There's Beauty in the Bellow

While bagging for one of my fellow cashiers last week, we met a very interesting person. She is the mother of Patrick Warburton and an abstinence advocate and activist, beautiful, elegant, and passionate. She told us that she is always looking for young people to talk about abstinence and encourage parents to talk to their children: "they'll listen to you, they won't listen to me." But as a cashier in a grocery store, communication in families is frequently rude, ungracious, impatient and tense in very small matters like "what are we doing for dinner?" "did you get everything on the shopping list?" If grace and courtesy have become alienated from everyday discourse, why should it be any better in more serious matters? If I did do a talk for Ms. Warburton, I could say "Talk to your kids," but I'd also have to say, "Go to church, get right with God, improve your communication with God, else why should they listen to you?" Jus

Today we hosted a little birthday luncheon for Teri, who's been our neighbor and surrogate grandmother for several years now. We made Ina Garten's incredible crab cakes (Daddy said they taste better than the expensive ones he once ate in some fancy restaurant), spinach salad with cucumbers, strawberries and roasted almonds and cherry balsamic vinaigrette, pinot grigio wine spritzers, and buttermilk biscuits from the Gluten-Free Girl's recipe. The biscuits turned out beautifully! As Momma was pulling them out, she exclaimed, "Oh, they look like real food!" I used a store-brand lactase milk (milk with the lactase enzyme added) and added lemon juice to substitute for regular buttermilk. We also followed Ina's philosophy and bought the dessert, a fruit tart from The Fresh Market. Since the tart has gluten and dairy, I wanted to make sure the biscuits wouldn't add any discomfort to what Momma was going to experience. I skipped out on the tart, made our favori