I have made rosemary elixir and peppermint elixir... and I have a Thai basil plant on my porch... Hm. How would that turn out? So I decided to again adapt the recipe for ginger elixir from Rachel Matesz's cookbook. First I tried it without sweetener. Uninteresting. Then I threw in stevia. Kazing! That worked great! Such an interesting flavor. I will certainly make it again.

Last night I decided to try something different. I had previously made and really enjoyed ginger elixir following the recipe in Rachel Matesz's cookbook, and it struck me that it would be interesting to try with rosemary. I have a rosemary plant growing on my porch, so I gathered some stems from the plant, and stripped off about four loose handfuls of leaves. Threw the leaves into the blender with two cups of boiling water. Pureed. Added two more cups of boiling water. Allowed to sit for half an hour. Once that was cool, I poured the liquid into a pitcher through a strainer and added four more cups of filtered water along with a couple eyedroppers' full of stevia. Refrigerated it overnight. Voila! Rosemary elixir!

This morning I'm drinking my first cup. I like it. The potent herbal smell and flavor is surprising at first. It reminds of the reaction I first had to horehound candy or anise lozenges. It's a bit of a slap in the face if you are not used to it, but it tastes good once you get past the "Mama never made anything like this" phase. I'll doubtless make it again.

I just got done making Cauliflower-Potato Mash from "The Garden of Eating." Holy cow, but it's tasty. Although I'm a fan of cauliflower, I was the teensiest bit skeptical of the recipe, but I think even my niece and nephew would eat it. I didn't have any nutmeg handy, so I substituted allspice instead, which worked wonderfully.

The recipe made 4.5 cups of mash, so that makes 163 calories per 1 cup serving. That's perfectly fine for a comfort food dish.

Hm. Now I've opened up a can of coconut milk and only used 1/4 of it. That leads me to my next entry: improvised curried lentils.

This evening I made sautéed collards with onions, mushrooms & garlic from the recipe on p. 316 of “The Garden of Eating.” Interesting. The collards are a bit bitter, most likely because I was trying hard not to overcook them. I used dried shitake mushrooms from the nearby Korean store, which were tasty, and since I had no dulse, I threw in a bit of kombu, ostensibly for the umami flavor. I think this is a dish I will grow to like.

I am scratching my head a bit, though, about how to find dulse in Phoenix. I wonder if we have any local sellers?

Tonight I made Caveman Chili from “The Garden of Eating.” It was okay. I cooked it in a steel pan that was pretty thin, and I wonder if that didn't burn the ingredients a bit more than intended. It also seemed to me that there wasn't quite enough liquid in the recipe, so halfway through the cooking I added a cup of boiling water, and then near the end another cup. Most likely it was a bit dryer than the chef intended because I only found tomatoes that weren't quite ripe enough. I look forward to trying the recipe again.

On second thought it's possible that I also cooked it on too high a heat. I kept it boiling as opposed to reducing it to simmering, so that may have been part of the dryihg out problem as well. It's all still quite edible, though. None of it will be thrown out.