My heat is set to a chilly 64 degrees to save money on oil, so to keep warm today I baked a nice quickbread with green tomatoes from our farmers' market. You can find a recipe on the Internet, if you like, but the prep is just like any other of that type of baked good. Use your taste buds and heart as your guide, and add nuts, cinnamon and other spices as you like. I put walnuts and a big cinnamon bomb in mine. For a vegan treat, substitute two tablespoons of applesauce or half a banana for an egg. There's a myth going around that baking is an exact science, but I don't really buy that unless maybe in cases of flan or something similarly delicate.
Green tomatoes, eh? Well, they're like zucchini that way. In baked goods, they taste like tart apples, with a softer, easier to process texture. I sure do have lots of apples here, but tomatoes are easier to work with.
Soon I'll take Zorro on our walk, despite the cold. I've been seeing a lot of these big, black beetles on the path to Cooper River lately (pictured). Have you seen them?
I'm a trading card artist, and one of my big projects this past summer was Viceroy's Insectae set. I drew about 40 insect cards for that set (plus a couple worms, pillbugs, etc., which aren't technically insects, sure), and I noticed this bug looked a lot like a blister beetle I'd come across in my research. The specific blister beetle who's been haunting our neck of the woods lately is called an oil beetle (Meloe proscarabaeus). They're pretty neat, but don't be tempted to pick them up, for they secrete a chemical called Canatharidin (shown as an orange dot on the illustrated beetle's thorax), which can cause blistering chemical burns upon contact with skin. This chemical, when diluted, is used for wart removal.
It's also used in the "Spanish fly" aphrodisiac. But don't do it!
