Holy Week 2021 (1 of 2)

Even though our church has not met in person since mid-March 2020, the leadership has tried to build community. They dropped off Easter lilies last year, and when they brought poinsettias, the pastors filmed themselves lighting candles for a Christmas Eve video. The deacons have sent cards for major holidays, and for Holy Week this year, they painted a labyrinth on the church parking lot. That way, anyone can stop by to pray or meditate as they walk the path to the center, where the medallion reads "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." The kids made decorations that now hang in the trees, brightening up the space for us and our neighbors.

Carob Chip Cookies

Another weekend, another failed bid on a house, another baked good. What else is new? This Saturday we looked at a cute little house in Mount Washington. Then we picked up paninis from the local cafe to eat in a park while watching an adorable toddler playing with a stick. Next we walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the 74-degree sunshine and the vistas all along Grandview Avenue overlooking the Monongahela River, the Point, downtown Pittsburgh, and the Ohio River. We even got to experience a classic set of Pittsburgh steps (left); this is "Well Street." Below is the mural at the cafe of a stork delivering baskets of coffee beans from different countries.

In the late afternoon, I pulled up David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet while baking carob chip cookies. Funnily enough, just that morning I had read an article shared by a friend on Facebook about "how carob traumatized a generation" of children in the 1970s, when their parents jumped on the health-food bandwagon: "Poor carob ... [i]t never wanted to be chocolate in the first place." Dear Husband had purchased the imitation chips because he gets migraine headaches with even a little exposure to caffeine, so this was an experiment to let him enjoy a classic treat without suffering for it later. 

I decided to use the recipe on bag instead of the usual Toll House one. Interestingly, although it claimed to be "allergy friendly," it still called for milk and an egg. I substituted an equivalent amount of applesauce for the milk but left in the egg and used brown sugar instead of date sugar. After saving a couple spoonfuls of dough for DH so he could have the privilege of risking Salmonella poisoning, I chilled the dough balls on the cookie sheets for a few minutes in the freezer. Maybe I should have pulled the cookies out a few minutes sooner so the edges didn't get a crispy, but all in all, a passable substitute for chocolate chip cookies.

May Your Home Smell As Good As...

...a scented candle in the bathroom after a nice long soak in the tub with a book and bath salts from a friend.

Or as good as this cinnamon apple pecan walnut sweetbread I made. Here is the recipe. It almost wasn't sweet, as just before combining the wet and dry ingredients together, I realized I had nearly forgotten to add any sugar, because I was distracted by a comedy sketch by Australian actor Hannah Gadsby. I didn't remember opening the sugar container, and a wet fingertip of mixed dry ingredients only tasted like flour. Therefore, I deduced that I had skipped a step, added the sugar, and proceeded. 

The house smelled SO GOOD while this baked. It was nice to come in from picking up a plastic bag's worth of trash from along the major road that runs in front of our current rental to the wafting scents of cinnamon, Granny Smith apples, and sugar. However, I did find the batter dry. The apple chunks largely fell to the bottom, and much of the nut crust fell off the top. Next time I would cut those back from 1 cup each to 3/4 cup.

Walking the Labyrinth: Guide My Steps, O God

Today I walked a labyrinth. It's a spiritual practice I have tried before but now the Adult Forum at my church is reading Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. In one of the chapters we discussed this morning, Taylor describes the spiritual discipline of "walking on the earth," of being connected with the ground that holds us up. We had also discussed how easy it is to fall into "cow paths," worn ruts that are direct but also unimaginative.

The most famous labyrinth is probably the one in Chartres Cathedral. Our church is having a competition for local artists to design a temporary labyrinth that can be set up on the lawn for Lent. It reminded me of the Franklin Community Garden and walking prayer maze that Dear Husband and I had discovered on one of our many daily quarantine walks way back last spring. I decided to check it out.

As you can see, the setting isn't much, especially this early in the year. But the half-circle, quasi-mushroom-shaped path was clear. I prayed before I started that the stress of house-hunting would be lifted. And then I walked. Not too fast, not slowly, just steadily onward, looking at the ground. 

I could see that other people had piled small stones on top of the brick painted "LOVE" at the center of the maze. Probably they had picked up a rock on their way in and left it--and the burden it represented--before spiraling out of the center.

I was not carrying a burden today so much as practicing the discipline of walking in the prescribed path. I could have easily stepped over the low brick markers, of course, but I chose not to. I found myself praying, "Direct my steps, O God."

On my way out, however, I couldn't help but notice that some of the bricks had fallen slightly out of line. I nudged them back into alignment with my foot. Then I picked up a chunk of brick to one side and carried it with me to a spot that no longer had a stone. This meant I deviated a somewhat from the path, but no one was waiting to take their turn or to pass me, so it seemed undisruptive, maybe even helpful to those who might come after me.

A charitable reading of this would be to say that it was like I was co-creating with God and the labyrinth builders. The bricks were out of place, and I was able to re-place them. A critical reading would suggest that I can't help meddling, that I assume my ideas are the correct ones, and that I can't leave well enough alone.

I can't tell you which is the correct answer, and maybe there isn't one. But I spent a short half hour in the thin sunshine, and I plan to walk the labyrinths at Chatham University and at Third Presbyterian Church later this Lent.

What spiritual disciplines are you practicing?

What Time is It? It's String Time!

Our cat, Rosamunda, can look absolutely angelic while sleeping, but in the evenings she turns into a fierce huntress. For a while she would run after projectiles like balls and even the occasional pencil, if we threw them along the upstairs hallway. This would keep her relatively entertained with a minimum of effort from us.

At some point she stopped chasing them and decided she much preferred stalking and attacking a string. So at 7 or 8pm, she will sit on Dear Husband's armchair and look meaningfully between him and the top of the bookcase, where the string lives between sessions. She will meow at him. For a while she would nip him with her teeth, because often he would put her off until she felt that was the only way to get his attention. 

After putting her out of the room a few times and reviewing our parenting techniques, we decided we couldn't reward that aggressive behavior by letting things get so far before acquiescing. At some point she tried reaching out with one of her paws, and DH found it so totally adorable that he decided that would be the signal: a tap with her paw would lead to "string time." I haven't been able to capture sufficiently athletic or acrobatic footage of her leaping and chasing the string, but here's a snapshot of her asking him to play.

Editor's Note: You might appreciate these posts about her "many poses" and her "many faces."

Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cake

I recently craved cinnamon streusel coffee cake. I don't drink coffee, of course, but we had received a postcard in the mail from a local realtor that had a recipe for it. I tossed the card into the recycling and was very shortly sorry. So I googled around for an easy-enough recipe that would produce the fluffy breakfast baked good. I decided on the King Arthur Flour recipe, and I even purchased a 5-pound bag of their product, since I was going to need ~5 cups of the stuff!

I prepared the batter on Friday night so that we would only have to wait a little over 1 hour Saturday morning for the oven to warm up and the coffee cake to bake. The preparations took about an hour and used up almost every measuring spoon and cup plus multiple bowls (wet ingredients, dry ingredients, filling, topping). I have never made a marble cake, so the instruction to swirl the batter and filling with a knife was hard to follow. Streusel topping was also new to me, and I think I broke it up too finely. 

Final critique: I'm not sure I successfully balanced getting the center "done" while not over-baking the outer portions. A 9"x13" pan makes a LOT of coffee cake! We will probably eat half over the next week, and then I'll freeze the other half for a month or so. What a treat to get it back out of the freezer to eat on some more. Despite almost 4 cups of white and brown sugar, Dear Husband declared it delicious and not too sweet. I'm so lucky he lets me "experiment" in the kitchen like this and know what I'll make the next time I host/attend a brunch.

This pie will phyllo you up!

I was looking for a new vegetarian recipe and decided to edit the "Curried Turkey and Couscous Pie" in my Better Homes & Gardens One Dish Dinners cookbook. It...turned into a cooking adventure in 10 steps.

1. Send Dear Husband to the grocery store for ingredients. He can't find frozen phyllo. Put out all-points-bulletin on Facebook. Get tips for ethnic stores and also a personal message from a residency classmate doing fellowship in town who has half a box of the stuff in her freezer after trying a Jamie Oliver recipe. Pick up phyllo dough and tips about how to use it (e.g. do not attempt to thaw in microwave).

2. Dial up a Zoom meeting while you assemble the ingredients: instead of 1lb chopped turkey, a can of chickpeas, drained. Instead of 1 cup frozen peas, an 8-ounce package of frozen spinach, partly thawed in the fridge. Instead of 1/4 cup fresh cilantro, the rest of a bunch of parsley--except you forgot what you were saving it for and used it all in the "fancy rice" with fish for dinner yesterday. Settle on dried tarragon instead.

3. Even though they aren't in the recipe, chop the rest of the green onions and a little yellow onion from the fridge. Also 2 cloves garlic. Sautee on the stove in some cooking spray. Add chunks of partially frozen spinach, chickpeas, a pinch of salt, 1.5 teaspoons of curry powder and mixed spices, and some large amount of crushed red pepper flakes, since you don't have ground red pepper.

4. Look up conversions for 14.5 fluid ounces: 1.8125 cups or 428.8162 milliliters. Add what you think is 425 mL of vegetable broth to the pot. Once it is boiling, remove from heat and add 1 cup of couscous. (The image in the cookbook definitely shows classic couscous, but all you have is pearled couscous, so you go with it.)

5. While the couscous cooks, grab a metal pie plate with a removable bottom that you hope approximates a spring form pan. Apply 3 sheets of phyllo dough coated with cooking spray along the X axis and 3 along the Y axis of the greased pan. Remove lid from pot to confirm that there is WAY too much filling for that little pie plate. Locate and grease a pair of glass pie plates.

6. Meanwhile, notice that one edge of the phyllo dough has dried out and broken off, while another corner appears to have melted onto a wet spot on the counter. Wonder how anyone worked with phyllo dough before cooking spray.

7. Transfer phyllo dough from metal pan to pie plate. Rotate phyllo sheets for second plate to get better coverage. Divide the filling. Fold over the edges of the dough, apply cooking spray liberally, and put in oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30-35 minutes.

8. Meanwhile, forget your own recipe for homemade cranberry sauce: Heat 1 cup of orange juice on stove while you rinse and pick over a thawed bag of once-fresh cranberries purchased around Christmas. Add 1/2 cup sugar and 1 cup water (fatal flaw!). Pop berries with a spoon.

9. Realize the sauce is too...saucey. Strain on stove. Looks like a murder scene. Put cranberry sauce in freezer to cool and reserve liquid for oatmeal at breakfast.

10. Remove delicious-smelling pies from oven and let cool before plating. This will require a sharp knife, a pie server, and a spoon for the little bits left behind. Serving size is 1/4 pie. Serve with the cranberry sauce and some yogurt to cut the strong taste of red pepper. (Or sour cream, or a non-dairy substitute to keep it vegan).

DH liked it! It is filling and different and might join the rotation of "every couple of months" dishes that are messy to make but good to eat. Turn-around time on the dishwasher was just 2 hours, a household record.