and sometimes you just need chocolate cake...

A little messy but so delicious!

It's been a rough week at our house.  Not only did Mr. Bean receive his second round of vaccines on Monday and not only is Mr. Bean going through his three month growth spurt, but we are also surrounded by the busyness of Holy Week (generally the most intense week of ministry for a pastor all year)...and most significantly of all, my normally happy, cheerful baby has turned into a mass of tears, hand-gnawing, drooling, night waking...and more tears.  The intensity of his needs this week has been overwhelming.  I mean, we were getting spoiled around here.  Mr. Bean was sleeping about 9 hours each night and he was generally happy most of the day.  The only time he wasn't happy was if he was hungry or tired, either of which could be quickly and easily resolved.

But even easy babies go through tough stages.  Because they're, well, babies.  And this has been a pretty tough stage.  When you're just three months old, it's pretty hard to find some coping skills for having nail-sharp teeth punching through your gums.  Most of the time, the only thing that seems to make my little bundle (of joy?) feel better is being held.  All.day.long.  And even then, he's grouchy.  So I've been trying to wash a load of towels all week and it only just got done yesterday.  I must be slightly exaggerating but not much when I say that virtually every time I set this little one down to do some essential task, he starts crying.  And try as I might, I.can't.make.it.better.

(On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I've found a way to stop the terrorists: stick them in a room with a crying baby.  They'll hand over those essential facts pretty quick.  Wait a minute, I don't believe in torture.  But still...).

So one awful week of awful hurty mouth later, I happened to be watching Nigella Bites on the Cooking Channel and she was making comfort food.  It was therapeutic just to watch someone peacefully and happily mixing starches and desserts.  And, oh, the fudge cake with chocolate buttercream icing!  I looked up the recipe and had all the ingredients.  And suddenly, I needed chocolate cake in the worst way.  There is a bone-tiredness, an emotional exhaustion that cries out for the one thing that will make it better: chocolate.  (A good nap helps too.)

We are still not out of the woods.  Mr. Bean is still battling those teeth.  I know he will be doing so for a couple of years, but I am desperately hoping--for his sake and mine--that this acute phase will be over soon.  Until then, I have half a chocolate cake in the fridge to finish.  And I now know how to make more.

fun winter day activity: molasses-on-snow candy

Molasses drizzled on fresh, clean snow.

Burrito and I have been trying to come up with fun winter's day activities.  We have been reading the wonderful series of children's picture books based on the original Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (for example: A Little Prairie House (Little House)).  The pictures are beautiful and the stories are just the way I remember.  It's been wonderful to share those memories with her.  We recently read Christmas in the Big Woods (Little House) and Burrito was fascinated by the molasses-on-snow candy that Laura and Mary made.  When it snowed heavy and thick this week, she suggested that we make the candy.  So, I dug out The Little House Cookbook and looked up the recipe.  It's very simple: 1 cup of molasses, plus 1/2 cup of brown sugar.  You prepare pans of snow and set them outside to be ready when the mixture gets hot.  You mix and heat the molasses and brown sugar until it boils and then turn it down to medium heat.  You heat the mixtures until it is 245 degrees, stirring frequently to be sure not to burn it.  Then, you bring in your pans of snow, drizzle the mixture across the top (I used a measuring cup with a pour spout so that Burrito could pour too), and let the candy harden.  When it has cooled and hardened, you break the candy into bite-sized pieces.

The finished product!

A couple of tips: if you drip the molasses mixture anywhere, it will make a terrible mess!  Be prepared to use some elbow grease and some vinegar to scrub it off.  Secondly, if you keep the candy in too warm a place, it will slowly melt back down to liquid.  So, eat what you want and eat it fast!:-)  Delish!

your mommy "sweet spot"

There are many times as a mother when I feel that I am not good enough.  For example, I stand in awe of "crafty moms."  They know how to do things with beads and buttons and glue guns that I can't even envision.  Granted, having Burrito has made me a little more open to crafty things.  We color and paint and I haven't really done that since I was a kid.  But sometimes I look at other moms who can really come up with all kinds of creative, adorable projects and sew their kids' clothes and I just feel, well, inadequate. 

But I'm coming to realize that there are strengths I have that other moms don't.  For example, a lot of moms don't like to cook.  They don't feel confident in it and haven't had their moms teach them to do it.  They may be great at teaching their kid to horseback ride or dance, however.  They may be fantastic at coming up with kid games.  They just have other strengths.

Well, for me, cooking is one of my very favorite things to do with Burrito.  She's getting to the stage where she loves to stand on a chair next to me while I cook and either help me or ask about every step of the process.  I suppose this might annoy some moms.  And the constant questions annoy me in other tasks.  But not with cooking.  I feel pretty confident with cooking.  Most of the time, I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  And I think I'm pretty good at teaching cooking too.  Burrito knows by now that we spoon out the flour and smooth it over with a knife.  She knows why we put bay leaves in the flour container  (to keep the weevils out!).  She has been taught why we put the pie crust in the fridge before rolling it out.  She knows that yeast and time make bread rise.  It's so much fun for me to teach her, too.  I love her eager, open mind and her enthusiasm for cooking.  I like to think that she gains some of that enthusiasm from my delight in cooking.  It brings me joy to share one of my favorite activities with her and to know that she is gaining a life skill that will serve her well down the road.

My second sweet spot as a mom is in taking Burrito to the library.  She has already caught Mommy's attitude toward this most wonderful place on earth and always comes home with lots of books.  No matter how many books either of us have, we always want more.  She often spends lots of time in her room, before sleeping or when she wakes up, sitting and paging through books quietly.  I love her enthusiasm for books.  And she's already recognizing most of her letters (thank you, Super Why!) and even an occasional word.  I love her love of words, stories and beautiful pictures.

My third sweet spot as a mom is taking Burrito to interesting cultural and artistic experiences.  In our town, we have an art museum and every time there is a new exhibit, we stop by to look at it.  Some of them interest her more than others, but sometimes she requests to stop by, rather than just me suggesting it.  I think she is getting something out of it and I love the opportunity to expose her to the arts and beautiful things.  We also have great theater in our area, including Children's Theater.  I love taking her to see plays (which she, amazingly, mostly sits still for).  And then there are fun experiences like food festivals, farmer's markets, museums, and live music.  And soon, I hope to take her to her first ballet.  I love being able to share a rich cultural experience with my daughter and I love seeing her enthusiasm for the arts.  It's beautiful seeing it through her eyes and we almost always make a great memory together.

No, I can't do great arts and crafts.  I can't sew.  I'm not the best home decorator.  But I'm pretty darn good at cooking with my kid, reading with her, and exposing her to great cultural experiences.  I'm learning that every mom has strengths and weaknesses.  Every kid will miss out on some stuff.  Every kid will have some special experiences.  And kids catch your enthusiasm for what you love. 

So, I'm curious...what is your mommy "sweet spot"?  Please share! 

on being the pastor's wife

If you would have asked me a few years ago how comfortable I would feel playing the part of the pastor's wife instead of the pastor, you might have gotten an earful.  But if you ask me these days, I'd probably tell you that being the pastor's wife (at least the way the congregation here is allowing me to experience it) is like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers: it just feels right.  I feel at home doing it.

A huge part of the reason I feel this way is because my husband does not require me to fit a cookie-cutter, image-conscious shape of a pastor's wife.  I needn't wear churchy dresses to do grocery shopping, it's ok that I'm not the best house-keeper, and I'm welcome to make our home as open or as private as I choose.  He thinks that his family is very important (more important in fact than the church) and he helps out around the house (not leaving me to do everything "domestic").  I'm not required to teach Sunday School or play organ (and you definitely wouldn't want me to do the latter!). 

Another reason I haven't felt pressured by the role is because I am working on growing in the areas of image-consciousness and people pleasing.  In the past, I've felt very pressured, particularly as a pastor because I had an idea that my goal was to please everyone, to make sure they were happy with me.  This led to me slapping on the happy mask sometimes.  And it was awful.  I hated that mask.  It suffocated me.  But a huge part of the reason for the mask was my own issues.  Why did I feel it was so important to please people rather than just try to please God?  Slowly but surely, I am in a process of recovery from people-pleasing and from the self-centered work of image-preserving.  And since I have a direction, a way to recover now, I am finding it easier to fit into the role of pastor's wife.

And then there is the thankfulness in my heart for the joy of being home with my daughter, thankfulness for the joy of being able to spend time writing, thankfulness for being able to volunteer doing things that I feel truly gifted to do.  Instead of spending all my time trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, I get to look for opportunities that fit the gifts God has given me and plug myself in there.  It's energy better spent.  It brings me joy.

In the difficult past few years, a few things rescued me.  One was God, whose mercies never ceased, even when I was tired and depressed and couldn't see them.  Then, there was my daughter, whose joy and miraculousness filled my heart with joy.  Many times in the midst of the stress, I would lean my head back and think of the adorable thing she had done that day.  It was my happy place, my joyful place.  She kept me going. 

And then there was one other thing that helped me immensely: cooking.  This may seem strange, but when you are under tremendous stress, you need a creative outlet and you need it a great deal.  For me, this creative outlet was cooking.  We lived in a small town that during most of our time there had no restaurant.  We were 15 minutes from any restaurant or take-out and what was available even there wasn't that good. I already liked to cook, but I really began to hone some skills during this time.  If I wanted good food to eat, I could not order it; I had to make it myself.  And since my family had to eat, I did not begrudge myself the time to cook creatively.  My husband would take over with Burrito and I would go into my kitchen, my other happy place.  I learned a lot about making beautiful food in those days.

Fast-forward several years.  Here I am now, a pastor's wife.  I have more time to do even more cooking, I have skills that I have honed, and I am suddenly finding that with that cooking, I have an incredible ministry resource at my fingertips.  Cooking is my one really strong domestic skill (unless you count mothering, I guess).  I don't keep house particularly well (I do keep things sanitary, but I'm pretty cluttery).  I don't garden well.  I'm not much good at interior decorating.  But I can cook, darn it! 

Lately, I've been feeling a real call to use my ability with cooking to create an open, welcoming place for church relationships to develop.  It's so easy to pass each other at church on Sunday and not get to know each other.  But it's wonderful when we can sit down, eat a meal together, and have good focused conversation. The ability to use this gift, because I want to (not because I have to), makes it a joyful opportunity.

I don't know what God has for me in the future.  I have a lot of opportunities to use many of my gifts now--gifts of teaching, shepherding, writing, encouragement, mothering, cooking.  I don't know how those gifts will play out in days to come.  But I do know that I am grateful to be where I am now, and I don't mind this role of pastor's wife at all.  I'm me and I'm the pastor's wife.  And that's just fine.

creative suppers on the cheap (I)

Since going down to one income, our family has had to do some budgetary adjustments.  We are much more conscious of what we are spending on groceries and much less willing to throw out leftovers or produce.  I won't say we perfectly use every last morsel, but we do try a lot harder to waste very little.  Whereas I used to plan my menus around what I wanted to eat, now I plan them around what is on sale.  However, I find that I can always find something delicious to make, even with more budgetary constraints.

Food is important to me.  While I never starved as a kid, there were years when food wasn't the most plentiful.  I tend to stock up enough food so that I never have to worry about being hungry.

But food doesn't just inspire sad memories in me.  Some of my happiest memories are about food too.  I just got a book from the library called What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.  One essay in this book asks the question, "Why do we cook, when it's not necessary for life?"  The answer the authors come up with is that cooking is something that is simply very human.  It adds a powerful dimension of creature comfort to our lives.  It separates us from the animal kingdom.  I would add that it is a powerful burst of creativity.  It even brings some meaning to our lives.  My favorite quote from an interview during my freelance writing days was when a cook told me that she felt cooking was one of the most intimate things you could do for another human being because when you cook something, it becomes a part of them.  Cooking means sharing in community, sharing in creativity, bringing something of beauty to the lives of those around you.  It brings people together.  It brings joy into my heart.

All this to say, I don't know if I could live on a diet of rice and beans.  Cooking and food are too important to me.  If there is a way to seize up life and experience it with gusto for each person, cooking and eating are my way.  So, one of my biggest worries as our budget got tighter was that it would mean very, very boring eating. 

Boy, have I been shocked.  We eat good.  We eat so good. 

And like I said above, one of the biggest helps is wasting less.  This means not only eating leftovers, but also not always having to follow a recipe.  Which is new for me.  I have almost always been a recipe cook, afraid to venture outside the boundaries of the known, the defined.  But when we have a bunch of veggies about to go bad in your fridge, when you have a hankering for something wonderful to eat, you bring these two elements together and you make something that makes sense to you.  That's how I came up with my Roasted Vegetables with Maple-Balsamic Glaze (which I made for friends this Easter and they loved it).  I am finding that if I have a well-stocked refrigerator and pantry (thank you, Costco!), if I understand some basics about technique when I cook (the why, not just the what), I can put together some lovely food.  Of course, I have to be willing to fail a little bit.  Not everything I create or adapt will turn out perfectly.  Sometimes there will be a great big flop.  Am I willing to fail?

One recent meal which decidedly did not fail came about because we had been given some beautiful lake trout caught by a local fisherman.  It was from a smaller fish, so the meat was a gorgeous pink, almost the color of salmon.  I decided not to mess too much with what God had made so beautifully, so I simply salted and peppered the filets, coated them in Dijon mustard, caked them in panko breadcrumbs and fried them in extra virgin olive oil in a cast iron skillet.  They came out crunchy and browned and almost buttery, melting in my mouth.  It was easily some of the best fish I had ever had.  I paired it with an adaptation of a recipe I had found in Cooking Light magazine, Mediterranean Barley with chickpeas and arugula  (I adapted this to Mediterranean Bulgar with chickpeas and spinach; spinach always makes an excellent substitute for arugula and is often easier to get.) Altogether, it was truly a beautiful meal.

I am learning to take what I have been given and make something beautiful out of it.

Hm, maybe that's a lesson to learn from life in general...

good food, simple food

I just finished French Women Don't Get Fat, not because I worry that I need a diet but because I share the philosophy of the book.  Basically it's about enjoying food, eating it in balance, eating smaller portions of only the really good stuff, and not having a huge guilt trip about food.  One of my favorite concepts from the book is that we overeat out of boredom.  We substitute quantity for quality all the time.  A lot of the time, poor food habits come because we are simply tired of our old food routine.

I used to like junk food, just like every other American.  I wasn’t brought up that way, which is key to how I came to approach food after my younger adult years.  My Mom was very careful about what we ate, with a balanced diet, low chemicals, lots of fruits and veggies.  I think my first food was an avocado, to which I attribute my continued love of that particular fruit.  But of course, when we are teenagers and college students, all of us eat the crappy stuff.  Easy Mac.  Fast food.  Slim Jims.  Potato chips.  Desserts that use high amounts of sugar to mask the lack of flavor.  High fructose corn syrup.  Soda pop.  I certainly ate my share of it. 

I remember when I was in seminary and my friend Natalie had come back from a trip to Europe and she said, “American food is gross.”  I just had no idea what she was talking about.  But I do now.  With every new indulgence I have into really good food, I understand more and more.  There have now come to be many foods that I can hardly bear to put into my mouth because they are, as Michael Pollan calls them, “foodlike substances,” things that my grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

Every few months I try have a cold cut sandwich because I forget why I don’t eat lunchmeat.  Today I did that.  Now, this lunch meat was fairly decent.  It was from Costco and was thick cut, good quality.  But it’s still pressed meat, you know?  It’s still full of a crappy salt mixture that makes me feel a bit nauseated when I put it in my mouth.  It’s still slimy.  Yuck.  I couldn’t even finish my sandwich.  Half of it went into the garbage.

Apart from the lunch meat misstep today, it was a lovely day for food.  Burrito and I have been trying to eat more fruits and vegetables as well as protein.  And since I have a tendency to run around the house or busy myself on the computer all day, failing to eat as much as I should, I am making the effort to sit down with her and have a snack when she has one.  This helps her to finish her meals too (or at least eat a little more).  And I’ve been noticing that when I eat a little bit every few hours, I feel so much better.  Our morning snack was composed of splitting an orange and having little almond butter cracker sandwiches.  We both finished the whole thing.  For lunch, I made her grilled cheese and homemade applesauce with cinnamon.  It is amazing what cooking apples will do to them.  These apples were the kind you get cheap in a bag, so they weren’t the best quality—rather tasteless raw, to be honest with you—but when I cooked them, they got sweet and tangy and delicious.  I made the applesauce chunky, skins on, and it was just perfect, still warm when we ate it.

Tonight was the best though.  I am of the mindset that vegetables artfully prepared are even more delicious than meat.  I'm sure this is a crazy idea to state in the middle of Montana.  And I'm not a vegetarian.  I love a steak as much as the next person.  But I do love well-prepared non-meat dishes.  They are savory.  And if you give me the choice between savory and sweet, I’ll choose savory almost every time. 

Ever since I saw pre-cubed butternut squash at Costco, I’ve been looking forward to trying this new convenience.  As everyone knows, it is a hassle and a half to cut open the tough skin of a squash, scrape out the seeds and fibers, peel the thing, and then cube it.  So it was very exciting to skip all those annoying steps and just get to the deliciousness that is a butternut squash.  Tonight I made Giada’s Butternut Squash Soup (with sage!).  Then I got a little creative and made an awesome Bruschetta.  I diced tomatoes, minced garlic, sliced basil, and drizzled it with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, finishing with a couple of grinds of sea salt.  I put this mixture on top of warm artisan bread, added a pinch of Parmigiano-Reggiano and toasted it in the oven.  It was divine.  I could have eaten it all night.  The sharp savoryness of the garlic and the complex tang of the cheese particularly hit me.  Wow, that was flavor. 

The amazing thing about something like Bruschetta is the simplicity of the ingredients and preparation.  Good food doesn’t have to be complicated.  I think oftentimes with food the important thing as a cook is simply “Don’t mess it up.”  I was explaining this to Burrito today when she ate her sugar-free homemade applesauce.  I told her that God made many foods so delicious that they didn’t need extra sugar.  To which she replied, “Yeah!”  I hope she got it.  It’s a really important lesson.

Of all the cooking lessons I hope to impart to her, the main ones are:

1)      Butter will make everything better

2)      Garlic—and lots of it—will improve every dish except dessert (Hubby adds: “And cereal.”  I’m not sure…maybe garlic could improve some cereals)

3)      Don’t mess it up

Oh, and we made homemade chocolate chip cookies today too.  With butter, of course.

foodie's paradise

One of the things I love best about living here in the Flathead Valley is the wonderful access we have to great food.  It’s a foodie’s paradise.  Or at least, coming out of the culinary isolation of rural America, it seems like it.  I will say our local grocery in North Dakota happily was run by a family that was up on some of the latest cooking trends that did not include cream of mushroom soup and Jell-O with carrots.  So I was able to find “exotic” things like Asian sauces, fresh gingerroot, a few fresh herbs on occasion, organic milk (which was awesome to have for Burrito), anchovy paste, sundried tomatoes, pesto and the like.  I was very grateful to them for their hard work stocking some of these items because it made a big difference to me in that tiny town.

But even so, it was quite a small store….and the next nearest store was 15 minutes away…followed by one that was 30 minutes from home…followed by the larger town’s stores that were a full 75 minutes from home.  I never knew for sure if I would find what I needed for a given recipe close to home, so when I was in the larger town, I was forced to stock up on things.  This, of course, meant that the chances of my stock-piled food items going bad before I needed them was high.  It was a very frustrating place for a budding cook to live, especially since for most of the time we lived there, there was no restaurant in town (unless you count gas station pizza—I don’t).  So, with no take-out options, I had no choice but to learn to cook the good food that I wanted to eat.  I had always been interested in cooking and even pretty decent at it but my desire to get better at more interesting dishes really began to take off in North Dakota. With no good pizza or Asian food available for take-out, there was really no other option than to make it myself. 

So, now that I live in an area with many beautiful, new grocery stores and wonderful restaurants and bakeries, I begin to get a little giddy when I walk in the door of one of these establishments.  When I lived in North Dakota, I used to go to Whole Foods when I was on vacation, mainly to look at all the beautiful food.  It was rather like visiting an art gallery for me.  We all need a place for beauty in our lives and for me, a big part of where I find beauty is in food.  I seriously get this quivery feeling of joy all over my body when I’m in the presence of that much beautiful food.  The feeling is, I think, a bit like the over-stimulation a toddler must feel in a toy store.  What to look at first?  What to touch first?

I still get that feeling when I go in places that have lots of beautiful food.  I still can’t get over the fact that I can go to my local grocery store and find fine cheeses in the cheese case (and this is the grocery store that locals don’t care for too much!).  I can scarcely believe I can go down to Great Northern Foods in Bigfork and pick up a French baguette that is not only beautifully golden but that is also a divine thing to eat, crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside, tempered with the complexity of flavor that putting time into bread will bring.  I pinch myself when I sit down to share a huge warm, homemade cinnamon roll with Burrito at Pocketstone Café.  Cinnamon rolls usually taste like cardboard, in my opinion, but this one is made with real food, not “foodlike substances.”  It’s chewy and fresh and topped with an amazing homemade cream cheese frosting that doesn’t use sugar to disguise the flavor but to bring out the flavor.  The care and time that have been put into this treat have converted this cinnamon roll skeptic to its lover after all.

Every grocery store here carries artisan bread and more obscure produce like fennel, celeriac, fine mushrooms, mangos, big tubs of fresh basil.  Every grocery store has a large and affordable selection of wine.  Every grocery store has a fine cheeses case with a goodly variety.  And then there was the machine I found at Mountain Valley Foods in Kalispell where you could grind your own peanut butter into nutty, creamy goodness.  I nearly swooned.

And so I have taken surveying missions into the wonderful grocery stores our area has to offer.  It is a wonder to now read a recipe and know where I can find most any ingredient in it and within a few minutes’ drive too.  The richness of the food available in this area makes my heart sing.

I know I’m a bit overly interested in my food, but besides writing, it’s my art form.  I just love to prepare and enjoy something wonderful.  And I love that there is always more to learn about food.  You never fully master the arts of cooking and eating.  You just keep discovering more wonderful things.  What a joy to be free to express that love and learn all the good things there are to prepare and eat in this world…especially this foodie paradise corner of the world.