Galette des rois

In France, as in so many other places, holidays are excuses to eat specific foods. On Epiphany day or on the Sunday closest to it, people (whether or not they are Christian and whether or not they are observant if they are Christian) eat galette des rois. I will complete this post by tomorrow, the actual feast. Meanwhile, happy drooling. I don't think there is galette des rois here in Greensboro.

Bread

Today I made and baked bread for the first time. Bread made with yeast and kneaded by hand. I have of course made all manner of quick breads: corn bread, muffins, that sort of thing. Not real bread, though. I do have a memory of making little loaves in my mother's oven for some kind of school project, and the funny thing is I don't remember yeast or kneading, but I do remember that the bread rose. Maybe my memory is faulty.

I have two roundish loaves cooling on a rack and of course I could not resist cutting into one and tasting it before it was completely cool. It was good.

These are whole wheat loaves, 100% whole wheat. The recipe is the "Plain and Simple" bread from the Cheese Board's book. I don't own loaf pans, and I don't like pan-shaped bread anyway, so I made rounds (one is actually an oval) and I sprayed the loaves, as they say you should to get more of a crust. It worked, but I need an oven thermometer. I think the oven was too hot. I followed the directions religiously because I wanted to make the basic recipe first and then fiddle with it once I had the hang of it, and the directions said 450 degrees for 5 minutes and then 400. Crust nearly burned. Anyway, I am pleased with myself and with the bread, the house smelled a little like France all of a sudden, and kneading really does get out your aggressions.

I still have writer's block, though. My latest Facebook update says "baking bread and battling writer's block." I need to stay off Facebook. Which mostly I do when I am writing. I am working on a book chapter and now that it is late at night and the bread is out it will probably start "cookin'," but I am trying not to stay up too late, so I'll have to go to bed trusting that the words and more importantly, the sentences will appear in the morning.

Some of this, as I mentioned in the last day or so, is undoubtedly related to the way in which my job drains me of my own writing voice and of much of my energy, but there are other causes too. At any rate, analyzing my writing process is not my purpose here and does not belong here.

The wonderful Fran (formerly of FranIAm blog), who is a dear friend and spiritual sister, now has a blog called There Will Be Bread and there she writes with great fluency and beauty, straight from the heart, and with a good mind, too. I on the other hand am rather dry these days. At least, though, there is bread with crust and crumb, right here, tonight.

Holy One of Blessing, your presence fills creation, bringing forth bread from the earth.*


* Contemporary translation, in inclusive language, of the traditional Jewish ha-motzi, the blessing over the bread.

Photos: Jane Redmont

Farmers' market postscript, Part II

 Photos taken at home today, again with the BlackBerry.

 

 
 

Took several of the tomatoes and even without artificial light they had that shiny reflection - some from the window light, some from the flash. Will photograph with another camera without flash tomorrow to see if I can get a better picture.  The Cherokee Purple tomatoes are delicious.   These are all heirloom tomatoes. 

Farmers' market postscript, Part I

The goat milk camembert from Goat Lady Dairy was to die for.  Is to die for.  I had some yesterday but there is plenty left. I took this photo yesterday a few hours after returning from the farmers' market.

Sisters and brothers!  Do NOT serve cheese straight out of the refrigerator! Take it out ahead of your meal and serve it at room temperature.  For a camembert, don't start storing the cheese in the fridge till you are sure it is ripe.  Then you can start storing it in the fridge, taking it out at least an hour before you plan to eat some of it or serve it to your guests.  Even a hard cheddar will taste better with time to lose its chill and remember its original taste and texture.

This camembert is perfect.  It is runny but still a little firm in the middle.

Have this as a cheese course (after the main course -- I even sometimes have it as the main course, after a big salad), not at the beginning of the meal. Camembert is best with a crusty bread, like a baguette or ciabatta (it needs a good crumb on it as well as a good crust) but a non-crusty one will do.  I tried it with a dense whole-wheat bread from a new bakery I discovered at the farmers' market and it was very good.

Below is a photo (taken from Goat Lady Dairy's website) of the original Goat Lady, Ginnie, who died last year.  Members of the Tate family continue to run the farm and dairy.

Farmers' market bounty, July 3

Tomatoes from Peterson Farm.

The photos are selective, as I tend to buy from the smaller farms that do sustainable agriculture.  (At this market, those farms are mostly not certified organic but they use no pesticides and watch their farming methods in a variety of other ways.  It costs $ to get certified.  One of the best such farms is Peterson Farm, and it has a blog! There are some great photos of the farm there.)  

There were larger displays like the one in the photo immediately below and there was also a lot of good people-photography opportunity, but I didn't have the portrait camera with me, only the BlackBerry in my pocket and my several shopping bags, which rapidly grew heavy with vegetables, fruits, and goat cheeses.

Not sure of the name of this farm.

I went to the market out on Stony Ridge Road in Colfax, off Route 40, not the downtown one near the old stadium.  I prefer this one in the summer most of the time.  Initially I only went to the downtown market when I first lived here. This market one is more basic-NC-folks and much less hippie-lefty and not so connected with the Slow Food Movement, though the Goat Lady Dairy people are at both markets.  Happily for me.  When I became a finalist for my current job at Guilford College, I googled "goat cheese Greensboro" to see what I could find, and sure enough, Goat Lady Dairy popped up; that's when I knew I could manage living here.  Seriously.

Interesting-looking squash from Peterson Farm.
 

Peterson Farm again. Yum.

Okra from Peterson Farm too.  I just bought one box.

This was a small family farm stand. 

Berries are among the higher-in pesticides fruit but I couldn't resist, and since this isn't an industrial-sized farm, the berries may be less toxic than the ones in the supermarket. I decided to take my chances, and I'll rinse the berries well.  I went for the "3 for $6" deal and got one pint of each of the berries: two kinds of blueberries --they really do taste different-- and big juicy blackberries.

Can't remember name of farm here.  
It's not one I remember from other times I've been at this market. 
Those onions look fabulous! 
They are going to go into one dish with squash 
and another made with okra and tomatoes. 
And I'll still have some left over.  

Four or five of these onions go a long way in the flavor department.

The first corn of the year is out in full glory.  More later in the weekend (when I add more text here) on the white vs. yellow corn disputes in my family.  This is a white corn variety called "Avalon," very sweet, and it turns pale yellow when cooked. I had these two ears for lunch. Here they are post-steaming and pre-seasoning.

And here they are mid-lunch. Olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. Nice alternative to butter if you are watching your butterfat intake or if you are a vegan.

I thought to myself, "Well, we are in North Carolina" when I saw these, but that was my bad and my nasty stereotyping.  I am an ignoramus. The true origins of whoopie pies are Pennsylvania Amish and New England.  I looked this up after I got home.  But anyway, there they were. I didn't buy any.

These are all BlackBerry photos. I'll take at least the Nikon digital camera with me next time.  It will fit into a big pocket and I can pull it out easily. 

Thanksgiving

This here is an Array Mbira, which is a modern U.S. adaptation of a Zimbabwean Mbira. Enjoy the music.

In other news, I invented a dish involving collards and caramelized shallots for today's dinner, and on Monday evening, I went to a "Thanksgiving rebellion" dinner hosted by the Native American student organization at Guilford. Tomorrow, blogging will return. At least that's the plan.

Sorry for the long absence. It's partly Facebook's fault and partly due to my insane work schedule and to my having been in a bit of a funk -- and committed to getting enough sleep to stay healthy on the job. Which didn't keep me from getting sick before and during fall break.

We've had a lovely Thanksgiving so far, +Maya Pavlova and I. We wish you and your loved ones a peaceful night (or day, if you have begun the new day on the other side of the globe) and we remember with respect and gratitude the First Peoples on whose land we live, the earth and its waters and skies, and the farmers who worked to grow our food. Her Feline Grace, who was in a playful mood for a good part of the day, is now asleep in an open sweatshirt drawer. Perhaps she will allow her picture to be taken tomorrow. Over and out.

Thank you for your prayers for Deenie

Just got an update. (See post below for earlier episode.) Deenie is staying at home. Her lawyer and friend (same person) intervened and did some diplomatic and firm persuasion with the health proxy relative. Thanks be to Godde.

If she goes somewhere besides home at some point, it will be a hospice facility and not that nursing home. But for now, she's not going anywhere.

Deenie was weak but awake today, not entirely coherent, but asked for a bit of food and ate it.

Our mutual friend writes: "So, dear friends, please keep praying for a peaceful passage, and for caring and justice on the part of all around her."

Illustration of Miriam the prophet and her companions, copyrighted, by Bonnie Cohen.

Travelers home safely

The intrepid Parents of Acts of Hope phoned to say they are home safely and happy birthday. They had a wonderful trip. They are off to bed since for them it is nearly 11 p.m. and they have been on a plane all day.

I am grading papers (grades are due first thing in the morning, no late grades allowed) and feeling all kinds of deadline pressure but taking a break to go out to dinner with two wonderful men who love each other. Life is good.

(That's the back terrace of the restaurant. Click to enlarge.)

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.

Palm Sunday foodie post

As they say under other circumstances, "it just happened." And it really is very simple.

See here for a French lentil salad. I just made some.

Believe it or not, I had never cooked with French lentils. But they were on sale in bulk at the food co-op, so I got some. I've cooked a lot with the regular U.S. brown/green lentils to make soup, and with orange/pink/yellow lentils to make dal (Indian lentil purée), but never with those dandy little French Lentilles du Puy. (Le Puy is a town in central France.)

Haven't served the dish yet (we eat our supper late here at Acts of Hope) so it is minus the walnuts (which I may or may not use, I tasted the salad and it really is fine on its own), and I didn't have green onions (scallions) in the house so I minced a little piece of a regular onion and it seems to work fine, especially since I had some fresh parsley, so the dish has green. How was that for a run-on sentence?

Shabbat Shalom

A friend dropped by a few hours ago with a warm, freshly baked loaf of challah which she had just made. Mmmm!

I gave her some flowers from the yard-garden-whatever-this-land-is-called.

The weather is sunny and fresh.

>
Here, for your enjoyment and perhaps also your edification, are some Shabbat songs and prayers.

I think I posted this a year or so ago, but never mind. It's a traditional Sephardic blessing before lighting candles. The beautiful (more on Sephardic music here) is by Balkan composer Flory Jagoda. The words are in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish, which is to Mediterranean Jews what Yiddish is to Eastern European Jews). You can hear the song, sung by Susan Gaeta, if you scroll down the page to where it says "click here." Here's the page.

Thanks to Ritualwell.org for the above and for the following.

Kiddush (prayer over the wine) with either feminine or masculine God-language. Has the tune of the chant, too. Here.

HaMotzi[ah] (prayer over the bread) with either masculine or feminine God-language. With the tunes.

Contemporary blessing after the meal here.

FDA and food safety: important appointments

This just in: two important Obama appointments that will affect all of us in the U.S. (and probably others too - I know of at least one case of FDA staff working with an overseas government).

Read it here.

Daffodil report

A lone daffodil was working very hard to emerge from its green sheath this morning and to burst into yellow.

It is still working at it, but under the influence of the noon sun, has been joined by several of its siblings.

Daffodil solidarity!

+Maya Pavlova has been asleep all day. Doubtless she will emerge when the sun starts to go down. She has missed all the vacuum cleaner action so far. We're in Mardi Gras cleaning mode. Soon friends will pop in for crêpes. (More on my annual Shrove Tuesday event here.) The party is early this year, at tea-time, because I am teaching on Tuesday evenings this semester. We'll also have a little late crêpes-eating after I get home at 10:30 p.m. Crêpes in the morning, crêpes in the evening, crêpes till the midnight hour.

Random foodie post with recipe

For a vegan dinner guest:

1. Whole wheat couscous with Spanish saffron (the latter left over from trip to Istanbul a year ago).

2. On top of the couscous, a newly invented concoction occasioned by a large bag of fresh mustard greens from last week's farmers' market:

Put some olive oil in a fairly large cooking pot.
Chop an onion and start sauteeing. Heat not too high, you don't want the onion to brown.
After rinsing the mustard greens to make sure there is no grit left, cut them pretty fine (fold each leaf and then cut strips one centimeter wide) and dump them into the pot, stirring and adding a bit of oil as needed; the mustard greens will start shrinking.
Add a dash of salt.
Add some raisins.
Keep stirring.
Add some more mustard greens because the original ones have shrunk some more and you still want the mustard greens to be the dominant ingredient.
Stir, stir.
The pot will be far from full. The large pot is less about needing large capacity and more about the broad cooking surface.
Take half a local apple, yellow and a little tart (it's what I had around, also from the farmers' market), not one of those newfangled sweetiefuji ones, and slice it and stir in.
When you take the pot off the stove, the mustard greens will be cooked and dark green, the raisins will be plump, the onions will be translucent, and the apple pieces will still be crisp.

That's it. The tastes marry well and the raisins' sweetness offsets the sharp spiciness of the fresh mustard greens. The dish will look pretty on top of the couscous.

The vegan guest and I both thought it was good. "I just invented it," said I. "Write it down," said she.

The cat walked around trying to sniff the plates; we kept explaining that it wasn't cat food and shooing her away. She'd already had homemade chicken broth as a treat. She is not a vegan.

This post is dedicated to Ralph (a.k.a. TCR) and JohnieB.

Her Grace wants to know...

...Why didn't you make +Clumber's Virginia Whiskey Cake at the holidays this year?

Alert Bay Area folks: Café de la Paz is closing

We interrupt this alleged blog break with a communiqué especially for Bay Area people and their friends.

Click to enlarge.

One of my favorite neighborhood restaurants is closing. Alas. I have had many fine meals there with good friends, and I know the owner. See below. And go there before the finale if you can. Also note the sale and the catering business. And the employee transition fund.

* * * * * * * *

Café de la Paz
P.O. Box 9144 Berkeley, CA 94709
510/843-0662
FAX 510/843-0669
cafedelapaz@yahoo.com

Dear Friends and Cutomers,

Sadly, after 15 years of operation in North Berkeley, Café de la Paz and Country Joe's Café & Music Hall are closing their doors. The recession turned the Café's moderately profitable business into one with unsustainable losses. We simply ran out of money and we're having difficulty refinancing. Given the dour projections for the economy in the coming year, there didn't seem to be any real alternative but to say farewell to our location at Cedar and Shattuck in North Berkeley.

There have been many joyful and memorable occasions and moments at Café de la Paz over the years. I thank everyone who has been part of that for their support. We will be continuing our catering business and perhaps the spirit that has animated the Café will re-surface in the another form and location in the time to come.

January 4 will be our final day of operation. We hope you will make it in to enjoy your favorite dishes once or twice more before we close. If you will pay with cash or personal check it will help. We will be open every night for dinner through January 4 and also for weekend brunch/lunch December 27, 28 & January 3, 4. There will be no more weekday breakfast and lunch except by reservation.

New Year's Eve Celebration. Come Ring in the New Year, next Wednesday evening, December 31, with music, dancing, poetry, great Cafe food and a festive countdown to midnight and then celebrate Country Joe McDonald's 67th Birthday (January 1) with cake. Country Joe will also be one of the featured performers (please see attachment).

Country Joe McDonald's Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Saturday, January 3, at 7:30 PM. Joe McDonald has kindly agreed to give a final, benefit performance of This Land is Our Land in support of the Cafe's Employee Transition Fund. Joe premiered this one man show of stories and songs at Café de la Paz in January of 2007 and has since gone on to perform it around the country to much critical acclaim. Tickets for concert style seating are $25 ($35 for front rows). Dinner reservations at 6 or 6:15 PM, before the show, are encouraged.

Open House, Goodby Party, and Garage Sale, January 4th, 12 Noon to 5 PM. On our final day of operation, in addition to regular Café dining upstairs, we are going to have a Farewell Party in the Fiesta room and Bar featuring:
· Free live music.
· An Everything Still in Stock Buffet including many Café favorites for the bargain price of $10 per guest
· à la carte Sangria, Wines, Margaritas and Mojitos
· A fabulous Garage sale of most everything still in the Café.

We have lots of things to sell. You can buy everything from Huichol yarn art to Fiesta Ware, tables and chairs, an espresso machine, remaining wine inventory, etc. If you would like a list, please send your request by reply email. If you have interest in the Huichol yarn art particularly, you don't have to wait. Everything we don't need to serve or sit on is for sale now.

We are going to publish a Café Recipe Booklet. Several people have asked for various signature Café recipes. A publisher friend has offered to help us produce a recipe booklet of the Café's favorite dishes, salsas and desserts, which we are using to help us raise money for a Transition Fund to pay some severance benefits to our staff during this difficult transition. We are therefore asking our friends to make a donation of $25 to $100 to provide a fund for helping all the Café's staff. You can mail a check (made payable to Café de la Paz, write "Transition Fund" in the memo space) or make donation by cash or check when you come to dine. We cannot accept credit cards for this.

It has been our profound privilege to serve North Berkeley and the East Bay progressive community for the past 15 years. This is a very special place on the planet and it has been great to be part of the fabric of its everyday life. I thank you for your patronage over the years and for many cherished memories.

If you'd like to talk about dates and locations for a catered event or any aspect of this transition, please give me a call: 510 843 0662.

Best wishes,

Russell Bass

Greensboro book party (and a cat blogging bonus)

I should have posted this before today, but between Finals Week and everything else including waiting for books to arrive (thank you, Publicist of Acts of Hope who chased down errant UPS for two days), I neglected to do so. At least I got invitations out to all of you who are in the area, at least I hope so. If I did not, write me at widsauthor at earthlink dot net: it's time for the Greensboro Book Party for When in Doubt, Sing!

The party is this Sunday evening, December 14 and it is a joint party with a member of my congregation, Sarah Lindsay, who also has a book out. She is a very good poet and we are holding the party at our church (or rather, our church is hosting the party, thank you, church) and thought it would be fun to have our respective crews of friends and colleagues be in the same place. Sarah will read some of her poetry, I will read bits of the book on prayer, and we will sell and sign books when asked (that's why I needed to get 50 books here pronto) and generally eat, drink, and be merry.

Grades are due first thing in the morning Monday (I'm aiming for sooner, but as usual, good luck to me) and I teach the deacon candidates a double session tomorrow an hour away from here. On Monday things slow down. We hope.

Again, please let me know if you are interested in attending the book event. You don't have to be bookish to show up.


+Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire, will not be present. She has other things to do and much as I tried to interest her in the book the day the first copy arrived (when I took these photos), she only wanted to groom herself. Her Grace has her priorities.


Bird? What bird? I only pay attention to the real thing.

A truly virtuous bishop, not swayed by the lure of literary fame.

Your Thanksgiving menus

This is a join-in post, campers.

Your Thanksgiving menus, please. OR your favorite dish on the menu today. OR your recipe for what you brought to your Thanksgiving potluck or for something you made at home.

Your choice.

I'll post my friends' menu in this space later. I know it already because we are bringing different parts of the meal and they announced their main course, but it's more fun to post after the meal.

I am making only the soup (thank goodness, see below) and have been looking forward to being responsible only for two things: making soup and showing up.

The soup is a butternut squash puree (made with itself, not with stock - it's simple and vegetarian) flavored with allspice. Though I'm remembering ginger from my mother's recipe, too. We shall see. I haven't made the soup yet due to the little afternoon episode yesterday. But dinner isn't till 4 p.m. so there's time. I may even go back to bed before then.

P.S. (Added later) I finally remembered the other ingredient! I kept thinking "I haven't made this in a few years, I know there is something in this soup besides allspice, what is it??" It's fresh ginger. How in the world could I forget? Good thing I keep fresh ginger in the house.

P.P.S. (Added much later) Menu of the Very Delicious Foodie Thanksgiving at the Home of Fabulous Hosts:

Cocktails of Prosecco and Lillet (yes, mixed! first time I'd ever had that combo)

Butternut squash soup (see above)
First of several wines brought by Retired Academic Who Is Into Wine:
Lindemans (Western Cape, South Africa) Sauvignon Blanc vintage 2007; fragrant, smelled of flowers.

Duck confit (one leg for each person - which led to jokes about the nine-legged duck)
Mashed sweet potatoes
Sauteed green cabbage (with olive oil and garlic as it turns out, but neither was overpowering; made by Lawerly Spouse of Retired Academic Who Is Into Wine)
Homemade cranberry sauce (made by one of the Fabulous Hosts) with half the sugar and twice the cranberries called for by the recipe on the package - perfect.
Cornbread (made by the Southern-born member of the couple of Fabulous Hosts)
Los Vascos Cabernet Sauvignon (Domaines Barons de Rothschild) from Colchugua Valley, Chile, 2006; excellent, nice and dry.

Then we went for a walk.

Upon return:

Pear Crostata (made by Lovely Hip Young Artist and Scholar Couple, with a really thin crust and almond slivers all around)
Pumpkin pie (made by Cool Couple of Colleagues of Fabulous Hosts)
Pumpkin brownie pie (a novelty invented by Young Son of Cool Couple of Colleagues of Fabulous Hosts, who was at the dinner but not at the table because he didn't want to be bored by all those grown-ups and because he was the only kid in the house and preferred to entertain himself; the pie is exactly what it sounds like: a pumpkin pie with a layer of brownie cooked on top!) (Confession: I didn't have any.)
All this with the best-wine-saved-for-last by Retired Academic Who Is Into Wine: a 1975 (!!!!!!) Chateau du Mayne Barsac.

After-dinner drinks:
Absinthe (seriously! 144 proof; I didn't have any)
Amaro (Averna brand, from Sicily, delicious, I had some; about 64 proof, more my speed)
Homemade (by one member of Fabulous Hosts couple who is studying Italian on the side and likes to experiment) fennel liquor a.k.a. Finocchietto (I stuck to the Amaro)

Decaf espresso

Father of Acts of Hope is ninety today!

We had a lovely day, Parents of Acts of Hope and I -- just the three of us, which was exactly what we wanted. Phone calls arrived from members of the far-flung Acts of Hope family, as did phone calls, cards, and e-mails from friends and extended family members, so we were also connected with many loved ones on this quiet day.

There was, of course, a foodie expedition. More on this in the near future.

Happy birthday, Daddy. You're the best.

Greetings from Chicago

It's only going to get more busy, so while there is still time, a little update:

1. The weather is clear and gorgeous and almost warm. We had a spectacular view flying down over Chicago at night with the city's grid landscape all light up.

2. It took me as long to get from O'Hare to the hotel downtown as it did for the plane to fly from Greensboro to Chicago.

3. The hotel staff calls me "Miss." (In Greensboro it would be "Ma'am.")

4. The hotel is a maze. I've gotten lost twice already, and I am a veteran of much girl scouting with a good sense of direction.

5. I went in search of food and found pappardelle with vegetables and some kind of fancy-shmancy parmesan. I almost ordered room service but it was the same food, only pricier, and it's already bad enough. So I suffered through the noisy half-closed hotel restaurant. Question: WHY do semi-chichi places feel they have to blast rock music through their eateries and lounges? You can't heard yourself think. With this statement, I am officially an Old Fart.

6. I have run into several friends and colleagues already. The conference officially begins Saturday but there are a gazillion pre-conference meetings. There are relatively few of us around, though. Tomorrow night and Saturday it will get truly crazy.

7. I left my name badge and other registration stuff at home because the study at my new house is only half set up and I was rushing to leave after my 4 p.m. class and changing cat-sitter plans. Stupid, stupid. For once I had registered early and had all my paperwork. I even rescued it carefully when the house thing happened and put the AAR registration materials envelope with my folders of Very Important Stuff That I Moved By Hand. It's not an enormous big deal, since the registration people will have me in their computer, but it does mean I will have to stand in line. And I might not have as pretty a nametag. Big crises I can deal with -- it's the little stuff that gets me.

8. I also left the eat-at-the-airport yogurt at home in its cute little pot with the plastic spoon I had carefully put with it, hence my need to rustle up dinner when I arrived here. Oh well.

9. There is construction on Wabash under the El. There is always construction somewhere in downtown Chicago. Wait, I haven't been here in 15 years, this generalization won't work.

10. I ran into Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (who are married to each other) and had a lovely chat with them. They invited me to the Religion and Ecology Luncheon tomorrow. They've been at Yale for three years and are happy there. We knew each other in Berkeley. They are also leading an afternoon session with this description:
This session will feature the new film Heart of the Universe with Brian Swimme. This is the first film to offer a comprehensive narrative of the evolution of the universe and the earth. The film draws on the best of current science blended with a poetic sensibility that evokes awe and wonder. This symposium will be led by Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, who together wrote the script and the accompanying book.

I know this will be wonderful and groovy, but I think I will just go to the lunch. Tomorrow is for the Art Institute and working on my paper and also for remedying my registration materials problems, and then at 4 p.m. is the annual meeting of the Feminist Liberation Theologians Network (FLTN, this is the land of acronyms, as are most professional organizations or clusters of organizations) and we're off and running.

In case I don't write again for a while: Saturday morning (another pre-conference meeting) is the Society for the Study of Anglicanism (SSA). Topic: "Christ and Culture: Post-Lambeth Perspectives." (I just added a whole paragraph here and decided to delete it for reasons of diplomacy. What I will say is that I'm not sure I want to spend an entire morning on Lambeth postmortems right now.)

At the same time are a forum on religion and violence, a panel on "Presidential Politics and Religious Rhetoric", a meeting of the Society for Buddhist/Christian Studies with a focus on Merton this year (boy, that one is tempting), and the Presidential Address at the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (Mary Frohlich, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago on "Under the Sign of Jonah: Studying Spirituality in a Time of Ecosystemic Crisis") , a Global Ethics and Religion Forum on "The Role of Religion in a Just and Sustainable World" with six panelists from different fields, and numerous other sessions. And that's before the official beginning of the AAR.

All for today. Peace out.


Photo of a little something from "Iconic Chicago Chocolate Maker Fannie May" (dixit a local business rag), whose newish store I (in the airport van) passed on Wabash.