Category: Uncategorized

What’s for supper? Vol. 245: Got any duck food?

Happy Friday! But first, a word from the ducklings:

PEEP.

Seriously, that’s what they say. Peep peep! Peep peep peep! Or sometimes, Weep weep! Weep weep weep! 

They’re terribly shy, as you can see:

and they don’t fit in at our house at all. 

It’s quite sad, how neglected they are.

They still only eat something called “protein crumbles” and they are VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT and also VERY EXCITED ABOUT GETTING FRESH WATER and then they fall asleep. AND THEN THEY WAKE UP AND PEEP PEEP PEEP!!! and then they fall asleep again.

And that’s duck news! We had something a little more elaborate than protein crumbles this week, as follows: 

SATURDAY
Burgers and chips

Cooked outside! It’s finally warm enough, hooray! Damien cooked the burgers outside and they were juicy and delicious. 

Speaking of outside, I have such big plans for our yard this year. I’m moving the garden beds I built (and really kicking myself for putting rocks on the bottom layer for drainage. I PUT ROCKS IN THE DIRT. On purpose!!!) to the other side of the yard, and planning a little patio encompassing the St. Joseph garden and the young peach tree. It is going to be so bougie, you will throw up, I’m telling you. Cannot wait. Those tacky cafe string lights and a little propane fire pit and everything. 

SUNDAY
Spinach salad with hot bacon dressing; matzoh brei

New recipe! I slavishly followed this recipe from the delightful Sip and Feast, which hasn’t steered me wrong yet. Well, I used about twice the amount of bacon it called for, actually. The salad is baby spinach, red onion, mushrooms, and chopped bacon, and you mix it with a hot dressing made of bacon fat, olive oil and wine vinegar, sautéed minced shallots, honey, dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and a little grated cheese. 

So the spinach wilts a bit when you pour some of the hot dressing on, and then you toss it and let people add on more dressing if they want. Oh land, it was so good. 

I sprang for good ingredients, thick bacon, freshly-grated cheese, actual shallots, and so on, and it was just wonderfully savory and tangy, with a fantastic array of textures. It was easy to make, and tasted like it came from an expensive restaurant. I only wish I had sliced the mushrooms thinner. They were a bit too chunky and sort of interrupted the flavor party, but only slightly. 

I also made matzoh brei for those who wanted it. Matzo brei is a weird little recipe that everyone should know: You take a sheet of matzo, break it into chunks in a bowl, and pour hot water over it. Let it sit for thirty seconds or so, and then press the water out. Then beat up two eggs, stir in the drained matzo, and fry the mixture up in some hot oil, turning once, until the edges are crisp.

People sometimes eat matzoh brei with jelly, or cinnamon and sugar, or any sweet breakfasty way you can think of; but I vastly prefer it savory. It’s so good just with salt and pepper, hot out of the pan, with the little morsels of still-crisp matzoh poking out of the egg. 

This is the best way to approach a box of matzoh:

@simchafisher660what’s in the box?♬ original sound – simchafisher660

 

Oh nooooo! That can’t be kosher! Better find another box.

(I’m not really on TikTok, not really. Just trying to figure out where to put the ten thousand little duck videos I now have. I did notice that, after finally managing to retrain myself to turn the camera sideways to take videos, I guess now you’re supposed to not turn it sideways for TikTok. Whatever! Shame on you! Where’s my cane!)

I also made some ice cream, and it turned out weird, and I don’t know why.

I made the same recipes I’ve used many times, Ben and Jerry’s strawberry ice cream, and Ben and Jerry’s sweet cream base with M&M’s stirred in. They just didn’t freeze in the ice cream maker, and so when I put them in the freezer, they came out a few hours later more like ice milk, with shards of ice surrounded by fast-melting cream. The taste was fine, but it just wasn’t ice cream. I have no idea. An ice cream mystery. The only thing I can think of was the cream was a little old, but it smelled and tasted fine. I dunno.

MONDAY
Chicken quesadillas with spinach and caramelized onions

I had four chicken legs, which I skinned, drizzled with oil, and sprinkled heavily with Tajin seasoning, then roasted. 

Then I shredded the meat. I forget why, but I found myself with a little extra time before dinner, so I sliced up about five onions and caramelized them. Then I made up quesadillas to order. Only a few people chose all the available options (chicken, cheddar cheese, fresh spinach, and onions) but those who did were rewarded with a tasty treat indeed. 

Quesadillas are something I never had or even heard of until I was in college. I realize these aren’t authentically Mexican or whatever, but they’re delicious. What do you like to add to yours, besides cheese? 

TUESDAY
Corn dogs and chips

Tuesday was Corrie’s little play, in which she was Mother Rabbit. She told Peter and the others to stay out of Mr. McGregor’s garden, but did they listen? THEY DID NOT. 

How the tables have turned, Mother Rabbit.

It was super cute, but between having to be in another town at 5 and various other people needing to be in yet another town and picked up in another town, respectively, at 5:30 and 6, it was beginning to look a lot like corn dogs. 

I love corn dogs. If corn dogs were the only thing America had ever invented, it would be enough. That and Magic Eraser. 

WEDNESDAY
Banh mi

I planned banh mi for this week because I thought we’d have leftover chopped liver to put on the sandwiches. But I forgot to tell the fridge-cleaning kid not to throw the leftover chopped liver away! It was a liver tragedy. Luckily, banh mi on its own is still delicious. 

Speaking of liver tragedies, I gained a bunch of weight when I started taking Lexapro for PMDD back in November or December. It works great for PMDD, which is actually life changing, but I gained 15 pounds, and that was a bummer, but, now I’m finally tapered off Lexapro (I’m trying Prozac) and it is time to get my punk ass in gear again, by which I mean I can’t just wander around the house eating everything I find and saying “ooh, I hate these meds, they make me gain sooo much weight.”

What I’m trying to tell you is that, I’m really trying, and by the time dinner came around, I was SO HUNGRY, so possibly that’s why these sandwiches seemed so good. 

Another possibility is that they were just damn fine sandwiches. Maybe both things can be true.

I marinated the meat for about four hours, and I cut up a bunch of cucumbers, chopped up a bunch of cilantro, did a quick pickle of some carrots and radishes.

Jump to Recipe

I actually pickled the carrots for a few hours, then just before dinner, I re-used the brine to pickle the radishes, which I had sliced very thin

but not before having a larf over the branding 

I mean, yes, I paid for them, so I should hope. Next time, ask me! I will come up with a better name! Sunny Day Radishes! Fatso’s Radishes! Chompsville Radish Farm! Mrs. Rabbit’s Radish Party! Those are all better than what they actually went with. But nobody asks me. 

Anyway, pickled radishes will turn a pretty salmon pink if you let them sit for a couple of hours,

but if you slice them thin (I used the long, flat holes on the cheese grater), they do take on flavor right away.

I set out mayo, sriracha, and sriracha mayo. I forgot the jalapeños, but nobody complained. We again had a sort of rolling dinner because everyone was going to and fro all evening again, so I toasted a length of french bread and heated up some meat in the microwave, then assembled my sandwich, and it was just perfecto. 

I only had half the amount of fish sauce the recipe called for, and you know what? It was better. So I have amended the recipe to show that.

Jump to Recipe

I also used more pepper, just because I was having fun turning the crank, I guess, so I amended that in the recipe, too. I am a whimsical food god and with a careless swipe of my finger will change the recipe of banh mi at will, just try and stop me. If you are still reading, put an X here   [     ] yes  [     ] no

THURSDAY
Fancy ramen

My plan was to serve ramen the day after the banh mi so there would be leftover pickled vegetables, but they all got eaten. Oh well. 

I had some boneless pork ribs and sliced them into strips, sautéed them in chili oil, and then doused them with soy sauce when they were almost done cooking. 

I ended up with that, some nice sprouts, plus shredded cabbage left over from last week’s fish tacos, spinach left over from the vast quantities of spinach I buy every week because I’ve become a spinach fiend, some crunchy noodles, some boiled eggs, and various sauces and some sesame seeds.

 

It’s a decent meal. 

I like to line the bowl with spinach and pour the hot ramen on top of that, so there is a tasty treat waiting at the bottom. I really am a spinach fiend.

One of these days I’m actually going to make a good ramen broth, rather than using the little packets, but I know it will spoil us all, and we won’t be able to go back, and then I’ll lose another easy meal, and I’m not ready for that! Don’t take away my protein crumbles! Peep peep peep!

FRIDAY
Mac! and! cheese!

Just because it’s been a while. 

In closing, let me say: PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP! Hope you are same.

Print

Pork banh mi

Ingredients

  • 5-6 lbs Pork loin
  • 1/2 cup fish sauce
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 minced onion
  • 1/2 head garlic, minced or crushed
  • 2 tsp pepper

Veggies and dressing

  • carrots
  • cucumbers
  • vinegar
  • sugar
  • cilantro
  • mayonnaise
  • Sriracha sauce

Instructions

  1. Slice the raw pork as thinly as you can. 

  2. Mix together the fish sauce ingredients and add the meat slices. Seal in a ziplock bag to marinate, as it is horrendously stinky. Marinate several hours or overnight. 

  3. Grill the meat over coals or on a pan under a hot broiler. 

  4. Toast a sliced baguette or other crusty bread. 

 

Print

quick-pickled carrots and/or cucumbers for banh mi, bibimbap, ramen, tacos, etc.

An easy way to add tons of bright flavor and crunch to a meal. We pickle carrots and cucumbers most often, but you can also use radishes, red onions, daikon, or any firm vegetable. 

Ingredients

  • 6-7 medium carrots, peeled
  • 1 lb mini cucumbers (or 1 lg cucumber)

For the brine (make double if pickling both carrots and cukes)

  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 cup rice vinegar (other vinegars will also work; you'll just get a slightly different flavor)
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Mix brine ingredients together until salt and sugar are dissolved. 

  2. Slice or julienne the vegetables. The thinner they are, the more flavor they pick up, but the more quickly they will go soft, so decide how soon you are going to eat them and cut accordingly!

    Add them to the brine so they are submerged.

  3. Cover and let sit for a few hours or overnight or longer. Refrigerate if you're going to leave them overnight or longer.

What’s for supper? Vol. 244: Overcome with paschal QUACK

Happy meat Friday! I hope you all had and are having and will continue to have a joyful and delicious Easter! 

Couple little food and other highlights from the previous week (because I may be a monster, but even I don’t do a food post on Good Friday):

On April 1 I made maple syrup from the sap I’d been collecting. I was only able to tap one tree, so I only got about five or six gallons of sap.

Maple sap looks like rain water and tastes only very faintly sweet. I ran it through a sieve a few times to get the debris out, and then just started boiling it. 

People usually boil sap outside or in dedicated sugar houses, and then just move it to the stove for the very last stage, but you can do the whole thing inside if you don’t much care about your kitchen getting all sticky, which I don’t, because it’s already all sticky.

The recipe is as follows: You boil and boil and boil it until it’s syrup, and keep on not caring about the walls. It took about four-and-a-half hours, and right at the end, I couldn’t find my dang candy thermometer, so I had to eyeball it based on how it ran off the spoon. I was terrified of burning it and ruining it after all that boiling! So it actually turned up on the thin side, but better a little thin than ruined. 

It still tastes lovely and mapley and is a beautiful amber shade. I got about a pint of syrup, which is what I was expecting. 

I also took Corrie for her first-ever haircut!

The two of us finally got tired of spending our lives detangling her hair. She loves it, she looks adorable, and, whew. 

I also bought a couple of kayaks off Facebook Marketplace!

Two nine-foot Old Town kayaks, because that is the brand the rental place used, and I figured if they rent them out, they must be durable and good for beginners. We haven’t had a chance to take them out yet, but I am VERY EXCITED. 

We also had two birthdays the first week of April. Irene baked and decorated her own cake, with her sisters:

and Lena wasn’t sure what kind of cake she wanted, so she said to surprise her. WHICH I DID. 

This, if you can’t immediately tell, is a gum paste Chun-Li from Street Fighters. Sometimes she needs to sit down a take a load off after all that street fighting, that’s all. 

But most of the week was super easy, super simple dinners because I was cooking and baking my little heart out for Passover, which we celebrate on Holy Saturday every year. Most of my Passover recipes are here. 

So here’s what we ate this past week: 

SATURDAY
Passover! 

Most of the food turned out pretty good! The spinach pies, which I like to make into little spinach bites in silicone molds, were a little heavy on the pie and light on the spinach, but they were okay. 

The chopped liver was a little uneven in texture, but the taste was out of this world. Tremendously rich and savory. So good. 

The chicken soup was fine. I made 89 matzoh balls, and I do believe they all got eaten. We also had gefilte fish, pickles, and some delicious charoset. Damien roasted some lamb and I roasted some cinnamon garlic chicken. Both quite tasty. It was a pretty table this year, too, and Dora came, and Moe came with his sweet girlfriend. Corrie did the four questions; Elijah did his weird Elijah the prophet thing. You can see some photos here.

 

And then dessert:

Jelly fruit slices and chocolate covered jelly fruit rings were very hard to find this year, for some reason, but I got ’em. Also a nice slab of halvah, and assorted macaroons. The only things I baked for dessert were chocolate matzoh with almonds, which you can see in the foreground of the photo above, and lemon walnut sponge cake. 

The chocolate matzoh is pretty hard to mess up, and that turned out great. You just make some caramel in a pot, pour that on the matzoh and heat it up in the oven, and then sprinkle chocolate on it and let it sit for a minute, and then spread the chocolate out, and sprinkle nuts on it. Freeze and break, and there it is. I think people make this with saltines, but that doesn’t sound very good to me. Matzoh has those unique blistered layers that hold up very well under the caramel and chocolate.

The sponge cake is very easy to mess up, and I actually did really well with it this year! I used the recipe on the side of the matzoh cake meal can. Of course you can’t use any leavening agents, so it depends on egg whites to make it light. Well, I folded those egg whites in like I was afraid they were going to leap out of the bowl and smack me. And I guess that’s what did it, because that was the nicest, lightest sponge cake I’ve ever made. 

The top had this wonderful crackly baked meringue-like crust, and the inside was tender and airy, just like it should be. I wish the lemon taste had come through more (I was a little low on lemon juice because I was rushing and juiced the lemons so lustily, I broke the bowl, and had to throw it all out), but overall, I was very pleased. Here’s the recipe, which I will type up legibly at some point. Even with my reading glasses on I had to get a kid to tell me what those numbers were supposed to be!

And that was Passover! We have now firmly established that it’s equally hilarious whether you say “young lambs” or “lung yams.” I’m gonna lose it either way. I wasn’t even drinking! So we finished that up and sang the songs, and Damien said “the order of the Passover is now accomplished” and we all shouted “MORE OR LESS” and we had dessert, and then we really had to hustle and get ready for the Easter Vigil, because we do All The Things. 

The vigil was nearly three hours long, and yes, Corrie singed her hair a bit, but only a bit, and then she fell asleep.

SUNDAY
Passover leftovers and candy

In the morning we had Easter baskets I got stickers for the kids’ baskets this year, and I thought some of them were pretty good.

I also got edible easter grass, because I figured the dog was going to eat it either way, and I really did not want to see it a few days later in the yard in . . . dog processed form. 

We made eggs on Easter day. The little girls learned how to blow eggs

I tried a new technique, where you put leaves on the egg and keep it in place with tulle and a rubber band,

and then dunk it in dye. Turned out subtle but pretty. 

MONDAY
Chicken cutlets

Monday Damien made the birthday dinner that Lena had requested for her birthday last week, but it turned out she had to be somewhere else at dinner time, so we had it on Monday. It’s the Deadspin chicken cutlet meal, with the delicious sauce and the fresh basil leaf and provolone on each piece of chicken. Delectable as always. 

TUESDAY
Aldi pizza

Normally, I try to make extra nice meals that everyone likes throughout Easter week, so everyone keeps on being overcome with paschal joy.  However, this year I achieved a level of tiredness I haven’t known in years, and consequentemente, I just couldn’t get myself to go shopping. So on Tuesday I just snagged some Aldi pizzas on the way home from school pick-up. 

Plus, also, I had my concert on Tuesday night! I personally did not play in a manner that would win any awards, but we were all nice and loud and we ended at the same time, and that’s what counts. Really glad I did the whole band thing. I may look around for a summer band to join, or I may just plug away at the Mozart clarinet concerto I bought, until this band starts up again in the fall. 

WEDNESDAY
Penne with leftover chicken and leftover sauce

Wednesday I just chopped up the leftover chicken and put it in the leftover sauce and heated it up, and cooked up a bunch of penne, and served that. I bulked up the sauce a bit with some sauce from a jar, which had this incredible tip on the label:

You may be thinking, “How is this a time-saving tip, when they are essentially telling you ‘eat the food you bought?'” But this is the era when people use cutting-edge technology to disseminate videos of themselves laboriously turning pasta into much worse pasta, so I guess we need all the help we can get. 

THURSDAY
Strawberry chicken salad

We needed a vegetable so bad, so I broke down and went shopping. We had salad with grilled chicken, sliced strawberries, slivered almonds, crumbled blue cheese, and big homemade croutons. 

A vegetable, I say! 

On Thursday we also BROUGHT HOME THE DUCKLINGS! We now have four little ridiculously adorable Pekin ducklings. Their names are Fay, Ray, Coin, and EJ, named after Damien’s great uncles and great grandfather. 

They are living in a tub in the house for a few weeks, and then they can move outside into a little wooden duck house. They’re just lovely. They’re golden and shiny and somewhat belligerent, and their feet are very funny. They stopped being shy about ten minutes after we got home, and now they just stomp all over the place.

We can’t tell if they’re girls or boys yet. When they get their adult feathers, the boys will have curly tails, and I guess that’s how you tell? 

The dog is fascinated with them, and finds them a little alarming. He’s being very gentle. They are pretty much ignoring him. They are incredibly messy and poop nonstop. They also put up a surprisingly loud racket, and peep and whistle very musically (they don’t actually quack yet). They are babies, so they get tired out very easily, and pile on top of each other, snuggle up, and go to sleep. But then if someone makes a noise, their little heads pop up and they have to find out what’s going on. It’s the cutest thing imaginable. Expect to hear more duck news!

I’ve been posting copious photos and videos on Facebook. Here is when they first came home:

and here is when the kids came home from school to meet them:

Here is a quick video of the dog doing his best to figure out what the hell is going on around here:

 

and here are some pics of their first little trip outdoors this afternoon:

 

I will attempt to write about things other than ducklings in the future, but I make no promises. 

FRIDAY
Fish tacos

I know it’s a meat Friday, but my brain wasn’t working when I was shopping, so we’re having tortillas with beer battered fish fillets, shredded cabbage, sour cream, salsa, avocados, and lime juice, and tortilla chips. 

Oh, one last thing! It’s matzoh brei (pronounced to rhyme with “dry”) season! There is probably still matzoh in the stores, maybe even on sale, so you should pick up a few boxes and try this. 

Take a sheet of matzoh and break it into bite-sized pieces. Put it in a bowl and pour some hot water on top. Let it sit for a minute, then pour the water off and squeeze it to get the extra water out. Then scramble the slightly softened pieces of matzoh into a couple of eggs. 

That’s it. This matzoh brei, above, is a little undercooked because I was starving and I rushed it, but it was still so tasty. The matzoh gets cooked right into the egg but it stays crunchy on the edges, and it’s perfect with just a little salt and pepper. You can also make this with fried onions and it’s superb. 

Okay, that’s it! Quack quack!

How we ruined a perfectly good cat

In the beginning, he was a normal cat.

My husband brought him home as a surprise for the kids, and to deal with the occasional critter that got into the house from the nearby woods. He was a nice enough kitten, handsome and stripey, and he spent a reasonable amount of time snuggling and pouncing and being adorable.

But once he grew out of his cuddly kitten stage, he made it pretty clear from that he didn’t need us at all, and that we existed for his convenience. We were to feed him, let him in and out, and step over or around him when he was sunbathing, and put up with the occasional random claw attack. A normal cat, as I said.

He was confident in his identity, and he understood his role in the family very well. He was the cat, haughty and sleek, dignified and independent. A normal cat.

The first crack in his armor was when we brought the bearded dragon home. This lizard is also a male, and believes himself to be a mighty warrior. If he doesn’t like you, he charges at you, and even though he’s about the size of a banana, his confidence makes it pretty intimidating.

He did not like the cat; and the feeling was mutual. In fact, the cat took his entire existence as a personal affront, and the first time we left the house, he managed to dislodge several heavy weights and knock the top off the terrarium to get inside the lizard tank so he could gobble up this ugly little intruder. 

I got home just in time. Put down my purse and turned the corner to see the lizard was on his back legs about to attack, and the cat cowering in a corner, smooshed into a little wad, a look of abject terror on his face. Another moment, and the lizard would have bitten his head off, or at least taken the biggest mouthful he could manage. I yanked the poor cat out by the scruff of his neck, and he scurried away and spent the rest of the day under the bed, reassessing his worldview. The next day he was fine.

But it seemed like, from that day forward, he started looking over his shoulder a little bit.

Then we got a bird. All summer long, the cat had been stalking and devouring wild animals, grasshoppers, voles, moles, even a careless rabbit, and yes, sometimes a songbird, and nobody had anything to say; but then we went ahead and deliberately brought an obnoxious green parakeet inside the house, and apparently he was just supposed to accept it. We weren’t going to let him restore the natural order of things. Instead, we were going to feed this bird, and give it toys, and teach it songs, and let it literally walk all over us with its little dirty birdy feet, and there would be absolutely no massacre whatsoever.

I vividly remember sitting on the couch having happy family time with the parakeet one evening, teaching it the Indiana Jones song, when there was a sudden thump at the window, and we all turned to see. It was the cat. He had thrown himself at the living room window and had pressed his face against the glass, his face frozen into a look of pure revulsion. He didn’t want to come in. He didn’t want anything to do with us. He was just sitting there, gazing in feline disbelief at what we had become. 

Then we got a dog. 

And honestly, the cat‘s life became hell. The dog is a boxer and he loves everybody, and wants to play-play-play, and wants to wuff-wuff-wuff, and snuff-snuff-snuff, and IT IS SO FUNNY TO KNOCK YOU DOWN, YOU CAT; and LOOK AT MY NEW WET ROPE, YOU CAT, IT IS WET; and LET ME SMELL YOU, YOU CAT; and never more from that day on did the cat have a moment’s rest. He was constantly being harassed and nudged and harried and hassled and rolled and battered. Even when he closed his eyes at night, I believe he saw visions of the jowly, joyful idiot, pursuing him, always pursuing him, prancing and dancing and not-quite-romancing, but generally just trying to be his best friend and maybe accidentally eat him up a little bit, but JUST FOR A JOKE, YOU CAT.

And the poor cat‘s spirit was broken.  All his haughtiness was gone. His dignity had all run away like the sands in an hour glass. He began to mew like a baby, and to seek out skritchings even when he wasn’t hungry.  He was needy and pathetic and he didn’t care who knew it. He put on weight; he started hanging out with the middle school girls, spending all his time gossiping and watching BTS videos. He never even talked about getting his degree anymore. The bird would openly laugh at him, and he would just look the other way, pretending he didn’t notice. But if you looked closely, you could tell.

Last night, we were watching TV with the windows open, and the unmistakable stink of a skunk came wafting through the house. We suddenly realized we didn’t know where the cat was. My husband made a brief search and couldn’t find him, so we grimly resumed watching our show. Sure enough, half an hour later there was a frantic scuffling at the front door, and the world’s most demonic smelling cat wanted to come in and be comforted. 

But we have hearts of stone, and did not feel like giving any cats any baths at midnight. So we stuffed him back outside. I went to bed and closed the windows, and over the next hour, I lay there listening to this poor forlorn creature scrabbling more and more frantically at the window, begging and pleading to be let inside. It was heart-rending. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I did what anyone with human soul would do: I got up and took a sleeping pill, so I wouldn’t hear the little bastard. 

Then in the morning, my husband scrubbed him down with a baking soda bath and released him, and left for work. When my son woke up, the first thing he saw was the body of the cat lying wet, stiff, and cold on the floor.

He wasn’t dead, though. He had just hit rock bottom. He couldn’t get any lower. It was the worst day of his life. 

Or so he thought. 

My son (who had just woken up) took one look at this pathetic creature, his whiskers drooping, his eyes forlorn, his fur gritty and matted with baking soda, and he thought to himself, “Poor little guy. Poor little kitty cat. I don’t know what he’s been through, but he’s obviously had some kind of a rough time. You know what he needs? He needs a nice warm bath.”

Well, I haven’t seen either one of them since. It’s possible that, in a fit of pure feline umbrage, the cat may have spontaneously combusted. I think if I go in there, I may just find little pieces of cat all over the place. Little bitty angry bits of the most disappointed cat the world has ever seen.

It’s a sad story, really. He was a perfectly good cat, and we went and ruined him without even meaning to.  There isn’t any justice in the world. 

Did I mention we’re getting ducks? 

Lent Film Party Review: The Reluctant Saint

Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party has been kind of a bust this year. So far we have only watched the second half of I Prefer Heaven, which we started last year and watched on the Formed app, and The Reluctant Saint (1962). We watched that on Tubi; it’s also currently on Amazon Prime.

What I know about Joseph of Cupertino is basically: He was Italian, known as kind of a simpleton, and he levitated. I don’t know how biographically accurate the movie is; I’m just reviewing what I saw. Here’s the trailer:

Here’s the plot:

Giuseppe is a grown man living with his impoverished mother and no-good father in 17th century Italy. His mother has been keeping him in school because she can’t figure out what else to do with him, because he’s so slow-witted and accident prone. She manages to palm him off on some Franciscan friars, who reluctantly allow him to tend the animals; but even there, trouble finds him, partly because, while some of the men are patient and kind, others are resentful and suspicious of his foolish, forbearing ways. He happens to meet and impress the local bishop, who is also of peasant stock, and who sees value and worth in Giuseppe’s simplicity and devotion. He directs him to study for the priesthood, to the horror of everyone including Giuseppe himself. 

His studies are a disaster, but when he reports for his preliminary examinations, the one scripture passage he is quizzed on is the only one he happens to know: about the lost lamb that the shepherd goes to find. So he’s doomed to study for another year, with even more esoteric books, and when he arrives in the city for his exam, the interlocutor turns out to be his old friend the bishop, who immediately lets him pass. 

But in the mean time (I may be slightly scrambling the order of events, but it doesn’t matter much), Giuseppe has taken up the slightly disturbing habit of floating up into the air when he prays. The fellow who previously considered himself Giuseppe’s rival tells the whole town that this is because he’s a saint, and the people swarm the monastery, begging for healing. One of his superiors (played by Ricardo Montalban), who has always eyed Giuseppe with suspicion, now believes that his powers must come from the devil, and Giuseppe is forced to undergo an excruciating exorcism. When it is completed and he is declared free of possession, he immediately begins to levitate again, and his persecutor realizes his mistake and repents. 

In the final scene, we see Giuseppe integrated happily into the community, accepted and valued at last, processing with them and chanting, and blissfully floating away, only to be tugged like a balloon gently back to earth by the very man who accused him of being possessed. 

My take:

It’s a dated movie. The characters speak with accents to show they are Italian, and moments of divine intervention are indicated by blinding light and loud, heavenly choirs. Giuseppe’s intellectual state is portrayed in a way that may make modern viewers squirm.

That being said, I give the actor, Maximilian Schell, full credit for taking on a kind of role that wasn’t really a thing at that time, and generally lending the character a dignity that’s probably ahead of its time, despite the plot relying heavily on comedy. 

Early on, it’s a little painful to watch Schell’s grinning, fumbling performance. It’s almost like the beginning of an Adam Sandler movie, where you think, “Oh my gosh, is he going to act like this the whole time?” But either the acting gets better or you just begin to accept it within the world of the movie, because it does get less uncomfortable.

It’s not entirely clear what Giuseppe’s intellectual capacity is, but he’s constantly mocked, abused, and bullied, and he tries his best to accept it with good humor. There’s some indication that he struggles with treating people well when they abuse him. It’s a comedy, overall, bbut you do feel how badly he wants to belong somewhere and be useful somewhere; and you feel how painful and awful it is for him to be dragged away from his happy world he’s found in the barn with the animals, and to have to be in a monk’s cell studying books he doesn’t understand; but you also see that he does it out of obedience and humility. 

Giuseppe is the patron saint of aviators, which is cute, but at least as he is portrayed in this movie, I think he would be especially dear to people who never feel like they belong or fit in or are in the right place, and never feel like they’re good enough, and are trying very hard to humbly work with the hand they were dealt. 

One thing I liked very much was the character of the bishop. Catholics and anti-Catholics alike generally take the shortcut of almost reflexively showing hierarchy as bad guys — but Bishop Durso (Akim Tamiroff) is so affable and lovely, it’s like balm for Giuseppe to have such a good friend. I love that he readily (correctly) identifies Giuseppe as a “true son of Francis,” and it’s pleasant to see another such man in the role of bishop. (I generally find it comforting to realize that, just like today, the church has always struggled with religious orders straying from their charisms, and has always had a problem with internal jealousy and competition and infighting cropping up in otherwise sound groups; but God, then and now, continues to raise up good, solid men and to place them where they need to be at the right time. The movie doesn’t necessarily draw this theme out; maybe it’s just something I especially needed to see right now! Nevertheless, it is there in the story. )

There was very little discussion of spiritual things in the movie, that I can recall, and that was a good choice. I mean there is, but Giuseppe doesn’t come out with any maxims, corny or profound, about God’s love or intentions; you can just tell from the expression on his face that he’s very devoted to Mary, that he tries very hard to be good, that he works hard to forgive people when they wrong him, and that it’s a constant sorrow to him that he’s always failing at what he tries, but he does love life all the same. All this makes it immensely gratifying when he eventually does find his place at the end. It’s not excellent acting, but it’s good enough. It works. 

There is no explanation or theorizing, that I can recall, about exactly why he levitates. It makes life much harder for him! It’s not something he would chose for himself. The very first time it happens, the movie (not especially creative in its cinematography in general) depicts this by showing, not him, but the statue that has sent him into ecstasy. We see it from his point of view, first over his head, then only slightly overhead, and then at face level, and that’s how we realize he’s rising into the air. This is clever, because it avoids what could be a clumsy-looking special effect of him dangling in mid-air, and it also invites us to see the phenomenon from his point of view: Just something that is happening, utterly out of his control, and who knows why. I’m not trying to read too much into it. I just appreciate that this is a movie that keeps things simple and doesn’t try to go beyond its own means. Levitation is weird. It’s something that Giuseppe just has to accept, and, well, so do we. 

When you see him levitating when he’s facing the altar, saying his first Mass, his face almost distorted with joy, it’s a short scene but quite powerful. It shows something you maybe don’t think about very often: What it feels like to be a priest. Or maybe what it ought to feel like? 

The only thing I had a quibble with is when the bishop, in the middle of their lovely nighttime chat while roasting chestnuts, admits to Giuseppe that’s he’s never really understood the trinity. That’s fine, but then Giuseppe blithely explains it by saying that it’s like his robe: You fold it into three, and that’s it: Three folds, one robe; three persons, one God. The bishop says “Brilliant!” Well, actually that’s the heresy of partialism! So if you’re watching with your kids, you might want to follow up on that scene.

It’s not really a kid’s movie, but there’s nothing graphic or terrifying in it. More sensitive viewers might be upset by how often the mother hits Giuseppe, and how mean she is to him in general, although she clearly loves him. There is nothing graphic in this movie, and although its overall tone is lighthearted, there are some sad and intense scenes throughout, mostly because Giuseppe is constantly mocked and harassed and pushed around so much. It also has a scene where he feeds a starving mother and baby, and is beaten up. His father is a drunk, and then he dies. The scene of the exorcism lasts several minutes and shows him kneeling and sweating by candlelight while in chains, while the priest dramatically prays in Latin. Kids who watch it will probably need adults to put some things in context. But as I said, the movie keeps things straightforward and simple.

Overall, I liked it very much, and I’m glad my family saw it. It was entertaining and engaging and memorable. Recommended, as long as you understand the sensitivities of your viewers. 

The man called Resurrection

[This is an essay I wrote two years ago, a year after my father died, a few weeks after my mother died, a few weeks before Easter. It was first published at The Catholic Weekly on April 2, 2021.]

***

After my mother’s funeral, I drove home and took off my wet, muddy clothes, and found that I could barely move. My flesh had turned to sand and I couldn’t make my limbs work. I crawled into bed, and the longer I stayed there, the heavier I got. I kept thinking about how my mother’s body was so light, they let her coffin down into the grave by hand. They used heavy machinery to place my father in the ground just before Easter last year, but my mother had become very light. 

In my mother’s funeral sermon, the priest spoke of Lazarus. Martha thought her brother’s death was a stupid, pointless death. She accuses Jesus: If you had been here, our brother would not have died! And she was right. But Jesus wanted to show them, I suppose, that he is who he says he is. He is the resurrection and the life. Where he is, there life is. That’s who he is, said the priest: He is the Resurrection. And he comes as close as he pleases, when he pleases, to do as he pleases.

In this story, he raises his voice, and Lazarus comes out. They undo everything that has been done: They take his winding cloth off, they feed him again. Lazarus lives again. 

I wonder if Lazarus was afraid to go to sleep that night. I wonder how he felt when the newness of his new life wore off and he sinned again for the first time: how stupid he must have felt when he had to repent again, even after he had already died.

I wonder how he felt later, when he started to die again for the second time. Maybe by that time he had gotten blasé about the process, and thought he’d be protected from that final darkness for a second time. Or maybe he was afraid he would be rescued, afraid he’d be called back and asked, for some reason, to do it all again. 

Isn’t it awful, sinning again and again? Facing death, being rescued, sinning and repenting and being forgiven, and then going out and doing it again? 

When my mother first became a Christian, she was crushed to realize it was still very easy to sin. She had heard, and read, and taken to heart the idea that baptism brings the life of Christ into human souls. She thought that, since Jesus had taken up residence in her heart, he would therefore prevent her from doing anything bad. She thought you choose Jesus and jump in the water, and when you come up again, you’re set for life.

But that’s not how it works. I don’t know which sin she committed that showed her how wrong she was, but I imagine it was something petty — something small and human, which nonetheless showed her very starkly that you can be washed in the blood of the lamb and then go right back to acting like a stupid sheep. In fact, it’s inevitable. You go back, Jack, do it again. It’s not a “one and done” situation. It’s an “over and over and over again” situation, and you don’t always know what it’s for. 

One stupid thing about the way my mother died was that she was a frail and tiny woman whose brain had long since been pillaged by dementia. She couldn’t dress herself, or speak, or sit up, and sometimes she forgot how to eat. So this little tiny ravaged woman got COVID. Then she beat COVID, and recovered completely from COVID, and began to get stronger, and then she died anyway, of something else. I think they called it “undetermined” on her death certificate, which made me laugh a little. I snickered through my tears that I knew the real reason she died. The very day before, her nursing home opened up visiting hours again for the first time in many months. She never did like social occasions, and would do anything to get out of them. I imagined her seeing some guests on their way, and thinking “Not this again!” and taking some extreme steps to avoid playing host.

I’m supposed to be writing about Easter in time of Covid. All I can say is that, if you zoom out far enough and take a long enough view, Covid time is no different from any other time. When the pandemic raged unchecked, it was clear to every sane person that death was near to us, or could be, or might be. But that’s always true. Death is always very close. Both my parents died, one at the beginning of the pandemic, and one toward the end, but neither died of covid. Death of all kinds is always very close. 

My father used to say he was going through an awkward stage, the one between life and death, and I’m feeling that pretty hard right now. Some Easters on earth are like that: If not tragic, then awkward and a little stupid, stupid like Lazarus caught between his first death and his second one, stupid like sin, stupid like things that happen over and over again and seem to have no meaning. 

When my grandmother had dementia, my mother, who cared for her, used to anguish over what the meaning could possibly be for her mother’s life. It went on and on and on, long past the time when anyone could make any sense of it, least of all my grandmother herself. Eventually my mother stopped asking, and just tried to rest in the thought that there are some things we can’t know right now. It doesn’t mean they don’t mean anything. It just means Jesus knows, and when he wants us to know, he will come and tell us.

When my mother’s dementia got bad, we had to put her in a nursing home, and my father went to see her every day. He went back and back and back to see his wife, who couldn’t even look at him or say his name, and after a few years of it, and by God, he changed. He started to love life. He became a happy man, and then the man called “Resurrection” came for him, just before Easter, just as the COVID lockdown began.

Sometimes Resurrection looks like getting your beloved brother Lazarus back; sometimes Resurrection looks like the death of both your parents, at least from the outside, at least for now. You never know what will happen when the Lord comes near. 

When Martha said, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” she was right. Sometimes he draws near, and then draws away, for reasons of his own. I do believe in the power of baptism. I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, eventually. I do believe in the man called “Resurrection.” I don’t care for his methods, but I believe in him. When he wants me to know more, he will come and tell me.

***

Image: Resurrection of Lazarus, Workshop of Daniel Chorny and Andrey Rublev, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Children’s book giveaway! Tomie dePaola’s CHRISTOPHER THE HOLY GIANT and THE LITTLE FRIAR WHO FLEW

Couple of things! First, Ignatius is having a 30% off sale on children’s books. Just about every book for kids is on sale until Sunday, March 26 at 11:59 PM Pacific. They have so many lovely titles, including many re-issues by Tomie dePaola. (I reviewed some others here.)

Second, today I have two more books to give away! Two more wonderful Tomie dePaola books, both great picks for Easter. And weirdly enough, they ended up being two books about two very different models of masculinity (or maybe that’s just where my head is at right now). 

First: THE LITTLE FRIAR WHO FLEW 

It’s a cheery, attractive, colorful book full of details, animals, flowers and fanciful historical costumes, and makes a good introduction to the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the simple-minded, accident-prone boy who experiences the joy of God so directly, he levitates.

The story has a gentle arc and ends quietly with Joseph escaping fame and returning to his solitary life in the hills.

The text is by Patricia Lee Gauch and illustrated by dePaola in 1980, in a style that’s a little more line-heavy and busy and maybe more comic-like, less elegant and delicate than the style we may associate with dePaola.

Not a bad thing, just worth noting.

Incidentally, last night we watched The Reluctant Saint (1962) about Joseph of Cupertino and we all liked it. I’ll try and do a full review later this week, but it was entertaining and well-realized and although it was certainly dated, it had some very moving scenes and extremely appealing characters. 

Next book! 

CHRISTOPHER THE HOLY GIANT, written and illustrated by  dePaola. This one was first published in 1994, and it is my favorite dePaola era. 

What a story! This is very much what I mean by a myth: Something that’s not perhaps intended to be taken as a literal historical account, but is crafted to convey things that are true and important about humans, about the world, and about God.

It’s told very simply, without embellishment, and lets the glowing, icon-like illustrations wallop you. 

There are two pages with no text

And it ends with Jesus telling him everything he needs to know, and Christopher listens, and the very next day his actions bear fruit. What do you know about that. 

What a book! Can we have this as recommended reading for high school kids? For seminarians? 

Uh, I don’t mean to be a weirdo, but Christopher actually kind of looks like the sigma male or gigachad meme guy, ultra-muscular, ultra-masculine lone wolf who does what he wants and follows his own set of very simple rules.

I feel like a lot of dudes I’ve encountered have been reduced to Reprobus [Christopher’s name before he meets Jesus] level-grasp of cultural and spiritual norms. They know they are strong, and they are just looking for someone even stronger to follow, the end. What to do? 

Not that there is any kind of pop cultural subtext in this book, or anything! I just thought it’s an especially poignant parable for 2023. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy this for your little kids but leave it around for your teenage boys to read. (I’m a big believer in leaving books lying around where they may be idly picked up, like outside the bathroom or in the car, or on the table when dinner is almost ready.) 

Anyway, both books, in their own way, are about being the person God made you to be, and using the strengths you have been given for their proper ends. Good stuff, good stories. 

***

And now the giveaway! To enter to win both books courtesy of Ignatius, just leave a comment on this site and I’ll use a random number generator to pick and notify a winner on Sunday afternoon. (That will give you a chance to still purchase them at 30% off if you don’t win.) Good luck! 

What’s for supper? Vol. 242: Vindaloo! Couldn’t escape if I wanted to!

Hey! Didn’t get a food post out last week, but I have a decent excuse this time: We got about forty inches of snow

and lost power for three days. We had a drought this summer, so the trees are brittle, and tons of them fell on power lines, including the ones right across the street from us.

We have a well, which is run by an electric pump, so that means we also didn’t have water for those days, and that means we had to buy water (in the next town, because the stores here were closed, because the power was out) to flush the toilets.  Yes, you can melt snow to get water to flush toilets, but if you’ve actually ever done this, you’ll know it takes about a roomful of snow to melt down into about three cups of rather smelly water, which is not enough to flush two toilets that ten people have been using; and also, if you are trying to keep your house warm, I do not recommend bringing in a roomful of snow to melt, with a heat source that you do not have! Everything was like that: Yes, there is a sort-of kind-of solution, but is it better? Unclear. The dog, at least, had a wonderful time. He always has a wonderful time.

Anyway we survived by the light of candles and light sabers,

and we didn’t have any babies or toddlers, so that made it easier. I had just bought a ton of comforters on clearance, so we had plenty of bundling material. We even lucked out in that I hadn’t done the weekly shopping yet when the power went out, so all we lost was a pack of ground beef. And we are now the proud owners of a small but decent generator, and all my baby trees survived, and we’re very, awfully tired of board games and turkey sandwiches. 

The power came back on last Friday, which was St. Patrick’s day, and our bishop did give a meat dispensation, so we popped out and put together a nice meal for that: Irish breakfast with all the parts we actually want, so no blood sausage or anything dyed green, but sourdough toast, fried mushrooms, beans, roast tomatoes, roast potatoes, bacon, and eggs fried in bacon fat. 

Very tasty, because how could it not be. I got cherry tomatoes this time, rather than attempting to roast slices of large tomatoes, which are insanely fragile. I mean who isn’t these days, but the cherry tomatoes was a good idea. 

SATURDAY
Hot dogs and smile fries 

I actually love hot dogs. The kids act like it’s some terrible thing when we have hot dogs for dinner, because they are barely American, possibly barely human. 

SUNDAY
Antipasto plate, pasta and ragu, garlic bread, vanilla bean panna cotta with fresh fruit

Sunday was St. Joseph’s day. We usually have a big Italian feast with several courses, but we were still sort of in shambles from the power outage, so we kept it on the modest side. I put together two big antipasto plates with various cheeses, cured meats, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and fruit

and yes, I was worried I hadn’t bought enough food. 

But I had.

Damien made a wonderful ragù with veal, pork, and pancetta. Wow, it was good. Like especially good. He uses this recipe from Deadspin, but it comes out different every time, and it was so savory and lively. 

We had a bunch of bruschetta for the antipasto, and garlic bread for the pasta. And Italian ices, and then also for dessert, I made something I’ve been wanting to try forever: Panna cotta. I used this recipe from Serious Eats and started infusing the cream and milk with vanilla bean pods the night before. 

You rub the vanilla bean seeds into the sugar, which feels very fancy. Then in the morning, I bloomed some unflavored gelatin powder in milk with vanilla extract, warmed up the cream, scraped the insides of the vanilla bean pods into it, and whisked in the gelatin mixture and the vanilla sugar. Then I just poured it into ramekins, covered them with plastic wrap, and let it chill for the rest of the day. 

Shortly before dinner, I mixed a little sugar with blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. I didn’t want them to break down a lot, so I didn’t do this far ahead of time. When it was dessert time, I ran a knife around the inside rim of the ramekin and then slammed them upside down on a saucer, and they came out well. Topped with the sugared fruit, plus some slices of mango, and oh it was so pretty

We also had some kind of fragile almond cookies on the side, I forget what it was called. 

I’ve never had panna cotta before, but it was a wonderful texture, silky smooth, and very creamy and refreshing. The vanilla bean specks had gathered at the bottom, so they were strewn all over the top of the glossy turned-out panna cotta and looked very elegant. 

Some of the kids opted to keep theirs in the ramekin and just eat them like cup custards. This is also a normal way to serve them, although people like to make them in glass containers, even wine glasses, if they’re going to serve them this way. 

So, very pleased with this foray. Damien, who isn’t a big fan of custards and such, thought they were great. I see many kinds of panna cotta in our future! You can put whatever you want in there. 

MONDAY
goblin food

Monday I served a truly terrible meal of very burnt chicken nuggets, a wad of very underdone hash browns, and dried-out leftover pasta. 

This kind of meal can be made more appealing by taking pains to make the table attractive. You can achieve this look by not clearing away yesterday’s dessert trash. Follow me for more etc. etc. 

TUESDAY
Reubens, chips

Tuesday there was still corned beef on sale, so I threw a few hunks in the Instant Pot for a few hours, and we had the meat sliced on toasted marbled rye bread with thousand island dressing, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut. 

Wish I had run the whole sandwich under the broiler to melt the cheese, but it was still quite delicious. I really don’t miss boiled dinner at all. Corned beef is great, but it needs to be squashed in among other tasty things, not just lying there like a cadaver. 

WEDNESDAY
Pork vindaloo and rice, pineapple

I was having a conversation about real mindfulness with my family — about the experience of deliberately standing as nothing but a witness — and the tremendous sense of gratitude that often arises when you’re able to shift into this mode. I realized this happens to me often while I’m cooking, which explains why this isn’t really a recipe blog, per se, but more of a food experience appreciation blog (as well as a big family slice of life blog). And it explains why I often forget to taste while I’m cooking, which I have frequently felt very guilty and stupid about. It’s because I’m not thinking about the end result, but just feeling overwhelmed with the beauty of the things passing through my hands, the colors and sensations and smells and patterns. This does not make for the best food, necessarily, but it makes my life better!

Anyway, Indian food is very conducive to this kind of experience. Just assembling the ingredients almost always puts me in a different frame of mind. Everyone had been sick for several days with a nasty head cold one of the kids brought home, and I was very optimistic about knocking that out, at least while we were actively eating, when I saw what was going into the marinade for this pork vindaloo

This isn’t even as many peppers as the recipe called for (I was doubling it), but it was all I had. So it’s guajillo peppers, garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, tamarind paste, cumin seeds, cloves, peppercorns, and turmeric, sugar and kosher salt. The recipe calls for white vinegar, but I only had cider vinegar. 

It’s quite easy. You just make a paste out of all the ingredients above. You just bash them all together until they’re a sticky paste, and then marinate cubes of pork in it. The recipe calls for pork butt and also pork belly, but I just went with the butt. As I often etc etc.

Marinate a few hours

and then add some water and simmer it up along with sliced onions for a few more hours, and then that’s it. You serve it with rice, and throw some cilantro on top. 

OH IT WAS GOOD.

Immensely tender, and the sauce was spicy, yes, but not blast-your-head-off spicy. Just enough to make your nose tingle. It was also tangy and a little bit fruity and a little earthy, and wonderfully nourishing and warming. 

I had a second helping of rice with just the sauce with little fragments of meat it in, and it was a joy. Wonderful recipe. The kids liked it! This may have been because I really talked it up ahead of time, and purposely acted very excited and happy about it, and mentioned many times that it was called “VINNNDALOOOOO,” but it’s not the kind of thing that they usually like. 

I also cut up a few pineapples that were hanging around, and that was not the absolute ideal side, because they were extremely acidic. Mango or something a little more mild would have been better. But it was a wonderful meal all the same. Vindaloo! Knowing my fate is to be with you! 

If you use the recipe, be sure to save it, as Bon Appétit only gives you a certain number of free views.

THURSDAY
Chicken enchilada bowls 

Thursday we had school conferences right before dinner, so I prepped everything ahead of time, and we had an unsophisticated but tasty hot meal waiting for us, and everyone liked it. 

I dumped a bunch of chicken legs in the Instant Pot with a can of red enchilada sauce and some diced tomatoes and chiles, and pressed the “poultry” button. When it was done cooking, I fished the chicken out, pulled the meat off the bones, and transferred it to the slow cooker along with the tomatoes and enough of the sauce to keep it from drying out. 

I chopped a bunch of scallions and cilantro, sautéed some frozen corn in olive oil to give it a little char (it’s dumb, but everyone loves it this way) and put that in a bowl, and set out shredded pepper jack cheese, sour cream, corn chips, hot sauce, and Taijin seasoning. Then I set up the Instant Pot again with rice and water. When I was on the way home, I texted one of the kids to press the “rice” button, and when I got home, I heated the corn in the microwave. 

Boom, hot dinner, with cheese.

One of the kids told me, “Jolly good meal, mother. I said that in a silly way, but I meant it.” When a kid stops to make sure you know they’re sincere, you know they’re sincere. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just pizza. No tricks!

And I still haven’t written up Corrie’s under the sea cake! I think I will have to give it its own post, as it was quite a journey. It is the reason I happened to have unflavored gelatin in the house for panna cotta.

Oh, one more thing, I got a big sack of flattened rice, something I just found out about (by seeing it on the shelf), which I haven’t had a chance to use yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Apparently it is parboiled, so you barely need to cook it, and Indians use it for all kinds of things: A quick, cozy breakfast, savory or sweet, a side dish with vegetables and potatoes, or you can fry it, or you can do whatever you want. It’s healthier than white rice because it hasn’t had as many nutrients polished away. 

Welcome spring with A Garden Catechism!

Last week, we got almost forty inches of snow and lost power for three days. This morning, the pipes froze. So naturally, I’m thinking about gardens. And I’m warming my hands over the bright, glowing pages of Margaret  Rose Realy’s beautiful new book, A Garden Catechism: 100 Plants in Christian Tradition and How to Grow them. 

I’m lucky enough to call Margaret a friend, so she is the one I always ask if there is something mysterious popping up in my garden, and I don’t know if I should be happy or not. She always knows what it is. I also ask her if there’s an invasive bittersweet vine on my fence and I don’t know how to get rid of it, or if my irises aren’t blooming anymore and I feel like I should do something but I’m not sure when or how. I ask her whether my apple seedlings can be saved, and whether it’s too late to put lilacs in, and whether it’s worthwhile saving seeds from the marigolds I impulse bought at Walmart. Margaret always knows!

Now she has taken her immense wealth of knowledge and organized it into an eminently searchable book for the gardener who wants to cultivate a space that’s not only beautiful, but rich with Christian meaning. Each of 100 entries — organized into color-coded sections of flowers, herbs and edibles, grasses and more, and trees and shrubs — includes a large, lovely illustration by Mary Sprague, an explanation of the history and/or symbolic significance of the plant in Christianity, what theme of garden it might fit into (Stations of the Cross, Marian, Rosary, Sacred Heart, and so on), what it symbolizes, and several paragraphs of detailed practical information and advice about what it looks like, where and how it grows well, and how to care for it, and in some cases, how to harvest, display, and dry it. 

Each entry also has a column of symbols for cross reference. There are a total of six possible symbols for different kinds of prayer gardens, and thirteen possible symbols for different kinds of suitable landscapes.

That’s about two-thirds of the book. The rest of it is a sort of condensed master class in horticulture, including information on everything from how to evaluate a site and design a garden, how to test soil and fertilize, how to read plant tags, how to collect seeds and even how to water. 

Next comes an introduction rife with practical advice for how to arrange an outdoor space for a shrine, stations of the cross, prayer labyrinth, and more;

and there is a section on ‘development of intent,’ to help focus your thoughts and ideas about what you hope to accomplish by making a prayer garden. There are several pages on color theory, a section on making stepping stones, ideas for how to keep a journal, and a reference chart collating all the information about plants in the previous pages. 

The overall tone is gentle, encouraging, and wise, and every single page is absolutely bristling with practical, reliable information, and it’s thoughtfully arranged to be as easy to use as possible. The goal is to help you come up with a plan that is meaningful and appealing to you (and maintainable in the landscape you’ve chosen), rather than providing ready-made plans for you to copy by rote. It’s also fascinating and informative for someone who’s just interested in gardens.

The book would make an excellent present for someone just starting out with gardening, who could use some encouragement with a plant or two, but would not be out of place for a master gardener who will appreciate the comprehensive breadth of knowledge gathered in these pages, and is looking for inspiration for a new kind of project. The unique combination of horticultural knowledge and spiritual insight and cultural and historical research pretty much guarantees that that almost anyone who picks it up will learn something new. 

Margaret Realy is an advanced Master Gardener and a Benedictine oblate. She has written several other books, and her writing appears regularly at Our Sunday Visitor and at CatholicMom.com. This book would be a great place to get to start to get to know this warm, kind, and incredibly knowledgeable woman. Happy spring!

 
 

The myth of Jesus

On the way to Mass, one of my kids asked me if it were true that people evolved from apes, because that’s what she heard in school, but she had read otherwise in the Bible.

Now, I know we have talked about this before. Many, many times. It’s just that she likes the story of Genesis very much, and she wants it to be literally true. The God she knows and recognizes is the one who is depicted literally in the pages of her picture Bible. 

She isn’t ready to hear what I have told her in the past, and what I told her again this time: That I’m not really sure how modern humans came to look like they do. That it’s okay to believe that Genesis is literally true, but that I think some kind of evolution must be true; and also that I suspect scientists aren’t quite as sure about what happened as they profess to be.

What I am sure of, and what I tell my daughter she is very free to believe, is what it does say in the Bible: that God made human beings on purpose, out of love, and that He continues to love them and to want to be with them, and that he deliberately gave them an immortal soul. When and how that happened, and what it looked like, I don’t exactly know, and neither does anyone. 

I told her that the story of Genesis isn’t bad science. It’s also not good science. It’s not science at all, and was never intended to be. I said that if she wrote a story about what kind of family she has, and someone told her it was bad science, she would be baffled, because it wasn’t science; it was a story. And that is what we generally mean by myth: Not something fake and made up to fool people, but just the opposite: something that attempts to tell something we think is true about what the world is like. And so the book of Genesis is a myth, in the sense that it was written to tell us all kinds of true things about how the world was made, and how humans were made, and by whom, and why, and what kind of relationship they have with God. 

It tells us that the creation of the world was not violent, not ugly, not competitive, not chaotic, and not random. It was in some way orderly, it was deliberate, it was done with a plan, and it was beautiful. It was good. It was done in the context of relationships, from the very beginning. This is the myth of our creation. This is what I believe about how God made us. 

My daughter is probably too young for such a subtle idea, but I’m not really sure what else to tell her. I knew she is very interested in Greek myths, so I said (probably confusing the issue more, but I was driving, and things pour out of your mouth as you drive) that Greek myths served the same purpose as Genesis: To try to explain what kind of world it was, as they understood it. They got some things wrong, but some things right.

Prometheus, for instance, I said. He was a titan who dwelt in a kind of paradise, but realized that mankind below was cold, bereft, needy and alone; and so he had pity on them and brought them the gift of fire. 

And what a gift. It was more than just a flame, but signified all kinds of good things, light, heat, warmth, protection, intelligence, enlightenment, and even comfort. He cared for them, and so he came down from heaven and brought them good things.

It was here that I discovered the D’Aulaire illustration of Prometheus has been quietly living in my head all these years as a proto-image of Jesus. Of course he had.

But then, I said, of course they also got a lot wrong. In this myth, the other gods didn’t want man to have all these good things. So they punished Prometheus for what he had done. 

And then it occurred to me: That part was a proto-Jesus story, too, albeit very darkly. In the myth, because of his kindness to mankind, Prometheus was nailed to a rock to have his liver eaten out by an eagle; but, because he was immortal, it regrew every day, and was devoured again the next day, and his agony continued. A wretched, ugly story, so perverse . . . but so familiar.

You see it, right? Fine tune this myth, and it becomes Jesus, who came down from heaven to save mankind, and for his troubles he was nailed to a tree and now he has become an immortal meal. The suffering part is over, but yes, his body becomes our food over and over again. The ancient story distorts the reality to come until the point of it all is lost, but it’s hard to deny the basic form is there. What does it mean?

Maybe the point isn’t lost after all. Maybe the point is that we tell these stories over and over again, but they don’t take on any kind of truth or beauty until Jesus arrives. That’s the point. If you want your story to mean something, put Jesus in the center of it. At least that is how it seems to me. 

We have all seen the man who is knee deep in theology, with ecclesiastical degrees and pedigrees up to his neck, but he has no love, no kindness, no spark of divinity inside him that he allows to become a flame. Why, because there is no Jesus at the center of his story. And we have all seen the man who doesn’t know the holy name of Jesus at all, and yet his whole life and all his works are animated and illumined by that presence just the same. We have all seen men whose lives make stories like this. What does it mean? 

It means that Jesus hides. He hides in Genesis, He hides in myth, he hides in humanity, he hides everywhere, so that we can find him. At least that it how it seems to me. 

***
Image: Charles Ephraim Burchfield letter to Louise Burchfield, 1933. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (Creative Commons)

What’s for supper? Vol. 241: Troubles with soup are better than troubles without soup

Happy whatever day it is! I didn’t do a food post last Friday because, I forget why. Oh, because I was complaining about the pope.  Anyway I wanted to share the results of a recipe from the previous Friday. It’s sabanekh bil hummus, Palestinian spinach and chickpea soup. I followed the recipe from Saveur and it was deeee-lectable. 

You saute some onions in olive oil, and then you toast some spices (cumin and coriander) and then grind them, then add them to the onions along with some garlic, plus allspice and nutmeg, and pepper, and cook a little longer, then add chickpeas and stock. (It called for vegetable stock, but I had chicken.)  

THE SMELL.

Simmer for about half an hour, add in fresh baby spinach, fresh lemon juice, some kosher salt, and a little more olive oil. Look-a here, now.

It was so good. The earthy spices combined with the bright lemon juice and the tender chickpeas and spinach made it a surprisingly interesting dish, considering it’s just broth with chickpeas and spinach.  Damien and I absolutely loved it. Definitely adding it to the Friday rotation. 

I’m kind of mad about this, but I’m now fully converted to the notion that fresh ingredients are worth the trouble. Sometimes you just plain don’t have the time or energy, and then it’s a blessing to use convenience foods! It’s fine, it’s not a moral issue! But if you can grind spices and squeeze lemons and crush garlic and chop herbs, oh man. Do yourself a favor. It eventually stops feeling laborious and extravagant and just feels like the normal way to cook, and it elevates your flavors so much.

Of course I still buy bouillon powder, rather than making my own stock, and I still routinely buy frozen pizza dough and so on. Let’s not be silly. I know you’ll agree that I draw the line at exactly the right arbitrary spot. I KNOW YOU’LL AGREE.

Damien and I were both insanely busy all week. Just tons of writing, and we had two birthdays, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember. Also Sophia went to Rome with her high school class, and we had to get both cars fixed (my car was doing something that was causing people to stop me and say, “Excuse me, do you know your car is–” and I would have to sigh, “Yesss, I am aware,” and I drove around like that for over a week before I had a chance to get it fixed. So penitential, much litany of humility. Damien’s car was fine, except for the brakes, pff), and Lena taught the dog to roll over, which was more emotionally fraught for the whole family than you might expect.  Also the dryer broke, and I hit some lady’s mailbox on the way home from band. I really kranged it good, and it was very cold out, so it shattered, so I had to knock on her door and say, I’m sorry, I hit your mailbox, and there was a very old, unclothed man sleeping in the living room with purple old his legs sticking out. Probably can’t really blame the dog for that (I do not take him to band). 

I did manage to get the one stinking maple tree tapped finally, though. It’s a long story and probably nothing will come of it, but I really hate not finishing projects, so I’m forging ahead. Look-a here, now!

 

I’m sorry I keep saying that. I’ve been listening to funk music lately and it stuck, for some reason. 

SATURDAY
Hamburgers, chips

Words cannot describe how long ago that Saturday and those hamburgers were. 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese

We had these sandwiches on ciabatta rolls. I really hate cooking with an iron frying pan, but it does come in handy for laying on top of a puffy sandwich and weighing it down when you’re trying to get cheap Aldi cheese to melt. 

MONDAY
Southwest chicken salad

I drizzled some chicken breasts with something called elote seasoning, which seems to be mostly chili powder, salt, and dehydrated cheese powder, and roasted the chicken, and served the chicken slices over mixed greens with shredded cheddar, some corn sautéed in olive oil, and chipotle ranch dressing, with corn chips. 

I feel like there were beans, but maybe they remained in the realm of hypothesis. Anyway, it was a good salad. 

TUESDAY
Lasagna, Mars cake

Tuesday was Elijah’s birthday celebration, and he requested Damien’s amazing lasagna, which he makes using the Albert Burneko recipe. Absolutely stupendous. Creamy cheese sauce, ultra savory tomato sauce with meat, just fab. I always get a terrible picture of this lasagna because, once he sets it on the table, no power on heaven or earth can slow me down.

It weighs about 87 pounds and it’s so good. 

I also made a Mars cake. Elijah likes Mars a lot, and I thought it would be nice to throw together a little fondant Mars Perseverance Rover with wheels that turn and a little gum paste Ingenuity helicopter with a rotor that spins, how hard could it be??

Well. I took a chance and broke away from my filthy box cake ways and used the King Arthur “Simple and Rich Chocolate Cake” recipe and it was exactly that, simple and rich (and chocolate, and cake. And a recipe. You guys, I’m so tired). And the cake turned out very well! I made a simple frosting with butter, a little salt and vanilla, powdered sugar, and milk, and the Mars part was pretty enough.

Then, well, things got out of hand a little bit with the robots

What can I say, an attempt was made. The good news is, he turned down my original idea, which was a galaxy mirror glaze cake with a surprise Mars-shaped heart baked right into it. So like when you cut space open, there’s Mars inside! Just like in real life! So we didn’t do that, which is good, because I can’t do that. Instead, we had the robuts, held together with toothpicks. They would have been better if he had let me put candy eyeballs on them, but I learned just in time that he actually feels strongly about robots and eyeballs. Look-a here.

WEDNESDAY
Tacos

Man, it’s a good thing I wrote this down, because I don’t remember this at all. What a week. I fell asleep on the couch so many times. 

THURSDAY
Mussakhan and taboon bread, tabouleh 

This I do remember. This is the second time I have made this meal, recipe also from Saveur, and it was just as popular this time. It’s quite easy, but packs a huge punch with flavor. You just have to get your chicken parts and onions marinating several hours ahead of time, and then you just roast it up.

Just before it’s done, you fry up some pine nuts and toss them over the top of the sizzling hot chicken, which you have lavishly spread over the piping hot taboon bread,

Jump to Recipe

which you have whipped up a few hours before dinner because you believe in yourself. Actually I timed it a little wrong and the chicken was ready a few minutes before the bread, so people started eating it before I could put it on the bread. A minor disappointment, soothed by the implied compliment that they couldn’t wait to get their hands on that chicken. I still had my chicken on bread, and I spooned up plenty of the lovely sumac-laden roasting juices to ladle over the tender, dimpled taboon. 

This meal is so good, you can’t imagine. The chicken is so juicy and the mixture of spices is just heavenly. You got the happy salty little bread cloud floating underneath and it’s really just hard to stop eating. 

I also picked up a few boxes of tabouleh, already mixed with seasoning, so you just had to pour hot water over it to wake it up, and then I added some chopped tomatoes and cucumbers and feta cheese. I ate, uh, kind of a lot of that, too, even though it was just boxabouleh. 

FRIDAY
Pizza

Just regular old pizza, whew.

Oh, I was planning to tell you about the whole other cake, but I guess that belongs in next week’s post! I mean this week’s post. I did start it on Thursday. Well, next time, I’ll tell you allll about it. It just about killed me. 

And now it’s Tuesday. We got a massive dump of snow, the power is out, and I guess we are going to have corn flakes and melted snow for supper. 

Print

taboon bread

You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups bread flour
  • 4 packets yeast
  • 3 cups water
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1/3 cup olive oil

Instructions

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.

  2. While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.

  3. Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.

  4. Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.

  5. If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.

  6. Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.

  7. Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.