I lead a women's bible study at my church. Not surprisingly, I am the youngest member, and the only single member. I don't have a lot in common with anyone else in this group, except the fact that we all go to the same church. Right now we're reading a book called Tactics which is an apologetic text on how to defend and talk about faith. Today we watched clips of the the author in action, arguing against a new-age author Deepak Chopra. It was interesting. I like Eastern philosoph, I find it fascinating and it gives me something to think about outside of the box of Christianity that I have been raised in.
What I found funny this morning was a comment made by one of the women. She had gone into Barnes and Noble recently and was appalled that Eastern religion books were next to books on Christianity in the religion section. I said that those are religious books too and this is America so all of those types of books should be displayed equally. This didn't seem to satisfy her, and I would have like to have discussed it further--but this never happens. Interuptions abound in this group and no train of thought every really gets to finish.
So why am I in this group? I mainly keep going because I cannot make it to church on Sundays and want to stay in touch with this part of my life--the spiritual side of my life. Also, they're like my family, grandmothers and mothers and aunts, and since I'm far from home their presence is comforting. So I keep going, putting up with the sometimes close-minded, set-in-their-ways tendancies.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Squash and Pumpkins
Squash/pumpkins
October 28 2009
Who was the first person to look at a large pumpkin and think, I want to carve a face in that odd, orange vegetable? It certainly does seem random that we carve pumpkins, but not hubbard squash for instance. Although, the hubbard and other winter squash have an impossibly tough skin and I feel there would be many missing digits. But, we don’t carve other vegetables. No bell squash faces, or beet jack o lanterns. The pumpkin does hollow out nicely and it large and thick. So it is suited for this activity, but why? Who wanted to make food a decoration? It’s like the colorful Indian corn or corn stalks. Did the pilgrims do this? I bet they used all the food to eat rather than decorate. We live in such a land of plenty that we can display this wealth in the form of a pumpkin we have no intention of eating, but will place on our doorsteps to show everyone that we could eat this if we wanted to, but we certainly don’t need to.
I’m trying to write pieces of flash fiction for different vegetables. So far I have a piece on the Beet. I was inspired by not only Tom Robbins novel Jitterbug perfume, but also my own essay about making borscht. I had beets on the brain and woke up one morning and wrote about a man who makes borscht, and then in the process of eating his stew, becomes a beet and then plants himself in the ground in the end, waiting to be eaten. Now, I’m trying to bring to life other vegetables but am having a hard become inspired. Robbins book was outlandish oddly written—I blame that for why I didn’t finish reading it. But it started out with “the beet is the most intense of vegetables” and I believed him. Combined with the fact that I had just picked some beets and was looking at borscht recipes I felt that all was working together for this piece to be born. But no other signs are coming together for other tubers, root vegetables or even fruit for that matter. I also need to cook more I think. I made chili recently, but for I opened a bunch of different cans of beans, through them in the crock pot with some stewed tomatoes and ground beef. It wasn’t very exciting. It tasted great, but didn’t inspire me to write. It nourished me bodily, but not imaginatively.
So back to square one.
I do still have a beet shriveling in my refridgerator. I had thought of writing a sequel or a continuation of the beet narrative, but thought against it after writing one sentence. It’s over. The obsession has ended. I need to move on. As do you. Good day.
October 28 2009
Who was the first person to look at a large pumpkin and think, I want to carve a face in that odd, orange vegetable? It certainly does seem random that we carve pumpkins, but not hubbard squash for instance. Although, the hubbard and other winter squash have an impossibly tough skin and I feel there would be many missing digits. But, we don’t carve other vegetables. No bell squash faces, or beet jack o lanterns. The pumpkin does hollow out nicely and it large and thick. So it is suited for this activity, but why? Who wanted to make food a decoration? It’s like the colorful Indian corn or corn stalks. Did the pilgrims do this? I bet they used all the food to eat rather than decorate. We live in such a land of plenty that we can display this wealth in the form of a pumpkin we have no intention of eating, but will place on our doorsteps to show everyone that we could eat this if we wanted to, but we certainly don’t need to.
I’m trying to write pieces of flash fiction for different vegetables. So far I have a piece on the Beet. I was inspired by not only Tom Robbins novel Jitterbug perfume, but also my own essay about making borscht. I had beets on the brain and woke up one morning and wrote about a man who makes borscht, and then in the process of eating his stew, becomes a beet and then plants himself in the ground in the end, waiting to be eaten. Now, I’m trying to bring to life other vegetables but am having a hard become inspired. Robbins book was outlandish oddly written—I blame that for why I didn’t finish reading it. But it started out with “the beet is the most intense of vegetables” and I believed him. Combined with the fact that I had just picked some beets and was looking at borscht recipes I felt that all was working together for this piece to be born. But no other signs are coming together for other tubers, root vegetables or even fruit for that matter. I also need to cook more I think. I made chili recently, but for I opened a bunch of different cans of beans, through them in the crock pot with some stewed tomatoes and ground beef. It wasn’t very exciting. It tasted great, but didn’t inspire me to write. It nourished me bodily, but not imaginatively.
So back to square one.
I do still have a beet shriveling in my refridgerator. I had thought of writing a sequel or a continuation of the beet narrative, but thought against it after writing one sentence. It’s over. The obsession has ended. I need to move on. As do you. Good day.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Just a random, what I'm up to blog
I wrote a piece this morning that was fun and adventurous, and about beets. Much like the essay I also have posted on this blog, this one was about food. I hope that you, whoever you are--the reader-- do not find it boring. It was inspired by a James Tate poem called The Radish and like I said, was fun, new and different for me. Here it is. Enjoy.
September 22nd 2009 Autumnal Equinox
The beet
There is a lone beet lurking in the refrigerator. It sits in the drawer with the prettier potatoes and carrots, all of which are scrubbed clean and shiny. The beet can be scrubbed, but it can never be shiny. It does not sparkle, but absorbs light. The beet’s real show is inside its bloody center. You cut a beet in half and stand back from the splatter; it’s like a Tarentino film, gory yet wonderful. The beet oozes its essence on to the cutting board. Dramatic? It can’t help but be dramatic. Your hands, the knife, the counter, the floor all will be magenta-colored in the blood bath as you chop and dice the beet. It gets under your nails and the smell of earth fills your nose. The soup pot will become like a millpond, full of mossy, dirt smells and water teeming with flavor. Add onion and cabbage and carrot to the pot to keep the beet company, and it will bleed all over them, staining them purple and red. Don’t forget salt and pepper and the stewed tomatoes. Adding more redness to the mess. Place the lid on the pot and let it boil. Boil, boil toil and trouble the witches say in Macbeth. I bet they were stirring a pot of borscht while doling out bloody omens. Serve your borscht with sour cream to sooth the tang. Take a spoonful and taste, close your eyes and think of the garden, the innocuous-looking beet leaves blazing out of the soil. You pulled them from the ground and beheld this tuber, this awkward, dirty root vegetable. You washed and put it in the fridge and now it’s swimming about in your mouth, and down your throat. You swallow and it fills you. You slurp up the whole bowl of borscht, you can’t help it, you are like one possessed. You put the bowl down, only to have it filled again by a pushy hostess. You empty it again within you, and your skin takes on a faint lavender color. You have another bowl, and now you are blushing the hue of beet, it has imbibed you with its juices and you are stained as if with beet jaundice. You refuse another bowl, reeling. Can you cry as Lady Macbeth? Out, out damn spot? No, for it is not a spot, but yourself that is red. You have become the beet, as it has become you. You sprout leaves from you the top of your head and look for a soft place to lay, to plant yourself; waiting for the next unsuspecting, innocent cook to pull you from the ground and place you in a soup pot.
September 22nd 2009 Autumnal Equinox
The beet
There is a lone beet lurking in the refrigerator. It sits in the drawer with the prettier potatoes and carrots, all of which are scrubbed clean and shiny. The beet can be scrubbed, but it can never be shiny. It does not sparkle, but absorbs light. The beet’s real show is inside its bloody center. You cut a beet in half and stand back from the splatter; it’s like a Tarentino film, gory yet wonderful. The beet oozes its essence on to the cutting board. Dramatic? It can’t help but be dramatic. Your hands, the knife, the counter, the floor all will be magenta-colored in the blood bath as you chop and dice the beet. It gets under your nails and the smell of earth fills your nose. The soup pot will become like a millpond, full of mossy, dirt smells and water teeming with flavor. Add onion and cabbage and carrot to the pot to keep the beet company, and it will bleed all over them, staining them purple and red. Don’t forget salt and pepper and the stewed tomatoes. Adding more redness to the mess. Place the lid on the pot and let it boil. Boil, boil toil and trouble the witches say in Macbeth. I bet they were stirring a pot of borscht while doling out bloody omens. Serve your borscht with sour cream to sooth the tang. Take a spoonful and taste, close your eyes and think of the garden, the innocuous-looking beet leaves blazing out of the soil. You pulled them from the ground and beheld this tuber, this awkward, dirty root vegetable. You washed and put it in the fridge and now it’s swimming about in your mouth, and down your throat. You swallow and it fills you. You slurp up the whole bowl of borscht, you can’t help it, you are like one possessed. You put the bowl down, only to have it filled again by a pushy hostess. You empty it again within you, and your skin takes on a faint lavender color. You have another bowl, and now you are blushing the hue of beet, it has imbibed you with its juices and you are stained as if with beet jaundice. You refuse another bowl, reeling. Can you cry as Lady Macbeth? Out, out damn spot? No, for it is not a spot, but yourself that is red. You have become the beet, as it has become you. You sprout leaves from you the top of your head and look for a soft place to lay, to plant yourself; waiting for the next unsuspecting, innocent cook to pull you from the ground and place you in a soup pot.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Borscht and cabbage the size of my head!
August 14th 2009
“a beet is what’s left after the cherry is finished with the carrot.” -- Tom Robbins
Recently, while visiting my aunt and uncle, Kathy and Al, in Polson I had a blast pulling things out of their garden. The last time I had seen his plot was on a chilly evening in mid-May; now it was bursting with robust vegetables. The row of cabbage was imposing and took over the garden. I was reminded of the silly cabbage patch kid dolls of my youth, seeing the hidden heads of cabbage as if swaddled in the large leaves. After seeing my excitement, he asked if I wanted one. I immediately accepted.
He pointed to the beets as well and I thought of borscht. I had recently started reading Tom Robbin’s novel Jitterbug Perfume which begins: “Beets are the most intense of vegetables.” I was inspired—beets were my future.
“Of course I’ll take some, if you can’t use them all, I say.
We went in for dinner: stuffed bell peppers from the garden, corn from the store, (they were sure to say that theirs wasn’t quite ready yet), and some mediocre salads I had brought from the Harvest Foods in Ronan. I hadn’t had time to make any from scratch. I brought carrots from my garden to add color and to ease my feelings of inadequacy and disappointment in my submitting to convenience. They were descent salads but, eh.
We then picked strawberries and raspberries after dinner. It was nice that they had remembered that I had wanted to pick their raspberries after hearing about how many they had. There were just enough from what was left after their earlier harvest to put on the chocolate cake. It was zucchini chocolate heaven on a plate, and in my mouth.
In the morning, I picked the veggies with an old, rusty knife that Al found in his garage. The cabbage, unsurprisingly, proved difficult to harvest. I remembered a knife I once used on a friend’s farm— the sharp blade was at the end of the shaft so you could cut at the thick stem straight on. It was quite effective as you could stab the cabbage stem and slice it in one motion. I sawed at this cabbage stem, rocking the large head back and forth, eventually it worked. I immediately had visions of making not only coleslaw but also sauerkraut.
Al related a story about when he was a kid and his family grew so much cabbage that they had a special wagon with a blade attached to the bottom for easy harvesting. He said they made kraut in a huge barrel and he would creep in and sneak whole pieces of the marinating leaves when his mother wasn’t looking. What a great story, vats of cabbage!
That Sunday I made borsht for some dear friends. It consisted of all garden veggies, except for the canned tomatoes I needed for the stock. My hands and the cutting board were stained a brilliant magenta color, and when I added the cabbage, the pot took on a bright red hue. Tom Robbins recounts just how “bloody” beets are, and he’s not exaggerating much. The deep purple juices stained every surface of my kitchen. The kitchen smelled of earth as I cut and boiled the beets. Their rough skin, although scrubbed clean, still retained the flavor and aroma of Al’s rich soil in Polson. I was eating the ground, and everything with it went into the stew pot.
My friends laugh at me for getting so excited about produce, but they just don’t get it. Gary Paul Nabhan writes in his book, Coming Home to Eat, “we were blessed by the food and not the other way around.” This line struck me as perfect. I feel blessed by food, especially vegetables and fruit from a garden. I cannot bless the food that comes from the earth, for I had so little to do with its success. I am blessed by the nutrients, beauty and especially the flavor of food.
Al and Kathy laugh at my enthusiasm for the berries they grow, black, raspberry and strawberry—but why not? Berries like that are precious. I rarely can pick enough to bring back in the house for pie because I can’t help but stuff them in my mouth immediately. I’m constantly amazed that food can grow from seeds. From puny (in Al’s words) cabbage plants, can grow enormous, edible cabbage possibilities.
Being in his garden reminded me of my childhood feelings of immeasurable possibility. The simplicity of caring for something the best you can and trusting that God will take care of the rest was refreshing and sustaining.
I see vegetables as tangible miracles that I not only get to hold and breath in, but also eat. And that’s my kind of miracle.
Al said grace for us that night in Polson and I reveled Robbins over the borscht on my porch with friends. We blessed the food, and were in return blessed through it. Amen to that.
“a beet is what’s left after the cherry is finished with the carrot.” -- Tom Robbins
Recently, while visiting my aunt and uncle, Kathy and Al, in Polson I had a blast pulling things out of their garden. The last time I had seen his plot was on a chilly evening in mid-May; now it was bursting with robust vegetables. The row of cabbage was imposing and took over the garden. I was reminded of the silly cabbage patch kid dolls of my youth, seeing the hidden heads of cabbage as if swaddled in the large leaves. After seeing my excitement, he asked if I wanted one. I immediately accepted.
He pointed to the beets as well and I thought of borscht. I had recently started reading Tom Robbin’s novel Jitterbug Perfume which begins: “Beets are the most intense of vegetables.” I was inspired—beets were my future.
“Of course I’ll take some, if you can’t use them all, I say.
We went in for dinner: stuffed bell peppers from the garden, corn from the store, (they were sure to say that theirs wasn’t quite ready yet), and some mediocre salads I had brought from the Harvest Foods in Ronan. I hadn’t had time to make any from scratch. I brought carrots from my garden to add color and to ease my feelings of inadequacy and disappointment in my submitting to convenience. They were descent salads but, eh.
We then picked strawberries and raspberries after dinner. It was nice that they had remembered that I had wanted to pick their raspberries after hearing about how many they had. There were just enough from what was left after their earlier harvest to put on the chocolate cake. It was zucchini chocolate heaven on a plate, and in my mouth.
In the morning, I picked the veggies with an old, rusty knife that Al found in his garage. The cabbage, unsurprisingly, proved difficult to harvest. I remembered a knife I once used on a friend’s farm— the sharp blade was at the end of the shaft so you could cut at the thick stem straight on. It was quite effective as you could stab the cabbage stem and slice it in one motion. I sawed at this cabbage stem, rocking the large head back and forth, eventually it worked. I immediately had visions of making not only coleslaw but also sauerkraut.
Al related a story about when he was a kid and his family grew so much cabbage that they had a special wagon with a blade attached to the bottom for easy harvesting. He said they made kraut in a huge barrel and he would creep in and sneak whole pieces of the marinating leaves when his mother wasn’t looking. What a great story, vats of cabbage!
That Sunday I made borsht for some dear friends. It consisted of all garden veggies, except for the canned tomatoes I needed for the stock. My hands and the cutting board were stained a brilliant magenta color, and when I added the cabbage, the pot took on a bright red hue. Tom Robbins recounts just how “bloody” beets are, and he’s not exaggerating much. The deep purple juices stained every surface of my kitchen. The kitchen smelled of earth as I cut and boiled the beets. Their rough skin, although scrubbed clean, still retained the flavor and aroma of Al’s rich soil in Polson. I was eating the ground, and everything with it went into the stew pot.
My friends laugh at me for getting so excited about produce, but they just don’t get it. Gary Paul Nabhan writes in his book, Coming Home to Eat, “we were blessed by the food and not the other way around.” This line struck me as perfect. I feel blessed by food, especially vegetables and fruit from a garden. I cannot bless the food that comes from the earth, for I had so little to do with its success. I am blessed by the nutrients, beauty and especially the flavor of food.
Al and Kathy laugh at my enthusiasm for the berries they grow, black, raspberry and strawberry—but why not? Berries like that are precious. I rarely can pick enough to bring back in the house for pie because I can’t help but stuff them in my mouth immediately. I’m constantly amazed that food can grow from seeds. From puny (in Al’s words) cabbage plants, can grow enormous, edible cabbage possibilities.
Being in his garden reminded me of my childhood feelings of immeasurable possibility. The simplicity of caring for something the best you can and trusting that God will take care of the rest was refreshing and sustaining.
I see vegetables as tangible miracles that I not only get to hold and breath in, but also eat. And that’s my kind of miracle.
Al said grace for us that night in Polson and I reveled Robbins over the borscht on my porch with friends. We blessed the food, and were in return blessed through it. Amen to that.
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