Weight: 206.8 (Not sure if this isn't just a scale problem. I doubt there is any detectable effect yet of my wonderfully fun but poorly planned diet.)
When I decided to take on this little experiment, I always planned to make some blackberry wine. Of course, that takes so long that I will likely be tea totalling it for a while. Plus, I notice that I need these blackberries too much to waste them on making wine. I'll go forage for some less palatable berries before I throw yeast onto them and leave them in a dark corner of the garage.
I've added to the cheats (which had been one use of flour a week, sugar for canning purposes, and free run of the spice rack) two more cheats 1) butter made from cream a friend gave me that they got at a dairy and 2) balsamic vinaigrette. The latter makes backyard weeds much more tasty. I should also mention that I've always had basic condiments on the list as well.
You probably think I'm completely defeating the point of all this with my cheats, but my body would tell you otherwise. I feel famished.
Breakfast: purple clover blossom. They are tougher than when I picked them and much better fresh. They are easy to spot for my two sons so I had quite a bit, but it makes for an unsatisfying breakfast. And if you eat too much of the stalk it can be annoying to the esophogas. I used the rest of the blossoms for a tea, combining them with mint. That was tasty. Added a little sweetener, I must confess, and it was a drop or two of agave nectar (bought).
Lunch: a rather nice salad with dandelion, some wild strawberries I never cultivated but found hiding out around our suburban home in unnoticed spots; a lot of lemon mint was in there too.
Dinner: I never knew I my will could break this easily. I had fasted for 3 straight days once with one of those liquid diets. But I never felt I wanted to eat something substantial as tonight. Since my oldest (10) didn't have football practice, we went down to the pier to try and get a big score of fish. That way, the month would be a breeze. I'm thinking a big sturgeon for my oldest son, a few rock fish for my six year old son and then a couple salmon for me. (BTW: only two weeks until the salmon season is over and I have no idea what I'm doing). Instead, I caught three giant starfish. I couldn't get any word on whether these sun stars are at all edible so I threw them back. But my boys drew in 6 little perch.
The other salmon-seeking frat boys on the dock were startled to find me racing after these little flopping fish like they held the key to eternal life. Throwing them into the cooler to swim around for a while, I knew that this would be the way to survive: silly little perch.
And that's all we got. So upon returning home I cleaned and fried the little guys with diced hot pepper I grabbed from the back yard (a very wise decision it turned out), mint, a bunch of spices from the rack, esp. turmeric, and lots of dandelion leaves. This was one of the most memorably delicious meals I can recall--ever. Turns out the little perch can be beheaded, gutted, and cooked right in the pan. Everything tastes great and crispy, just remove the spine and you have a fine meal. The fats and frying process (did I mention last post that I am using butter made at home from some donated cream?) made the now cooked and crispy backyard weeds incredibly tasty. I went to sleep absolutely sated. Worried that I now gained back some weight.
I've learned my first big lesson along the way: there are families in this community who are doing what I'm doing every day of the year. In my affluent neighborhood, there are several homes that house multiple families that hail from places like Eastern Europe, South East Asia, and Iraq. My sons have made friends with Russian kids who hang out on the pier all night. They aren't there for sport, they are getting table food. Some of them hang out on a street down the block, and with close observation, they play after school till bed time--they don't eat dinner. In related news, a local school took lunch trays out of the hands of students who were behind on their lunch money payments, and gave them two pieces of bread with a slice of cheese in the middle. They then threw the entrees away because they couldn't reserve them by law. Some say they needed these lunches because they were their only real meals for the day. See: http://heraldnet.com/article/20080914/NEWS01/709149868 I didn't believe this could be true in my area, but it makes sense now. I have no political statement to make here; but it is interesting that I didn't really notice this kind of thing before my experiment.
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