Garden Surprise - Mystery Solved

As I mentioned in my Garden Adventure post earlier this year, I had no deer for a while so I decided to plant a garden. One of the things I planted was an assortment of lettuces.  Everything was going fine until one day I noticed something strange.  There was this white thing sticking up out of the ground.  As far as I knew, lettuce didn't grow big thick roots like that, so I took a picture and put it on Facebook, asking my friends if they could identify this plant.

I got all kinds of responses, running from white carrot and parsnip to horseradish.  After checking out those plants online, I knew it wasn't any of them.  I still had a mystery on my hands.  And for some reason, I stopped eating the leaves.  I mean, I had planted lettuce, and this sure wasn't a lettuce, so I wasn't eating it until I knew more.

A friend of ours, Brian Henderson,  used to be the horticultural professor at Algonquin.  He's now the head gardener at Upper Canada Village.  While out prowling the countryside one day, we stopped in for a visit.  As we were about to leave, I mentioned this strange plant and he said it sounded like a Daikon Radish.  I had never heard of such a thing, but I must have described it really well because, when I looked it up online, that's certainly what I had. 

I read that they don't mind a hard frost, so I left it in the ground until this week when morning temperatures were often around minus 7C. Then I dug it up, washed it off, removed and stored the leaves and wondered what to do with the thing.  The younger leaves can be used in salads, as I had been doing in the beginning.  The bigger leaves can apparently be cooked like spinach, or used in recipes calling for spinach or kale.  The root itself, I figured could be grated and used in salads too.

A friend came for tea yesterday, and I showed her what I had accidentally grown.  She knew what it was right away, and said she always had to get hers at a farmer's market!  I asked her what she did with them, and she told me they were good in stir fries and stew.  I was planning on having a meal of pork shoulder chops, with onions, potatoes and carrots all cooked in the same pan.  I decided this was a good time to try cooking some of my Daikon radish too.  It was actually very good, and now I'm planning on creating a stir fry soon.

Like my friend,  I will be looking for these daikon radishes at farmer's markets in the future. I can't imagine growing a whole row of these things as one is good for several meals!  One or two a year will make a nice change of pace though, so I will be looking forward to finding them.

Finding this new vegetable growing in my garden was a much better surprise than finding that the deer had eaten all my hostas, as they had for the past couple of years.  That's for sure!

Perhaps a Slight Change of Plans

As of Saturday I have been on the 17 Day Diet for a week now, and I’ve lost 7 pounds so far. My hubby is not on the diet, but he has lost 10 pounds in the same time frame. He’s eating what I’m eating, plus the usual carbs in his oatmeal at breakfast, sandwich at lunch time and potatoes or rice at supper. But since I’m trying to lose weight, he thought he’d try too, and he’s cut back on cheese, desserts, and cereal at bedtime. I said cut back, not eliminated, and yet he’s lost 10 pounds. I don’t quite understand this.

I know why I’m losing weight. Carbohydrates create energy. The body needs this energy to function. When people eat less carbohydrates, their bodies turn to fat for energy. It doesn’t matter if it gets the fat from something you just ate, or the fat around your middle. If you didn’t eat any fat, then your body starts using what you’ve stored and you lose weight. That accounts for my weight loss. If I could figure out what accounts for his, I’d include some of the extras I see him eat.

Actually, on Sunday we had to go somewhere and ended up eating at Wendy’s. I chose a salad that came with chicken, while he had our usual chili with his side salad. The pecans that came with my salad came in a bag, and while I tasted them (they were sugar coated!) I didn’t put them on my salad. For dinner we had a chicken stir fry. I was supposed to just put garlic and ginger and soya sauce on that, but I made our usual sauce, which contains, amoung other things, cornstarch and brown sugar. I even got into the rice a bit. Hey, I’ve been good all week and 7 pounds in one week sounds wonderful, but seems like an unhealthy drop to me. Well, sure enough, my weight is up a couple of pounds this morning.

I’m also a bit dizzy, so I think I’m going to have a carb included day today, and eat the rest of the stir fry for lunch. I love seeing those numbers on the scale go down, but it won’t do me any good if I’m not healthy when I’m finished. Checking things out on the web, I find that low carb diets are good for lowering blood pressure. That’s the last thing I need, as mine is considered low to start with. It would likely explain the dizziness though.

I’ve enjoyed my meals on this plan though, so perhaps what I’ll do is skip ahead to the next 17 day cycle, as various carbs are included in that one. It’s still a weight loss plan, just not so accelerated as the first 17 day cycle is. I’m not giving up, just modifying the plan to suit my own body.