Sunday Dinner

On the way to the blackberry cobbler recipe a couple of weeks ago, I also came across one for pork roast with a blackberry sauce which I immediately filed away, thinking it might be good to try with pork chops we already had on hand in the freezer.  In a subsequent browsing I also found a cranberry couscous recipe which I decided to pair with the chops in blackberry sauce.  Both recipes were pretty complicated by my standards – - not so long aog my favorite cookbook was one containing recipes using five ingredients or less, and I still prefer relatively simple foods that are still recognizable when cooked. 

In both our families of origin Sunday dinner was usually eaten mid afternoon, so we decided to continue with that tradition, so after a late morning trip to the gorcery store, I set to work.  I had further complicated already complicated recipes by printing them out strangely, so ordering my tasks and keeping the two fruity, chicken-brothy recipes straight left my intellectual capabilities somewhat overtaxed, and I began to wonder if the products would justify the processes. 

I am happy to report that they did. Cracker Bearelle was much delighted with the meal, and my tastebuds were quite happy too.  In the couscous I especially loved the contrast of the sweetness of the orange-juice-soaked cranberries with the mouth-turning sourness of the pieces of fresh lemon.  When it’s time to plan the menu for our first Thanksgiving alone together in our new home, I will definitely want to consider serving the cranberry couscous with turkey breast.

Becoming a Better Housekeeper

I’ve had this goal in my 43 Things for quite some time now, and as I survey my progress – – no more dishes moldering in the sink for days on end, weekly cleaning routines rather than frenzied cleaning motivated by impending guests – – I begin to wonder how will I know when I’ve completed this goal. On the one hand, I think I have become a better housekeeper; on the other hand, one can always be better.

What I think has improved most in the time since I’ve been homemaking with Cracker Bearelle is my attitude toward housekeeping tasks: I no longer make myself miserable dreading them, and I’ve begun to really incorporate them into my daily and weekly routine. Another difference is that now these tasks are a part of my chosen role, tasks I perform in order to keep things nice and running smoothly in or home, rather than, as before, senseless repetitive chores that take time away from my real work. And it seems a good thing to be more firmly tothered to the physical sensory world, a connection that anchors and nourishes my intercourse with abstraction and the life of the mind.

*Getting” to Carry Each Other: Friday Night Saturday, and Saturday Night Date Nite

Tonight after a quick and easy, tasty supper of veggie burgers and sour cream & onion potato chips, Cracker Bearelle and I headed down to the Frankfort Avenue Carmichael’s for a reading from a new book about spirituality in the music of U2 We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel Accortding to U2.  It was a really good reading and talk, and I am looking forward to reading the book and to initiating Cracker Bearelle into the mysteries of U2.  Right now I am listening to Boy and Cracker Bearelle is talking to her peoples. 

After some intense, though amicable, negotiations, Cracker Bearelle is going to rise by 8:00 tomorrow morning so we can get out to the Bardstown Road farmer’s market hy 9:00.  After the makret, Cracker Bearelle is going to hole up in her cofee shop and do some serious work, while I take the TARC home where I’ll hang out and make chicken salad for supper which we’ll eat after the $.25 ice cream social and a late afternoon showing of HP and the HBP. After that, who knows.  But it’s been a great week and it’s sure to be a fabulous weekend.

“Look to This Day, For It Is Life”

Thursday evenings Cracker Bearelle and I attend the Taize prayer / candlelight meditation service at The Church of the Advent.  Tonight’s closing blessing had special resonance for me, and so I wanted to include it here. 

Look to this day, for it is life,

The very life of life.

In its brief course lie all the verities and realities

Of our existence:

The bliss of growth,

The glory of action,

The splendor of beauty.

For yesterday is but a dream,

And tomorrow only a vision,

But today well lived

Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

look well therefore to this day. 

 

Amen.

 

Two Meals for a Homecoming

After an absence of a hundred days and one thousand nights, Cracker Bearelle is home again!  To celebrate her homecoming I made a lunch of caprese salad, garlic bread, and corn on the cob. Despite the simplicity of the recipes, I was a little nervous about the caprese salad as I had never made one before. I don’t know, maybe I thought the recipe waqs deceptively simple, and I would make some rube mistake.  To be on the safe side, I went over my understanding of the recipe with Crakcer Bearelle when she called me from the airport.  I even had her explain chiffonading to me, which, thus reassured, Idecided to try.  Cracker Bearelle thought that the salad looked beautiful, and even I was confident that it tasted delicious. The bread and corn weren’t half bad either, and we have decided to have a corn-on-the-cob orgy in the very near future. 

For dinner I fixed one of Cracker Bearelle’s favorite meals classic baked macaroni and cheese (and, yes, grating your own cheese is worth it) with green beans marinated in a yummy vinegrette (the recipe seems to have disappeared into the cyber ether). 

It is great to have her home, and I have been away from her on the Internetz far too long.

Assuaging the Rage for Order

"I knew we had tall kitchen bags with handles!"

For the interim between closing and moving in I had bought some cheap no-frills trash bags – - you were lucky if you could wrestle the things out of the trash can and get a twist tie around it sort of without making too big a mess – - with which I lined our makeshift mop-bucket trash can.  But ever since we’ve been moved in, we haven’t been able to find the “good” trash bags, rendering taking out the trash an unnecessarily onerous task.  Well, no more. After struggling to extricate one of the sad bags from the trash can Friday morning, trash taken out, I sat down on the kitchen floor, arousing much feline interest, and set about reorganizing the cupboard under the sink: laundry stuff on the left, closest to the washer/dryer, general cleaning in the center with Glad Tall Kitchen bags front and center, and dusting and floor cleaning stuff to the right. I even retracted the Swiffer Duster so it coulbe be tucked away in a corner of the cabinet. 

We’d also had an incident where cleaning juice insulted the pristine packaging of our cotton swabs, so I attened to the cupboard under the bathroom sink next, trying to impose a stricter segregation between cleaning stuff and toiletries. 

"Ew! something gross got on the cotton swabs.'

And last though by no means least, after today’s grocery shopping I reorganized our food pantry (which is also a cupboard), alphabetizing our impressive collection of spices and shelving them according to height.  On the bottom shelf, roughly, I shelved baking stuff on the left, cooking stuff on the right (next to the stove), and eating stuff in the middle. Spices occupy the balance of the middle shelf, with cooking oils to the left, and things like kosher salt, corn starch, and sugar-in0the-raw discreetly tucked in behind the spices.  The left half of the top shelf is given over to tea and snacks, and there are skillets and a colander to the right. 

"Look at all this, baby! This! This is why buying a packaged spaghetti seasoning mix is just wrong!"

Now I can just hear everyone thinking OCD to the OMG. Well, what of it.  The way I figure it, I’ve just saved myself as much as 30 minutes a week by not having to hunt hunt through the cupboards for this thing or that, saved us the aggravation of those cheapo trash bags, and probably saved us money since we’ll be less likely to buy duplicates of things we already have or have to throw away and replace toiletries contaminated by cleaning supply cooties. 

 

A place for everything and every thing in its place. Now repeat after me, Cracker Bearelle. A place…

This Little Piggy Went to Market

Last night I spent some time planning the coming week’s meals and making out a grocery list so I would have some parameters for today’s excursion to the much larger Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market. Still it was hard not to buy everything. The crates of sweet little baby watermelons and the ranks of glistening eggplants were especially enticing, but I patiently counseled myself that there would be other Saturdays at the market on which to buy eggplant, watermelon, and pretty purple flowers. 

Although Cracker Bearelle and I have both digested Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore’s Dilemma and expressed intellectual assent to the wisdom of eating locally, when faced with the steep prices of farm-raised free-range chicken parts, I wasn’t sure of the strength of our commitment. That would be a conversation I would have to broach with her later, but in the meantime, I decided to buy a dozen eggs (we already buy the free-range chicken eggs at the grocery store) and a pound of ground chicken for Cracker Bearelle’s scrumptious tacos.  The chicken breasts for chicken salad with grapes and pecans I’ll buy at K-Rogers tomorrow. 

And as it turns out we didn’t need to have much of a conversation: both of us would rather spend more for locally-harvested meats and eat less of it than buy boatloads of factory-farmed meats for cheap.