Born on this lavishly romantic day in 1841.
Did you know that he was a devout Catholic, and that his father was an inkeeper, butcher, and professional zither player? Does that explain a thing or two? Or not? Either way, here are a bunch of Slavonic dances to which you can whirl heedlessly around the living room.
P.S. This is exactly what a composer should look like.
Happy birthday, man. I love you so much and I always will.
Several years ago, a nice family came over our house. It was partly for a social call, and partly to see if our family would do well as a daycare for their two kids when the mom went back to work. The girl was about four, and the boy was about six.
As we adults chatted, the kids explored the house. At the far end of the living room were the toys, including a tidy bucket full of weapons belonging to our sons and daughters. There were bows and arrows, swords of all kinds, scimitars, light sabers, pistols, slingshots, rifles, daggers, and machine guns. I watched a little nervously, because I knew this mom leaned progressive, and was raising her kids to be non-violent.
Her little girl immediately found a baby doll, sat down, and put the doll to bed. The little boy scuttled over to the weapons, and before I could say more than, “Um–” he had grabbed two swords and swung them, with a natural expertise, in a gleeful arc over his head.
“HAHH!” he shouted, and held that pose for a moment, swords raised. Eyes on fire, happiest boy in the world.
I slewed my eyes over to his parents, not sure what I would see. Horror? Disgust? Outrage? Dismay?
They both looked . . . immensely relieved. “Well, there goes that,” said the dad, apparently referring to the no-weapons policy they’d followed strictly for the last six years. I tried to apologize, but they both said, “No, no, it’s fine.” And it was fine. There was no tension in the room. Their son had hands made to hold weapons, and now he had some.
I wasn’t surprised to see the boy taking so naturally to swordplay, but I was fascinated to see his parents taking so naturally to the rules of our house, which were so different from the rules in their own home. Once their son’s unsullied hands first made contact with the weapons of war, the whole family relaxed into that reality immediately.
In this short piece in The Globe and Mail, this mom’s friends need someone to tell them what our friends realized: Hey, it’s okay if your boy wants to swing sticks around. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with him, or that he’ll inevitably grow up to be a rapist or a sociopath or a steroid-fueled abuser. There is a place for fighting boys in the world, if we let there be a place.
She says:
When I was pregnant I dreamed about the sweet, sensitive child I would have. I imagined us sitting at the table engaged in some means of creative expression, perhaps painting or writing stories. I imagined sitting quietly in the park listening to the birds and finding shapes in the clouds. But it was not to be.
My wild boy chases the birds, leaps from the park bench. He runs and jumps and yells and climbs. More than once I’ve felt pangs of envy while in the company of friends and their sweet, quiet little girls.
Before you lambast for not valuing her son, read on. It’s clear that she loves and enjoys her boy, and gives him reasonable rules: he wants to swing a stick? She tells him, “Be careful,” and leaves it at that. She says,
I’m through apologizing for Malcolm. His wildness is not a product of permissive parenting or the negative influences of a violent TV culture. His wildness is his own, and as such I embrace it even if others do not.
But what is she supposed to do when her boy comes into contact with other boys, who are repeatedly told, “Put the stick down”? She notes:
I have heard many open-minded parents declare: “If my son wants to play with dolls or dress up in girls’ clothes, I’m totally fine with that.” But what if your son wants to play with sticks and do battle? Are we so afraid of the power of violence to overtake us that we are uncomfortable with its harmless expression in children’s play?
Yes, we are, and it’s making a mess of the world. It doesn’t make violence go away when we always tell boys, “Put that stick down.” Instead, it’s making a world where people, boys and girls alike, have no idea what to do about unjust violence.
Boys playing with sticks is not a meaningless game. It’s something that little boys absolutely must be allowed to do, if that’s how they want to play. A boy who wants to pick up a stick needs to know that he can, and he may, and that his affinity for sticks is not a bad thing. He needs to know that a stick is a powerful thing, and that the world needs men who know how to use their sticks.
Boys who are never allowed to be wild are boys who never learn how to control that wildness. Boys who are not allowed to whack and be whacked with sticks never learn what fighting is like. What’s so bad about that? Well, they may end up hitting someone weak, with no idea how much it hurts to be hit. Or they may end up standing by while the strong go after the weak – and have no idea that it’s their job to put a stop to it.
Either way, the weak suffer. The whole world suffers.
Boys aren’t a problem to be fixed. Parent should correct the little details when the way they play really hurts someone else, but we should let the main energy of our children go the way it wants to go. If that means finding shapes in clouds or writing stories, that’s fine. Don’t push our sons to be fighters if they doesn’t naturally run that way.
But if they naturally want to turn everything they touch into a weapon, then that’s fine, too — as long as they know there are rules. If your boys wants weapons, then keep weapons in your house. Make a place for them. Give your boys permission to be who they are, and encourage whatever good impulses you see in them.
And give other parents permission to let their kids be kids, too. Some parents aren’t hearing it from anyone else. If your house is the place where their son first lays hand on a sword, don’t apologize! But let him know that swords come with rules. Don’t banish fighting; banish cruelty.
In the issue of violent play, as with so many other issues, we’re forgetting there’s such a thing as balance and middle ground. Parents believe that there are only two choices: we can raise our sons to be quiet, passive, nurturing empaths who could easily slide into a princess dress without making a ripple — or we can raise them to be swaggering, slavering beasts who exist only to give orders and mow down anything in their path.
There is, of course, an in-between. There are men who are strong and tough and in control of their strength, and these men were once boys who grew up with both weapons and rules. But it’s become impossible to talk about that kind of boyhood, without being accused of trying to turn boys into one extreme or the other. When I say that my son carefully carried around caterpillars when he was a toddler, I hear that I have a secret desire to castrate men. When I say that my husband protects our family, I hear that I’m perpetuating rape culture and the myth of female victimhood. When I say that there is a difference between men and women, I hear that I am the problem – I’m the reason there’s violence and unhappiness in the world – I’m the reason we can’t all just get along. I hear that if only we would all agree to put the stick down, we’d be fine.
Yes, well. When your daughter is the one who’s lying barely conscious on the front yard of some frat house, my sons will be the ones who will know enough to charge in, swinging sticks to chase the brutes away. They’ll know because we let them have sticks, we let them find out what sticks can do, and we told them what sticks are for.
Violence doesn’t take over when boys are allowed to have sticks. Violence takes over when no one tells boys what sticks are for.
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Here’s the promised pork chop post from Friday’s “What’s for Supper?” post. Some nice ideas here, collected after I asked Facebook what to do when I had a bunch of thin pork chops and no exotic ingredients. Sorry about the terrible formatting. Today, I let the computer win.
Oh, and here’s what I finally ended up making: just regular frickin’ pork chops:
The secret ingredient is frickin.
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My Grams always made chops with sauteed onion, cream of _____ soup (usually mushroom, but whatever you have on hand works–unless it’s chicken…a little too Frankenstein for me. wink emoticon ). She’d cut up potatoes and add them once the chops were browned, and then pour in the soup, and slow-cook on the stove top for a while–long enough for the potatoes to be done anyway. DELICIOUS.Some Italian dressing and lemon juice. Crockpot. Make some rice. Microwave frozen vegetabkes.
Balsamic vinegar, honey and shallots – just sear them, remove, throw bv, shallots and honey in and let bubble for a few minutes. throw chops back in and cook a little more. Done. There are kinder, gentler ways of doing this recipe but who has the time?Balsamic dressing mixed with Dijon mustard
Smother those suckers
Season as you like, brown both sides in a big skillet, add a couple of sliced onions and let them saute a bit, add lots of beef broth, simmer for 20-30 minutes, add a little cornstarch/water and boil to thicken the juice a little. serve with rice. Family favorite here smile emoticon (the onions are the key to the flavor)
Soy sauce, garlic and ginger (fresh, if you can!)Sliced apples, cinnamon, alcohol of choice (beer, wine, etc), butter, sage or rosemary. Serve with egg noodles or rice.
Dip in egg, bread crumbs and pan fry on each side just to brown, cook spaghetti, put pork chops on top of noodles and pour red sauce over top, bake 350
serve cereal.Cereal, the other other white meat.
Dice an onion and slice a bell pepper (not a green one) if you want to use one up. Slice up a few stalks of celery (1/2 cup or so) Layer chops, onion/pepper/celery, and one can of diced tomatoes in a large skillet and sprinkle dried parsley, salt, pepper and a few dashes of gar
lic (you can add a clove of garlic with the onion if you have fresh, instead) over top. Simmer for one hour on stovetop. (If you want to double, you can do it in the oven in a 9×12 at 350 for an hour, but it’s better on the stove…I’ve done two skillets before!) Serve with rice. We call it “Pork and Veggies.”
brine them for an hour in salt water in the fridge, then just salt and pepper and pan fry or brown them in the pan and finish in the oven.
You have soda (Coke) in the house? You can cook it down to a great glaze and then fry the chops in it.
Sweet and Sour Pork III Recipe You can sub out the pinapple for other fruit. We did mango, but I bet almost anything would work in a pinch.
Smothered Pork Chops Recipe
Here is an simple way to make sauteed pork chops smothered in a scrumptious gravy.
Fry up some onions, put the chops in a baking pan, mix the onions with some cream of mushroom soup and 1/4 cup of milk, pour it over the chops, throw it in the oven covered at 350 for an hour. serve with rice.
I was going to make slow cooker ranch porkchops. Google the recipe. You know, if this baby ever stops screaming.
Do you keep minced garlic on hand and onions? Cook together with a bit of salt and pepper, some oregano and Rosemary. Then remove and cook two cups of basmati rice (you want basmati because it cooks pretty fast). It will retain the flavor of the chops and is delish.
This is one of my husb’s favorites: pound them even thinner, dip ‘em in raw egg, roll ‘em in bread crumbs, add any seasonings you want (I usually add garlic and onion), and pan-fry them for a couple of minutes and voila! A dinner that everyone will eat. If the kids are willing to wash their hands, they can do the prep and that makes them happy too.
Chopped apples and a little cinnamon bake them together.
Baked with cream of mushroom soup spread over them, serve with rice.
Soak em in honey and whiskey and grill them.
My mom always just cooked them in some butter and put garlic salt on them, served with veggies and mac & cheese. It was cheap and easy.
I do something like this with thin boneless skinless chicken breasts. Delicious.
Parmesan-Crusted Pork Chops : Giada De Laurentiis : Food Network
FOODNETWORK.COM
Marinated Baked Pork Chops Recipe
Pork chops cook in a tangy marinade of soy sauce, Worcestershire, and ketchup-15-minute prep!
Salt and pepper, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and some sliced mushrooms and onions… it’s easy — takes about a half hour — and it makes a gravy too!
2 cloves garlic chopped, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 cup soy sauce…marinade for as long as possible (the longer, the better it tastes), and fry up in oil about 4 minutes on each side.I am a terrible cook and my picky kids will actually eat this.
Just pan fry them after coating in flour, salt, pepper. Yum.
Pork Chops with Apples and Onions
Slice some potatoes up as thin as you can, mix with a can or two of cream of mushroom soup, add some garlic and paprika, stick the chops down in the soup on top of the potatoes and cook for 1 hr. All you need to add is a salad or whatever veggie you have around.
Fr Leo FOR THE WIN. I’ve used this maranaide for every form of pork, from skewers as recommended, to pork chops that I then cooked in a skillet, to crock pot.
Food for the Soul » Blog Archive » Cola Pork Skewers
Rub them with olive oil, powdered ginger, rosemary and black pepper, then pan sear them.
I like them pan fried or broiled with nothing but salt pepper and dried thyme oh and olive oil
Here, all pork chops must be panfried, then pan gravy made from the drippings and butter, flour, and milk… And served with a heaping pile of bread and gravy. It is one of my favorite, if not it all healthy, meals.
Mix jam and a little creole mustard (or dijon or anything). Lay the chops out on a broiling pan, brush with mixture. Broil on one side (2-5 minutes max), flip, brush again, broil again (2-5 min max). Done!
Brush with oil, coat with a mix of half Italian bread crumbs and half Parmesan cheese, with a bit of garlic powder and pepper. Bake in foil lined pan at 350 for 50 minutes. So good, SO easy.
Pour a dab of Louisana Hot Sauce on each one both sides and spread it out thin and sprinkle sea salt, pepper and garlic powder over that and bbq.
Bake them with 5-spice or just salt and pepper, or marinate with soy sauce and bake. Slice into bite sized bits and set aside. Cook rice or brown rice the usual way. Set aside. Scramble some eggs a bit dry. Set aside. Sautee some bite-sized vegetables in oil and set aside. Mix them together in a pan, sauteeing with a little more oil until warmed together. Fried rice.
ooo thin chops… very easy: brush with BBQ sauce and put them on the grill, about 5min each side. If you prefer a very quick stove top choice, dredge in flour seasoned with salt, pepper, (cayenne pepper if you like it up a notch), rosemary, and saute in olive oil. also 5 min each side. By very thin, I assume you mean less than half an inch.
Crush juniper berries, salt and black pepper together, and rub into the surface. Bonus: juniper is gin flavour!
Salt pepper and Rosemary. Pan cook or broil.
Per 4 pork chops: 1c of chicken broth, 1t of orange zest, 1t of ginger, 1t of garlic all simmered. After simmering for a minute, toss in chops and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes and cook until soft
I use a pyrex dish and add sauerkraut, including liquid. real easy and good.
Yay, it’s Friday! Time for the What’s For Supper? round up, where you can share your inspired, inspiring, dull, or humiliating weekly menu, or pass along recipes, or find recipes, or just complain about food and feeding people and eating in general. Most of us think about food a lot, so why not talk about it here?
At the end of this post, you’ll find an InLinkz button, so you can add your post. Feel free to join in in the comments, too.
Here’s the inaugural What’s for Supper? post,
and here is vol. 2.
A few questions:
Is Friday the best day to post these? I leave the link-up open all week, so people can add to it whenever they like.
What about a question of the week? Something like, “What’s your favorite potluck dish?” or “What’s the best thing about cold-weather cooking?” or “Where are all these moths coming from, and should I just kill myself now, or what?” Or should I just keep it free-form?
And here we go.
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I’m linking to this restaurant not because the food was so outstanding (the fries were yummy, though), but because I feel bad that we drank bottled water from the van instead of ordering drinks, and I feel like we owe them. I had a cheesesteak. In Kansas, I met the inimitable Catharine Bitting, and I asked her why Philadelphians would let an empire rise and set on whether or not a candidate properly understands a cheesesteak. It’s just a sandwich, after all, yaas? She explained it’s because Philadelphians’ lives are so empty and miserable, they have nothing else to live for, so they focus all their energies on cheesesteaks.
Some of us spend kind of a lot of time thinking about food, and there is nothing wrong with that.
We had gotten about five hours of sleep all weekend, and so on Monday, I went shopping without a list. I just grabbed the panstless baby and lurched through the aisles grabbing anything that looked familiar. So the rest of the week looked like this:
We are close to being tired of pulled pork sandwiches, but we are not there yet! Aldi has these wonderful boneless half loins for $2.29 a pound, so I get a 4- to 5-pound hunk, put it in a shallow pan, pour a can of beer over it, salt and pepper it generously, cover it loosely with tinfoil, and chunk it in a 275 oven for a few hours. When it’s done all the way through, I slice or shred it with fork, knife, standing mixer, or whatever, and toss the fat to the dog so that he will continue to worship me as a god. The meat comes apart more easily if you work on it while it’s still hot. Then I throw the shredded meat right back into the beery juices
The beery, porky steam the fills the kitchen all afternoon doesn’t hurt, either.
cover it with foil again, until it’s time to reheat it for dinner. It just gets better as leftovers, IF ANY. And I just use bottled BBQ sauce, because my homemade kind never thickens up enough. Go ahead, tell me what an inauthentic heretical pulled pork poseur I am. I can take it. I’m fortified with pork.
Re the potatoes, I was thinking, “Oh no, I just did oven roasted potatoes last week! Everyone will be bored reading about it again!” But then I remembered my kids really like oven roasted potatoes, so that settled that. I found a few envelopes of onion soup mix, so I used that for a quickie seasoning. It turned out not to be any faster or tastier than whatever seasonings I usually grab off the spice shelf.
For the chicken, Benny and I made a quick marinade of olive oil and lemon juice, with the Faithful Four: salt, pepper, oregano, and crushed garlic. She pronounced it “gross nemmonade,” and warned me that I would die if I ate it.
You will die.
Duly noted. You let the chicken sit in the marinade for a few hours, then put it in a broiling pan under a high broiler for 15-20 minutes, turning once, until it’s golden brown. Let it sit for a few minutes (this lets the juice redistribute along the meat fibers or something) and then slice it. This meal makes me feel SO VIRTUOUS, I can hardly live with myself.
This is the first time I’ve made naan. I’ve never even eaten it before, so I have no idea if I did it right. Except I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to burn it.
They look okay, but some of it was naan-edible, ho ho ho.
I think I didn’t make them flat enough. They turned out more like pancakes, and didn’t have the bubbles I see in pictures.
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I just glugged a bottle of sauce over the chops and let them sit a couple of hours, then put them under the broiler for a short time until they edges were crisp. The kids begged for flavored rice, so threw some bouillon cubes into the water (one cube per cup of water) before adding the rice. I did manage to cook the peas until they were hot, so that was a win.
Before I discovered the bottle of teriyaki sauce, I asked Facebook for simple pork chop recipes made with non-exotic ingredients, which Facebook was happy to provide! It’s a long list, so I will make it a separate post, which you can see here.
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Did I mention I never actually made a meal plan this week — just kept putting meat in the cart until it looked like I had enough meat? I’ll have to buy something on the way home from school this afternoon. Probably spaghetti, le sigh.
Don’t forget to check out the separate pork chop post! There are dozens and dozens of simple ideas there.
What’s for supper at your house? Share your weekly menu, favorite recipes, cooking tips, or cooking disasters. We spend so much time thinking about food, why not talk about it here?
A reader writes:
I cannot understand why some practicing Catholics that I know do not agree that referring to a child by his/her gender and name before birth (as soon as it can be known) is MORE life-affirming than not doing so, and is clearly a moral issue because of the inherent dignity of the unborn.
Read my response at the Register.
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In Slate, Education Columnist Rebecca Schuman shares a gallery of photos of herself flipping off her sleeping seven-month-old baby. Schuman explains why, so far, she hasn’t found a compelling reason to stop taking and sharing these photos.
She loves her baby, but the kid is a bad sleeper, and is making her very tired and frustrated.
The reasons I take and post these pictures are varied. I crave emotional release after hours of increasingly desperate nursing, jiggling, rocking, walking, and, my personal favorite, walk-nursing (all wriggling, self-torpedoing 22 pounds of her). I’m also trying to amuse my husband, to diffuse what could otherwise be even more strain on two adults pushed to the boundaries of civility. And, of course, there’s the defiant gesture of Parenting Realness, an offshoot of the Go the Fuck to Sleep genre—that urge to fly in the face of decades of parenting decorum and admit that while we adore our children to smithereens, we’re not going to pretend to love the bare Sisyphean relentlessness that our days and nights have become.
She argues, I guess with tongue in cheek, that Kant and Artistotle would frown on her behavior. Kant, she says, would say that “what I’m doing isn’t necessarily bad for the baby per se, but it might be hardening my heart toward humanity in general”; and Aristotle would condemn her for “habituating” herself to “the wrong kind of actions.”
But, she argues, her actions don’t actually harm the baby in any way:
[I]s my current use of the one-digit salute warping my offspring’s fragile little mind? She’s a baby, so she doesn’t understand what the bird means yet. Also, she’s asleep, so she doesn’t know I’m doing it. And also, she’s a baby.
Let me be clear. I, like the author, despise the “lovin’ every minute of it” culture that is strangling American parenthood like so much sentimental kudzu. We’re expected to cherish every second we spend with our children, and we’re expected to be awash in joy and wonder at all times.
This is bullshit, and I’ve said so more times than I can count. It makes us into worse parents when we expect to be joyful and grateful all the time. Raising babies is hard, and there are lots of times when it just plain sucks. I recall telling my pediatrician, in a moment of sleep-deprived candor, that I wasn’t actually going to throw my always-screaming baby out the window, but I sure felt like I wanted to.
Speaking the truth about how we feel can be a great release. I have mountains of sympathy — oceans of sympathy, galaxies within galaxies of sympathy — for strung out parents who are exhausted beyond belief by the insane demands of babyhood. My own baby is six months old and is currently all angry all the time, because she thinks she can run, and her ridiculous doughy legs won’t cooperate. I’m hardly getting any sleep, and things are kind of awful right now. I’m having a hard time writing this post, because the baby won’t stop shouting at me.
But listen to what I said: the demands of babyhood are awful. That does not make your baby awful. One of the first things you need to learn, if you want to be a good parent, is to make sure you know the difference between “fuck this situation” and “fuck this baby.” The former is a universal experience. The latter is grotesque.
But why? The baby doesn’t know the difference, and I believe this mom who says she loves her baby. Isn’t this just some harmless, if tasteless, venting? Does it really matter what goes on around the head of someone who doesn’t and can’t understand what’s happening, which is really just a joke anyway?
Well, how would you feel if this were a gallery of photos of a fed up policeman flipping off people he’s put in handcuffs? Or a gallery of photo of an overworked heart surgeon flipping off a series of unconscious patients? Or a gallery of frustrated judges flipping off prisoners headed to jail? Or a gallery of exhausted nurses flipping off dementia patients? Or a gallery of under-appreciated ESL teachers flipping off a roomful of baffled foreign students who didn’t know what the middle finger signifies?
Not cool, right? Even if they are only venting, even if the people being flipped off had no idea it was happening. We expect more of people who do know what it means, because of their position of authority. Along with the authority and strength of their position comes the responsibility not to abuse the weaker person, even if the weaker person has made a lot of trouble for the stronger person, even if the weaker person doesn’t know it’s happening, even if the stronger person is very tired. If these policemen and judges and surgeons and teachers felt free to behave grotesquely and offensively toward the people under their authority — if they wrote jocularly about it in Slate magazine, and proudly provided a link to more photos — we’d freak the hell out, and rightly so.
We would demand that they treat the weaker person with the dignity they deserve because they are human beings. This is what we expect from people who are simply doing the jobs they are paid to do. Why should we expect less of a mother?
Just because someone can’t fight back, that doesn’t mean we can use them. Just because someone can’t fight back, that means we can’t use them.
Recall the infamous Army Private Lynndie England photos from Abu Ghraib. There were many photos showing prisoners being tortured and humiliated, but Americans were especially repulsed by the jaunty, thumbs-up “lookit me!” ones. The ones where the prisoners had bags on their heads, the ones that showed that the torturers thought the whole thing was kind of funny.
Recall: Schuman’s frivolous joke here; England’s hilarious prank here.
No, the Slate writer’s baby isn’t be tortured. But there is something chillingly familiar about “HA, you can’t fight back!” attitude. You don’t need to look up your Aristotle to know that some things just aren’t funny. Even if it makes you feel better.
The very worst thing that you can do to another human being is to use him. I used to think this was just some abstract theological formulation meant to neaten up the codification of sins. But now I see that objectification of human beings lies at the heart of every sin. That’s what it always comes down to.
We don’t use people, even if they don’t know they’re being used. Especially if they don’t know they’re being used. And for God’s sake, especially not when it’s our own child.
There is a huge difference between sporting a blue mohawk because you think it looks cool, and sporting a blue mohawk because you want to horrify and offend everyone you meet. Trying to set yourself apart from your peers is morally neutral and should be tolerated, even if it makes adults cringe a bit. But trying to give the world or your family a big “F you” is a problem.
It’s behavior that matters, and so it’s the behavior that parents should focus on. This is just as true for kids who wear exactly what their parents want them to wear. Just as there’s nothing especially virtuous about dressing in a modest and conventional way while being a snippy, catty, arrogant little twerp, there’s nothing especially vicious about dressing like a weirdo if you’re reasonably courteous and responsible.
Read the rest at the Register.
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What’s for supper? So glad you asked!
While I’m no cooking jainyus, I do manage to feed twelve people, seven days a week, without spending a million dollars and without anyone getting rickets.
I’ll list our dinners and include any recipes that might be interesting, and I hope readers will share their menus and recipes, too, so we can all get some good ideas from each other. If there’s enough interest, I may start a weekly blog link-up.
There was interest! And tons of variety — and, best of all, absolutely zero meal shaming. So this week, I’ve added an Inlinkz feature, so you can link up to your own blog. If you don’t have a blog, just join in by leaving a comment.
If you link to your blog, don’t forget to link back to this post, please! Feel free to download and use the “What’s for supper?” image, above, in your post. (It’s pretty chimpy, but it will do for now.)
And now . . . what’s for supper?
SATURDAY: BBQ at my sister-in-law’s house. I ate too much. It was good. I didn’t have a camera on me, so here is a picture of bacon that I took yesterday:
Too bad today is Friday, innit?
SUNDAY: Enchiladas, beans and rice.
I like Pioneer Woman’s Chicken enchildadas (I made one tray with green enchilada sauce and one with red). I don’t bother browning the tortillas, though. These are excellent as leftovers. Ex. Cel. Lent.
I usually use the standing mixer to shred meat, but I couldn’t find the attachment; so I tried my lovely mezzaluna knife, and it worked great.
Love that tool. It’s about as close to being a ninja as I will ever get.
Beans and rice: I was really rushing, so I just cooked up a bunch of rice, chunked in a few cans of chili beans and a few cans of diced tomatoes, and mixed it up with chili powder. I also made some plain white rice for boring people. (This is one of the compromises I am okay with making: If it’s almost no extra work, I will make a mild version and a spicy version of the same dish.)
MONDAY: Eat My Poo French Toast Casserole, oven roasted potatoes, watermelon.
Normally, everyone loves French Toast Casserole, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to use up stale bread. After Monday’s meal, all I can say is that this dish comes out better when you don’t spend most of the day ankle-deep in stinky basement water, ripping the skin off your hands on rusty old hose connections, wondering how long it would take the kids to notice you’re dead if you get electrocuted while you sort out the power cords for your collection of three sump pumps that work well enough to be scary, but not well enough to, I don’t know, get water out of the basement.
I also recommend not breaking lightbulbs all over the kitchen floor while you’re writing about dying babies; not having forgotten to buy sausages, and not having promised the kids you’d go to the beach when there’s mega thunderstorms predicted all day. I recommend that your laptop not choose this particular day to break, and that your blog platform not choose this particular day to refuse to upload images.
For a final touch, I recommend having something on hand other than rye bread, moldy wheat bread, and rancid eggs, or at least I recommend discovering before evening that this is what you have on hand. And — hold onto your butt, because this is top chef level stuff — I recommend that you not only turn the oven on, but also put the food into the oven at some point.
Garnish this dish with a heartfelt scream, such as, “THIS DAY CAN EAT MY POO!”
And that’s my recipe.
For oven-roasted potatoes, you scrub the potatoes (no need to peel them), cut them into wedges, drizzle with oil, and season with salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and red pepper flakes, or whatever else sounds good. You can bake these in a medium oven, but they turn out best if you roast them under the broiler. Takes about half an hour if the pan is actually in the oven; considerably longer if not. You can also add chopped onions, yum.
Oh, and you can use the apple corer to cut the potatoes faster, as long as you don’t mind coming up with the occasional inapwo-pwo spud:
TUESDAY: Chicken burgers and chips, possibly salad. Sure, let’s say we had salad.
WEDNESDAY: Picnic! All summer, I’ve been promising the kids we’d have a picnic at the beach. They started school on Thursday, so Wednesday was the day. We had turkey and salami sandwiches, pepper jack cheese, dill pickles, chips, root beer, and so much candy they couldn’t eat it all.
THURSDAY: Bacon and spinach pasta, garlic knots, salad.
The six- and 11-year-olds were in charge of cooking bacon, and the 8-year-old was in charge of pressing garlic.
The three-year-old was in charge of cutting up an eraser. This picture looks fairly lovely, but within five minutes, they were trying to kill each other for hogging the garlic press.
The store was out of spinach (perils of Aldi shopping), so I got kale, instead. I cooked it up and it smelled like a dead squirrel, so I threw it out and served the pasta without it.
Garlic knots: Cut a ball (18 oz.) of store-bought pizza dough into 12 pieces. Roll each piece into a snake, tie it in a knot, and pinch the ends together. Put on a greased, floured pan. Top each knot with a dab of butter or brush with olive oil, then sprinkle with garlic powder, parmesan cheese, and a little salt. Bake at 350 until they’re toasty. (I made 24 knots, which wasn’t really enough for 12 people.)
FRIDAY: Pizza! Two black olive, two plain. Salad. I use frozen dough, because I can make pizza dough in the standing mixer or in the bread machine, but making enough for 12 just isn’t worth it to me.
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What’s for supper at your house? Share your weekly menu, favorite recipes, cooking tips, or cooking disasters. We spend so much time thinking about food, why not talk about it here?
How I spent my summer vacation
Alas. We spent our summer swimming, watching X Files, sucking down gallons and gallons of ramen, eviscerating countless watermelons, making a meticulous survey of the entire lifework of the master cinematographer Chow Yun Fat, and creating various kinds of heartache for your long-suffering soul sister, the public librarian.
Read the rest at the Register.
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The Catholic Church has a consistent, compassionate approach to end-of-life issues, but many Catholics don’t know what the Church actually teaches. As a result, doctors, hospice care workers, and the guardians of patients in distress are branded “murderers” even when they’re doing their best to care for the sick and dying in a loving, responsible, and ethical way.
I wrote this article for Catholic Digest in 2013. I’m reprinting it today in light of recent conversationg surrounding Baby Jake and the court’s decisions about his future medical care.
“Technology runs amok without ethics,” says Tammy Ruiz, a Catholic nurse who provides end-of-life care for newborns. “Making sure ethics keeps up with technology is one of the major focuses of my world.”
How do Catholics like Ruiz honor the life and dignity of patients, without playing God—either by giving too much care, or not enough?
Cathy Adamkiewicz had to find that balance when she signed the papers to remove her four-month-old daughter from life support. The child’s bodily systems were failing, and she would not have survived the heart transplant she needed. She had been sedated and on a respirator for most of her life. Off the machines, Adamkiewicz says, “She died peacefully in my husband’s arms. It was a joyful day.”
“To be pro-life,” Adamkiewicz explains, “does not mean you have to extend life forever, push it, or give every type of treatment.”
Many believe that the Church teaches we must prolong human life by any means available, but this is not so. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment” (CCC, 2278).
Does this mean that the Church accepts euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide—that we may end a life to relieve suffering or because we think someone’s “quality of life” is too poor? No. The Catechism continues: “One does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted” (CCC, 2278).
Richard Doerflinger, associate director of Pro-Life Activities at the USCCB, explains that caregivers must ask, “What good can this treatment do for this person I love? What harm can it do to him or her? This is what Catholic theology calls ‘weighing the benefits and burdens of a treatment.’ If the benefit outweighs the burden, in your judgment, you should request the treatment; otherwise, it would be seen as morally optional.”
Palliative care is also legitimate, even if it may hasten death—as long as the goal is to alleviate suffering.
But how are we to judge when the burdens outweigh the benefits?
Some decisions are black and white: We must not do anything, or fail to do anything, with the goal of bringing about or hastening death. “An act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator (CCC, 2277).
The dehydration death of Terry Schiavo in 2005 was murder, because Schiavo was not dying. Withdrawing food and water had the direct goal of killing her.
But if a man is dying of inoperable cancer and no longer wishes to eat or drink, or his body can no longer process nutrition, withdrawing food and water from him might be ethical and merciful. He is already moving toward death, and there is no reason to prolong his suffering.
Moral Obligations
Our moral obligations are not always obvious. Laura Malnight struggled with doubt and fear as she contemplated the future of her tiny newborn quadruplets. Two of them had pneumonia.
“It was horrible to watch them go through what they had to go through to live, being resuscitated over and over again,” Malnight says.
One baby was especially sick and had suffered brain damage. The doctors who had pushed her to do “selective reduction” while she was pregnant now urged her to stop trying to keep her son alive. “They said we were making a horrible mistake, and they painted a terrible picture of what his life would be like in an institution,” Malnight says.
Exhausted and overwhelmed, Malnight was not able to get a clear answer about the most ethical choice for her children.
Everyone told her, “The baby will declare himself,” signaling whether he’s meant to live or die. “But,” says Malnight, “my only experience with motherhood was with these babies, in their isolettes. The thing was, we would put our hands over our son and he would open his eyes, his breathing would calm.”
“We just kind of muddled through,” she says. Her quadruplets are now 13 years old, and her son, while blind and brain-damaged, is a delightful and irreplaceable child.
Doerflinger acknowledges Malnight’s struggle: “Often there is no one right or wrong answer, but just an answer you think is best for your loved one in this particular situation, taking into account that patient’s own perspective and his or her ability to tolerate the burdens of treatment.”
The key, says Cathy Adamkiewicz, is “not to put our human parameters on the purpose of a human life.”
When she got her infant daughter’s prognosis from the neurologist, she told him, “You look at her as a dying system. I see a human being. Her life has value, not because of how much she can offer, but there is value in her life.”
“Our value,” Cathy says, “is not in our doing, but in our being.” Doerflinger agrees, and emphasizes that “every life is a gift. Particular treatments may be a burden; no one’s life should be dismissed as a burden.”
He says that human life is “a great good, worthy of respect. At the same time, it is not our ultimate good, which lies in our union with God and each other in eternity. We owe to all our loved ones the kind of care that fully respects their dignity as persons, without insisting on every possible means for prolonging life even if it may impose serious risks and burdens on a dying patient. Within these basic guidelines, there is a great deal of room for making personal decisions we think are best for those we love.”
Because of this latitude, a living will is not recommended for Catholics. Legal documents of this kind cannot take into account specific, unpredictable circumstances that may occur. Instead, Catholic ethicists recommend drawing up an advance directive with a durable power of attorney or healthcare proxy. A trusted spokesman is appointed to make medical decisions that adhere to Church teaching.
Caregivers should do their best to get as much information as possible from doctors and consult any priests, ethicists, or theologians available—and then to give over care to the doctors, praying that God will guide their hearts and hands.
Terri Duhon found relief in submitting to the guidance of the Church when a sudden stroke caused her mother to choke. Several delays left her on a ventilator, with no brain activity. “My husband and I couldn’t stand the thought of taking her off those machines. We wanted there to be a chance,” she says. But as the night wore on, she says, “We reached a point where it was an affront to her dignity to keep her on the machines.”
Duhon’s words can resonate with caregivers who make the choice either to extend life or to allow it to go: “I felt thankful that even though all of my emotion was against it, I had solid footing from the Church’s moral teaching. At least I wasn’t making the decision on my own.”
Adamkiewicz agrees. “It’s so terrifying and frustrating in a hospital,” she remembers. “I can’t imagine going through it without having our faith as our touchstone during those moments of fear.”
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End of life resources
Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services (from the USCCB)
Pope John Paul II, To the Congress on Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State, 20 March 2004
NCBCenter.org provides samples of an advance directive with durable power of attorney or healthcare proxy.
This article was originally published in Catholic Digest in 2013.
