Purple tastes delicious.

So we decided that it would be a great idea to make a dinner of all purple ingredients. Because purple is a fantastic color. Because purple foods are often the cooler versions of normal foods (like cabbage or potatoes, even onions.) And because doing it sounded like a really fun plan. So here is how we did it, so you can make your own purple meal if you like.

We diced up three little purple potatoes and three big beets. Peeled the beets, washed the potatoes, coated them with olive oil and roasted them at 400 degrees, stirring every 10-15 minutes until they were tender.

We browned some ground beef (not purple, we know), drained it, sauteed a purple onion (also diced and then added the beef, some salsa (also not purple, but delicious) and a drained, rinsed can of black beans, (sort of purple) and a can of refried black beans (more purple), with some little shavings of beet, to make everything look more purple. Add cayenne and cumin to taste. We stirred that up til everything was hot and well mixed and vaguely purple.

We cooked half of a purple cabbage just in water in a pan until it was softer, very dark purple, and still a little bit crunchy.

Then we mixed the roasted root vegetables, the taco-y stuff and the cabbage in bowls together and ate it with blue corn chips. And it was beautiful and amazingly delicious. We thought about finishing off with a mixed berry smoothie, but none of us felt like it after all the deliciousness.
 
We're already scheming for our next color meal. Green? Perhaps with a spinach pasta, a salad with avocado, a fruit salad with kiwi fruit, green grapes and granny smith apples? Or orange with butternut squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, oranges, and perhaps a pumpkin pie or something for dessert? Wouldn't this be great to do with kids? I know of a lot of kids who only like white foods. Like Bread. Or Rice. Or mashed potatoes. Wouldn't it be great to start them early and cook lots of colorful foods? Have a week of color meals? Or every once in a while just have a purple meal?

At Labyrinth we sell a lot of beautiful cookbooks, many of which seem to be as much about the photography as they are about the food. One in particular is arranged by color and is called "Ripe" and goes through fruits and vegetables at their peak of ripeness, and gives one recipe for each ingredient. It's sort of a funny book, self-indulgently beautiful, and more expensive than I think is necessary, but it is nice to look at, and makes me want to cook more intensely colorful meals.

Life in the Darkness and Thankfulness

I keep saying that I should write some more about our little electric lights fast for advent. It's an idea we copied from the influence of the professors Lipscomb at Houghton college, who fasted all lights but candle light (and string lights for the tree) in their home throughout the season of advent. My friends and I were all pretty impressed, and some of the guys decided to do it in their house their senior year in college. This past advent was the first year that I've lived in a place where candles are allowed, and since I was living with two good friends from Houghton we all decided to go for it, and to use the time to reflect on the coming of Christ, as light in our darkness.

Living that metaphor was a beautiful experience in many ways. Candles are a nice calming light, and many of them smell nice, and sitting in the darkness together singing hymns and carols is really fun. But a lot of this experience was tough. Because we all work full time jobs, we often didn't see any daylight in our apartment, and rising early in the morning to get dressed by candlelight or attempting to cook by candlelight are both pretty frustrating experiences. It was also hard on our minds and hearts. The gloom could get pretty oppressive, hard to wake up, hard to be cheerful, hard to accomplish any small task. As Advent progressed the days got shorter, but we also added more light in our lives. We got more candlesticks, got a tree covered in light (which glowed like no tree in my memory), and the last week of advent, put up a row of string lights in the kitchen. Every time we added light in our lives there was so much delight, and we'd break out in exclamations like, "Christ is coming!" And now that Christmas is past, the light is something we are constantly thankful for. The electricity, the convenience, the brightness of being able to see each other, and find the keys or the wallet or the book we were reading without worrying about dripping wax. Thankful for so much.

Though thankfulness is nothing new in our house. As a graduation present, friends from my church back home gave me Selections from 1000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp. I had liked her blog in the past but I devoured her little book, and it made me want our apartment this year to be defined by thankfulness. So even before we had found an apartment, before we had a wall, we were thinking of having a "wall of thankfulness" to put up things we are thankful for. So we have a wall (or now going on three walls) covered with sticky notes, all things we're thankful for. Some items of thanksgiving are huge things: Creativity. Another chance. Stillness. Some are still broad, but less abstract: Cookbooks. Hymns. Sunshine. Letters. Leftovers. Lots are people we're thankful for: Shane and Clara here in our home! Families we love. wonderful coworkers. Parents. T. S. Eliot. Some sticky notes have stories which make us laugh a lot. We have a trio of notes all of which voice our thankfulness for butter. They read: "Butter." "Butter." and "BUTTER nomnomnomnomnomnomnom." And the story behind those three is as follows. One evening I saw Rebekah wrote the word "butter" on a sticky note, and thought "yes! we are all thankful for butter!" but instead of putting it on the wall she put in on her lunch bag to remind herself not to forget the butter she was going to take to work in the morning. So I wrote a "butter" thankfulness note, and when Rebekah had successfully reminded herself, she added hers on the wall right next to mine. When our friends Clara and Shane came to visit they loved that we had two "butter" post its, and added a third, with the appropriate commentary to go with it.

Here are some other posts from our wall in no particular order, though one should note that since we have the wall of thankfulness in the kitchen there are more food related thanksgivings than might be there otherwise. Yarn shops. Laughing together. The means of grace. Hyperbole and a Half. Using a blowtorch. Humor of the Wardwells. Sleep. Curry. Reading out loud. The money to pay for car repairs. Unexpected food at work! Abigail. Changing gender stereotypes. The internet. Free public bathrooms. Classic Christmas movies. Jenn and Joey. A wonderful grad school experience. Pomegranate. Mumford and Sons. The ability to see. Cassie. The color of the sky after a hurricane. Diner breakfasts. Kind Clara who leaves the parking spot for me. Kind Rebekah who leaves the parking spot for me--on the same night. :) Three tissue soup. Agape love. The purple tool kit. Lights. Hot showers. HUGE PILE OF KALE! Stars. Sanctification. Pandora. The Library. Bagels. Pre-marital counseling. Disinfectant wipes. The month of November. Silhouettes. Owen. Tabletop campfires. The hierarchy of adverbs. Returned wallets. Birthdays and friends who celebrate together. The cookie press. Forgiveness. Bouquets for Rebekah! Christmas bonus. Little brothers. FYHP. Phone lines and the people who make them work. Chloe. Apple crisp. Sundays: a day of rest. Chocolate. Alarm clocks. Letter from Anonymous PEGs. Classes that made us think and changed who we are today. A new toilet. Sharon Creech's novels. Grilled vegetables and pesto. Spiced cider. Love.

Happy New Year!

I used to write “update emails” to all my friends and relations. I wrote them in London, and I’ve written some since Houghton, but I think I am going to morph over to other means of communication, which brings you all to this blog. Here is the Christmas update letter of blogposts, covering a great deal of ground, and hopefully telling some good stories along the way.

Spring

photo by Woods Pierce

This past spring I wrote thesis, worked with the beautiful and talented Linden to design and construct the world of our production of All’s Well that End’s Well, including but not limited to making a giant pop-up book as the set for the play. It was pretty intense, and I’ve never been more proud of a production so if you’d like to read a lot more about that I recommend you check out our blog allswellindesign.blogspot.com. I also finished all my coursework for my second masters degree, an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance, and all in one month All’s Well went into performance, I took a very intense acting class (last class of graduate school) my dear friends got married, I finished up my job in the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted and I graduated. All of these were pretty emotional experiences, and all involved tears, except for finishing up PEG. I was an RA, you see, so I needed to hold it together for the girls. But we had some really special times right at the end in the PEG dorm. During finals week in PEG we always plan one activity each day for the “loud hour” study break in the evening. One of the last days of finals week, one of the girls had suggested we should make a blanket fort, and so we made the largest most amazing blanket and furniture fort ever. It spanned the entire common room, used about 15 sheets and blankets, two tables on their sides, a couch, rope, scarves and I brought homemade cookies down for us to eat inside of it, and it turned into a sing along of “I’ll make a man out of you” and various showtunes. That brings me to the end of spring, but lest you think I ended my time in PEG in May continue reading for the adventures in the summer!

Summer

photo by Pat Jarrett

I made a visit home after graduation, three weeks or so, but still very short, including a trip to Houghton and some lovely time getting invited over and over for tea or for lunch or for a walk up the hill. I may not know a single student there anymore, but I know the hills and the buildings, and I know the professors and it is such a joy to have professors caring so much about their students long after they’ve graduated. The rest of my time at home was spent visiting with family and friends, and before long I was back to Staunton for the American Shakespeare Center Theater Camp! I have written pages and pages about this camp which you can read here, but for now let it suffice to say, working for that camp is an honor and a privilege. Those young artists are just brimming with potential, potential they realize every day in that camp. I cannot say enough good things about the work they do or the experiences they have, but I am very, very proud of every one of them.

And then.... I got engaged. There’s a few days between the two camps, and in those few days I went to visit Owen in Princeton. It was the evening before my birthday, and after a long tiring day in the car I got to him, we went on a walk, and that was that, and it was lovely. The next day was my birthday, so we had many, many, many people wishing us well. I had known that Owen and I would be really happy, but I hadn’t realized that so many people would be so happy for us both. It was pretty special. And, in case you were wondering, the ring belonged to Owen’s grandmother, and it’s really, really beautiful. Random strangers frequently tell me how much they like it, and it’s nice to say “it’s his grandmother’s ring.”

After the second session of ASCTC, I moved to New Jersey, home of the everlasting strip malls, terrible drivers and many people very dear to my heart. When I moved I did not have a car, a job or a place to live, and thanks to the generosity of Rebekah, her family, and some new friends Jenn and Joey, I was able to have housing and transportation while I found a car, a job and Rebekah, Abigail and I found a place to live.

Fall

In the Fall (or late summer, however you like it) I began working at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ. I work walking distance from Owen’s apartment, and although being a bookseller is not my life goal, it is an excellent job for the year, a job that I enjoy, but that I do not need to take home with me, and am able to get involved in my church, spend time with Owen and my housemates and adjust to life as a grown-up, commuting to work, earning a paycheck, paying off school loans. Other highlights of the fall were a trip to Rheinbeck Sheep and Wool festival (which you can read about here) and our experiences with Hurricane Sandy. We were all fine, and didn’t sustain any damage, although we were out of electricity for about 4 days. Our stove runs on gas, so we were able to cook, and it was cold enough outside that our food stayed refrigerated on our balcony. Mostly it was a time with all of us (Owen stayed with us in our apartment) being together, playing Settlers by candlelight, singing hymns and reading Shakespeare out loud together. Not too different from regular life, just a bit more gratitude. Speaking of gratitude! One of the happiest parts of our house is the “Wall of Thankfulness” which is a wall (and now more than one wall) which we are covering with post-it notes, each saying something we are thankful for. It’s been such a joy to have around us as we eat and work together.

Winter

Which brings me to winter. Highlights have included housemate Rebekah’s chorus concert in which her students sang beautifully, and the auditorium was packed full of parents, friends, family, all eager to cheer their kids on. As a house we decided to fast electric lights, and go with only candles, and eventually string lights. That was an adventure that deserves its own post, but suffice to say, living out a metaphor of advent, of waiting in the darkness for the light of Christ was really painful and meaningful. I also spent my first Christmas away from my own parents, and with my parents-to-be! I spent all the surrounding days working at the bookstore, so I just had the one full day to be with Owen's family, but it was a wonderful day, and I'm growing to love them all more all the time.

Let me finish out by saying a few more things about Owen, and why I am full to overflowing with the joy of getting to marry him. Perhaps it is the brute strength of his gentleness. Perhaps his delight in the world around him and his eagerness to learn about it - the name of those clouds, the vein structure of this leaf, the tastes of new foods, and the history of places or ideas. Perhaps it is his mind--so quick, so skilled in making connections or seeing patterns, for a math lemma or the stitch sequence for a knit lace, a sharp mind paired with a generous, patient attitude towards sharing his knowledge, sharing the skills to making connections oneself. At his last class teaching this semester at Princeton his students applauded him and all said they were sad his class was ending. Not a class full of math kids. Not people particularly interested in the subject outside of that class, just loving it as Owen teaches it. Maybe part of the joy is the pleasure of doing things together with him, be it chopping vegetables for dinner, going on a trip to the museum in Philly (with crayons!) or just being in the same car. A couple years ago, he and I decided to draw an apple each day for 100 days, inspired by the Sharon Creech book Heartbeat. As we drew those apples the drawings started getting better. Partially because we improved with practice, but only partially. The apples started looking more beautiful in our pictures because we saw them as more beautiful, just by the act of seeing. Every day there was more to admire, the combination of colors, the texture of the speckles, the curve of the sides of the fruit or the little bit of the stem. It’s the same as loving Owen. I don’t just love him better now (now that I know him better, and have figured out better how to love) I love him more, because day by day I know more of him to love.

Happy New Year everyone.

LEGOs. Why mess with a good thing?

I'm looking forward to buying my kids LEGOs. The little bricks so they can build things. Anything they can think of. And I'm a bit ashamed of the LEGO company for their marketing schemes in the last few decades. No imitation Barbie "Friends," no war toy movie knock-offs. Remember the sound of running your fingers through the bins of the LEGO bricks as you looked for just the right piece? Remember the castles? Remember the cities? Remember the inner debates about if we should make a particular tower taller or wider?

If you'd like to watch some incredibly well researched critique of this whole business, here's a couple of posts from Feminist Frequency. She's a little ranty at times, but she raises incredibly telling examples and points out distressing trends in the LEGO industry which sadly cross over into a lot of the marketing for kids.

Slaughter of the Innocents

For advent, my housemates and I are fasting electric lights, and are just using candles and now, string lights from our tree. It has been inconvenient and troublesome, exhausting to prepare our lunches by candlelight in the early morning, but fasting doesn't seem worth it if it isn't hard, so I am glad we're sticking with it. While I should probably talk some more about candles and all they can mean again another time, today I found out of the tragedies in Connecticut, and I realized how little I was considering the darkness of this world, and our need for Christ and his light. 

If you haven't heard this news, go read it or look at this incredibly powerful collection of images from the NYTimes.  http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/12/14/nyregion/20121215_SHOOTING_GOBIG.html?ref=nyregion#1 I like to think we can shelter children from some of the horrors of this world. The other day in the kids section at work, a little girl picked up a copy of the book, The Man Who walked between the Towers and took it to her mom, who read it to her. At the end of the story, the book mentions that even though the twin towers aren't there anymore, the story of the man who tightroped between them makes the memory of them live bright. And the little girl asked, "why did they move them?" Her mom just told her they didn't move them, and that they weren't there any more, and that they could talk about it more when she was older. I forget that children have been born and lived their whole lives since that tragedy, born to lives with their own tragedies to meet, and griefs to deal with. It breaks my heart to think of kids this girl's age seeing their friends die, and siblings and parents and families all ripped apart with death. 

Death so close to Christmas too, when we think of people as being more than ever our brothers and sisters, and sing of peace on earth, and goodwill to men. I forget how much death is a part of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of the Son of God, who's mission on this earth was to die for our sins. "Nails, spear, shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you" we sing in church, and T. S. Eliot, in his poem about the Magi writes about the similarities between birth and death. The narrator of the poem says after the journey,

"All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death."

And in the Bible itself, the birth of Jesus paired with the slaughter of the innocents, as Herod killed any child that might rival his station as king of the Jews. So even as our tracks of Handel sing out, "Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people" we can read of the mothers whose childen were murdered, and the sounds of "weeping and lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." I don't know what to say to this. So I sit. In the darkness of my living room. Praying for everyone effected. Waiting for the light.

Food. And its complexities.

Growing up I had a pretty healthy relationship with food. I think Rochester is a really good place for people who like food, Wegmans being an exceptionally nice grocery store, and the Rochester Public Market being one of the oldest and best loved in the country. Some of my favorite memories of growing up involve chopping vegetables for dinner while my mom or brother read books outloud, or getting basket after basket of peaches or sweet corn or red peppers to can or freeze. At my best friends-the Kennedys'-house I learned how to make a consistently excellent white sauce, how to caramelize onions and how to bake oatmeal bread. My favorite food growing up wasn't french fries or jello (we only had jello at church dinners) but my mom's tomato soup, which does not in any way resemble Campbell's, being packed full of potatoes, vegetables and ground turkey, often eaten with fresh bread. Food was a nice part of my world, and I was glad to know how to make it, liked eating it, and felt like it was one of the simple, good, parts of life.

Events over the last several years shook up my ideas and feelings about food. Many of my close friends have become vegetarians or vegans out of strong moral convictions. One of my closest friends developed an eating disorder, family members have had some serious medical issues and my parents went on a "separate your starches from your proteins" diet which made me sad and angry and other feelings I didn't know what to name. Is it weird to grieve for my mom no longer making "my mom's tomato soup" because with potatoes and turkey it doesn't fit their diet? Add into that a discovery of many of my friends with a plethora of food allergies including a couple of friends with celiac. My fiance went through a grueling nine month allergy identification diet in which he could eat very, very few things besides vegetables, most fruits and rice and potatoes. We got through it, but it was tough, and now his short list of allergies (including eggs and wheat) seems easy to handle. With all of these climactic food changes in the lives of people around me, I started noticing what everyone around me was eating. I watched the PEGs choose food at the cafeteria. I learned to make tex-mex breakfast foods from my friends from Texas, and I tried lots of things at our remarkably varied (and often excellent) cafeteria.

Now with all of that at my back, I and my housemates are cooking for ourselves three meals a day, and there are so many decisions. Decisions before we grocery shop. Decisions before we cook. I'm not sure what to do with them all. I recently read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's staggeringly good, and focuses around the question, "what should we have for dinner?" looking at food in our culture, on our dinner plates, and through history. I read it almost entirely while eating my lunches at work, which is not an experience I recommend, though I wholeheartedly encourage you to read it. Pollan writes winsomely, expertly and with feeling about topics which would in other hands seem bland. As he writes it, corn is a tragic hero, mushrooms radiate mystery and organic paradises leave much to be desired. He doesn't answer the question, doesn't say, "this is what you must do" but tells the stories of our food where it comes from and what does into it, and suggests that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's what we've been doing in our apartment. It's been a joy to make all the soups and the curries, the salads and the breads and the muffins. We've had some meals which were real flops, some meals which were not healthy (Guy Faulks Day dinner was fish fingers and sweet potato fries), but mostly I've been really proud of us. Many of our most delicious recipes so far have come from the Moosewood Family Restaurant cookbooks. The sweet potato-apple-chipotle soup is a thing of beauty, and their chili-fest chili was pretty delicious also. Their recipes are all vegetarian, many of them vegan. It's been really nice to bring food to work in tupperwares and eat home cooked food I made myself or made by one of my lovely housemates. It's been nice having ownership over my food, and it's been nice to share it with others. I think that's my favorite part of food.

One of the people I look up to the most is one of the women who TAed us when we were 1st year honors kids in London. She said one day, "Isn't it wonderful that we have to eat? That we have to stop working and sit and feed ourselves, and hopefully with other people." It was a blessing in college (when the food was just there for us) and is still a blessing, every day to be able to eat. To have the means to purchase and prepare food. And to enjoy it with friends, and this week, family.

Adventures at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival

So what is a sheep and wool festival and what makes it wonderful? It's the gathering of hundreds of vendors of yarn and wool and related products and animals and people come and buy yarn. One can also come to buy spinning wheels and wool to spin, or drop spindles and dyes or the animals themselves. There is sheep shearing and there are sheep dog events (like in the movie Babe!) and there are textile weavers and basket weavers and leather workers and potters and so many people who work with their hands. And though there are many things which made this weekend at rhinebeck wonderful, I think I can scoop up most of my delight into three big straggly categories.

The weekend was wonderful because it was one enormous sensory overload. If all we had done that weekend was travel to Rheinbeck and go hiking we would have had a beautiful weekend. It could not have been more beautiful weather, out in the countryside of the northeast, through rolling hills and valleys covered with trees at their peak of color. But once we got into the festival we went through shop after shop of yarns in the most beautiful colors. Every time I thought I'd found a favorite ship I'd find another with even more beautiful combinations of colors. The picture above is from Briar Rose Fibers, a wonderful shop with staggeringly beautiful yarn. You might be able to get an idea from the pictures, but it is not the same as being there in person because in person you can touch the yarn. My hands are still happy from the memory of running my hands through baby Alpaca and Cashmere, though merino wool and silk and bamboo, and through lambswool. It's such a treat to just touch these things, but even more of a treat to be able to buy some and take it home with me.

The second great joy of the weekend was just the exposure to such a high concentration of skill. Last year at a yarn shop in Princeton I overheard a conversation between the store owner and a pattern designer about what sort of patterns she should be producing. They decided the safe choice was to stick with very simple patterns because so few people have the skill to do anything more complex. It made me sad to think that the level of skill in textile arts is falling, that maybe we're loosing the skills our grandmothers might have had and that maybe we won't be able to get them back. A weekend at Rheinbeck was the sweetest antidote to these thoughts. Not only did I see people everywhere wearing gorgeous, complex hand knits, I got to see people exhibiting phenomenal skills in all areas of textile design and production. At a stall selling lace weight yarns and threads, I saw a whole display of wedding ring shawls, lacework knit with such fine thread and so airy a design that you could pull the whole shawl through a wedding band. They were for sale, at about $700 a piece, which seems like a steal when you start counting the hours that went into that piece of artistry. I found a picture of a wedding ring shawl online to give you an idea, but the ones on display were even more lovely than the one above.


The part of the weekend making my the most grateful right now is that people I went with. Owen insisted I come with him and his mom, aunt and cousin even though I had been scheduled for work, so I asked and got Saturday off. So I got to meet my aunt and cousin-to-be, and got to spend more time with my soon to be mother-in-law, and it was wonderful. It made me think what a familial thing knitting is. Lots of people learn from their mothers or grandmothers, and when people buy yarn they buy it to make hats or sweaters for their children or husbands or girlfriends as much as for themselves. Over meals Owen's mom and aunt kept talking about their mom, the sweaters she would knit (with the tight neckbands) and how much she would have enjoyed a festival like this. And yet again I was humbled and glad to get to wear the ring she left for "Owen's bride." One of the sweetest moments of the weekend was over breakfast when Owen's aunt said how nice it was to see her mom's ring on my hand. All weekend I was just showered with generosity, some financial ("it would make me very happy to buy that yarn for you") some knowledgeable (as I asked many questions about gauge and planning for patterns) and lots of generosity of heart as women I'd never met continued to exclaim how glad they were to meet me or would just announce to each other, "I like Clara so much" and it is a joy to be so welcomed into a family.

I am realizing how much I could be networking online over textile arts and over books, and these seem like worthwhile things, but I'm not sure. Right now I'm selling a lot of my time at $10/hour, and the time I have left over is a little precious to me, and though in the long run I think I would appreciate being connected to all the people I know who knit over Ravelry and I would like to be able to use GoodReads as a way of sharing my thoughts and recommendations about books,  I also like to just be with my housemates in the evenings, or communicate more directly with friends I love.