Because you know and I know that you didn’t get a present, and here it is Wednesday. And no, he doesn’t want a report on the cat’s DNA for father’s day. Yes, I saw it had free shipping.
Instead, print out this heartfelt Father’s Day Blessing card:
I even deliberately didn’t put “happy father’s day” anywhere on it, so you would have something to write on the inside. Print, fold, and sign with love and sincerity, you bum.
It was a kindly old priest in Coke bottle glasses, a matter-of-fact French Canadian servant of God with no desire to act as Grand Inquisitor. But his simple, basic questions did the job they were intended to do: They let us know that this was real, this was serious, and our responsibility was not going to go away.
Lots of pretty summer food this week! Here’s what we had (carbs at the end). I struggled mightily with the photos in this post. If they turned out sideways or upside down, it’s because WordPress is evil, and no other reason.
No pics, but mighty tasty, cooked on the grill.
This was a glorious meal. Damien went out for chicken and corn to grill, and discovered that clams were a dollar a pound, so he bought many pounds.
Here cleaned the clams, then made this sauce:
Coarsely chop a big onion, and saute it lightly in a little olive oil and a small pinch of red pepper flakes. Add salt and pepper. Once cooked, add a 1/4 bottle of white wine and two sticks of melted butter.
Then put the clams on the grill and let them cook, without turning them, until they pop open. Then put them in a bowl and cover them with the sauce.
You guys, they were so good. I’m predisposed to any kind of seafood, but the flavor of that sauce was out of this world.
The chicken was also fabulous! A sweet char on the outside, juicy on the inside, and the combination worked well. Really good outdoor food.
Here’s the rub he made, for 20 chicken thighs:
1.5 cups brown sugar 1.5 cups
.5 cups white sugar
2 Tbs chili powder
2 Tbs garlic powder
salt and pepper
Then he grilled it all!
The corn, you can grill right in the husks until they’re charred, and it comes out so very sweet and juicy.
We buttered it and sprinkled it with chili lime powder.
Look at the carnage. Look at that lake of butter and wine! I completely shamed myself with the number of clams I scarfed down.
We had it with cans of Narragansett Beer, Made On Honor.
Dessert: vanilla ice cream with blueberries and strawberries. Oh sweet, sweet summertime (almost).
This meal looked nicer in person, I promise. I put a pork shoulder in the crock pot with a can of beer, half a jar of jalapeno slices and juice, some minced garlic, and salt and pepper. Possibly an onion.
I really wanted to use my new used food processor, but all the recipes for broccoli slaw that I found online started with “take one bag of broccoli slaw,” and people who write stuff like that should feel bad about themselves. I guess they can follow up with a cake recipe, with first ingredient: cake. Then they can mentor some young people and advise them that the best way to find a job is to make up a resume in which they describe their current successful career. Bah!
So I took slaw matters into my own hands and made this:
I fed into the food processor:
Half a head of red cabbage
one pound of broccoli, stem and florets
two cored green apples with skin on
Then I mixed that up with:
Normally, I can make omelettes. The trick is not to turn it too soon, but the real trick is to have a decent pan, either nonstick or stainless steel. Then I go through a stage of self-recrimination where I demand to know why I thought it would be quick and easy to whip up twelve omelettes to order. But normally, I can make omelettes.
Well, not today! The damn things just wouldn’t hold together. This was the very best one I made, and it’s a tough little beast:
Then Damien came home and had pity on me, so he made his own. Guess what? This is how his turned out:
I think it was the eggs. I think they froze and then thawed, and they turned against us. We need this entire generation of eggs to die out before we can ever have omelettes again.
Chicken ramen with sliced pork, mixed vegetables, sriracha sesame seeds, soft boiled eggs, and a little dulse (seaweed), with crunchy noodles. Good stuff.
I took some boneless pork chops and sauteed them in olive oil. When they were almost done cooking, I gave them a good dousing with soy sauce, then finished cooking, and sliced them thinly.
We had to be out around dinner time, so I made the food ahead of time and served it cold. The drumsticks, I just drizzled with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted them.
I still have a ludicrous backlog of tortillas, so I cut them into triangles, tossed them with olive oil, and sprinkled them with chili lime powder. I spread the triangles in shallow pans and baked them for . . . I dunno, a while. A good idea, but the execution left something to be desired. These really need more room, and more shuffling around, then I had time to give them. Still, not bad. I made them as a delivery device for this pretty corn salad I made:
I mixed together:
Shh, don’t tell the kids. We’re making steaks and eating them all by ourselves, in honor of the Sacred Heart.
Here come the carbs!
HAMBURGERS:
hamburger: 0
PULLED PORK:
pork: 1
OMELETTES:
2 Season’s Choice hash browns: 42
RAMEN:
1 package Top Ramen, chicken flavor: 26
Pork cooked in olive oil and sesame oil: 0
CHICKEN, CORN SALAD:
2 medium tortillas, 16 chips: 48
TUNA NOODLE:
1-1/4 cups dry egg noodles: 38
tuna: 0
cream of mushroom: 1/2 c : 11
1 oz chips: 16
1-1/2 cups corn flakes: 39
mayo:0
ketchup, 1 Tbs: 5
vinegar: 0
You’re too generous! I had to save about half the questions for next time.
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Q. Who was worse – Samantha Bee or Roseanne?
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Q. Why a duck?
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A. According to Wikipedia,
The duck is a recurring reference throughout the Marxes’ and especially Groucho’s career. His signature walk was called “the duck walk” and on Groucho’s television program You Bet Your Life a stuffed duck made up to resemble Groucho would drop from the ceiling to give contestants money if they said the day’s secret word. Ducks are the only animals that perform lines in the song “Everyone Says I Love You” in the Marx Brothers’ fourth film, Horse Feathers. Their fifth film was called Duck Soup..
Q. You’re stranded on a desert island with your children. There is no food. Who do you eat first?
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Q. Three men in a cafe order a meal the total cost of which is $15. They each contribute $5. The waiter takes the money to the chef who recognizes the three as friends and asks the waiter to return $5 to the men.
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The waiter is not only poor at mathematics but dishonest and instead of going to the trouble of splitting the $5 between the three he simply gives them $1 each and pockets the remaining $2 for himself.
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Now, each of the men effectively paid $4, the total paid is therefore $12. Add the $2 in the waiters pocket and this comes to $14.
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Where has the other $1 gone from the original $15?
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A. You could try making the aggressive kid be the victim’s slave for half an hour, which redirects their energy. But really the only way to attack this problem is to address it consistently every single time it happens, no matter what else is going on, until the rotten kid gets the message; and once you start making headway, you should expect relapses.
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Q. Also, how do you teach an extremely curious 8 y/o with low impulse control to stop breaking everything?
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Q. Did you ever have issues being confident in your parenting choices? If so, how did you deal with it?
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A. Reminds me of this:
A. Who killed JFK?
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Who can even say what’s in this podcast? What isn’t in this podcast? Not Chuck Norris, that’s who!
And not a poem by Donald Justice.
Photo by Carlos Killpack via Flickr (Creative Commons)
This past Trinity Sunday, also known as Casual Heresy Sunday, I thought I’d dig up Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed (affiliate link) and read the kids a few passages of Real Theology™ to correct some of the dumb things we heard that day.
We had tried reading it several years ago and got terribly bogged down. The kids were just angry and baffled, and we couldn’t make any headway, so we quit.
I remember thinking, last week, that I knew a lot more about what the Trinity isn’t than about what it is, and this is certainly still true. But after reading only a few chapters of this book, I discovered we also can know a lot more about the Trinity than I ever imagined, and it’s blowing my mind.
So we’re making this our new project, and keeping on reading, a chapter or part of a chapter at night several times a week. We often stop and re-read a paragraph, sometimes more than once; and we keep looking up the beginning of the Gospel of John. It would not be unreasonable to read each chapter two or three times before going on to the next, but I want to keep moving, because we have such a poor record of finishing books.
I’ve been so desperate for something like this — not just for the kids, but for myself. Sometimes your spiritual life is flat and uninspired, and you just have to keep the faith and power through; but sometimes there really is something you can do about it. There may be things you didn’t know about God that you will be very glad to know! Going to Mass, making the sign of the cross, praying a Hail Mary . . . it all feels new and exciting, almost perilous! In a good way. There’s just so much there, and I’ve been so casual about it all.
Are the kids getting much from the book? I’m not sure. Their various responses seem to be more about personality and type of intellect than age. My nine-year-old is completely on fire about it. Damien and I are agog. Even some of the more jaded can’t-we-just-get-back-to-Mario-Kart kids have questions. And I do think that there’s value in seeing that other people are excited about the Faith, even if you aren’t feeling it yourself right then.
At very least, this book puts to rest for good the idea that you can plow through the Baltimore Catechism for First Communion prep and then you know all there is to know. Not by a long shot, hot stuff.
This book is a tremendous gift. Some people think that, when we call some article of faith a mystery, we mean that it’s just too huge and weird, and our brains can’t even handle it, so we just need to let it be. Instead, mysteries are, as my husband says, a deep, deep pool. You can dive in and never get to the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you should just linger on the shore, feeling thirsty and hot like a dummy. Sheed says we have an obligation to try to understand more about the God we worship. Why would we not? What are our brains for, if not that?
I bought the paperback and then the Kindle edition, too, because we managed to lose the physical copy but we need to keep reading. The concepts are incredibly dense but the language is crystal clear, and it doesn’t come across as dated. If you feel that your faith is stuck at an elementary level, I cannot recommend this book enough.
A little over a year ago, I told you how great the Couch to 5K program is. I describe why I started the program, exactly what it entails, and how it helped me physically, mentally, and emotionally. Here’s an update in our transformation from sad blobs to happier, somewhat more toned people with some blobby aspects.
It turned out that having a built-in babysitter was the lynchpin for regular physical fitness, and once those babysitters left for college, it got super hard to keep running regularly. We did try. We ran separately, and it was lonely. We tried running at night in the winter, and that was horrible. I also tried these marching workout videos, and they were pretty good, but I slacked off after several weeks. In January, I consoled myself by writing a satirical news story about how I was fooling myself, but that only takes you so far. Then we got a Y membership so we could stow the baby hobbit in childcare and run around the track, but man, it is not the same. You have to make twelve circuits for a mile, and the air is dry and weird, and you can’t have loud, panting conversations about NFP when you’re running at the Y. And then some lady runs right in front of you wearing bright pink running pants with a thong-shaped pattern on it, as is her constitutional right, and you get mad your husband, which isn’t fair, but that’s how it is.
So, with less and less exercise, I slid further and further into blobby despond. Our whole household is terribly sad over the winter anyway, so it was not a good scene. People were making caramel popcorn with entire sticks of butter before 11 a.m. We were scrolling through Facebook with our noses, because it was too exhausting to move our thumbs.
Then the college kids came back home, and . . . now we can go running again. And that’s how it is! We’re running anywhere from three to seven times a week. To our delight, we didn’t have to start from zero, even after taking so much time off. We’re not as fit as we were by the end of last summer, when we were topping four miles sometimes, but we’re well on our way, and can easily do two+ miles.
The kids, age 9 and up, will be starting Couch to 5K when school gets out in a few weeks. I highly recommend it! And do get outside as much as possible. I’m glad we used the treadmill when we first started, because it was better than nothing, and I know the track at the Y kept us from losing too much ground; but being outdoors is fantastic. I’m trying to learn more about the ever-changing flora and fauna that surrounds us. So far, we’ve identified a pretty little friend called an arctic starflower
which look like magical seed pods, but are made by gall wasps out of oak leaf tissue to cushion their developing larvae. Eek!
. . . and, with the help of friends, discovered that that weird sound that almost sounds like an alien toy, like one of those plastic tubes you whip around in a circle over your head, is actually the song of a hermit thrush:
We see wild turkeys, just birding around, and meandering deer, and flame-red salamanders. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to figure out what weed produces that intoxicatingly wild, dusky, spicy smell, but I can’t get enough of it. Best of all, Damien and I have regular time together that’s just for us. That’s my favorite part of my life right now.
I still eat too much to be losing significant weight, but getting regular exercise does so much to put food back in its rightful place, as fuel rather than hobby or master. I’m much happier with my shape, my posture, and my energy levels and confidence than I have been in many months. I bought a frickin’ two-piece bathing suit yesterday. Even if I never wear it, the fact that I thought I might is a big deal!
My blood pressure is great. I have zero back pain and haven’t had a single migraine since we started running regularly. Since my migraine meds were messing with my heart, this is a relief.
I’m not a great runner. I’m very slow, and my form is inefficient and silly. It’s hard to start, every single time, and I generally feel very strongly that the first 1/8 mile is bullshit, just bullshit. But sooner and sooner in each run, I’m hitting that moment where I feel strong, competent, and optimistic, and that feeling sometimes lasts for hours.
So if you’re feeling bad, this is me pestering you to try Couch to 5K. If I can do it, you definitely can. You guys know me. I’m not a go-getter or thing-achiever, but I’m telling you, this program changed my life.
I don’t know which of you bastards put a hex on me, but nothing I cooked came out well this week. Also my best cow went dry and the tallow kept lumping on me no matter how I boiled it. And I lost my best mob cap. But I did go running every single day this week, seven days in a row! Now I have a . . . strained toe tendon? Or something? This doesn’t mix well with lots and lots of driving. Ow. But still, I ran.
Here’s what we ate, carb counts at the end:
I seem to remember my husband made this while I . . . did something important. Probably lay down. I think he roasted the chicken in the oven, the served it with mixed greens, sliced strawberries, feta cheese, toasted almonds, and balsamic vinegar. This dark picture doesn’t do justice to how pretty this meal was, even if the almonds did get a little over-toasted:
It was not easy for me to make the transition to seeing fruit as a natural part of savory meals, rather than as dessert, but once you put balsamic vinegar on fresh strawberries, you’ll never go back.
I couldn’t find my excellent spiedie marinade recipe, so I made one up, and it just wasn’t as zippy.
2 tsp red pepper flakes
red wine vinegar 1/2 cup
1.5 c oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
salt and pepper
1.5 tsp mint
1 Tbs minced garlic
2 Tbs sugar
I think I’ve used one with lemon zest in the past. This was good, just not amazing. I cubed a boneless pork loin and set it to marinate early in the day, and then the kids put it on skewers (soaked in water to keep the meat moist) and my husband grilled it in the evening.
We served it on toasted rolls with mayonnaise, and had raw peppers and hummus on the side.
Operation Enough With The Chips All The Time proceeds apace.
We didn’t want to trivialize the memory of our fallen heroes by grilling hamburgers, so we had hot dogs after the parade, instead.
I put out an assortment of toppings: Ketchup, mustard, relish, sauerkraut, chopped cukes, grape tomatoes, diced onions, pickled pepper rings, blue cheese, celery salt, sliced pickles, buffalo sauce, and chopped scallions, if I remember correctly, which I never do. Several of the kids had a Chicago hot dog, which is yellow mustard, pickle relish, onion, tomato, pickle, peppers, and celery salt.
My favorite: Blue cheese, buffalo sauce, and scallions.
I think it’s actually supposed to be chives, but whatever. It’s yuhm.
We like grilling corn on the cob slowly right in the husks, which makes it immensely sweet and juicy, but I forgot, and had the kids shuck the corn. So Damien grilled it anyway, and we buttered it, then sprinkled it with chili lime powder.
It was supposed to be ice cream pie for dessert (you mash up ice cream with a potato masher until it’s soft and spreadable, then spread it in a graham cracker crust, and dress it up with chocolate sauce, peanut butter, marshmallows, whipped cream, candy, sprinkles, nuts, cherries, whatever, and then freeze for a couple of hours) but we forgot to make it, so we just had ice cream.
I didn’t take any pictures. I did add the chili lime powder to the meat, and it made it much brighter and more interesting. I was also starving because we had the final high school concert of the year and ate super late. I also added chili lime powder to a can of refried beans I had for lunch the next day. I keep thinking it’s not very good, but then I keep using it, so I guess I like it.
This is a cute meal. I took my biggest pan and arranged stripes of chopped bacon, sliced avocado, halved hard boiled eggs, grape tomatoes, chopped cucumbers, chopped Romaine lettuce, and diced chicken.
It was okay. I made the chicken in the instant pot and basically just steamed it in lemon juice, which made it kind of damp and lemony, which is not my absolute favorite way to enjoy chicken. Oh well. I left my feet in the picture to prove that I’m not one of those fancy food bloggers who doesn’t have feet.
The pork, I seasoned generously with salt and pepper and put it under a hot broiler in a pan with some drainage, and turned it once.
I planned to make biscuits, only my planning didn’t extend to having flour in the house, so I decided to make risotto instead, which doesn’t really go with coleslaw, but it didn’t matter because I was also out of parmesan cheese, so it wasn’t really risotto.
I sauteed two diced Vidalia onions in olive oil with salt and pepper and a tablespoon of minced onion in the Instant Pot, then added four cups of white rice, and stirred it up until the rice was opaque. Then I added eight cups of chicken broth, closed the lid and valve, and set it on high for seven minutes, then did a quick release. Heck, everyone ate it. They kept asking me if it was flavored rice or brown rice, and I kept telling them to shut up.
It seems we have some kind of effing potluck to go to. We were supposed to have scrambled eggs and hash browns, which is not all that great, but at least we wouldn’t have to talk to anyone or put pants on. Effing potluck. What do you recommend that requires almost no effort on my part and that pairs well with a bad attitude?
And now for the carbs:
SPIEDIES:
roll – 39 or 40
2 tsp red pepper flakes 2g
3 Reese’s peanut butter mini cups: 15
HOT DOGS:
1 hot dogs: 3
COBB SALAD:
chicken cooked in lemon juice: 0
PORK, COLE SLAW, RISOTTO:
pork, salt, pepper: 0
cole slaw:
risotto:
rice 4 cups uncooked: 576
olive oil: 0
2 vidalia onions: 32
about 61.55g per cup
Last week, a priest responded to the article “Five Rules for a Royal Bride” with a humble request: “I wish Catholics in the pews would write us new pastors and new ordained priests advices like these! Y’all help us to be men of God, men for others, and men that have joy in their lives! Send me your five advices before I become pastor . . .”
Can do.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image by photographer Matthew Lomanno, part of his visual essay North Country Priest. Used with permission.
Back around 2003, I had a conversation about abortion with a liberal friend. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that I, a pro-lifer, sincerely cared about some inconsequential cluster of cells that happened to be human, happened to be technically alive. She wasn’t a cold or cruel person; she just didn’t understand the point of even mustering up a thought for a person you can’t even see.
What kept her up at night, she told me, was the thought of an Iraqi mother scrambling around in the bombed-out ruins of her house, calling out the names of her children, fearfully searching for their bloody remains. That’s the scene that brought a lump to her throat and made her feel panicked, made her feel the urge to rescue, to change things. Not abortion.
She knew I supported the Iraq war at this time, so that’s why she brought it up. Mercifully, I can’t remember how I responded. I hope to God it wasn’t some kind of hawkish, utilitarian garbage about how collateral damage is a shame, but it’s inevitable in wartime. If that’s what I answered, I’ll have to answer for it on judgment day.
If someone gave me a chance to respond to my liberal friend today, I hope that I would say something like what Fr. Martin tweeted out the other day, after the news served up two kinds of tragedy at once: The repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban, and the news that parents who approach border guards seeking asylum will have their children removed from them, to be “put into foster care or whatever.”
Here’s what Fr. Martin tweeted, in quick succession:
As several friends pointed out, the message calling out pro-lifers got tens of thousands of retweets, but the one calling out social justice activists got mere hundreds. But don’t fool yourself that this is evidence of liberals once again refusing to be self-reflective. If Fr. Pavone (for instance) had tweeted out similar paired messages to his audience, you would have seen the retweet numbers reversed, with pro-life conservatives cheering on the jab at liberals, but nervously ignoring the jab aimed at them. Left and right are equally guilty of this silly game. We love it when our enemies’ oxen get gored, but we want our own pet oxen to be left alone.
I believe Fr. Martin knows this, and that was part of the point of the tweets. Not only did he demand that each group inspect its own consistency, he demanded that we see that these two questions must go together. These two groups of people, left and right, must go together. Don’t we see that we both want the same thing, overall? Don’t we see that we’re not, in fact, enemies?
All humans deserve justice, whether they exist inside or outside the womb. It’s all right to put your emphasis more on one form of work than the other. It’s all right to be called mainly to advocate for the unborn, or to mainly advocate for immigrants, or some other vulnerable group.
But it’s not all right to believe that, because your work emphasizes one kind of work for justice, then work that emphasizes some other kind is foolish, trivial, misguided, or even evil. We can say “X is important to me” without proceeding to “. . . and therefore, Y is stupid, and if you care about Y, then you’re stupid, too.”
Love is generous; love overflows. This is the hallmark of love: It wants to expand. Love always helps us see more and more good in more and more of humanity, not less. We may not be called specifically to devote ourselves to fighting abortion or to fighting social injustices of various kinds, but if we have scorn for those who do, then our work is not motivated by love. We should stop and ask ourselves what it is motivated by.
The Lord never gives us a Sophie’s choice. If we find ourselves making a choice like that — saying “my cause is so vital that your cause can go to Hell” — we can be sure that we are not doing the Lord’s work.
We hear a lot about “whataboutism” as an increasingly popular fallacy these days. “You say you care about that microscopic little embryo,” my liberal friend might have said, “But what about the grieving mother searching for her actual born child that she knew and loved? What about him?”
Or, “You say you care about a bunch of dirty illegals busting into our country uninvited,” my conservative friends will say, “But what about the tiny child torn limb from limb before he even has a chance to see his mother’s face? What about him?”
But whataboutism isn’t just a logical fallacy, it’s a message from Hell. Hell always wants to diminish. Hell always wants to reduce. Hell always wants to narrow your point of view, divide your affections, sequester your heart. Hell wants you to believe that there’s only so much love to go around, and so you better parcel it out carefully, divvy it up without allowing in distractions like compassion, gentleness, mercy, or humility. Hell wants you to feed your sheep by stealing food from the shepherd next door. Hell isn’t satisfied with seeing you do wrong; it wants you to insist that you’re doing it out of love. Hell doesn’t just crave suffering; it wants to drain joy dry.
I am pushing myself to reject this kind of thinking. It is not from the Lord. I can’t work and strive for every good cause at once; but if zeal for thy house makes me bulldoze my neighbor’s house, then that’s not zeal at all; that’s just another name for damnation.
***
Image via Pixabay (Creative Commons)
