Impeassioned

Fresh English peas: way too delicious for their own good.

You see, they're not in season very long, they only stay fresh for 24 to 48 hours, they're expensive (probably because of that freshness issue), and they require shelling.

Step 1: obtain peapod.

Step 2: unzip with thumb, ignoring disgusting blister
incurred while baking bread.

To test whether these are truly fresh, shake the pods; if you hear rattling, the peas have dried out and are past their prime. The day of purchase, shell them and boil them for three minutes, then immediately rinse them with cold water to stop the cooking. A third of a pound (purchased from a farmer's market stand whose proprietor thought my pea maraca moment was very amusing) yielded less than a cup of peas. I could probably eat at least five cups, so you see the danger.

A mere dollar bought me a massive bunch of radishes, and for another dollar I got some lovely carrots. Clearly yet another salad was in order! Bored with this blog yet?

I really wanted to make this horizontal, but for some reason the rotating function sucks.

Farmer Dude also told me that radish greens are edible, but that they're too "prickly" to eat raw, so these greens are probably going to be steamed and cooked up with leftover chickpeas and rice and an overripe tomato for dinner either tomorrow or Saturday.

Pretend this is horizontal, too!

Because I'm a fan of completely destroying the good work I try to do via healthful dinners, I also made a half-recipe of ginger chocolate chunk cookies that are tasty, but ugly, ate way too many of them, and gave the rest away before I did even more damage.

On the "probably not what you want to hear right after I talk about food" side of things: I spent an hour or so in the endoscopy suite of the VA and saw two colonoscopies, two upper GI endoscopies, a stricture dilation, and a lot of great GI-related banter. One guy had candida all up in his esophagus, which was simultaneously awesome and sort of awful to see, and one of the colonoscopies was performed on a guy with what the doctor I was trailing called a "seriously cavernous colon." The thing's diameter was large enough for it to qualify as prime Manhattan real estate, especially the cecum, which seemed to have two lumina as the result of an appendectomy the patient had years ago. I'm not thinking of actually going into GI, but our GI faculty seem to have fun doing what they do, despite the squishy sounds and general yuck factor. And there are squishy sounds, oh, yes indeed.

Yogurt mint salad dressing
1/4 cup plain yogurt, Greek or otherwise
1/4 cup rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice, plus the zest of one lemon
honey to taste
salt and pepper to taste
mint to taste (I used about a teaspoon dried)

Mix the ingredients. Dress your salad. Ain't life grand.