Archive for the 'Soul Food' Category
August 31, 2010 @ 6:01 am | Filed under: Food and Drink,Soul Food
Some of our weeks are truly crazy.
With MJ’s work schedule, we’re sometimes separated for two - three days and nights at a time each week. By the time he drives back into town from whatever kind of week he’s had, he’s ready for a few good things.
Namely – his home, his bed, his table.
I guess my burgeoning love for cooking and spending time in my kitchen originally stemmed from the sheer knowledge of this. It became important to me to find ways to make his arrival home each week something for him to anticipate.
That’s not to say that there is always ample time on my part – or in my own schedule – to prepare a labor intensive meal or spend loads of effort on ambiance. But I’ve learned that in setting a table I’m also setting a heart, and that doesn’t require a lot of time or money or even effort.
It merely asks that I care.
I care deeply.
The next time you find an occasion to prepare a table – or a heart – here is a great recipe that is beautifully pleasing and deliciously memorable!
Farfalle with Tomatoes & Spinach
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon plus 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 8 ounces uncooked farfalle pasta
- 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
- 1 cup vertically sliced yellow onion
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 5 garlic cloves, sliced
- 2 cups grape tomatoes, halved
- 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
- 3 cups baby spinach
- 3 tablespoons shaved fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 3/4 cup (3 ounces) crumbled feta cheese
Preparation:
1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil with 1 tablespoon salt. Add pasta, and cook according to package directions; drain.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and oregano; sauté 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Add garlic; sauté 2 minutes. Add tomatoes and vinegar; sauté 3 minutes or until tomatoes begin to soften. Add pasta and spinach; cook 1 minute. Remove from heat, and stir in Parmigiano-Reggiano, remaining 1 tablespoon oil, remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, and pepper. Sprinkle with feta.
Serve with Olive Flatbread: Preheat oven to 450°. Unroll 1 (11-ounce) can refrigerated thin-crust pizza dough onto a baking sheet. Combine 1½ tablespoons olive oil, ½ teaspoon crushed red pepper, and 1 minced garlic clove; brush over dough. Sprinkle dough with ⅓ cup chopped kala-mata olives. Bake at 450° for 11 minutes or until browned and done. Top with 2 tablespoons thinly sliced basil.
healthy recipes, recipes, Tasty Tuesdays
August 25, 2010 @ 10:46 am | Filed under: Family,Motherhood,Soul Food
“Making the decision to have a child-it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” -Elizabeth Stone
There was a time when I thought this road called Motherhood would one day become breezy.
One day when ear infections and middle-of-the-night stomach flus were a thing of the past.
One day when homework no longer required my assistance and lunches no longer needed packing.
One day when they’d shop for their own clothes and purchase the extras with – could it be – their own money.
Now I know differently.
There are no breezy sections on this Motherhood Road.
Whether our children are two, twenty-two, or forty-two, we feel their pain in a way that is so exquisite that there is yet to be a word created that would aptly describe it. It takes us to the very brink of all we think we can feel or think or experience…and then the very next day it surprises us all over again in completely new ways.
It has been said that pain is the best teacher in the world. And while a part of me really wants to balk at this, particularly in the case of motherhood, I find that I still agree with it.
The pain of motherhood – of loving this extension of yourself so much that your heart bleeds when they hurt – teaches us about what is good and right and truly important in this world. More and more these days, I am reminded of what is no longer fundamentally important to me. Instead I cling to what I know.
And I know that my purpose is to love and to nurture and to find joy in the simple things.
I came across this blog that I wrote quite a while back. Instantly, it took me back to a day when The Teacher gave a lesson that I didn’t necessarily want to learn.
Forty-eight hours ago, I sat in a doctor’s waiting room, nervously and mindlessly flipping through the worn and smudged pages of one magazine after another. For two solid hours I sat in that black vinyl chair, all the while my heart was somewhere in the depths of that doctor’s office, in whatever room Nate was in.
As a half-hour turned to one, then an hour and a half came and went, I gave up all pretenses of reading or people-gazing or anything else that one tends to do in those type of settings. I gathered my purse and moved to the edge of my seat, and was truly only a nano-second away from barging behind The Door and finding my son all on my own.
And then these words begin to spill through my mind in the sweetest possible way:
“Peace, peace. Wonderful peace.”
“Coming down, from the Father above.”
Just like that my twirling thoughts stilled and my pulse returned to normal. Even though I sat here, in the one place, facing the one thing that I feared most during my kids’ growing up years, I felt the peace of God. I wish that I could control heredity, that I could somehow shelter both boys from the pains and trials of life, whether it be physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional. And yet – just as I could only sit with them held firmly in my lap during those awful visits for shots, for ear infections, for chicken pox – now I could only sit in a lonely chair in the waiting room, knowing that my firstborn was on his own this time. Besides my presence and my prayers, I was helpless.
“Peace, peace. Wonderful peace.”
“Coming down, from the Father above.”
The lesson that day – and the one that I’ve had to repeat several times since – has been one on acceptance. Accepting what is and letting go of preconceived expectations and even plans and goals I may have had for my children. What I’m learning is that in letting go I am receiving something so rich and so full that my mother’s heart almost can’t contain it all.
I am receiving the fullness of joy that comes with true peace of mind.
And that’s pretty breezy, let me tell ya!
Family, life lessons, Motherhood
August 12, 2010 @ 6:27 am | Filed under: Family,Soul Food,Uniquely Me
“Our most treasured family heirlooms are our sweet family memories. “
My heart is overflowing with gratitude.
I type away at this blog sitting in the exact same spot…each and every time. I guess you could say I am a creature of habit, and you’d be right. Tucked into one corner of our sofa, I sit with my laptop propped open and a cup of hot tea by my side. And then…
the thoughts begin to flow.
My heart is overflowing with gratitude.
By the soft glow of the light in the living room I can make out the shelves in front of me. A few short weeks ago they held many books, lots of framed family photos, and greenery. In short, each shelf was carefully and ornately decorated. And then something most wonderful happened to those shelves…
They became the home of over fifty pair of salt and pepper shakers.
My grandmother collected them – salt and pepper shakers. In all, she must have had two hundred or more sets. One of my most prized – and certainly most cherished – possessions is now a part of this collection. They’ve replaced many of the books, the pictures have been rearranged, and the greenery has just gone away. We’ve rearranged the beautiful to make room for the meaningful.
Now every time I glimpse these salt and pepper shakers out of the corner of my eye it’s a myriad of emotions that well up inside of me. But none of them are sad; and there is no sense of loss. Instead, there is the very real knowledge that love lives within this family of mine. These shakers represent a whole lifetime of summers when six grandkids would take our turn dusting the shakers and – one by one – hearing my grandmother tell the stories of where they’d come from and who had given them to her.
So this place of gratefulness where I find myself right now is a gift within itself. And it’s exactly that – a place – not just a state of mind or an emotion. Almost like it is its own little latitude where I have settled lately and claimed residence and walked its paths and met its people. It is a good place. A real place with a few dark corners and maybe even a couple of fixer-upper rooms. But, overall there is just so much beauty here…and the longer I stay, the more I see to know and to love.
This place of gratitude, of knowing where we’ve been and where we’re going and – in between all that – recognizing that where we are is equally as important. This is just one of those moments when the world slows to all but a crawl and I have a few moments to look around and drink it all in, savoring it.
My heart is overflowing with gratitude.
Our family…our memories…our heirlooms…our treasures…our everything.
August 2, 2010 @ 6:05 am | Filed under: Pure Sunshine,Soul Food,Uniquely Me
Setting out for the long drive, I settled familiarly into the passenger seat with all of my traveling accoutrements: a couple of books, a lap quilt, my iPhone, and a pile of magazines. A few miles in, though, along Highway 16, and it’s clear I’m not interested in any of these distractions.
A few turns and we top a hill and there lies…the most majestic view ever.
GLIMPSES has – over time – become the spot where I leave insights into things I consider beautiful and meaningful. Places, people, cirumstances – that speak to me. When I sit down to write – to paint the portrait in the window of life of that day, I discover there are colors I didn’t know existed.
I have begun to see life more beautifully and find myself appreciating so much more.
This, I realize, is one of those moments…
We drive further. The trees get lusher and thicker as stores and gas stations grow more sparse. The traffic is light and our fellow road companions seem about as mellow as we do on this day. It’s definitely enough to make me believe Robert Frost was on to something when he penned “The Road Not Taken…”
I choose to write about the good, to catalog the beautiful…and by doing so, the bad has all but disappeared, even in my mind.
My soul has settled into a grateful place. A very, very good place to be.
And grateful places need good rest. But before good rest comes our acknowledgement of good things.
We glimpse it then. The sign. And we made the turn, almost without talking about it first, and certainly without giving it much thought. The lane was just too irrisistible, too inviting.
We heeded the beck and call, following the distant, dusty trail that pointed us about as far past civilization and noise and busyness as we could possibly get…past the traffic, the stores, the lures of anything else we’d planned for this trip.
And we pulled off of the planned – the purposed – and took a moment to breathe in serenity. Places of serenity are the spots where you find fresh inspiration, and these wells need to be mined for all they’re worth. They appear every so often along our path and, if we can see them for what they are and drink them in, then Serenity Road is a road well-traveled.
I am refreshed and excited.
To tackle it all. Because I’ve done it so far and the satisfaction of pulling it off ignites me to keep doing it. I’m actually looking forward to some crazy organization days ahead…finishing Summer II classes…delving into the big middle of the current novel I’m trying to write…preparing for the exciting yet challenging changes in MJ’s job and travel schedule…getting my resume and letter of introduction ready to send…carving out some new beautiful traditions for our family this fall…cooking…and spending as much time as possible with the kids and the grands in the coming weeks.
All this busyness and craziness will be good for us. Because you know what? This is just life, and this is how life rolls. It’s kind of like the road before us…this road I’ve dubbed Serenity. It has ups and downs and twists and turns. It grabs my stomach when I least expect it and gives me more reasons to smile than to frown.
Things will slow down, and oh don’t you know we will graciously welcome the lull when it comes. But, for now, it’s okay. Because we are together and we are happy and there are a hundred moments a day when we can stop what we are doing in exchange for something quick and simple.
Like a hug. Or a family dinner. Or a story or two.
Or pulling off the side of Serenity Road and breathing in the beauty of…simplicity.
And you know how I crave simplicity.
living simply, memories, summertime memories
July 29, 2010 @ 6:23 am | Filed under: Soul Food,Uniquely Me
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| Free photo collage created with Smilebox |
living simply, summertime memories
July 14, 2010 @ 6:36 am | Filed under: Pure Sunshine,Soul Food,Uniquely Me
There is something refreshing about things that are real.
Real chocolate. Real deals. Real people.
When we walked into this old-fashioned hardware store on Saturday and spotted glass-bottled Cokes for sale for $1.00, it was a REAL deal waiting to happen.
Not to mention that it was an “honesty policy” and you merely pulled your ice cold beverage from the cooler and left your dollar in a simple attached tube that read:
”LEAVE $1.00 HERE”
There is something so refreshing about moments like this one.
Moments where you find tiny treasures hidden amongst the dusty ordinariness of normalcy. Moments where those treasures remind you that it’s the dust you truly treasure, ’cause that’s where the work is, that’s where the memories are, that’s where love resides. Quiet and paitent…waiting to be lived.
Moments like this are refreshing.
There is something equally refreshing about sharing them with someone who is the real deal. Someone who says what they mean, and mean what they say. Someone like my MJ.
Today is his birthday, and the birthday boy will be on the Red-Eye home from Chicago sometime later tonight.
I’ll ask him Thursday morning what he wants to do for his big day (even though it means we’ll be celebrating a day late) and he’ll shrug and say, “I’m doing it already.”
And then we’ll pretty much just hole up in this happy solitude playin’ life by ear. We’ll sip coffee at ten and shower by eleven, or maybe noon. We’ll have a loose plan for dinner, meaning all the while to shoot for a real, honest-to-goodness night out, but in the end we’ll probably have another impromptu living room picnic.
We love life, love our home, love each other.
We love the beauty of our languid mornings and cozy evenings, but sometimes it’s during the in-between that we notice most what makes us happy. It’s during the demanding weeks when he’s on the road and I’m immersed up to my neck in school or writing that I’m more inclined to notice just how extraordinary the mundane moments can be.
I’m reminded how happy my favorite coffee mug makes me.
Or how much I love hot baths.
Embracing the real things rises to the occasion best when life is nitty gritty. Or when it’s tough and busy and not-always-fun.
But today is good. It is very, very good.
It is real.
And I do love real things.
Happy Birthday, Mike!
living simply, summertime memories
June 30, 2010 @ 6:53 am | Filed under: Family,Soul Food
The past seven days have been amazing.
- I’ve come to know my grandfather much, much better.
- I made cookies and drew pictures with Andi during a sleepover.
- I kept a tall pitcher of ice-cold peach tea in the fridge.
- I strolled the aisles of Target! Ahhh….bliss!
- I ate watermelon in the evenings.
- And enjoyed restaurants that I don’t have “at home.”
It was a GREAT week.
But I am home now and almost giddy with happiness!
Home. It is the {second} best four-letter word in the world.
Next to love, that is.
Home Sweet Home
June 28, 2010 @ 6:13 am | Filed under: Soul Food,The Solid Rock,Uniquely Me
I try to write down my day’s agenda early in the morning, before anything can possibly happen to alter… The Plan. I do love a good plan, and when it comes together all smooth and delightful, well – that is one good feeling!
It throws me off to have it wrecked before midmorning. So the past week has been a challenge in flexibility and in “going with the flow.”
All of which is good for the soul.
Or it at least sounds as though it should be good for the soul anyway.
Instead of doing a load of whites on Monday, towels on Tuesdays, spending 3-4 hours writing each morning, I’ve been learning the art of simply sitting. Sometimes I sit and wait for my grandfather to eat. Sometimes I wait for him to finish a story. Sometimes I wait for him to wake up. Sometimes I wait for him to walk with slow, halting steps across the room.
And sometimes I wait for nothing more than another moment to learn a little more about this man who loves me so much.
Although this might not be the week to ask him just how much he loves me. I’m the one asking him multiple times a day if he’s drinking enough water, or if he’s hungry. I’m the one handing out medicine and cautioning him to use his walker and that I think it’s time to take a breathing treatment.
But I’m also the one on the receiving end of some really great stories and the one who’s caught a twinkle in his eye a time or two. I’m the one who’s seen frustration, anger, and sadness – manifested by unshed tears- all swiped away hurriedly by shaking, wrinkled hands, and this completely melts me.
These days don’t call for The Plan or any plan. These days ask simply for acceptance. For each moment to be acknowledged and embraced because it exists and it is important.
Not all days work out according to The Plan, and perhaps that’s what makes each morning’s new mercies even better.
daily agendas, living simply, plans
June 24, 2010 @ 7:35 am | Filed under: Soul Food,Uniquely Me
We’re on the brink of another sacred weekend, those all-too-precious 48 hours of togetherness, and it’s always a lovely feeling. On Friday nights, an aura enters our home – and although I’ve never quite been able to put a name to it, I think it’s just an extra dose of love.
We hoard our weekends like little treasures, and while sometimes I think we should be making efforts to visit interesting places or socialize more with friends, the truth is that home is our favorite place to spend time. And when we’re both there…it’s pure perfection.
I have all these dreams of making home the best place possible on this earth. Like citrusy-smelling candles and open windows in the springtime and soft music, dim lights, and living room picnics on long winter evenings.
Home is where you hang your heart. Where it goes to seek refuge from the beating it may take from the outside world during the week. Where it finds solace from the winds of adversity.
And where it recharges so that – when it emerges from the walls of home again – it is able to operate at full capacity, giving and caring for all the duties and responsibilites that make up a productive life.
So home is not confined to a house, to a building with four walls and a roof. Instead home is where the heart is. With the people we love and the ones who love us back.
I’m not “at home” this week, nor will I be this weekend.
And yet my heart is preparing for another sacred weekend anyway. Because it doesn’t matter where we are, or who we’re with, my heart is most at home when the work week comes to an end and MJ’s week on the road comes to a close.
We won’t be in the place we’ve lovingly turned into a home that we adore this weekend, and instead he’ll join me here at my parents’. Where he’ll help me prepare meals, spend long amounts of time in conversation with my grandfather, and more than likely feel less than comfortable sleeping in a bed that is not his own. And yet…
…our hearts will be at home.
June 12, 2010 @ 9:40 pm | Filed under: Pure Sunshine,Soul Food,The Solid Rock,Uniquely Me
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~Dr. Seuss
It was Tuesday night and my deadline was today at noon.
I’d already typed in a zillion-and-one different thoughts over the course of the day, only to go back later and delete them all. I stared a blank computer screen and tried to focus.
No, this wasn’t for a story idea. Or an article for a magazine. Or even a blog post for Faith Lifts.
What held me in the throes of agony was a speech.
In just four short days I would stand before the 2010 graduating class of NCCA and tell them -
Tell them what?
It wasn’t that I didn’t have ideas. Oh no! It was more like I had too many.
How do you stand before a group of excited kids and try to impart a bit of the knowledge and wisdom you’ve gleaned along the way? Can that kind of advice/revelation/sharing really be done in a fifteen minute speech?
I finally decided that I wasn’t going to find the answer that day. So I went to bed.
And, as I do every night before I drift off, I deliberately shut out all the other things in my head and on my heart. I turned them all over to Him and began to relax as the stresses of the day slipped off my shoulders.
My last thought as I went to sleep was that I wished I could share this with the graduates.
The next day I knew what to say.
Life is either simply complex or complexly simple. I like to think it’s the latter.
And so this afternoon I stood behind the podium, looked into the eyes of the graduates, and said this:
“ I would ask of you today that you always listen for One certain voice. As you move forward into your college years, your careers, or your ministries, you’ll hear a lot of different voices.
Voices that will vie for your time, your energy, and your loyalty. At the end of the day – as your head touches your pillow and your eyes close in exhaustion – there is only ONE voice that truly matters.
If you can keep the voice of God as your focus in the big middle of everything else you have going on, your life will be a very simple, very happy, very productive one.”
It’s a lesson well learned.
It really is that simple.
