Easter Homily

"Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness. Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Saviour has set us free."       

~ St. John Chrysostom

I love figs

 

A large pile of ripe figs became a delicious dinner last weekend.  I cooked the fruit over low heat, added half a bottle pinot noir and a sprig of rosemary, and let the liquid reduce to a thick, burgundy sauce.  While the sauce reduced, I browned the pork roast and put it in the crock pot. Adding the sauce, I let it cook until the house was filled with the delicious fragrance.  

Cheesy polenta was the base for the tender meat and sauce.  

Yumola. 

Sometimes cream puffs help

Yesterday was a yucky day. At some point in the afternoon, after uninspired school lessons, a generally blah ambiance began sinking into our souls.  When a young woman asked if she could make cream puffs, there was no need to think. The answer was a definite "Yes!"

Gram's apron and her copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking helped set the mood.

One cream puff is my limit, but the younger members of the family are able to indulge more and still fit in their pants, so it was safe to make a whole batch.

That one cream puff was delicious and the whole thing cheered us up immensely. 

Thanks, Claire.

Cornbread stuffing fiasco averted

A huge sigh of relief has been breathed here at the house. The cornbread stuffing recipe has been found; a friend sent it along via email, so we are on schedule for Thanksgiving yumminess.

If you are interested, I posted the recipe on my food blog here .

For those still living on the plain bread side of the stuffing debate (aka:Staci): come to the cornbread side; we'll be waiting with open arms!

The Spirit of Food

I was amazed when I went to the table of contents of The Spirit of Food and found the following names:

~ Ann Voskamp
~ Lauren Winner
~ Robert Farrar Capon
~ Wendell Berry
~ Alexander Schmemann
~ Luci Shaw
~ Andre Dubus

What a collection of literary friends, all in one place!

From the back cover: "You are invited to a feast for the senses and the spirit! Thirty-four adventurous writers...all bring a keen eye and palette to the larger questions of the role of food - both its presence and its absence - in the life of our bodies and spirits."


Gems from its pages:

"...this offering to God of bread and wine, of the food that we must eat in order to live, is our offering to him of ourselves, of our life and of the whole world...It is our Eucharist. It is the movement that Adam failed to perform, and that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful. Yes, to be sure, it is a sacrifice but sacrifice is the most natural act of man, the very essence of his life." Alexander Schmemann


"On Sunday morning as I watch my priest lay the Communion table for the gathered believers, I remember why eating attentively is worth all the effort: the table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where he becomes present to us." Lauren Winner


"In Little Lent, the Orthodox abstain from meat and dairy for four weeks before the feast of Christmas. She prepared all of her usual foods in their simplest forms: borscht with vegetable broth instead of pork, salads with oil instead of mayonnaise and sausage. She practiced this as a quiet reminder that she was preparing body and soul for Christmas.

The body and soul formation was not something that I had ever taken seriously. As a lifelong, devout Protestant, I had thought a great deal about my soul. As an American, I had obsessed a great deal about my body. But I had rarely considered body and soul in mutual relation. Everywhere I went in Russia as an exchange student - and I was drawn instinctively to churches - I witnessed a fuller understanding of the body and soul in communion. "Sometimes if I cannot pray," Olga had said at the entrance to the cathedral, "I come to the church and light a candle."

At that time, I would have called Olga's gesture an empty ritual. I might have considered an inability to pray a personal failing, and I wouldn't have thought it could be remedied or substituted by lighting a candle. But Olga allowed this bodily action to stand in the place where her mind and heart might lag, and I found the possibility moving." Amy Frykholm


Some of the essays come from favorite books of mine:
Mudhouse Sabbath (Lauren Winner)
Supper of the Lamb (Robert Farrar Capon)
What Are People For? (Wendell Berry)
For the Life of the World (Alexander Schmemann)

After the flurry of Thanksgiving hoopla has settled down to a weekend at home, to hours of sipping hot toddies and slowly but surely decorating our Christmas tree, I am hoping to read more. What beautiful writing.

For now I know enough to say: Highly recommended!

Sunday afternoon

Patio Party

Tuesday night we had a dinner party on the patio.

As the blanket of the day's heat started to fold back to the cool of the evening, as the sun set behind the house, as the stars overhead began to twinkle, we enjoyed the company of three good friends; time slowed and the laughter was set free.

The conversation danced from a report from the CiRCE conference that was attended (not, alas, by me. "Next year in Dallas" is my cry), to the health of parents (one guest could not be there because of an emergency hospital visit by her mom), to books we are reading, to death and burial from Orthodox and Protestant perspectives. It was a strange assortment of topics, but it somehow seemed right as we relaxed more and more under the purple umbrellas and the twinkle lights.

And, yes, we ate. Salad with steamed beets in balsamic vinegar, baguettes, pork tenderloin with apricot and rosemary sauce, fingerling potatoes, stir-fried beans and peppers, and a plum frangipane tart (ala mode, thank you very much.) We slowed it all down, let the conversation fill in the waiting moments between courses, and it all worked beautifully. It was a pleasure to make food for dear friends.

Our backyard is very ordinary. It is a slab of cement with its share of blemishes in this corner and that. The lattice that is designed to hide the dump pile is always falling apart and calling attention to itself, and the mint green whale of a propane tank is nothing but ugly. But all we do is sweep up and move the trash cans around the corner, and we are ready for a party. A few table cloths, a few rows of twinkle lights, and we can set the stage for rich fellowship and great food. It is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

A summer list of a different sort

The To Cook (and Eat and Drink) version is posted over at Notre Pain Quotidian.

New food blog

Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.


I wanted to let you know I will be moving any food conversation over to my recipe blog, recently changed to: Notre Pain Quotidian. Notre Pain Quotidian is French for Our Daily Bread, a beautiful reminder of the sacredness of our everyday lives and Who provides.

Rediscovering the love of cooking

I have not enjoyed cooking for many years, but that is not to say I don't cook. I cook all the time. I bake bread. I buy and use real ingredients. I make a Thanksgiving stuffing worthy of eloquent praise.

I have five children, three of them boys who seem always to be hungry. The youngest one has been known to ask when the next meal will be, even as he is about to put the last bite of the current meal in his mouth. My husband, still recovering from my lack of meal concern during five rounds of morning sickness, worries about dinner. "Will it be there today?", he can't help wondering. In my defense, it is next-to-almost-always there; in his defense, those first trimester dinners were absent often enough to qualify for trauma.

My usual approach to life is this: If you have to do something all the time (think laundry, training children, weeding the garden, and, yes, cooking) you might as well enjoy it. I can talk about hanging wash on the line as if it were fine art, but I have not managed to do that with cooking. I have allowed the routine of it all to slide into drudgery. Oatmeal, burritos, chicken-a-la-whatever, and on and on it goes. One meal just marching on to the next.

In the last year, though, enthusiasm has been on the move. I have been searching online for uses for basil and limes. I have roasted parsnips. I have tried different recipes for pizza dough and perfected one I like best. I have cooked hunks of meat with success, and I have planned and executed multi-course meals. Even more amazing is the fact that I have loved it.

The answer to not enjoying cooking, it turns out, is to do more of it.

It also helps to have so many eloquent food writers around. (Here, here, and here are some of my favorites from this year.)

And so we come to Christmas, a day when I have always stayed out of the kitchen. If it is drudgery, why be there? But now I want to cook. In lieu of simplicity, we are well on our way to a feast, a meal worthy of the celebration of this most special day. There is a roast in the refrigerator covered with rosemary and garlic and salt and pepper; it smells divine. Yorkshire pudding will get made with the roast drippings. There is a bottle of Lava Cap Syrah poised to uncork. I have made rolls with rye flour, molasses, raisins and buttermilk. Greens and tomatoes and purple onion will find themselves in a glass bowl, topped with an orange/sesame dressing we love. Apple pie and chocolate cream pie are filling the house with delectable smells.

As I stirred and stirred (and stirred some more) the chocolate custard for the pie, I read these words from Robert Farrar Capon:

"Berate me not therefore for carrying on about slicing onions in a world under the sentence of nuclear overkill. The heaviest weight on the shoulders of the earth is still the age-old idolatry by which man has cheated himself of both Creator and creation. And this age is no exception. If you prefer to address yourself to graver matters, well and good: Idolatry needs all the enemies it can get. But if I choose to break images in the kitchen, I cannot be faulted. We are both good men, in a day when good men are hard to find. Let us join hands and get on with our iconoclasm."

Capon has been an effective cure for thoughts of drudgery.

Some things won't be changing. I will still ask my youngest to wait at least an hour after one meal before he asks me about the next; even a food enthusiast benefits from other pursuits. We will still be able to sink a ship with the number of bean and cheese burritos we consume in a year. And oatmeal has been and ever shall be our breakfast staple. The change is in the attitude, and I am sure I am not the only one who welcomes it.

Merry Christmas and Bon Appetit, friends.