State of Gratitude

When I got home yesterday, there was a package waiting for me. The return address said, "State of Gratitude." Inside was a gift from an anonymous iPol reader. This wonderful t-shirt (which I'm wearing as I type) and beautiful card, thanking me and cheering me on. Whoever you are, you don't know how much your gift  means to me. I'm soaking it up. Thank you.

Richard Rohr says my personality type needs to fall in love with something every day. (For more on The Enneagram, hang around me for 3 seconds. I've been obsessed with it for a decade.) That's what food and photography do for me. Whatever the frustrations in my day, the overwhelming sadness or unfairness in the world, or the imperfect way of everything, I can capture a moment. A biscuit with jam, evening light on a jar of lilacs, the silent, white space of St. Ignatius Chapel. 

I heard someone on Radiolab talking about a last interview Maurice Sendak gave. He said he could hardly stand to think of parting with the tree outside his window--he loved it and wanted to be with it longer. But he said he was ready to go. How beautiful. The commentator, a doctor, said, "It's healthy to want to stay, and it's healthy to be ready to go." None of us are long for this world. It's the one thing we can be sure of. So capture the light while you can.

Feta and Green Onion Biscuits

These biscuits were definitely on the "pro" side of the list.

But along with the pros, there were some cons this week. My spiritual director loaned me a rock to meditate with. On the outside, it's gray, bumpy, and rather unattractive. On the inside, it's a brilliant blue stone. She said life is like that, and we have to remember that it's a package deal--the ugly with the beautiful.

The principal of my kids' school, one of the best leaders I've ever known, is getting promoted to the district level and won't be there next year. I cried a few times.

My dad lost his job of 30 years. It's a long and personal story, and obviously, a sad one.

I keep thinking of the bombing victims in Boston and those two lost brothers. The Catholic sister I was with last weekend would say the "blessing seed" deep inside them, the one that everyone is born with, was mangled somehow. 

But underneath the bumpy grayness, there's been some brilliant blue. Some of the things that made me smile this week:

• Walking into the bathroom and seeing 4 years worth of Guinness Book of World Records on the floor. 
• Seeing my clients find some sparks of light in some previously dark corners.
• Getting a call from my nephew Ezra asking how my dog Padre was doing. I could bottle that little voice and sell it.
• Taking photos with my new camera. Yancey said he didn't know it would make me this happy.
• Bringing home an outfit for Loretta and her wearing it 3 days in a row. Home run. (She's getting picky these days.)
• Sitting with my spiritual director on her deck in the sun, listening to the birds and knowing, in that deepest place, that I'm not in control of anything.

Some weeks, the cons outweigh the pros. Or they barely even out. Whatever kind of week you've had, I hope you can see the polished brilliance, still inside no matter what.

P.S. Oh yeah. The food. These are a riff on my classic biscuits, and will elevate any soup to divine heights. The feta adds some moisture that makes them even fluffier, if that's possible, and the green onions add beautiful little flakes of color.

Feta and Green Onion Biscuits
Makes 6-8, depending on the size of your biscuit cutter. I doubled the batch for 6 people, and we had none left over.

2 c. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 Tb. baking powder
1/2 c. (1 cube) cold unsalted butter
1/2 c. coarsely crumbled feta
1/3 c. finely chopped green onions
3/4 c. cold milk
flaked salt and milk for tops

Preheat oven to 450.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, salt, and baking powder. Cut in butter with your fingertips or a pastry cutter until butter is in pea-sized lumps. Add feta and green onions and gently mix with your hands.

Add milk, and mix with a wooden spoon until mixture just holds together. Knead a couple times in the bowl, then let dough rest for a minute or two.

Flour a work surface. With a rolling pin, roll dough out into a rectangle about 1/2" thick. Fold short ends toward one another, then roll out again until dough is about 3/4" thick. With a biscuit cutter, cut out rounds and place them close together in a pie plate on a cookie sheet. Roll out remaining dough the same way and cut out the rest.

Brush tops with milk, then sprinkle lightly with flaked or coarse salt. Bake in preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, until tops are golden brown and biscuits are cooked through. Serve hot with butter.

Tomato Barley Soup

Three generations. Riding bikes in the sun. 

After our bike ride with Grammy, Poppy, and the kids yesterday, I told Yancey, "This is a very short window. The oldest are healthy, the youngest can ride a 2-wheeler, and the 10 year-old still wants to be with us." A little blip on the screen, really. And all the more precious for it.

After our ride, we came back to the house and grandparents played cards with kids while I made dinner. We have people over a couple times a week, and I usually plan ahead more than I did last night. Nothing prepped, chopped, or even dreamed up. (I did have a pitcher of Sanity Sangria in the fridge, which buys a lot of time. That came into being as it always does--two half-finished, very mediocre bottles of red wine. A little triple sec and some fruit juice and a miraculous transformation ensues.)

Enter Refrigerator Soup, though I've named it something else here. A vegetable soup like this: 

1. Is a wonderful way to pack in oodles of veggies.
2. Makes great leftovers (not that I have ever devoted any time to thinking about that).
3. Is endlessly variable.
4. Makes a pretty picture.
5. Kind of demands biscuits. I made a divine variation, which I'll post later this week.

Loretta only ate half her bowl, but that's alright. Look at this face. It's hard to be tough about anything.

Tomato Barley Soup
The great thing about a soup like this is that it's almost impossible to mess it up. Don't go light on the salt, taste as you go, and have fun cleaning out your fridge!

 1/4 c. olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped or thinly sliced
2 large carrots, finely chopped
1 large red bell pepper, finely chopped
4 cloves minced garlic
2 cans chicken stock (or water)
1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes with juice
1 28 oz. can crushed tomatoes
1/2 head of small cabbage, finely shredded
Few big handfuls of chopped fresh kale 
1/2 cup quick-cooking barley (or 1 cup cooked grain, like rice)
big handful fresh basil, coarsely chopped
juice of 1/2 lemon
lots of coarse salt
pepper 

Heat up the olive oil in a large stockpot or Dutch oven. Add onion and cook for 5 minutes. Add carrots, red pepper, and garlic, and sauté until soft, about 10 more minutes. 

Add chicken stock and tomatoes and simmer for 20 minutes. Stick an immersion blender in and puree about 1/4 of the soup to give it more body.

Add cabbage, kale, and barley and cook for 10 minutes. Add basil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and add more of anything to taste (including more water if you want your soup thinner).

Serve unadorned or with lemon zest, parmesan, or more basil on top.

Kale Salad with Crispy Chorizo

Sometimes, Yancey and I are at home together during lunchtime. On a weekday.

Among the activites that sometimes commence (wink wink), salad-making is one of them.

He'll be absorbed in a project, and food will be the last thing on his mind. I have no idea what that is like. I wish I could leave more brain space free for other ponderings. Like making the world a better place, marketing my consulting practice with more aplomb, or getting my yard to look less like an abandoned junkyard. (I've heard somewhere that you can't be a reader AND a gardener. I take solace in that.)

But no. I wake up thinking about the three meals in front of me and how to make something with whatever is in my fridge. And Yancey benefits. I'll say, "I'm making a salad. Do you want some?" He'll answer, "Umm....I guess so." He doesn't feel hungry, necessarily, and if I weren't around, he probably wouldn't eat lunch. He'd have an apple at 3:00 and call it good. 

But if I'm home working during the day, I love the opportunity to get some vegetables in. At the hospital (where I'm doing a lot of consulting these days), I grab a sandwich or a cup of grapes from the cafeteria. It's a treat to make a mess and eat something interesting.

This time, it went like this:

Fill a medium salad bowl with washed and chopped lacinato kale (or other greens). Mix in julienned carrot, thinly sliced red onion, roughly chopped green olives, and chunks of smoked mozarella or feta. Then heat up a heavy skillet and pour a big glug of olive oil in. Add some big chunks of fresh crusty bread and a handful of chopped chorizo and fry them together with salt. Everything will turn crispy and a little bit orange. Dump that hot mixture in with your greens, and toss the whole thing with white wine vinegar, olive oil, and salt. And if you're lucky enough to have a cutie husband around, give him some too even though he says he's not hungry. Don't believe him.

P.S. A giant THANK YOU to everyone to voted in Saveur's contest and who called, texted, or commented to say congratulations. What I got out of the whole thing (no word on the winner yet) is that 1) I am loved and appreciated and 2) This blog is going to be around for a long time. 

Four Years and a Plea

I'm not a scrapbooker, and I've given up hope that I'll ever do anything with the photo boxes stashed in my basement, marked things like "2000-2007?" or "To sort!"

But I have this blog, and I've been nostalgic lately about everything it's seen since I started it 4 years ago. Loretta was 2, Wyatt was 6, I was starting my consulting practice and waiting for clients to call. Yancey had just gotten into the fire department, and we were pinching ourselves and missing each other. I posted almost every day. When I look back, I realize this was a vital window onto the world for me. In fact, it helped me see the world differently. 

I went back and found this photo of Loretta, and I'm crying as I sit here. I have the feeling, every day now, that these are the years I will miss. "Mother" is just one of my identities, but it's the one that has transformed me the most. There are lots of ways to be broken open, but motherhood has been mine. 

That's why I'm so honored to have Saveur pick In Praise of Leftovers as one of 6 finalists for their "Kids' Cooking Blog" category in their "Best Food Blogs 2013" awards. I have never thought of this as a kids' cooking blog, but it's clear other people have. I couldn't be happier to know that I might have played a part in more families cooking and eating together. Or in more mothers feeling a little less alone as they take care of their families and fulfill their other callings in the world.

You can vote here and it's sort of complicated. Bear with me! You have to do the following:

• Login as a Saveur user (or register if you don't have an account.) This is so annoying. I'm sorry.
• They have twelve different categories. Scroll through or hover until you find the "Kids Cooking" category. I'm listed with 5 other wonderful blogs. 
• Click on In Praise of Leftovers after you've logged in, and that's your vote. You're allowed one vote per category. I know I've got some people my corner (Jordan, Emily, my mom and sister) who would stay up all night voting for me, but they've figured you out. You can't do that.
• If I win, I'll be really, really excited. That's most of it. But they'll also give me an all-expense paid trip to a big giant food extravagaza in Las Vegas next month. At first I thought, "That's not my thing." Then I thought, "Why not?!" I've put a lot of heart into this blog, and it would be silly not to celebrate that.

When people ask my father-in-law how old he is, he says, "65, thank God!" I'm 39, thank God! Getting older every day, and so grateful be to alive and learning how to pay attention. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me into your life and giving this life of ours--yours, mine, and beyond--the attention it deserves.