I endeavor to grow basil and blog

I purchased some cute little basil plants and potted them in old jam jars that had been accumulating, waiting for a purpose.I like basil and hope it grows. It can certainly get lots of light on my windowsill and I've set my [digital] calendar to remind me to water it. If it dies from my (admittedly) black thumb, oh well. Maybe there's some kind of edible cactus I can grow.

I have a lot of drafts of blog posts that are finished, but unpublished. I hesitate to publish them because they are not bland life-updates (food, plants, pictures of cute things) but actual statements of my opinions and thoughts. I recently suffered (endured?) an unpleasant attack on (criticism of) my personality and it's made me doubt my ability to judge how offensive/appropriate I am at any given moment. I know who reads this. So maybe I'll keep stringing you along with these insubstantial posts. Maybe I'll work up the courage to get over it. We'll see.

This post's theme word: bromide, "a trite or obvious remark; a platitude."

Bean salad

I made some delicious summer food: bean salad. There are five kinds of beans, so this volume of bean salad will easily last me through this week. Easily. (Why make so much? you might ask. Because it's hard to buy a quarter-cup each of 5 types of beans. Cooking for one person is not really possible; I usually have at least a full meal of leftovers for the next day.)A few weeks ago I made a similarly large vat of tabouli, another food with strong summer associations for me. Both foods are also garlic-filled and delicious.

This post is dedicated to M., who gave me the "recipe" and said, "Will you blog about it?" Yes. Yes, I will.


This post's theme word: seriatim, "one after another; in a series." It is an adverb, as in "I ate the beans seriatim: first the red one, then a green one, then a chickpea, then another red one..."