Sap, what gets out sap?

So on Monday I met a friend for lunch at an awesome restaurant called Veggie Planet.

While I was waiting for the bus to come to take me to Harvard Square the tree I was standing under dripped sap on my head. So I arrived at lunch with a nice sticky patch in my hair. Luckily, the sap was clear, so it wasn't super apparent to other people. I did manage to wash the worst of the stickiness out, but I couldn't get all of it. Some research led me to discover that if you put peanut butter over the sap, and then blow dry it till it's melty the sap combs right out. This worked very well for me. Granted not for about 8 hours till I got home from work, but that's beside the point. Peanut butter removes tree sap from hair.

Back to Veggie Planet. It is a delightful little hole-in-the-wall vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Harvard Square. And their food is pretty cheap! I had a delicious black bean and monterey jack pizza. So good! I'm becoming such a fan of these cheap, fresh, vegetarian places.

Clover Food Lab

One of my classmates introduced me to a delightful food lab in Harvard Square on Friday. It's called Clover. It is a fast food restaurant that makes food using ingredients that are as fresh as they can be, as local as they can be found and as organic as possible (which means a seasonal menu too). It also happens to only serve vegetarian foods, but that's just an added bonus. And it's reasonably cheap. They also have various food trucks around town. When we went on Friday I had the BBQ Seitan pita. It was delicious. Seitan is a kind of wheat-based protein. It has a kind of duck-like consistency to it and it seems to absorb flavor not unlike tofu. And it was one of the first times all week that I'd eaten a meal and not felt disgusting afterwards, or like I needed to go into a coma. In fact, Clover made such an impression on me that after I got off work on Saturday I stopped in and got a chickpea fritter pita. It didn't disappoint.

The chickpea fritter (courtesy of the internet). Doesn't that just make you hungry?

Vegetarianism

I don't know if I've mentioned it before or not, but a few weeks ago my boss gave me a display to be in charge of (in a little used corner of the library where everyone forgets about it, but which happens to be near my desk). For the last month or so it has had cooking books on it and so every few days I go and fill it in where people have taken the books. I've recently noticed that when I add new books they tend to be books about vegetarian dishes or vegan cooking or other organic-y kinds of things. While I love me some red meat, it makes me wonder if I'm becoming one of those kind of people. But I enjoy my meat so I brushed off the feeling.

Don't those look delicious?

Back in March I found a cookbook from Taste of Home that had full color photos on nearly every page and had tons of simple relatively quick recipes and that had 12 weeks worth of menu ideas. It was pretty cool. Best part: clearance for $5. So I bought it, put it on my shelf, and didn't look at it again. This week I've been trying  to pull together some meal ideas so I can shop more efficiently and so I pulled it out again. I was looking through it on the train on my way to work and I kid you not, almost every single recipe had meat in it (with obvious exceptions like for breakfast, where many more didn't have meat). And I love meat, so that should be fine, but as I was reading it, I couldn't help but wish that there were more vegetarian dishes.

Yesterday, I was invited to come in to work a couple hours early (hello extra money next week.) and then have a full hour for dinner. So I decided to splurge and treat myself to a nice dinner at Panera Bread. So I walked in and was looking at their sandwiches, trying to decide what I wanted to go with my half caesar salad. I was rather surprised that none of the meat filled sandwiches sounded very good to me. Usually, meat is the first thing I spring for when eating out. I ended up having a hot tomato and mozzarella panini (which was fantastic and hit the spot).

All these things make me wonder if I'm losing my taste for meat to some degree. Not that that would be a bad thing. I mean the Doctrine and Covenants is pretty clear that meat is to be used sparingly and I'd be pretty on board with sparingly meaning not everyday, or maybe not even most days. But, I think the best part of losing my taste for meat a little bit is that means I won't have to fight the urge to buy it as often when it's so expensive. Score! (don't you love how every paragraph ends with my reassurance that I'm really not vegetarian?)