Feeding Beautifully

The last couple of months I've been trying to do more of the cooking. It's something I have always enjoyed, and always had a pretty good knack for, and always done a lot of - until the last couple years when I have been dating, engaged and married to someone who also loves and is good at it. We love to share this task (not at the same time usually, because some people don't share work spaces as well as others, and one of us definitely likes to work hard on something and present it to his wife when it is well-thought-out, completed, and beautiful).

But I've realized it's easy to let someone else being willing to do something for you, and enjoying it in general, and taking over when you're feeling really tired or morning-sick, to turn into it being his job. So here we are turning it back into a shared task, a shared delight. I might be back to doing most of it, even - except that he is pretty faithful to do breakfast every day while I'm showering and preparing for my early work day. I'm finding the fun in it again, and learning more creativity, and looking for excellence in how a simple things is done.

We are also (both) working at feeding our souls with the Word. Daily readings you can find easily linked to are a wonderful help for this, and ensure that you don't just skip to your favorite Psalms, or spend 10 minutes trying to find a good passage for the day.

The world has been charged with the glory of God, as the poet Hopkins so famously has written. It comes out everywhere. It's there in the growing and harvesting and shopping and preparing and serving and eating of beautiful and good foods; it is explicit in the pages of words passed down through the ages and the church; it is shimmering in the light on the trees you can't stop looking at early dewy mornings; it is leading and inspiring the kindness in faces that smile across the room and in arms that hold you and in hands met in the passing of the peace and in gracious words of forgiveness from someone you dealt false or rudely with again.

The glory is there. Sometimes it takes a little poking and pulling back of the leaves to see it growing quietly there. Sometimes it looks like contentedness that borders on the mundane. Sometimes it is waiting on the shelf to be picked up and opened. Sometimes it is in your cupboard and in your fridge and needs to be measured and tossed and marinated and grilled. And then shared. Glory is meant to be shared, given, helped with, talked about, received.

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I made this bread today. Vermont Whole Wheat Oatmeal Honey Bread. So very delicious, soft, and rich. I sensibly put one loaf into the freezer for busy July days when Baby is making things harder, but we have already eaten about half of the other loaf... not even as a meal, just snacking. I'll have to bake more bread, maybe even tomorrow.

And I posted this to facebook the other day when I needed a bit of encouraging for the day's tedious and seemingly-endless hours. 
I always want to be a little less weak, a little more purposeful. 2 Corinthians 2:14-17 has been on my mind a lot since Fraser read it at breakfast yesterday.

"But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place. For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things? For we are not like many, peddling the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, we speak in Christ in the sight of God."

Leithart on poetry

On why we write animal poems, actually.

I like it. Here you go.

link to something lovely

I've been reading Jennifer's Trovato's blog this morning, and loving the photography by her and her husband, loving her words, loving her home as I see it portrayed there. Both Jen and Kenny used to live in Moscow and we attended the same little college - he was one of the funniest, most personable guys in my class, and she was one of the most beautiful and grace-filled girls in the class just below ours.
I just wanted to link to a fine post of hers from last month, and say that you should check out Horace & Mae, the Trovatos' photography work. Lovely stuff.

jt and the sea: our different sameness: February

Serving the Body of Christ

Rachel Jankovic at Femina Girls has such a good post today. Read it. Just do it.

http://www.feminagirls.com/2014/02/24/fight-for-us/

Flavors. Dinner. Yum.

Lately I've been poking around on this site, Budget Bytes, by Beth. This is not because I know Beth (because I don't), and not because we need to save money (though beating the budget is always nice), but simply because I somehow got a link to it and have found so may delicious looking recipes there. Admittedly I have only made a couple of them. But I have been faithfully pinning them like a true Pinterester for future use, and wow, some are just phenomenal looking.

Last night I made Chicken and Pumpkin Soup. We had leftover chilis in adobo sauce from something fancy Fraser made earlier this week, and pumpkin from a Christmas pie, and one last pair of chicken breasts from a package, and there are always leftover parts of onions in the fridge and partial bags of frozen veggies in the freezer.

This is super easy. The recipe says it takes an hour and 5 minutes, and that's about right, while during that hour you definitely have some free time to toss together a salad or clean the kitchen floor - or both, as it happens I did, because I did ten minutes of prep work earlier in the afternoon just after finding the recipe. I get a little excited about putting together a tasty supper, especially when the husband has done most of the cooking for the last week and I'm needing to get my own creative juices flowing again before he takes over. :)

I changed a few things in the recipe, but not enough to affect the flavors that much. I used about 50% more chicken and 50% more pumpkin (which was a pumpkin and squash mix, actually, since I baked up a tiny decorative squash that's been sitting around here forever. The picture is of the beautiful steaming thing after pulling it out of the oven - sitting pretty next to the dutch oven we use the most, this perfect smallish soup-size orange one). I used that salty powdered cheap chicken boullion, but it tasted fine - didn't need to add any salt to the finished soup. Annnd I skipped the fresh cilantro, partly because my husband doesn't really care for it and mostly because we just didn't have any (because my husband doesn't care for it, ha), but put a pinch of dried cilantro in instead. This is a delicious soup. Filling. Colorful. Spicy (go with the 2 chilis she suggests, and maybe taste it and see if you want to add a bit more of the sauce too; it's really not too hot).

I put together a salad from another source, but I heavily edited it. It was a Mexican Salad with Honey Lime Dressing, and as such had corn and black beans in it (which I didn't want seeing as the soup already contained those), and also contained jicama, which is cool but would have necessitated me running to the grocery store. AND the recipe would have made too much for us. So here's what I did, for 2 good sized servings:

  4 or 5 leaves of lettuce
  a tomato
  tops of 2 green onions
  1/2 avocado
  1/4 bell pepper
  some feta cheese

And the dressing. You only need about 1/3 of the dressing this recipe makes for that little salad, so be judicious with your drizzling of the dressing. You never want to overdo salad dressing; just enough for flavor.

These two dishes went beautifully together (visually and gustatorially), and I kind of want to make the salad again when we have leftover soup this evening or tomorrow.


*Sidenote: this made a lot of soup. We put some of it in the freezer.

Pretty Eats

Have you ever used Foodgawker?

It's a great way to find new recipes. The page organizes links to websites of good recipes, and it is done in a beautiful and searchable way, with new recipes added ridiculously often and counters for how many readers have liked and viewed each one. Since vast numbers of new links to recipes are added daily, they tend to fit well in the season we're currently in. The search categories are helpful, including 32 such as 'beef,' 'bread,' 'breakfast and brunch,' as well as searching by keyword, excluding by keyword, and searching by the submitter of the recipe. You can also look at recipes from the most recent day, or week, or month, favorite ones, or just a great heap of them altogether.

I use this page a lot, and in the last week we've found and used a number of recipes, including the delicious Ham and Baked Bean Soup, which I made on Thursday and we've eaten once or twice a day since then.

Still alive, and it's Thanksgiving week

Yep, still alive and thriving over here. Just not as good at posting things as I used to be; sorry.

It's almost Thanksgiving, which means I've been married for almost 4 months to my favorite fellow on earth, and it also means it's going to be easy for me to write something here. All I have to do is list some of the things I'm thankful for and ta-da! How simple and how perfect for the week we are in.

1. I'm (still) so thankful for this man. Being with him is both natural and unbelievable, and this new life together is both simple and full of things to learn. Fraser gives to me every day, somehow, and sometimes (like when we go shopping) even wants to give more than I want to let him. I love when I can surprise him with something delicious smelling when he walks in the door from work. And when he comes up with a great idea like "let's drive to Spokane this afternoon!" And when he tells me I am not allowed to go to work because I'm so sick. And when he reaches out for my hand when we are walking somewhere - even if mine is in my pocket already. He makes me laugh, and can stop my tears, and his laughter is one of my favorite things.

2. I'm grateful for our wedding photographer Chris Walker and the great job he did. Here's a sampling of our photos. http://chriswalkerimages.com/blog/2013/7/27/1/

3. I'm thankful for cooking: for the spacious kitchen, the beautiful pots and pans, and the full cupboards I have. I like baking late at night, and making quick scrambled eggs on a late morning, and steeping tea, and chopping up onions so precisely and small, and leaning down over a pot or fry pan to breathe the fire and life that is simmering there.

4. I love this book we've decided to work through (over the next few years, probably. It's 300 recipes, after all!). Thanks to whichever roommate or relative or friend happened to leave this behind and left it for us to inherit! The Italian Cooking Encyclopedia. http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-definitive-professional-ingredients-techniques/dp/0681020377/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385073811&sr=1-3&keywords=the+italian+cooking+encyclopedia

5. I'm thankful for fabric and needles and thread and irons and patterns and the Joann's store. Currently working on our stockings. And I'm not very good at it. And sometimes frustrated. But I will one day have cute stockings to post a picture of, I'm sure. Not to mention, to put presents into. :)

6. I'm happy to have family - so much family, and more all the time, it seems. Thankful for my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, who have been part of my world since before I could understand who they all were. Thankful for the siblings who've been best buds and good competition and tagalongs and little shadows and adorable frustrating hilarious human beings. Thankful for a new set of parents and grandparents, and their love and welcoming, and for a new sister and brother and the different surprising perspectives they give me on life, and things, and my husband. And thankful for all the kids who call me Aunt Bobbi, and the new ones who will someday. They steal my heart over and over.

7. Electric heaters. No explanation necessary.

8. Paychecks.

9. Winter sunlight. I'm about to take a walk to do a few errands, and thing that'll perk me up just about as much as I need for the rest of the day, and the week.

10. Chocolate chips. Seriously, when there isn't a good solid chunk of chocolate bar to grab, a handful of these little dudes is pretty much the best thing I can think of. I'm off to raid the cupboard and pop one at a time as I head out to do those errands.

Taking renovate to a whole new level

This post from the National Journal. I love the photographs.

The White House gutted

This day...

Life is not a stroll through a perfectly-manicured flower garden. The sun doesn't always shine, and sometimes you have  nightmares rather than daydreams. Sometimes snow means sledding and pom-pom hats and happily rosy cheeks, but sometimes it also means not being able to get to work and having painfully cold toes. Life includes stumbling and falling and getting dirty and thinking you're lost, and getting really lost and blubbering like a baby about it; it includes realizing you're inadequate and that horrible knotted feeling in your middle when you have to apologize to someone you care about, and the even worse knot when you have to ask them to apologize.

Life is not always fun and adventurous, or sweet and peaceful. But it is always just what God has appointed for you. Let His gifts fall thickly about you, and let your hands not clench when your heart feels cold, nor your feet stand still when your knees feel like folding. He is your all; let all of His love push you down the way He set for you.

Thankful and prayerful today:

-for 4 cups of coffee from the french press for 4 cold roommates
-for our good dog Patch, and that he would be found and returned to us soon
-for flicks to comfort the sappy chick soul (saw The Vow last night)
-for beautiful songs (http://grooveshark.com/#!/artist/Amy+Adams+and+Lee+Pace/748111)
-for Mel's family far away, and seeing them with her via Skype
-for tire chains and a chivalrous eldery man who helped me get my car from the ditch, and that I'd stay out of it from here on
-for the way a wet cold morning makes you love dry clothes
-for the bright and cheer of christmas lights around our front window
-for being unsatisfied (and hence depressed) about how I've been doing with life: may it make me change and grow and do better
-for His grace and His faithfulness

Boys and Men

This links to something written by Pastor Joost Nixon of Spokane, WA. Good words.

"One of the deficiencies of Western culture is that there is no objective marker for young men to know when they have passed from "boy" to "man." . . . But what this ambiguity about adulthood does, practically, is leave our mature males to be "boys-in-men's-bodies"; irresponsible, piddling around with follies, instead of moving the football of cultural dominion down the field and into the end zone."

Read it. http://biblicalchildrearing.blogspot.com/2012/10/piddling-with-follies.html?spref=fb

Wife of Sysiphus

As a nerd, a lover of poetry and of the classics, a sucker for the blues, and a believer in death-and-resurrection, I appreciated this poem.

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15630

Rock that is Higher than I

Pastor Wilson gave an excellent sermon this morning on Psalm 61. Excellent. I told my roommates when I got home that I feel like it is cliched when someone asks you how the sermon was to say it was just what you needed... but sometimes that is 100% true. Much of the time it is, in fact.

I wish I could post a link to a video of this, but I don't think that it was filmed. There is probably audio available for it a couple days afterwards. I'll find out. Here is a link to the sermon notes. A couple things that I think weren't on there that stuck in my mind were, "Pray about your troubles. If it's big enough to trouble you, it's big enough to trouble God with," and at the end of the sermon, "Don't live like your troubles ARE'NT present; but live as though Christ IS present."

Leithart on the music of the spheres

"Earthly time is tuned to be a harmonization on the music of the spheres." (via twitter)

Read his blog post Tuned Cosmos.

charis: gift and counter-gift

http://www.leithart.com/2012/05/26/grace-and-gratitude/

Rosi Golan song

It's Been a Long Day is a beautiful song.

on Lent

This is a great piece written by pastor Toby Sumpter. I am sharing part of it here in case you don't have time to go read the full thing, but you really SHOULD go read it. :)


"If you plan to fast during Lent, do not kid yourself into thinking that fasting is the same thing as suffering for Jesus. Just because the pastor said that Lent is dangerous doesn’t mean you’re being a great risk taker by abstaining from chocolate or coffee or beer. Do not come up here and take the sign of the cross upon your forehead and pat yourself on the back and say that you have somehow done something courageous for Jesus. The point of abstaining, the point of taking the cross upon your brow, the point of prayer and fasting, the point of all this must be evangelistic, inviting the gospel to fill our lives, our families, our communities. The point is to make time to pray for the lost, to love the lost, to invite the lost and the hurting into our homes, and to share life with the lost and dying in our community. Abstaining from something is not the mark of Christ, but if you give yourself to heart-aching prayer for your neighbors, you have begun to be a disciple. If you plead with an unbelieving loved one to submit to Christ, the word of the Lord is going forth. If you graciously confront your roommate for obvious sin and folly, realizing that you may lose or strain a friendship, you are beginning to be a disciple. If you love your wife like Christ loved the church, and give yourself away for her more and more sacrificially, you are beginning to be a disciple.

And if you fast, let your fasting and prayer be toward particular ends, particular needs, particular hurts, not vague feelings. Fasting does not benefit us. Fasting is a bodily posture. Just as you might kneel or lift your hands in prayer, so too fasting is a posture of humility and urgency. Some of you need to learn to fast and pray. You might dedicate one day a week, one meal a week, you might do it individually, or as a family. But the point is not for a show of piety, the point is not to harness some mystical power. The point is to cry out to God. Peter says that humility is evidenced in casting all our cares upon the God who cares for us. Some of you need to cry out to God because you haven’t been. Some of you need to cry out to God because you’ve been carrying all your cares yourself, because you are weighed down with burdens and stress and fear and unbelief. Use this season of Lent to repent. Set aside time to pray, to pour out your heart to the Lord. And pray it out. Pray until it’s all out. Pray your cares on to the God who cares for you."

Bryan John Appleby

Tonight my roommate talked me into going to a little concert a few miles from here. It was cheap, the timing was good, and she showed me one of the songs of one of the bands this afternoon and hooked me. I am so glad I went! While the first band was - interesting, let's say, and the second band was ok, Bryan John Appleby was really, really good. In spite of the beardiness of the whole band. Ha. I loved his voice, his guitar, his accompanists, and all their songs, at least as well as I understood them.

From Appleby's website: Seattle based songwriter Bryan John Appleby spent winter and spring of this year holed up with close friends in a Ballard warehouse banging pots, plucking strings, tapping mason jars, and plunking pianos. What emerged from these musical ramblings was the long awaited debut full-length Fire on the Vine. The album elaborates on his affinity for organic soundscapes and acoustic found sounds.

From Grooveshark: lots of good songs.

Leithart: enlightenment gratitude

Peter Leithart's most recent blog post: read it here.

In which he quotes various people including Descartes: Gratitude is “a sort of love, excited in us by some action of him to whom we offer it, and whereby we believe he has done us some good, or at least had an intention to do us some. So it includes all that goodwill does, and this besides, that it is grounded on an action we are very sensible of, and whereof we have a desire to make a requital.

Doug Jones: Mary Bursting

Great essay on the inexpressible glory of this season we are celebrating.

A friend just shared this...

I had to do the same. Later tonight, I plan to go look it up in Orthodoxy and read the context.

‎"The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within."

-Chesterton

(As always, clicking on the photos will enlarge them to full size)





















Giving thanks 206-219
206. Christmas lights draped over and around the windows
207. a pile of clean dishes in the sink and on the counter
208. Tali's guitar - when she plays it, when Maria plays it, and when I try to play it
209. Adele
210. balls and skeins and tangles of yarn of various colors
211. sitting around the house Sunday afternoon with roomies, crafting Christmas gifts and listening to Wodehouse on audiobook
212. a clear windshield on an icy cold morning
213. wire whisks in the kitchen
214. central heating
215. the old jacket I found at home - dark blue, too large for me, pocketed and collared, and (once again) very boyish
216. laughs and funny moments with my student that are deep and real and distract us from school for a few minutes at least
217. Adam's old fashioned crunchy peanut butter, sitting in my cupboard right now
218. Gilbert Keith Chesterton
219. Thanksgiving week and the good times and great foods I shared with family