Veggie Pasta

I stopped at the farm stand around the corner from my house yesterday and purchased some fresh zuchini and summer squash. I'd alway wanted to try making pasta ribbons with the squash and that is what I did tonight. These were sliced on my grater and sauteed in a tiny bit of water. On top is some leftover veganrella, sauce, and some tofurky kielbasa.

Last night, I also made Leslie's sloppy lentils. I had a bag of tri-colored lentils on my shelf and thought they would be a good candidate. They are ok, but I am not in love with them. I've added quite bit of crushed red pepper and feel like they still need something else.

Did you notice the new plate? It was $1.25 on clearance and I thought it might be nice to take pictures without a glare from my white dishes.

Let's see, what else? Oh, yesterday I went to see the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? It is about the history of the GM EV1 electric car in California. I found it very interesting, though it was very frustrating to see how so many different factors killed this great technology and I left the theatre wondering what is wrong with us.

For those of you that don't know, the EV1 was a completely electric car that would get 75-100 mile per charge. The electric charge equaled about 60 cents a gallon for gas and the vehicle had zero emissions. They were available for lease. At the end of the lease period, GM collected all the cars and did not give owners a buyout option. Then they destroyed all the perfectly good, working vehicles.

The movie talks about the many different facets of this story which include GM's interests, big oil, our goverment, CARB (the California Air Resource Board) that repealed the law they made that required 10% of the cars in CA to be zero emissions, other car companies and even the consumers.

One particularly frustrating point is that everyone says electric technology is the past and that hydrogen is the future. A little research on hydrogen powered vehicles shows that we are no where near seeing one available to buy. They cost upward of $500,000 to make each one. We have no good source of hydrogen or an infrastructure to support it. (We'd need to build 1000's of filling stations before it would be possible to sell.) Why tout a technology we don't have and squelch one we do have an infrastructure already built to support?

Though all of the players were a problem, GM really got my goat. If they took the cars off the road because the couldn't sell them, why did they need to destroy them? Why couldn't leasees purchase them? What kind of environmental policies does GM have that warrant destroying perfectly good vehicles? There were better batteries available for the EV1 which could double the range and make it a more viable option to many consumers. GM bought the battery technology, shredded the EVs, and sold the technology to Chevron.

I would never purchase a GM car even if they came out with a hybrid. What a waste of a wonderful technology. Now GM and others are devoting tons of time and money to hydrogen which is most likely not even a viable solution.

I've been talking about getting a Prius for a few years now. It is time for me to make that move pretty soon.