I feel like lately I've been getting stuck in a rut in a lot of different ways - work gets tedious, I never seem to make progress on anything, and I end up eating the same things a lot. I did finally get around to making a new recipe the other day - Gobi Manchurian.

It's an Indo-Chinese recipe featuring battered and fried cauliflower in a tomatoey sauce. I got the recipe from an old issue of VegNews. It came out pretty well - considering I'm a novice at battering-and-frying. And *gasp!* my mother ate it, too!

I also found some vegan zucchini tamales at Whole Foods last week. They're delicious with green chile sauce. Why? Because EVERYTHING is delicious with green chile sauce.

You can sorta almost see my super cute houndstooth skull plates from Target! What would I do without Halloween sales?

We've been growing a basil plant and some tomatoes since June. As a result I've been looking for every possible excuse to eat fresh basil. Pasta with tomato and basil has become one of my default lunches when I can't decide what to eat.

Somewhere in all my still-packed stuff is a book on backyard gardening. Now... as it happens we don't have a back yard, just a porch. (Well, technically there's a pit of rocks that you can walk out into downstairs, but there's not much sunlight.) But I've been checking out a lot of urban gardening blogs and it seems like you can grow almost any vegetable you want in containers. Do I smell a new hobby?