Dinner started with a great, chunky salad but ended with peanut butter and jelly sandwich on toast. This is mostly my fault: at lunchtime today, a coworker asked whether it was harder to give up garlic or cheese and we took opposing sides. Since I have a weakness for foolish bets, I proposed a two week abstension to lend some tooth to our positions. He called cheese; I called garlic.

Luckily it was misheard as one week, since I'm already going slightly batty. My take so far, approximately 12 hours into the deal: cheese is the much more missable ingredient. The creaminess! The melted gooiness! Garlic, meanwhile, is EVERYWHERE and eating around it in prepared food is quite a pain. I suspect the trick is to cook from scratch more, making up for garlic's lost kick with a blend of scallion, onion, pepper, mustard. Alas the batch of fiery, herby, garlicky pasta sauce I made last weekend went into the freezer today since it can't be touched for a week.

I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, this spartan fare is a nice penance for the self-indulgent craziness of July: Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, canoeing, bicycling, kite-flying. Photos at Flickr, stories to come.