So for my birthday I roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (from an Ina Garten recipe, though I didn't add parmesan and toasted pine nuts--although I would have loved too). And I made a soup with all my favorite things in it: rutabaga, sweet potato, rosemary, red wine, wild rice, thyme, garlic, carrots and onions. I also added kale ribs while it was simmering for extra flavor. And then for dessert I made brownie pudding/Denver chocolate pudding.
I found a Williams Sonoma recipe online, and instead of just plain old boiled water over the top, I first poured the water through Lauryl's aeropress. We have a family version that uses instand coffee powder in the topping, but I was not going to buy instant coffee just to get a tablespoon or so. So I used real coffee. And then I whipped cream with a little brandy (to go with the homemade vanilla extract made with brandy). The cream didn't really whip up--maybe it had been open too long. But it still tasted awesome. I also managed to get some friends together practically last minute. That with Shanna's Turkish groove music saved the day. Happy Birthday to me.
This is the site where I found the brownie pudding recipe: www.mybakingadventures.com (And by the way, I had better success typing in "Denver chocolate pudding" than "brownie pudding."
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
I suppose I'm technically being lazy since I haven't been posting much of my own writing, thoughts or pictures over the last couple entries. Technical life has gotten a bit more tricky since my computer has been out of commission over the last few weeks. But the quotes I've been putting up from my pastors and teachers have also expressed thoughts that I found wonderful and freeing and wanted to share.
I have been writing short pieces for my teachers, but generally they need recontextualization to make them appropriate for a broader audience.
So here's another from Dr. Leithart:
Carey Ellen Walsh (Exquisite Desire) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs. Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its victim under its spell.” To counter desire, one needed to exercise rational management and control: “The Greek philosophical tradition placed desire under the care of rationality. Hence, Odysseus did just what desire calls for; he bested emotion with a reasoned plan. Under this classical influence, Foucault argues, desire became for the West largely something to manage, dominate, and even defeat.” Sexual desire needed to be control, and that control is what makes someone virtuous.
The Song doesn’t minimize the power of desire to control us. On the contrary, it emphasizes that potency even more than the Greeks. It isn’t just possible that desire will escape our control; it’s the very nature of desire to burn like the flame of an uncontrollable fire. Yet “that is no reasons to avoid it.”
“The Hebrew writer might see the classical attempts to secure reason’s mastery over desire as futile and misguided. Flames and the grave have, as it were, a life of their own. Desire’s muscled, tried independence is seen in the Hebrew writer as an essential and not correctable facet. It is most vitally an utter, thrilling loss of control, a giving over to the sensation of want, a foregrounding of that exquisite, aching sense of yearning, while everything else blurs, falling to the wayside. In a real sense, it had better be out of control, or it is not desire.” We our “helpless in desire” and the Song makes “no attempt to domesticate desire, to rid it of its risks, either through moral legislation, shaming, or reason’s mastery.”
Wisdom and virtue are not found in mastering desire, but in the maturing of desire. For the lovers, the “journey through desire is an education between them and for them.” One of the bits of wisdom is precisely about the power of desire: “Desire envelops people, coloring and reorienting their world and their worldview.” Another insight is that “any force that all-consuming has the power also to wound, through exhaustion, disintegration, or despair, dangers for which a person might likely be ill-equipped.” The woman’s education also involves a “cautionary wisdom” that connects love with death and also, importantly, focuses on timing: “do not stir up or arouse love until it delights.” This is not an insight that comes from confining and controlling desire, but comes along the pathway of desire.
Behind all this is, I think, an anthropological point. Desire is extroverted, ecstatic; Narcissus is a case at the margins, and even he falls in love with his image, desires himself as other. Yet desire is intimate, arising (so the Bible says) from the innards, the “reins” or “kidneys.” Desire tells us that at the heart of who we are we are not ourselves; desire teaches us that what is most inner in us is turned inside out. We don’t like to be destabilized that way, and Greek wisdom is largely the wisdom of trying to keep myself to myself, keep my inner self properly inside, under the watchful eye of reason. For the Bible, human beings are much more radically social creatures, oriented without ourselves, finding ourselves not by keeping our “reins” in but finding ourselves along the journey out.
This is also a social and political difference, and a cultural/literary one. Odysseus is curious, but rationally so; and he wants to head home, so he get things back under control. Christianity invented adventure, the journey out and out.
And this, finally, is a difference, as all are, of theology proper. For our God is radically, eternally ecstatic. The Father finds Himself and knows Himself in the Son and by the Spirit. Christianity honored desire because it worshiped a God who went outside Himself. Christianity invented adventure because it proclaimed a gospel of advent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pastor Wilson in one of his wedding exhortations charged the groom to "want way more than you do" and said that the desire for marriage is just the "training wheels of desire." As a female, emotional and desiring marriage, family, and many other things, I continually wonder how my emotions and desires fit into the world. I sympathize more with the squashing of emotion than letting it all hang out, but still, hearing that desire does not have to act destructively is a relief and a freedom. Even the more untamed parts of me have a place and purpose in the order of things.
I have been writing short pieces for my teachers, but generally they need recontextualization to make them appropriate for a broader audience.
So here's another from Dr. Leithart:
Carey Ellen Walsh (Exquisite Desire) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs. Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its victim under its spell.” To counter desire, one needed to exercise rational management and control: “The Greek philosophical tradition placed desire under the care of rationality. Hence, Odysseus did just what desire calls for; he bested emotion with a reasoned plan. Under this classical influence, Foucault argues, desire became for the West largely something to manage, dominate, and even defeat.” Sexual desire needed to be control, and that control is what makes someone virtuous.
The Song doesn’t minimize the power of desire to control us. On the contrary, it emphasizes that potency even more than the Greeks. It isn’t just possible that desire will escape our control; it’s the very nature of desire to burn like the flame of an uncontrollable fire. Yet “that is no reasons to avoid it.”
“The Hebrew writer might see the classical attempts to secure reason’s mastery over desire as futile and misguided. Flames and the grave have, as it were, a life of their own. Desire’s muscled, tried independence is seen in the Hebrew writer as an essential and not correctable facet. It is most vitally an utter, thrilling loss of control, a giving over to the sensation of want, a foregrounding of that exquisite, aching sense of yearning, while everything else blurs, falling to the wayside. In a real sense, it had better be out of control, or it is not desire.” We our “helpless in desire” and the Song makes “no attempt to domesticate desire, to rid it of its risks, either through moral legislation, shaming, or reason’s mastery.”
Wisdom and virtue are not found in mastering desire, but in the maturing of desire. For the lovers, the “journey through desire is an education between them and for them.” One of the bits of wisdom is precisely about the power of desire: “Desire envelops people, coloring and reorienting their world and their worldview.” Another insight is that “any force that all-consuming has the power also to wound, through exhaustion, disintegration, or despair, dangers for which a person might likely be ill-equipped.” The woman’s education also involves a “cautionary wisdom” that connects love with death and also, importantly, focuses on timing: “do not stir up or arouse love until it delights.” This is not an insight that comes from confining and controlling desire, but comes along the pathway of desire.
Behind all this is, I think, an anthropological point. Desire is extroverted, ecstatic; Narcissus is a case at the margins, and even he falls in love with his image, desires himself as other. Yet desire is intimate, arising (so the Bible says) from the innards, the “reins” or “kidneys.” Desire tells us that at the heart of who we are we are not ourselves; desire teaches us that what is most inner in us is turned inside out. We don’t like to be destabilized that way, and Greek wisdom is largely the wisdom of trying to keep myself to myself, keep my inner self properly inside, under the watchful eye of reason. For the Bible, human beings are much more radically social creatures, oriented without ourselves, finding ourselves not by keeping our “reins” in but finding ourselves along the journey out.
This is also a social and political difference, and a cultural/literary one. Odysseus is curious, but rationally so; and he wants to head home, so he get things back under control. Christianity invented adventure, the journey out and out.
And this, finally, is a difference, as all are, of theology proper. For our God is radically, eternally ecstatic. The Father finds Himself and knows Himself in the Son and by the Spirit. Christianity honored desire because it worshiped a God who went outside Himself. Christianity invented adventure because it proclaimed a gospel of advent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pastor Wilson in one of his wedding exhortations charged the groom to "want way more than you do" and said that the desire for marriage is just the "training wheels of desire." As a female, emotional and desiring marriage, family, and many other things, I continually wonder how my emotions and desires fit into the world. I sympathize more with the squashing of emotion than letting it all hang out, but still, hearing that desire does not have to act destructively is a relief and a freedom. Even the more untamed parts of me have a place and purpose in the order of things.
Monday, October 5, 2009
On Experience
To enjoy life rquires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attatchment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.
Montaigne, "On Experience."
Montaigne, "On Experience."
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Food for thought
From today's eucharistic meditation:
Many unbelievers have dismissed this Table before us as a great superstition. Two thousand years after Jesus lived and died, here we are gathering to eat His flesh and drink His blood. What kind of sense does that make?
The first thing to note about this charge is the truth of Chesterton’s observation—a man who refuses to believe in something does not believe in nothing, but rather he eventually come to believe in anything. The cavalier dismissal of this Table as the center of the world has not banished superstitions; rather, it has opened the door wide open to them.
Unbelievers instinctively know that we are saved by what we eat. That is quite true. But we have to eat the body of Christ, drinking His blood, and we have to do this by true faith in the Word that is declared over it. If you refuse to partake of this, then there may be a brief period of food atheism, or perhaps food agnosticism. But when that brief period is over, the superstitions will come flooding in, and people start trying to align themselves to some arbitrary standard of righteousness by what they put in their mouths. It is inescapable—you will either put salvation in your mouth through evangelical faith, and it will come in the form of bread and wine, or you will try to justify yourself by some other form of salvation food, some other kind of false gospel food.
If you eat and drink grace, then it will go down the way grace always does, smoothly, and you will be doing it with deep gratitude. If you eat and drink works—and this is the only alternative to grace—you will be trying to choke down sawdust cakes, molded and shaped by carpenter’s glue. So come, here, now, in true faith. The Table is set before you. God’s grace is before you.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
"Pain is your goldmine"
says a writing teacher to his students.
Let's see.
Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage. A wrongful arrest. A suicide.
Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a main condition of our existence. Suspense is known only to mortals, and its agent and messenger is time.
Eudora Welty, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," On Writing, 96.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Food
Well, here's some of my culinary output in the last two months or so.
Baked ricotta, with lemon and black pepper. Good on bread.
French lentils: beautiful itty bitty ones, mottled grey and green and even a little blue. Not the average drab dust-colored ones. I cooked them with caramalized red onions and lots of red wine, and I think cumin. They turned out marvelous, simultaneously sweet and savory. So good!
Fried egg in a corn tortilla, simmered black beans from the NY Times recipe (now one of my favorite recipes---you must never never never buy canned beans again!), avocado, and paprika sprinkled over top. I love paprika; it's now one of my favorite spices, up there with ginger and cumin and white pepper.
Homemade pizza with all the works. My dad especially liked this one. I think it was the little bit of sugar in the Penzey's pizza seasoning. (Usually I add the salt before I remember the pizza seasoning; and since the pizza seasoning already has salt in it, I forego it.) Oh, the other spice I've discovered I really like: fennel seed. Good on pizza too.
Company appetizer platter.
My brother's graduation cake, from an Ina Garten recipe.
Half-frosted: see the dark cake underneath? I didn't care too much for the frosting (my mom really liked it though) but the cake was lovely. It would work particularly well in an icecream cake. I would just like a bit with some melted chocolate, berries, and some almonds.
In the early stages. One of my best frosting jobs, actually. The frosting was very forgiving. I just don't particularly care for frosting: too much extra stuff. Just give me the chocolate.
Baked ricotta, with lemon and black pepper. Good on bread.
French lentils: beautiful itty bitty ones, mottled grey and green and even a little blue. Not the average drab dust-colored ones. I cooked them with caramalized red onions and lots of red wine, and I think cumin. They turned out marvelous, simultaneously sweet and savory. So good!
Fried egg in a corn tortilla, simmered black beans from the NY Times recipe (now one of my favorite recipes---you must never never never buy canned beans again!), avocado, and paprika sprinkled over top. I love paprika; it's now one of my favorite spices, up there with ginger and cumin and white pepper.
Homemade pizza with all the works. My dad especially liked this one. I think it was the little bit of sugar in the Penzey's pizza seasoning. (Usually I add the salt before I remember the pizza seasoning; and since the pizza seasoning already has salt in it, I forego it.) Oh, the other spice I've discovered I really like: fennel seed. Good on pizza too.
Company appetizer platter.
My brother's graduation cake, from an Ina Garten recipe.
Half-frosted: see the dark cake underneath? I didn't care too much for the frosting (my mom really liked it though) but the cake was lovely. It would work particularly well in an icecream cake. I would just like a bit with some melted chocolate, berries, and some almonds.
In the early stages. One of my best frosting jobs, actually. The frosting was very forgiving. I just don't particularly care for frosting: too much extra stuff. Just give me the chocolate.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
remind me to read this
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford.
From his essay for the New York Times, May 21:
A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.
From his essay for the New York Times, May 21:
A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.
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