"I can't believe I ate the whole thing"

That's a cinnamon roll.  An 8 dollar cinnamon roll.  We went to San Antonio Saturday and stopped at Lulu's Bakery & Cafe on our way back home. We almost only go to restaurants by recommendation out here and we're almost never disappointed.  There is so much good food in Austin (and near it) and this place was no exception.

In fact, the menu offered jumbo burgers, which I got and which actually tasted like real beef, as well as "over-sized chicken fried steak."  Good grief!!  The thing was bigger than a dinner plate!  We actually sat at the bar/counter and watched the short-order cooks and waitresses work their magic.  As much as Trisha doesn't eat meat, she was impressed at the oddity and size of everything there.  I guess everything is bigger in Texas, including the traffic jams on the way back to Austin on I-35.

Speaking of food (which I do a lot and am quite happy about), I cooked my usual tomato thing so we could have lunches this week.  I call it spaghetti but nobody agrees with the name.  I pretty much never use spaghetti noodles, only sometimes use noodles of any kind usually replacing them with couscous grains and every once in a while rice, and don't even make it into a legitimate sauce.

However, my "spaghetti" is so good and so fresh a Frenchman would even eat it and not consider it a wasted dish.  It's never exactly the same thing, but this time around it consisted of: 1/2 a large garlic (meaning 1/2 the bulb itself, not just a clove), 1 onion, olive oil, 5 or 6 tomatoes sort of cut and boiled down for a while, about twice the basil you see in the picture there (note that the small leaves are the size of baby spinach leaves, the large ones the size of small, mature spinach leaves, for comparison), mature spinach, spices (fennel seed, oregano, black pepper) and Better than Bouillon.

The main variations are spinach or not, yellow squash, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, lavender, bay leaves and the type of tomato.  It all just depends on what I feel like putting in and what I remember to use.  Also, if I could use homegrown tomatoes, that's what I'd do every time.  Since Trisha doesn't eat cheese, that's the only other thing I usually consider.

Speaking of speaking of food, I looked over my selections of yogurt for the last couple weeks and discovered they all have "natural flavor": that stuff that nobody really knows where it comes from including the guy who squashed the bug and extracted its juices for Red #whichever.  Even my favorite one, Liberté, that I thought was natural has it.  The only one of the lot that didn't have it was Greek Gods, the one I made fun of for looking silly.  So this week I bought all the Greek Gods flavors at HEB Central Market to try out.

Central Market is the local competitor to Whole Foods down here.  It sports a line of main-stream hippy and fresh products that attracts most everyone from Billy-Bob the beef-braising, brisquette-barbequeing Texan to June-Flower the hippy with the home-made-looking sun dress with the tag from the local wanna-be store, and a lot of people in between.  Not too many people from the country (I just wanted to write that name) and not a ton of legit hippies, but a really good range of food options for people like me who want to improve their diet and not trash the Earth, but want to take a moderate approach about it.

And no, I don't fit into any of those persona types.  I wear the same, standard Eric-uniform I've been wearing since probably after high school that 90% of the time repels stereotypes and leaves you with this aura of mystique as I walk by.  Or something like that.  Yep, not only is it the same uniform, but possibly even the very same non-hip, non-trendy jeans and tee-shirts that I was wearing at that time.  I wouldn't know.