Not too solemn Holy Saturday foodie post

It's a quiet, rather than solemn, day here at Acts of Hope Central. +Maya Pavlova is having her mid-day sleep on her bedroom perch at the window, sacked out on her pillow. She got up to check on the kitchen when the fresh goat cheese emerged from the shopping bag, but is back in the Land of Nod.

This semester my school week goes nonstop (including evenings) from Sunday night to Wednesday evening, and I have Thursday for recovery and whatever writing I can muster and Friday/Saturday for writing, unless there are churchy activities. This week was different because of Pesach and Triduum, so this is my first day of solitude and quiet, though there was a fair amount of quiet yesterday because I attended two contemplative Good Friday services. They contained a lot of silence and barenness. I also had a few meetings with my senior-thesis-writing student whose thesis was due yesterday at the end of the work day. I have mentioned him on Facebook but perhaps not here. His thesis is on the eschatology (=views of "the end" -- death, the afterlife, the end of time) of bluegrass music in Southern Appalachia and it is quite interesting. He is from that region himself, so he is exploring his cultural roots as well as writing a scholarly analysis. We have just three thesis-writers this year in our department. It's not something we require, just an exercise in which a few of our top students engage. The other theses are about masks and their performance in Bali and Mahayana Buddhist meditation. My colleague who teaches courses on Buddhism and other Asian-originated religious and wisdom paths is the supervisor for those two. Now all of us on the department faculty have to read them! We have a week to do so. Then the students will make presentations based on the theses and we will celebrate their work (it's not really a defense strictly speaking, this is just an undergraduate thesis) next weekend.

So where's the food? Here: for the first time in months I went to the downtown farmers' market today. It's been a year without much money or time, and in winter there's not much growing here anyway, so I think it had been five months at least since I last went to this market. Today I had a little time and a little money, thanks be to Godde, so off I went, leaving Her Grace at home to her morning slumbers.

Note: +Maya Pavlova got up way before I did this a.m., though being a civilized feline bishop, she did not wake me up. She rose early because there is a lot of bird action outside these days and she wanted to watch the early Kitty TV show at the living-room window.

I returned from the market with two kinds of goat cheese, fresh eggs, a large green onion (with both the scallion green tips and the white bulb), mixed baby lettuces from the first salad crops, arugula from the same farm, some Middle Eastern spreads and dips (three of them including baba ghanoush and fool, the latter thick and cold rather than the warm soup version), milk, buttermilk, and butter from a regional dairy, apple butter, and best of all, a bunch of yellow tulips. There don't seem to be a lot of tulips here in the Southland and I loved yellow tulips especially, used to get lots of Dutch tulips in Boston when I was living there to brighten up the late winter and early spring. These tulips are from the same farm as the lettuce. I also got a bunch of small, tight flowers (pink and red and white) whose name I am forgetting. When +Maya got up to smell the goat cheese (one kind is the fresh spreadable sort and she loves fresh goat milk products) she also tried to eat those flowers and their leaves.

Baby goat from Goat Lady Dairy, the farm that makes our goat cheese.

So now I have had a little fruit juice, goat cheese and whole wheat matzoh, apple butter and egg matzah, and a hefty mug of fresh coffee with milk, and I am ready for a day of writing and housework in this mess I call home.

I am also going to finish reading the book on Dorothy Stang.