My blogging is falling off. I know, I know. But I'm getting stressed out about this fall's new class, and that's been where my energy has been going. So what's new with me?
Well, this weekend I had some alcohol aversion therapy practiced on me. On Friday, Ted took the day off, and so we went to Tamari for happy hour dinner and cocktails. There, we ran into Katie and Randy, who thought that the idea that Nick texted us -- Sidelines for $1 Shot Night -- was an excellent idea, as did Davin when he found out about it. When we got there, Friend Dave and his lady Shannon were also there! Such good times! $1 shots!
I was hungover on Saturday. I don't know what happens to you when you get old, but your body just can't party like it used to. But on Saturday, we had plans to meet Sarah and Roger for dinner at Mad Mex in Monroeville, and then attend the monthly Arthur Murray Saturday Night Dance Party. Sarah and Roger are professional dance instructors, and once a month their studio holds a a BYOB/F dance party. Now, Ted and I don't dance. We're physically awkward and uncoordinated people, and it's no surprise that we can't waltz. But Sarah, God love her, is a proselytizer for her field. So she showed me the basic steps for a Hustle and Rhumba (the box step), and then told her students that I could participate in either. Sarah's students are nice people, and so whenever we attend these dances, I usually have one or two guys who come over and ask me to dance.
Except instead of one or two dances on Saturday night, I got asked to participate in like, a dozen. Imagine this: you are hungover. Someone comes up to you, makes you stand, spins you in a circle for two minutes, and sits you back down. Repeat. When you're not spinning, Sarah is trying to force you to drink sangria.
Oooooog.
Ted and I spent Sunday cleaning the house. Both the fridge and the stove top got cleaned, hooray! And SO MUCH CAT HAIR.
This week, my mother's come down twice to paint my kitchen cabinets, and that's not going well. I like the look -- we're moving from an ugly fake oak laminate to white -- but so far, after two coats ... we need a third coat. And yes, we scuffed and cleaned before we painted. On both of those days I got no work done on the class, and this is stressing me out additionally. Plus: making dinner with all of the cabinet doors and drawers hanging half open is no picnic. But today is back to reading about the Gulag.
Oh, and we're totally broke and there's still like, a week until the end of the month. While we were able to be really frugal in June, that seems to have fallen apart in July. I don't know, people. I don't have the heart to be parsimonious.
***
Another thing I'd like to bring up is a dream I had last night. I know, there's not much that's less interesting than other people's dreams, so I'll try to keep this brief. It had many of the nonsensicalities that one finds in a dream, typically: inexplicable jumps from place to place, one person turning into another part way through, absurd situations, etc. Still. Suffice it to say, Ted and I had started a business together in an exotic locale, and I was very happy with it. But then we abandoned the endeavor at Ted's request. We became wealthy (I don't know how) thereafter, but I was still unhappy without the business. Plus, Ted started cheating on me*, and I had to throw his new lover out of our house.
*NB: Poor Ted! In my dreams, he is CONSTANTLY cheating on me, even though in real life he has never, in all six years we've been together, demonstrated anything but commitment and fidelity. I'm well aware that Actual Ted would no more cheat on me than he'd pluck out his own eyes, but Dream Ted is a dick, and always running around on me unremorsefully.
Anyway, none of that's really the point. The point is that throughout the dream, my Uncle Bill, who passed away last year, was following me around, comforting me and consoling me in my losses. At the end of the dream, he gave me a big hug, and the money to go back and reopen the business I so missed. His face and body and voice -- his entire physical presence -- were particularly clear to me throughout the dream; when I hugged him, I had the sense that he was acting not just on his own behalf, but on his brother's, my grandfather's, as well. (My grandfather George is long dead.)
I awoke from the dream in the middle of the night, in the middle of a lightening storm, and had a particular sense that Uncle Bill had in some way been there in my dream, not just as a memory or a construction of my own psyche, but really, actually present with me. This is strange.
I'm a practicing Catholic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I have any particular deep faith in the unseen world. I practice religion because I think that having a spiritual practice is good (for me), and because it helps me to be a moral person. As far as whether or not God exists, or there is an afterlife where my deceased loved ones are awaiting me ... eh? I don't know, it seems unlikely? The older I get, the more unlikely it seems. (Poor Ted. When we were discussing this one day, he goes, "Wait. You've been dragging me to church for years, and I believe in God more than you do??") I don't know. I'm not saying that God and the afterlife don't exist -- I tend to believe these are questions the answers to which I cannot know -- I'm just saying that in 30 years I've got no evidence to offer you that they do. I can only factually assert that religiosity helps me to be a more moral and centered person.
Despite this agnosticism, though, the sense as I lay in bed last night that my deceased uncle had visited with me in a concrete way, and as a representative not just of himself but of his dead brother, was intense. I don't have anything else to add, other than to recount the event. I said a little prayer that went, "God, I don't know if You're there, or if my uncle and grandfather are, but if so, thank You, and thank them for me," and watched the lightening until I fell back to sleep.
Living in the world is a strange thing to do.
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Ethiopian Cooking and Popery
Today was another food-centric day. To start with, I got a text from my mother late this morning: she was at the Mills mall, and asked me to meet her for lunch in Aspinwall at Patron. So basically the day started out with delicious chicken fajitas.
Then I came home and got dinner started. I had a meeting to attend at my church tonight (I got talked into being on the Parish Life committee -- I don't know about you, but when a priest asks me to do something, I usually end up doing it), so I decided to pre-prepare dinner, so it could just be heated up when I finally got home.
Ted and I enjoy dinner at Abay, one of the Ethiopian restaurants in East Liberty, and so, just as I decided it was time to learn how to make homemade Thai, I've decided it's time to learn how to make Ethiopian at home. Plus, I had some beets and potatoes from last week's farmers' market languishing in my veggie drawer.
The first hurdle I encountered is that there seem to be fewer resources on the internet for Ethiopian recipes than for Thai. The second hurdle is that there seem to be 1,000,000 variations on berbere, which is a spice mixture that makes up a key component of a lot of Ethiopian cooking, specifically wats. Finally, I couldn't crush my fenugreek seeds, because they were as hard as tiny bits of gravel. So there were roadblocks.
I decided to make tikil gomen, a cabbage, potato, and (oftentimes) carrot dish; kay sir dinich, which is beets and potatoes, and which as far as I know is exclusive to Abay's menu; and doro wat, chicken stewed in berbere. The tikil gomen and kay sir dinich were pretty simple: it seems much Ethiopian cooking starts with a base of onions, garlic, and ginger, cooked in a spiced clarified butter called niter kibbeh. I confess I didn't undertake this, and just sauteed the aromatics in plain old butter, but maybe in the future I'll undertake this African version of ghee.
I used epicurious.com's berbere recipe, though I cut back on the paprika and chile, and substituted ancho for New Mexico chiles -- and, as I said, I didn't have ground fenugreek. I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter, and added four chicken thighs and about two tablespoons of the berbere mix, and a few cups of filtered water, and let it simmer forever. It turned out perfectly tasty, but it didn't taste Ethiopian. I plan to try a different berbere recipe in the future. The vegetables were simpler; I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter again, threw in potatoes, carrots, and cabbages, several cups of filtered water, about a half teaspoon of turmeric and a teaspoon of cumin, plus a pinch of salt and black pepper. This tasted most successfully like the tikil gomen I'd had at Abay. The kay sir dinich was onions, garlic, ginger, butter, chopped beets, potatoes, and a pinch of salt, boiled down until everything was tender, and it tasted pretty much like the restaurant version as well. I'd say the main sticking point is the berbere.
And the injera. Ethiopian food is served with a spongey flatbread -- more like a pancake, really -- made out of fermented teff. Trying to make it seemed like more of an undertaking than I was ready for, so on my way home from my meeting I stopped at Abay and bought two injeras for $3.21. It helped make things seem more authentic.
So, in summary, I don't have any recipes down, but it wasn't a disaster, and I have something to build on.
Oh, and if you're curious about the church meeting, we're putting together a youth group program for the parish's teens. Being Catholic is odd, I know. I was raised Presbyterian and converted to Catholicism when I was 22. I preferred it as a practice, and I chiefly see religion as a matter of practice. I can't tell you whether or not God exists -- I've never talked to Him, anyway. But I do know that it's good for me to have a spiritual practice and moral reference, and so when I found Catholicism to be more satisfying in this regard -- I enjoy the ritual, the solemnity, the historical reliance, and the universality of the Church -- I converted. (I didn't feel I wanted to stray too far from the religion I was culturally accustomed to.)
The trouble, of course, is that I'm very liberal. And, frankly, I think the Church -- the papacy in Rome, the American Council of Catholic Bishops, etc. -- is frequently despicable and loathsome, in its treatment of women, the LGBTQ community, its refusal to embrace contraception in AIDS-ravaged communities, and so forth. But I regard my relationship with the Catholic Church the way I regard my relationship with the United States of America, which is also frequently despicable and loathsome; I might be a Catholic and I might be an American, but I'm not necessarily responsible when either of these bodies do despicable and loathsome things. And I have as much right to this Church and this country as do the people who move them to be despicable and loathsome -- moreso, in fact. So it's my job to be a good Catholic and a good American, and try to push these bodies in better directions, or at the very least, it's my right to say that I, a good person, represent these bodies, and so they should be judged according to my beliefs and behaviors as much as according to those of the despicable, loathsome types.
But this seldom comes up for me in church on a day-to-day basis, because I belong to a very liberal parish -- I sometimes think, being in the ghetto, the diocese just kind of ignores us -- and my priest is The Awesomest. He is good and kind and holy and there is a rainbow flag in the parish office. So.
Then I came home and got dinner started. I had a meeting to attend at my church tonight (I got talked into being on the Parish Life committee -- I don't know about you, but when a priest asks me to do something, I usually end up doing it), so I decided to pre-prepare dinner, so it could just be heated up when I finally got home.
Ted and I enjoy dinner at Abay, one of the Ethiopian restaurants in East Liberty, and so, just as I decided it was time to learn how to make homemade Thai, I've decided it's time to learn how to make Ethiopian at home. Plus, I had some beets and potatoes from last week's farmers' market languishing in my veggie drawer.
 |
| Local beets and potatoes. And look at my adorable wee Japanese ginger grater! |
The first hurdle I encountered is that there seem to be fewer resources on the internet for Ethiopian recipes than for Thai. The second hurdle is that there seem to be 1,000,000 variations on berbere, which is a spice mixture that makes up a key component of a lot of Ethiopian cooking, specifically wats. Finally, I couldn't crush my fenugreek seeds, because they were as hard as tiny bits of gravel. So there were roadblocks.
I decided to make tikil gomen, a cabbage, potato, and (oftentimes) carrot dish; kay sir dinich, which is beets and potatoes, and which as far as I know is exclusive to Abay's menu; and doro wat, chicken stewed in berbere. The tikil gomen and kay sir dinich were pretty simple: it seems much Ethiopian cooking starts with a base of onions, garlic, and ginger, cooked in a spiced clarified butter called niter kibbeh. I confess I didn't undertake this, and just sauteed the aromatics in plain old butter, but maybe in the future I'll undertake this African version of ghee.
I used epicurious.com's berbere recipe, though I cut back on the paprika and chile, and substituted ancho for New Mexico chiles -- and, as I said, I didn't have ground fenugreek. I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter, and added four chicken thighs and about two tablespoons of the berbere mix, and a few cups of filtered water, and let it simmer forever. It turned out perfectly tasty, but it didn't taste Ethiopian. I plan to try a different berbere recipe in the future. The vegetables were simpler; I sauteed onion, garlic, and ginger in butter again, threw in potatoes, carrots, and cabbages, several cups of filtered water, about a half teaspoon of turmeric and a teaspoon of cumin, plus a pinch of salt and black pepper. This tasted most successfully like the tikil gomen I'd had at Abay. The kay sir dinich was onions, garlic, ginger, butter, chopped beets, potatoes, and a pinch of salt, boiled down until everything was tender, and it tasted pretty much like the restaurant version as well. I'd say the main sticking point is the berbere.
And the injera. Ethiopian food is served with a spongey flatbread -- more like a pancake, really -- made out of fermented teff. Trying to make it seemed like more of an undertaking than I was ready for, so on my way home from my meeting I stopped at Abay and bought two injeras for $3.21. It helped make things seem more authentic.
 |
| I can't take credit for the pancake. |
So, in summary, I don't have any recipes down, but it wasn't a disaster, and I have something to build on.
Oh, and if you're curious about the church meeting, we're putting together a youth group program for the parish's teens. Being Catholic is odd, I know. I was raised Presbyterian and converted to Catholicism when I was 22. I preferred it as a practice, and I chiefly see religion as a matter of practice. I can't tell you whether or not God exists -- I've never talked to Him, anyway. But I do know that it's good for me to have a spiritual practice and moral reference, and so when I found Catholicism to be more satisfying in this regard -- I enjoy the ritual, the solemnity, the historical reliance, and the universality of the Church -- I converted. (I didn't feel I wanted to stray too far from the religion I was culturally accustomed to.)
The trouble, of course, is that I'm very liberal. And, frankly, I think the Church -- the papacy in Rome, the American Council of Catholic Bishops, etc. -- is frequently despicable and loathsome, in its treatment of women, the LGBTQ community, its refusal to embrace contraception in AIDS-ravaged communities, and so forth. But I regard my relationship with the Catholic Church the way I regard my relationship with the United States of America, which is also frequently despicable and loathsome; I might be a Catholic and I might be an American, but I'm not necessarily responsible when either of these bodies do despicable and loathsome things. And I have as much right to this Church and this country as do the people who move them to be despicable and loathsome -- moreso, in fact. So it's my job to be a good Catholic and a good American, and try to push these bodies in better directions, or at the very least, it's my right to say that I, a good person, represent these bodies, and so they should be judged according to my beliefs and behaviors as much as according to those of the despicable, loathsome types.
But this seldom comes up for me in church on a day-to-day basis, because I belong to a very liberal parish -- I sometimes think, being in the ghetto, the diocese just kind of ignores us -- and my priest is The Awesomest. He is good and kind and holy and there is a rainbow flag in the parish office. So.
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