True confession: I still eat edible food-like substances, even as I mock them.

I'm going to start working at keeping this blog going. I spent a lot of my computer time over the summer at myfolia.com, keeping track of my garden. Now fall is setting in and I have bags of unprocessed produce in my kitchen and I've eaten at church dinners for three nights in a row.

I took a tomato salad to one of them with tomatoes from my own garden, and a Safeway pie to another. I enjoyed a lot of the food, but turned up my nose at a supermarket bakery chocolate chip cookie. I was already full of good food, including several desserts, and it looked really unappetizing. I knew how it would taste. Flat, chewy, sweet, and slightly stale. I think the slightly stale flavor must come from all the preservatives they add! (If you are reading this and you brought those cookies, I'm sorry! I would scarf them down if I were hungry....but they don't stand up well next to home-made cake...I brought a store pie myself.)

I used one of the worst insults in my food vocabulary when turning it down. I called it an edible food-like substance. My son tried to force it on me because he had picked it up and decided he didn't really want it. He pointed out that I had already eaten several other edibile food-like substances at the dinner, including Cheetos, which I use to as a classic example.

This is a phrase I like to throw around the house when I'm talking about food, or when I'm shopping. What's real food, and what isn't?

"Edible food-like substance."

In my own food world, I understand this to mean:

Cheddar cheese on wheat bread: real food.

Cheetos: edible food-like substance.

The author of this little gem is Michael Pollan, who wrote "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

He also said:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Nice and simple. I've got the first part down. Need to work on the second two.

You can hear a great interview with him at Cooking up a Story. It's broken into four parts (each section fits YouTube's length limits). I'm a cheapskate, so I watched this video and never bought the book.

The first part is here, and the next three sections can be found in links at the bottom of the page.

http://cookingupastory.com/michael-pollan-in-defense-of-food/

MyFolia.com

MyFolia.com is a garden website. Think FaceBook for gardeners. Think electronic garden journal. Think blog. Think "garden wiki reference."  Think "obsession." It's a little of all of those. I love it, and use it for my garden record keeping. It does have a "download" feature to allow supporter/users to download all their data for safekeeping in case the site gets fried.

It's NOT filled with advertising (although they are planning to add affiliate sales from seed companies). It's supported by the young British couple who run it and write their own programming, and by many users who think it is so valuable that they pay a little every year (and get a few extra features). I actually supported it last year, and will renew my membership later this month. But it is free, unless you want to chip in support.

I have inventoried all my "seed stash" on MyFolia....I get all the description and plant info entered, and then when I plant the seeds, I just have to refer to the seed entry and put in what how many I planted, and which garden they were in. As they grow, I can mark milestones like Sprouted, First True Leaves, Hardening Off, Transplanted, etc.

The owners just added a very nice "Harvesting" feature to the list of milestones that allows users to keep a running record of harvests. 

In one of my favorite journal entries by another gardener, one of my garden buddies recently cataloged every single item she harvested from her garden to make a single bowl of salad - she laid all the individual leaves out side by side and photographed them, labeled the photo, and wrote a detailed description of every plant, leaf, flavor, what she liked and how they all came together in the salad. She doesn't do that every day - - that would be really obsessive -- but she's experimenting with new plants, many of them unfamiliar Oriental greens, and recording her results - I thought it was informative and very pretty as well.  She got more out of a 4x4 garden last year than I did out of my much larger plot, and she has very similar interests, so I "tune in" to her journal frequently.

Disclosure:

I already wrote and posted this review on a more private forum for friends! But the site is offering a free month of membership for any member who writes a review on their blog or website.