MMWS: Day 3 – Damn you, crepe cart.

You know that feeling you get when the Internet breaks?

“Ah, DSL is down… can’t check my mail… guess I’ll go read Google News… or… no… wait… I’ll, uh… see what’s going on on Facebook… no… ok, there must be something… I know, I’ll *talk* to someone! Wonder who’s on Skype… dammit… maybe I should just check my mail…”

Well, sugar is like the Internet.  Never heard that one before, have you?  Sugar is like the Internet because I got stir crazy today and decided that I’d go check out some new food cart in town for lunch.  I ended up, after a series of witty misadventures that I won’t go into, at the old Southeast area standby for food carts on Hawthorne Ave.  They’ve got half a dozen carts or so, and so even if the vegan-tattoo-black-clothes-nosering-stoner-stereotype running the place spontaneously decides that Wednesday is now “sit outside but don’t make food day”, you’re likely to have an alternative (one of them must not know it’s Wednesday).  Oops, I said I wasn’t going to go into it, didn’t I?

And… best of all… the one place that seems to generally remain open in some relation to the posted hours is the crepe cart.  If you’re not familiar with the concept of crepe cart, imagine wafer thin, crispy-edged eggy-sweet pancakes stuffed with every decadent filling you could conceive of… featuring, one of my favorites, Nutella.  Lots and lots of it.  But it’s in a pancake, and you’re outside, so it is absolutely not the same thing as eating it out of the jar.  It is not the same thing.  This is healthy.  That’s sick.

Right.  So… I abandon myself to the idea of the cart lot, and order a burrito (carnitas, so-so) and turn to see the crepe cart.  Oh yeah.  Crepes.  The only thing better than making them and eating them is skipping the making.

“I’ll take two nutella and banana… one for the kids… or… no… I’ll just get one with strawberry… or… wait… uh… what if I… cheese?… eesh… what’s the point… Oh!  I know!  I’ll just go home and make my own!  Aw, crap…”

I stood there thinking about how I could have it be that a fresh, strawberry and lemon curd crepe could be in my mouth, smothering my tastebuds in its sweet, creamy, tangy goodness but I wouldn’t be ingesting sweeteners.  What if I stood on my head?  Closed my eyes?

No.  The Internet is broken.  Period.

Note from outside.  It’s fall.  Fully fally feeling.  That means the basil is at the ‘use it or lose it’ stage and flowering like there’s no tomorrow.

Gratuitous Close-up of Basil

It’s time to make pesto.  Buckets and buckets of pesto.

Nascent Pile-o-Pesto

This basket represents about… a fifth of the basil out there.  We don’t eat that much pesto.  Note to future self: Listen, I know pesto is good.  Zucchini bread is good, too.  It doesn’t make them better to have too much.  Control yourself, OK?  If you need to fill a space, plant eggplant.  We never have enough of that.  Listen to me this year.  Idiot.

Incidentally, we had too many tomatoes, too, but I think that was more of a utilization issue.  Also, the striped romans all had really bad blossom end rot.  As it turns out, most of the extra zucchini and tomatoes are coming back in the form of eggs:

Kill, Dottie! Kill!

I leave you with this crazy zinnia.  It’s like it couldn’t decide how to spice up its various pistils and stamens and whatnot… so it just went for it!

Love the curly yellow ribbons.