Barber Banter

Beginning yesterday Ben put Sara Groves’ song “It Might Be Hope” in my head which carried me through the nail-biting. Today, I’m humming it all the more (and louder!) because it IS hope!

You do your work the best that you can
you put one foot in front of the other
life comes in waves and makes its demands
you hold on as well as you’re able

You’ve been here for a long long time

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
just when you least expect it
you walk in a room
you look out a window
and something there leaves you breathless
you say to yourself
it’s been a while since I felt this
but it feels like it might be hope

It’s hard to recall what blew out the flame
it’s been dark since you can remember
you talk it all through to find it a name
as days go on by without number

You’ve been here for a long long time

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
just when you least expect it
you walk in a room
you look out a window
and something there leaves you breathless
you say to yourself
it’s been a while since I felt this
but it feels like it might be hope

Before Barack Obama’s acceptance speech I received an email from him thanking me for my support. He ended with this statement that confirms my confidence in his belief that each American really does matter and that he’ll keep the conversation going:

“We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and
I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”

Sounds good to me.

Good work, America.

Here you go, a site for all your everyday Adventist apparel needs. My favorite is, well, I just can’t decide. What with all the laughing out loud, I get distracted. I hope the creators will keep dreaming up more ways to laugh at ourselves. Go see!

In my quest to eat foods in their appropriate season I’ve decided to include “summer” in my recipe post’s titles as a reminder to me in a couple of months that I cannot make these dishes and expect the same tasty freshness and that the ingredients will come from anywhere near local. However, in a little less than a year I can revisit these recipes and this will be a good way to remind myself of their goodness.

Yes, I know some would say today is the official end of summer but I’m going to continue sharing some more summer recipes because the actual summer food is still readily available in farmer’s markets. So, ya ready? ipod (or other music)? Apron (I’m so messy)? Adventurous spirit?

Greek Frittata (Courtesy of Real Simple Food Fall 2006)
3 tablespoons olive oil
10 large eggs
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 5-ounce bag baby spinach
1 pint grape tomatoes, halved
4 scallions (white and green parts), thinly sliced
8 ounces Feta cheese, crumbled

Heat toaster oven to 350 degrees F. Add the oil to a 2-quart casserole and transfer to oven for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, in a bowl, whisk together the eggs, salt, and pepper. Add the spinach, tomatoes, and scallions and combine. Gently stir in the Feta. Remove casserole from oven. Pour the egg mixture into casserole.

Bake until the frittata is browned around the edges and slightly puffed and a knife comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes.

Then I added our usual summer side dish (sliced local tomatoes and cukes and some homemade hummus) and called it a meal. And oh, what a delicious meal it was. I love groaning over food.

The recipe above is listed exactly as it was printed in Real Simple Food and this is what I learned and/or will do differently next time:

• I didn’t use all 10 yolks. I just couldn’t do it. It turned out fine.
• I used organic spinach and recommend it to you too. Here’s why.
  
• I used a combination of small tomatoes and larger sliced tomatoes. I liked the variety of shapes.
• I used some wild oniony things that I found growing in our yard. They were ok on taste but like a piece of wood in texture. I do not recommend that I use them again. I promise not to make you use them either. Blegh.
  
• Our completed dish was a bit salty for my tastes so I recommend either decreasing the salt, perhaps to 1 teaspoon, and the Feta by a quarter or more. Or both.
• My toaster oven isn’t quite up to par when it comes to even heating or heating well so it took nearly an hour to cook this frittata through and through. Know your toaster oven or plan for some extra time just in case.

So, Eric Peters is making a new CD and is raising the money for it up front, by himself, no label.

You can read more details at Eric’s web site, but the summary is that he’s hoping for 300 people to give $50, raising a total of $15,000.

If you are able to give $50, he’s throwing in (copied straight from his website):

• advance album 2 weeks prior to release date
• 2 CDs (1 autographed/personalized if you wish, or both signed if that’s your druthers)
• your name (and thanks) in the CD liner notes
• your photo on the website
• 2 free tickets to one of my shows in your town/area

From the latest Speaking of Faith podcast on Play:

You look at the successful lives of people who have really made a difference in human society, and what you find is that they didn’t do things by the rules. They, in fact, insisted on making their own rules. They were playful people. I happen to be at the ripe old age of 64 just learning how to ride motorcycles for the first time. Terrifying but awfully fun.

—Frank Wilson, a physician at Stanford University Medical Center

For fellow MacBook (Leopard) owners:

System Preferences → Keyboard & Mouse → Trackpad → Trackpad Guestures →
For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad and click the button

Why this isn’t checked by default, I will never know.

“I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now
and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Ich liebe dich, du sanftestes Gesetz” is excerpted from Rilke’s “Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.)

I don’t know how long we’ve been listening now but for quite some time we’ve spent Sabbaths with our ears and hearts and minds tuned to podcasts of the National Public Radio program “Speaking of Faith“. If you’ve not experienced it yet, oh, I encourage you to do so. I’ve known of the program for quite some time but wasn’t interested in another “conversation about faith”. I suppose you could say that’s how calloused I was feeling about such things and their sometimes (or maybe, often?) close-minded damage. Good subject, good intentions, bad results.

So even when Ben hopped happily on daily diet swollen with many, many podcasts and talked excitedly about this “Speaking of Faith” my reaction remained fairly disinterested. But he’s a persuasive fellow and was so very excited that I couldn’t keep my back turned for too long, really.

All that said, this has come to my dry crackedness like a waterhose that visits the hanging plants outside my door. [I think I better water them when I'm done here.]

This morning we listened to “Approaching Prayer” which was made available on the SOF website May 20 this year. (The website is really fantastic. For each podcast you can listen to the podcast of course, as well as read the transcripts; get the “Particulars” with full-text of referenced readings, images, intervening music details, and links to other references; other resources; the interviewer’s journal; and credits. As a visual person, I appreciate readily finding information about something I’ve heard so I reread and continue to process it long after my ears get bored or forget.) Ben has been telling me I really needed to hear this but we didn’t get to it together until today. Oh, it was so good.

The interviewer Krista Tippett spoke with Anoushka Shankar, a musician and the daughter of Ravi Shankar (considered one of the world’s greatest sitar players); Stephen Mitchell, a writer and translator; and theologian Roberta Bondi, a professor emeritus at Emory University and author of books about how she learned to pray when she discovered the writings of the earliest Christian monastics. Their varied backgrounds provide an intricate combination of shared experiences with prayer.

I’m having a hard time expressing what I’m still processing from it. I’m glad for this because it means I’m still thinking and I’m thinking about things differently. Yes, that’s it. Speaking of Faith moves me to thinking in different and welcome places. Oh, it’s so incredible when we think from new places. Here’s a few more samples of the beauty I’m still savoring and attending to.

“What is prayer?

I make a list:

• Praise
• Gratitude
• Begging/pleading/cutting deals
• Fruitless whining and puling
• Focus

There the list breaks off; I had found my word. Prayer only looks like an act of language; fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself. Focus. Get there, and all that’s left to say is the words. They come: from ancient times (here, the round of Psalms, wheeling through the seasons endlessly in the Office), from the surprisingly eloquent heart (taciturn Thomas last night with his intercession, precise as a poet), from the gush and chatter of the day’s detail longing to be rendered.

So what is silence?

Silence speaks, the contemplatives say. But really, I think, silence sorts. An ordering instinct sends people into the hush where the voice can be heard. This is the sorting intelligence of poetry, marked by the unbroken certainty of rhythm, perfect pitch, the placing of things in right order as in metrical form. Not rigid categories, but the recognition of a shape always there but ordinarily obscured by—what? By noise, which is ourselves trying to do the sorting in an order that may be a heroic effort but is bound to be a fantasy.

Silence, that inspired dealer, takes the day’s deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card in place. Scoops them up, and does it all over again.

And the dark night of the soul?

Is the joker constantly turning up? It’s in every hand.”

(Excerpted from Patricia Hampl’s book “Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life”.)

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

(By Mary Oliver. I originally discovered this poem on Katie’s blog after she heard it read by Garrison Keillor ON THE SAME DAY that Ben shared it with me after he heard it in this SOF podcast. I love how good things trickle and rush at us together some days.)

Robert Bondi, speaking to Krista Tippett:

“…Let me tell you a story about when I first started teaching in the seminary where I teach now. And I would just find when I came home at the end of the day I would be so exhausted that I could hardly contain myself. And I would be met at the car, usually, pulling into the driveway by my two children and my husband, who would all come out to tell me all the things that had gone wrong in the day, like the washing machine had overflowed and the rug in the dining room was soaking wet. And I would think, “Oh, I just want to go back to school.” I would come into the house, and Richard and I would fix supper, and then we would sit down and eat and I would fall asleep with my head in the mashed potatoes. But the fact is that I knew all along that, however it was, it was better that I was there than that I wasn’t there, that my family needed me, that being part of a family means showing up for meals. And prayer is like that. However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It’s like being in a family.”

So beautiful I’ll be working it over in my mind for a long while.

Not me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a pattie I didn’t like. Potlucks are always good places to find various versions of the same idea. With mushroom soup or some sort of tomato sauce on top or again, mushroom soup. But still, no complaints here I can probably find it in me to love ‘em all.

So, this is my Granny’s Oatmeal Patties recipe and it’s good. I’m going to make some without the sauce just to have around and use as a base for some meals for the rest of the week. I love summer because I don’t have to start with much, add some corn on the cob, greens, sliced tomato, and most likely some hummus and it’s a full plate of goodness. So, home base for tastiness is the following:

Saute:
2 T onion
1 stalk celery

Then add:
1 1/2 c quick oats
2 eggs beaten (Maybe I’ll just use the whites, it’s hard to say…)
1/2 t thyme
1 T poultry seasoning or some such substitute
1/2 c walnuts, chopped (I’m going to try it with pecan meal since the walnuts were just too spendy for the ‘ol grocery budget)
5 T evaporated milk or cottage cheese (I’m definitely going with cottage cheese here because what in the world would I do with the rest of the can of evaporated milk? I’m sure I’d find a use. Still.)
1/4 t garlic salt
2 T soy sauce (We’ll see how necessary I find this ingredient when it’s all said and done. Half the recipe is kind of a toss up as far as I’m concerned, you see.)

Form into a shape that makes you happy and fry. At least, fry them if you wanna be like Granny. I don’t want to be that much like her today so I’m going to try baking them. Oh. Except that means I have to TURN ON THE OVEN. Oh boy. I did not think this through. I’m going to push through and do it anyway. These patties are gonna be that good.

Thanks for the recipe, Granny. If only you’d left your pickled watermelon rind recipe, too. I guess that will remain a flavor of my childhood memories. Has anyone else had those? It sounds disgusting now but I sure loved ‘em and snuck none to few from the relish tray long before anyone else made it to the dinner table in my day.