred vision, itching, general weakness, heatwaves, feeling of suffocation, purple skin patches, and sleep disturbance. In the U.S. and Canada, rather than asking manufacturers to stop using the dye, they are only required to note it on the label.


So, the moral of the story is, buy organic relish, or make your own if you can. My husband made two kinds, zucchini relish and this mix with cauliflower.


I really wanted to try it, but I am still limiting my ingestion of gluten, so I had a veggie hot dog without a bun, along with some kamut pasta. (There is gluten in the veggie dogs and in the kamut pasta, but I figure it's less than a big fluffy hot dog bun would have.) The relish was tasty, but I kind of missed the bun.

Not the classiest looking meal, but you have to have some easy nights, right?


On Sunday, we decided to make a big pile of sushi so that we could have some for dinner and the kids could take some to school for lunch the next day. We also had homemade miso soup and edamame with our dinner.

The kids rolled their own sushi so they could pick out the fillings they wanted for their school lunches.

My husband sautéed portobello mushrooms to fill some of the sushi. We put a bit of mayonnaise and toasted Panko breadcrumbs in others.


I also had leftover sushi for lunch the next day, along with Pad Thai from a box.