It's nice to have a garden...

... and a boyfriend with a green thumb.

One thing I never learned about as a silly city girl is the art of gardening, and the wonder of having fresh vegetables and herbs at your disposable. At the beginning of the summer, we planted three varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, onions, beets, parsnips, and a whole array of fresh herbs (among other things), and we're finally starting to enjoy the fruits of our (his) labour.

As a descendant of farmers on both sides of the family, I guess it's pretty sad that it takes me tremendous effort to keep even the most low-maintenance house plants alive. But such is life.

Dinner was a freebie tonight... we just chopped up some tomatoes and herbs we picked from the garden, tossed them with linguine and gobbled it down with a dollop of ricotta. 

It was. SO. GOOD.

I mean, it makes me kind of mad. Because when I go to the grocery store to pick up these types of ingredients, I end up with watery tasteless tomatoes and herbs packaged in so much plastic. Would you believe that I never even really knew what a real tomato tasted like? That I actually thought that I didn't like tomatoes? The flavour in the stuff picked from the garden is nothing at all like what you buy, unless you go to a farmer's market - which I do sometimes, but I don't live close enough to do it regularly. Even the taste of our arugula is incomparable. I pulled a leaf off the plant and it had such a strong peppery flavour that it almost burned my tongue. In a good way, of course...

I have so many plans for the other things we have growing. SO. MANY. PLANS.

Can't wait for those beets to be ready.

Just... no.

No.

This is gourmet tuna...

... and in the world of canned tuna, if you haven't eaten Ortiz brand canned tuna, you haven't lived.

While in Spain, we bought it among other canned seafoods (all delicious) and it was on a whole other level. It's so good that it would be a damn shame to a make a tuna salad sandwich with it. I opened the one can -- yes, I only brought one can back -- at home alone while waiting for Jean to arrive, and though the plan was to only eat half so that he could taste it, it took everything in my power to not gobble down the entire thing straight from the can.

It's tuna belly and it's buttery and scrumptious and unctuous and silky and and and....*drool*

So no, Clover Leaf, until you can come out with a canned tuna that holds a candle to Ortiz, tuna has not gone gourmet.

My only regret is not bringing an entire case of this shit back to Montreal.

Yum Yuck

I have a ravenous appetite for good food, but I have a love/hate relationship with cooking.

It's a whole bunch of things. I love eating out. One of the greatest things about living in this city is the endless cache of excellent food options. In the last five or six years that I've been living downtown, I've been spoiled with boundless access to a variety of eclectic food options. Feel like Vietnamese? Italian? Turkish? Lebanese? Italian? Comfort food? Poutine? Japanese pub food? Portuguese? There's almost no limit to the good food that's on my doorstep. If I had a bottomless wallet, I could eat in a different restaurant every day for a month and never repeat a dish, if I wanted to. Probably way longer than that.

I love being in restaurants. I love people watching. I love food. Good food. I'm drooling right now.

But... eating out is costly, and unfortunately, when you become an adult, you end up with a lot of other more important things to spend your money on. Fun things like car payments, gas, insurance, rent or mortgage payments, condo fees, utilities, repaying student loans for some. At a certain point, you have to cut back. Eating out so often just isn't as easy as it was before.

The thing is... I don't really love cooking. It's not that I can't cook, because I can. It's just a huge effort every time, even when I'm cooking something simple. I also have "chef's stomach", which means I'll be craving something like crazy, but after spending time making it, I just don't want it anymore. I often struggle through meal preparation and finally sit down to eat, exhausted and prone to just shovelling it all in because I'm so done with food already. The following day, I open the fridge and look at the leftovers and think "I so don't want to eat that right now." I know, some people love leftovers - even prefer leftovers, but I'm just wired in a way to want to eat something different for. every. meal.

I imagine it to be easier when you're cooking for a family. It's easier to manage your ingredients when you're not the only one eating them. Jean and I don't live together, and on the nights when I'm eating alone, I find myself with an excess of herbs and vegetables that I can't get around to using before they go bad. Hell, we have trouble managing these things when we're together. Having no obligation to or routine of putting food on the table for other people on a regular basis makes me feel less motivated to spend time in the kitchen.

If I had a love for cooking, these things probably wouldn't be an issue. But I don't like being in the kitchen. Being in the kitchen feels like a job to me, it's exhausting. Jean and I also don't really have overlapping palettes in the sense that I tend to prefer strong, interesting flavours. I automatically like all asian foods, for example, and while he likes it, it's not his preference. Finding meals that we both like has been an exercise in frustration -- mostly for me -- but it's getting better.

So, we're trying. My eating out has cut down by about 75% and I've even actually been bringing my lunch from home at work half the week! Don't get me started about how big of a deal this is to me, and how depressed I often feel when I'm eating leftovers or sandwiches at my desk.

It's an uphill battle, but it will all be worth it when we figure it all out and have healthier and less costly eating habits.