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  This, to me, is just the taste of summer. We had the most perfect Memorial weekend consisting of back porch barbeques, swimming, hot weather, ice cream sandwiches, and strawberry rhubarb pie. A friend gave me some rhubarb which I had to freeze till I had time to turn it into something AMAZING and this had to be it. I love rhubarb and it seems there is lots to make with it, coffee cakes, rhubarb spritzer but pie seemed a reasonable choice to me. The inside had the perfect amount of sauce and was just warm enough to wonderfully compliment vanilla ice cream. If you check out the recipe, I did make some modifications one obviously being strawberries instead of raspberries. I would have preferred raspberries but I couldn’t find them. The other being that I didn’t pre-cook my rhubarb because I didn’t want mush, I wanted chunks of fruit.   December 2003 – Melissa (center) stands with her cousins and grandpa beside their shanty in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi. Melissa is a four year old and was raped by a neighbor in the community trash heap, which is used as a public restroom. (photo and text, property of IJM) I was reading a home decorating magazine the other day and came across a profile of some new, chic, young interior designer. The article listed her favs– stuff like her favorite mascara, favorite handbag, favorite eco-friendly, carbon-foot-print-reducing bottled water (actually I’m making that up, but you get the picture). Under her “favorite charity” was listed, “Bent on Learning“. It’s an organization that brings yoga to the classroom for New York school children. I looked a little further into the group, and I found Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan. I’m eternally thankful I don’t know the exact number of dollars being pumped into the charity, or I may throw up. I’ve been reflecting on charity, in these hard times, that only show signs of getting harder. Instead of keeping a tight fist on our hard earned cash (as would be the natural thing to do) we are going to be called to help others in greater need. I believe in starting with your community, making sure your church family is well taken care of, and then reaching out further. And the one organization that comes to mind for me, time and again, is International Justice Mission. Internationl Justice Mission is a human rights agency that works to abolish human trafficking, slave labor, forced prostitution and abuse in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Zac and I visited the headquarters in Washington D.C. last year and were so impressed with how they make each dollar go so far. They have high standards for the lawyers they hire (under their job requirements is a ”mature Orthodox Christian faith as defined by the Apostle’s Creed”) , and they work with residents of the countries too, to have the greatest and most lasting impact. We got to sit in on the morning prayer meeting, before everyone began their day of work. We heard about their after care programs that help women and very young girls recover from sexual abuse and lives of cruelty. Last month IJM led a raid on a brothel in Mumbai, India and saved seven victims. All the women had been sold into the trade for as little as 150 rupees, or $3. ”One victim in the brothel told IJM operatives prior to the raid that she was forced into prostitution under threat of beatings, and that the madam had been controlling her by restricting her access to her infant son.” The woman and her son were both rescued, and all the women are now receiving help from IJM’s aftercare program as they readjust to a life of freedom. Read the whole story here. Let’s see, given the choice, should we use the few dollars extra dollars we have to teach some New York kids to hold a ”downward facing dog position” . . . . . . or give women and young girls in third world countries a new life by prosecuting their sexual abusers. It’s a hard choice. It’s a good thing we have celebrities, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Obama, to steer us in the right direction. (P.S. On a brighter note, I was happy to find out the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a proud supporter of IJM.) 1 COMMENT | |
In works of art, bread often symbolizes life. It is the most elemental of “made” foods. To “break bread” with someone is to share in the most fundamental of rituals and establish a relationship with them. I guess a modern equivalent might be to “share a beer” (often described as “liquid bread”.) Not until Mr Atkins did it become fashinable to look down on this most necessary of foods. So why are many people afraid of making it? One of my favorites is a crusty on the outside, chewy inside loaf pebbled with cranberries and tosted walnuts. Now, I have been searching for years for the recipe that allows me to make that quality of bread in my own oven– with the perfect crumb– chewy and full of holes with the perfect crust. Then came my introduction to the no-knead bread, the answer to years of searching. It will vanquish your fears of yeast or spending all day in the kitchen. So I offer to you my rendition of the cranberry, walnut bread: 1 1/2 cups white flour, more for dusting 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour ¼ teaspoon instant yeast 1¼ teaspoons salt 1/3 cup cranberries 1/3 cup chopped, toasted walnuts Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed. 1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Mix in cranberries and walnuts. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest about 24 hours at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees. 2. Lightly flour a work surface and flop dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes. 3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger. 4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 25 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 10-15 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack. 
I remember the day Andrew and I took Meghan to the Boston Museum of Science in the pouring rain in a stroller I had salvaged from someone’s trash heap and then reupholstered in denim and still Meghan was cute enough for someone to exclaim over her, and then turn to me and say, “Enjoy her, before you know it she’ll be grown and gone.” I thought, “Yeah, right.” After all I was twenty and knew everything. Well, here I am and she is grown and gone, but thankfully living twenty minutes away. Even more than that, now our fourth daughter has grown and gone and that is really hard to believe. We have now said good bye to four daughters, and really there is no kidding myself; it is for ever. And you know what, just because I’ve done this three other times does not make it any easier. And it wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Our life at home keeps getting a little smaller and a little quieter. Yet, it is a very humbling and satisfying to see them grown into the people that I wanted them to become. It actually isn’t good bye; my children have become my friends and confidants. The graduation ceremony was a big snoozer with Congressman Walt Minnick as speaker. He forgot he had already won the election and spent most of his time at the podium running for office. My camera battery had died so Andrew had to miss most of the preliminaries and stood around outside the maintenance buildings of University of Idaho with the battery charger plugged in. He had taken my phone so Jarrett could call him when Aileen’s school was being announced but when we called to tell him; we got my answering machine. That battery in the phone was about dead too so it was plugged in inside the car and down the parking lot from Andrew and the camera charger, so although he did have the phone, it was doing him absolutely no good. Like it seems he always does, he came in the nick of time and got to miss all the boring bits but was there for Aileen’s name to be called. Aileen has landed a job in Seattle with a lab and will be living with Caitlin, Zac and Freyja in the Queen Ann district.
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 Mom and baby boy #3 Canon, now a big 5 year old, sat quietly and drew this picture of his mom and the expected little brother.  "We are having a new baby, it is a girl" Anwyn, soon to be seven, was a bit disappointed that she would not be having a sister so in her make believe world she wrote little note to Taite and stuck it in the mailbox outside the playhouse. She’s beginning to see the benefits now of being the only girl though and said to her mom she was glad that Grandpa E would call her, only her, “the little princess.”  A turkey farm in Pennsylvania that I visited. I thought this was a beautiful photo with the swirls of white and pink and was quite pleased with the picture but Eric just thought it was weird.
Is has been a year now that our house has been up for sale and on February 14 we moved into our new home. We became the owners of two homes. There was a reason we never owned two homes before, there was a reason we never bought a vacation house and it’s because we can’t afford it! We kept believing that as the time drew nearer to move, our home for sale would miraculously sell; we thought somehow we deserved to have it sell so we could move on with our lives, we thought we deserved not to have to worry about weeding or cutting the grass fifty miles away, we thought we deserved to have money to pay the bills, we thought we deserved to live in ease and comfort, we thought God understood all this. We wanted to be looking back at how everything just fell into place and sweetly smile and say, “Isn’t God good.” We’re not there yet… but I have learned some things along the way, good things. Make no mistake, I do not have my act together on trusting God; I was about ready to cry a puddle of tears when the library told me I had a $15 dollar charge on overdue books. Do I sound like I’m whining? It is so much easier to display peace that passes understanding when you have money to back it up. Some time back I came to the conclusion that I do not need to be God’s public relations gal; He doesn’t need my help to make Him look good. I did not need to put on rose colored glasses and exclaim everything perfect. I did not have to pretend something was wonderful when the reality of it was that it, well, it sucked. And yet, I was not off the hook. I don’t get the go ahead to wallow in self pity and despair. I don’t have to like the trials I’m put through or pretend to be glad for them but I am called on to trust God, not money, not health, not intelligence, not talent. And it is very easy to say I am trusting God and another thing altogether when I have to live that I trust God, when God throws a monkey wrench in my very lovely ordered life and says, “Now trust Me;” that’s when we are revealed. A few verses in Jeremiah 17 suddenly become crystal clear: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, And shall not see when good comes… (dagger to my heart!) We can become so focused on the trial, ruminating on it from the moment we wake up until we go to bed, making sure we wake up in the night to put in a little more time, that we can’t see any good- ever and consequently become like a dry piece of sagebrush… in a salt land. That’s pretty dead. We can be so overly focused on the trial that we miss the innumerable blessings. But when we shift our focus from dwelling on and being consumed by our trials and instead hope in the Lord, we become like a tree planted by water, thriving. We are not asked to be idiots thinking that the trial is a load of laughs, but neither can we let the trials be the focus of our life. That’s hard. No, we don’t need to be God’s PR man but we do need to trust God without being anxious. Doing so in the small things will make it easier when big things hit; the tree planted by the waters will spread out its roots and thrive. ”If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small” (Ps.24:10) And really, it is just a house, I mean two houses, really not all that monumental in the way of adversity. Remind me of this tomorrow…  Like a tree planted planted by waters
I took this photo a week or so ago when Zac noticed it on the way home from work. Lots of people in Seattle are intruiged by the tagger known as Cold Killer. And now I’m wondering. . . . . . why am I feeling sucked in too? In some minds he is Seattle’s graffiti darling, a favorite with his own band of followers. In other’s opinion he’s the mentally challenged menace who is ruining public property and creating the same eye soar all over the city. Loved by many, hated by most, the pac man ghost artist is alive and well, and you’ve just got to wonder, “what’s his deal?” The story, according to a phone interview in 2004 between Seattle’s Stranger and the Cold K himself goes like this: Cold K witnessed a murder while out on the streets somehwere in the Central District. He reported it but he says the cops wouldn’t listen to him. He was so messed up over never knowing what became of the murderer that he just started writting “Cold Killer” and drawing morbid pictures on walls and things all over:
(Above: Flikr photos- follow the links for credits) “I started out doing skulls and crossbones, anything sort of death-related, and then it became a ghost,” The Cold K told the Stranger. Certain people laud Cold K and other graffitist as artist, cultivating an urban art expression, all their own. There are the masters, and there are the punks who just scribble their initials on any wall they can get their paws on. Here’s one of Cold K’s groupie on the subject: “Sure, there were other taggers painting all over Seattle, but Cold K’s expressionless ghosts were identifiable, noticeable, and varied enough in style that they didn’t become boring. I imagine that if I owned property in the city I wouldn’t be too fond of graffiti artists but, since I don’t, and since I’ve always been a big fan of culture subversion, Cold Killer is my favorite tagger in Seattle.” But do taggers see themselves as artists, perfecting their “skills” and honing their expressionism? ”I try to make my art look as nice as possible, so people will like it” Cold K said (again Stanger interview), ” but I have some motor damage, and my brain is kind of rotted out from huffing and other drug abuse, so the pieces usually come out super shitty. That is what makes me paint a lot. I think if I practice #?% and my tags aren’t so shitty, people won’t hate it so much.” After 5 years and counting, the Cold K is still going strong. Or is he? With all his fame, I could only think he had to have some copy cats out there. I did some more research and learned that if the ghost has teeth, it’s not his tag. So my above photo is of an imposter. I couldn’t belive it! I had to go out and find an original, and armed with my wealth of Cold K information I think I’m up to the challenge. Tim surprised me with an early birthday gift and flew me to Argentina this morning. It was an over-night flight and we got up-graded to business, so after a night of flying/sleep we hit the ground running this morning. I love Buenos Aires!! They call it the Paris of S America and does feel like that! Like a Paris you can do on the cheap while speaking Spanish– so much the better! Today we checked into our hostel, took off on foot, visited the Presidential Palace Casa Rosado where Evita addressed the throngs from her balcony, explored the different barrios, stopped for lunch at a cafe, went to the most amazing cemetery I have ever seen (and saw where Evita is burried), toured the National Museo de Bella Artes which has some incredible masterpieces including Degas, Monet, Picasso, tons.. I wonẗ bore you. I plan to eat a lot of beef while Iḿ here. A couple just started doing the tango behind me. Are you kidding me? I recently attended a wedding where the Best Man made a (very long) toast without ever using a single subjective noun. It went something like this: “So, just wishing Ken and Barbie (not their real names) the best on their big day. Hoping great things for their future. Really glad God chose to bring them together in this way. So honored Ken asked me to be here. Wanted to say a few things about how wonderful Ken is…” You get the picture. I practically developed hemorrhoids just straining to catch one solitary subjective noun. As bad as that was, I’ve now developed a nasty habit of noticing whenever people choose to drop their subjective nouns. It happens a lot in public speaking, I’m not sure why. Someone speaking up in Sunday school the other week: “Yeah, so thought about this connection between the era of Jonathan Edwards and his ideas about religious affections.. ” I wanted to stand up and shout, “ What?!? Who thought about it? Did you mean to say you thought about it? Do you think you’re speaking Spanish?!? You can’t just drop nouns whenever you want to!” E-mails are another particularly guilty culprit– “Hey! Just wanted to drop a line and see how things are…” The reason I’m bringing this to your attention is that while you may not have ever noticed this practice before, you will after reading this post. The marginalization of any member of society, especially one as important as subjective nouns, speaks poorly for the future of language and society in general. Marginalization usually leads to subjugation which is not a long way from all out nounocide. Within a few short years the sentence “I just killed a HUGE cockroach in my office and am leaving his dead carcass as a warning to others” could look like “Just killed a HUGE in my and am leaving dead as a to”. I think we can all agree that would be a great loss. So my solution is, the next time you are at a wedding and the best man starts leaving out his subjective nouns, just quietly tap him on the arm and say, “I’m sorry but I think you dropped an ‘I’.” Just a thought…. I mean, it’s just a thought.  I think this bracelet came from my granny's jewelry box.  How fun are these? They are huge clip-ons that pinch and pull on your ears but I'm waiting for a chance to wear them.  I love this necklace of ivy leaves, it looks somewhat Grecian to me. I found it at a little shop on the coast where the woman collected tons of vintage jewelry to sell.  My little find from a church garage sale.  This is a fur clip but I have worn it in my hair before too. The detailing is just beautiful.  Though I don't think you can see it very well, even the back has amazing carvings. I love going to garage sales, second hand stores and antique shops. Eric hates them. He hates the particular second hand smell they all seem to have but to me it’s worth it. I enjoy poking around for little treasures and my most favorite finds are jewelry. You can get some great pieces for a steal. That is where I found the necklace for my wedding when I decided I wanted some big gaudy thing to wear. I have actually been vetoed on a few of my recent ideas for this blog; my daughters thought I was being mean. I probably was, so in an attempt to look somewhat kind, friendly and fun I thought I would turn my attention to food. We are big into it around here; it has been a learned love in my life. I grew up near Boston with a mother from Kansas, so seasoning food meant a tiny bit of salt and if you were really going wild and living on the edge, pepper, and easy does it! Add to that a father who thought you were trying to get away with something if you added something exotic like onion or garlic to a dish and , “What is that green fleck in the spaghetti?” To my mother’s defense, when my dad was on business trips, she would branch out and we would have things like rice instead of potatoes; my dad was a meat and potatoes guy. One time while the mouse was away, I remember salmon from a can and fresh kumquats and kiwis, two very exotic things back then. Andrew and I have cabinets devoted to spices and we use them a lot. The first time he seasoned something I thought he meant to do me in. He lavishly sprinkled all kinds of stuff on the meat and dumped all kinds of green spices and big chunks of onion and garlic in the spaghetti. He asked me to trust him on this one and I did and I love the way he seasons food and my life!
Terrific and easy dinners in the summer include grilled asparagus. It’s grown in the fields all around us, so we can buy it fresh out of the field for that night’s dinner. Just drizzle a little olive oil and sprinkle a little Maldon salt and grill. Grilling asparagus takes that little vegetable up a notch and gives it a wonderful, nutty flavor. Another easy way to great asparagus is to put it on a baking sheet and again drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and bake at 350 for about 15 to 20 minutes. Apparently this method works well for brussel sprouts too.  A little flare up  Andrew's grilling success despite the fire  summer grilling by Mike Casbon  It must run in the family, this is Ben Casbon's creation. This incredible shrimp was grilled by Ben Casbon. It has truckloads of cumin on it and it is impossible to eat just a few.  Foccacia is an easy addition to a summer meal. Foccacia is so easy to make: 3 C flour, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp yeast, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 C oil and 1 C warm water. Let rise once then shape into circle, let rise on pan, poke with holes, slather olive oil and herbes de provence or rosemary and Maldon salt and bake until golden (375 for about 15-20 mins)
 
 perching dinner on their laps  
K
 On the deck  Salmon on the grill using aluminum foil makes clean up a breeze |
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