Letters from a Small State » Food and Drink

Dirty Face

Elizabeth — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 02:17:07 +0000

Eating means making
Mess to small
People
And to some of them
Sticky marshmallow
Becoming
Hand spider web
Is the reason.

Day 7, A River of Stones

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#reverb10 Day 28: Achieve is a Dirty Word.

Everyone Eats the Gummy Worm

Elizabeth — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:55:53 +0000

I'm having steamed fish and broccoli for lunch

Here’s my Zen meets Don Draper assessment of life: Everyone Eats the Gummy Worm.

I’m thinking about this, because I’m getting sort of a mish-mash of people on my Twitter Feed with no organization at all. Yes, I know there are list-y things, but I am not where I can use those to my (diss-)advantage yet.

SO, there’s @Zen_Habits comingling with @DonDrapersLiver… what the hell is wrong with this picture?

What Does it All Mean?!

Hmmm well…

Maybe it’s a little bit like killing the buddha on the road when you meet him, and then going to the bar afterward to ponder the consequences. Which then leads to getting so drunk you forget where you parked the car, so you let a really hot guy drive you home and make out with him in front of your house until your Mom comes out and pounds on the window and says “Where the hell is the car?!” and you pull away from the handsome redhead and suddenly think:

“Wasn’t I 40-years-old and in India at the beginning of this story?”

Then, of course, other questions follow

Why am I so human? Did I ever actually READ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” or did my husband just talk about it a lot? Why am I so interested in what in your closet today, you supremely wonderful, semi-famous-y other normal person?

Poor Buddha. He had no idea I was coming, that I bludgeoned him with that thrift store andiron, and that afterward I slugged back that unworthy bourbon, and and cheated on my guru.

My Twitter feed prompts me into such trouble. It is a rambly-pambly edible metaphor of who I dream of being, along with the hauntings of my distracted life. I love both parts of that life so much. I love consuming the beany fiber of daily inspirations and rah-rahs that spur me to action, reminding me I’m GOOD!

But at the same time, I roll my tongue luxuriously over the wriggling sweet candy of black humor, word play, exhaustion and personal angst that TASTE so good.

Handily, It’s a also great place to grab a pile of life coaches and to stare into their beatific smiles. I love them for that.

But I crave, too, the rolling-rumbling beer bellies and grease-slick smirks. I am not going to eat quinoa (I don’t know how to pronounce it yet) at every meal, even if I lie to you and say I will.

Yeah, I crave black beans on Tuesdays, with tortillas and a margarita and time with Tammy.

But I like dessert. I like crunchy sugar worms that no self-respecting carp would ever fall for.

Shouldn’t we all?

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Airline Food

Elizabeth — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:10:37 +0000

This Guest Post is by author and Zen Buddhist Karen Maezen Miller.

I asked her to write her after meeting her via Twitter and seeing a kind of half-hidden beauty and bare truth in her writing.

Airline Food

I am traveling across country today. Not quite across the country, but in a hopscotch route over five states in six hours with a breakneck plane change to deliver me from Los Angeles to Kansas City at the lowest price I still can’t afford.

The first leg of the flight took off late, and to the indignities inflicted – sweltering slow lines, humorless scowls, foul air and bare feet – I fear the worst will be yet come. The peanuts they are about to hand out won’t compensate, but I’ll take them. I’ll take them the way we take everything these days: in defeat.

This is how far we’ve fallen.

I used to know a man who flew frequently and strictly first class. This was in the days of first class. Like the man himself, his style of comportment seems now to have belonged to the lost age of American elegance.

He was highly placed in an industry that produced a reputable, durable and glamorous product: the automobile. He worked alongside icons of American ingenuity and leadership. His fine suits adorned. His silvery hair crowned. His shoes were supple and unscuffed. He appeared in all ways to have arrived at an invincible upper echelon.

Among his innumerable successes, he bragged of one thing: he had kept his weight within two pounds of what he had weighed when he graduated from Harvard Business School 30 years earlier. He lived in an Ivy League world, to be sure, so privilege itself wasn’t his point. The point was how you conveyed it.

He attributed his trim bearing to one rigor: he never ate airplane food. Given the hours he spent flying, this amounted to a significant restriction in caloric mediocrity.

I knew him well enough to see that his stylings camouflaged one weakness – a limp. Childhood polio had left one leg laggardly. He compensated for the half-skip with buoyant self-assurance.

We’re on the last leg of our trip now, having passed through a desert hub thick with delayed and dislocated travelers.

Flights late, passengers torpid, everyone glued to their chairs and devices. They eat pizza and chili dogs, frozen yogurt and French fries, because there is no more airplane food.

There is no elegance, no invincibility, no buoyant self-assurance. Across this country, we are falling, falling, and there is only the sad shame of our undisguised limp.

***

Karen Maezen Miller is a Zen Buddhist priest and the author of two books, Momma Zen and Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life. She blogs regularly on her website, www.karenmaezenmiller.com, and for the Huffington Post.

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Emotional Eating Happens

Elizabeth — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:00:43 +0000

The #reverb10 prompt for today is about “soul food” which to me has always directly translated into “comfort food.”

And who can speak more about the extensive need for comfort food than Colin and I?

Colin and I are wrapping up YEAR 2 of ” Creme-Filled Uncertainty” with a big sidedish of “Deep Fried Instability.” We like to garnish our days, as I have mentioned before, with a tangy relish of Denial.

At the end of the day, however, when the house is quiet and we’ve laid down our arms on the battlefield once again with sibling rivalries and beating back Princess and Iron Man useless plastic crap, we inevitably comfort our emotional wounds like people have done for centuries.

With food.

In particular, I myself — no longer getting to go OUT for buffalo wings and now being the goddess of fruits and veggies, must be a good example myself — love to partake in a little bowl of Pennsylvania Dutch treat: Snyder’s of Hanover Buffalo Wing flavored pretzel pieces.

I tried them once, and two years later I have not looked back.

Colin has other snack-hour favorites, and when we have guests, he will even do the complicated and special process of making real buttered popcorn for them. Which is treat that we share with the rest of the family once in a while, on movie night.

But, for the two of us, the sanctity of our down time has been marked by an opportunity to go blindly into the snack cupboard, and to come out sighing in relief.

We have plans to wean ourselves from this habit over the new year and I am confident we will. For the time being, however, as we walk on our path of questionable circumstance, we aren’t giving ourselves too hard a time over a little comfort food therapy.

This post was part of #reverb10, and the prompt was Soul food. What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul? (Thanks to author Elise Marie Collins)

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Parties: Math Made Fun!

Elizabeth — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:37:31 +0000

Day 9, #reverb 10: Party.What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? (Thanks, Shauna Reid)

Here’s the best party advice I ever learned:
Never –ever– hang your invite up on a wall.

Parties are simple mathematical equations. They are algebra.

On one side of the = sign is everything you need for the party:

alcohol
friends
alcohol
food
streamers and noise makers and kebabs and funny hats and chairs
tequila.

And on the OTHER SIDE of the equals sign is your future as a popular human being, covered up in a sparkly wrap of flimsy self-worth.

Here’s some geometry for you, to further understand what I mean.

IF you just let any random nincompoop show up, THEN the most unpredictable group of discordant ne’er-do-wells will undoubtedly come, hauling behind them a pony keg and a parade of perfectly coiffed mullets.

And everyone else will be at Applebees.

So, IF you hang your invite on a wall, THEN the party will actually be at Applebees. Where you will not be.

Here’s the second best piece of party advice I ever got:

“B.Y.O.B.” is for amateurs.

Of course people might bring you a bottle of wine, or have their own favorite beer they want to cradle on their lap and not share with anyone (true story. He really did hold the 4-pack in his lap! And it was Keystone Light!).

But guests shouldn’t have to come with booze in hand. Arriving at a party should be worry-free, where guests perch at the precipice of an evening, ready to pour themselves into relaxation and slide down into a happily mysterious night.

Guests SHOULD have the joy of rifling through your leftovers in the fridge to find the last bottle of microbrew they’d never tried before.

Or better yet, they should come rushing over early, just to slurp down the annual white sangria garnished with celery, which you only make on the occasion your Arbor Day Smash Up.

My gay friend, Mike, was the Yoda of parties for me when we were roomies. He taught me the secrets. We were pretty poor (I was working at Chi Chi’s for extra cash), but I saw how the investment paid off. A quality party needs the “guest” factor: with every guest feeling like the party arrives when they do. They arrive thinking:

This is going to be fun. The guests are going to hand-picked. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I know I don’t have to deliver it. I only have to deliver my amazing self.

This Year’s Main Event…
So, since Shauna asked, I didn’t really go to any AMAZING parties that didn’t involve (headache commencing) goodie bags and bounce castles this year. Most were low-key affairs.

In July, we did host one fun event. It was a 2nd annual torch-lit folk concert fundraiser. More people showed this year than last. Colin’s pancetta-wrapped grilled shrimp (just hand-wrap big prawns in thin pancetta, dunk in olive oil, season, and grill. The bacon melts into the shrimp and “disappears”) sent waves of swooning guests back to the food table repeatedly.

And naturally bug spray was made freely available.

For now, I guess I am needing more low-key than PARRR-TEE!

The best time, for me as a guest, was in Maine, at a lake’s sandy cove with Ellen and Peter and their boys. It wasn’t a party: more like gathering of people who love our family and are happy to see us — ALL of us — and ready to give Colin and I some peace and tranquility in a very beautiful place.

That, to me right now, is the perfect party.

Speaking of parties, this post is part of a daily writing project called #reverb10. Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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It Takes a (Christmas) Village?

Elizabeth — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:49:13 +0000

#Reverb Day 6 Prompt: Make: What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Thanks, Gretchen Rubin)

I made cookies (seen pictured), 500 or so of them for a church fundraiser. Well, actually I just rolled and cut and baked them, and shopped for the ingredients. So I didn’t make ALL of them, start to finish. I had help:

1. Anna made the dough from my great-grandmother’s recipe.

2. Linda made the icing, many shades.

3. Jeff and Diane set up the tables.

4. Stephanie spooned the nonpareils into her mouth.

5. Pat made the Stars of David.

6. Ellen made the striped mittens.

7. Becca made the sprinkle mountain.

8. MANY other friends iced and frosted and decorated, oh my.

Which leads me to a more pressing bell that has been ringing in my head recently:

Doesn’t it really take a village? Why are we always waving flags and singing songs for independence, when activities seem to come to conclusion more pleasantly with help and company?

Case in point: #Reverb10. Yes, I do blog anyway. Sure, I am capable of weaving my own thoughts and posting them at regular intervals.

But isn’t gathering like (and sometimes unlike) minds to convene on a concept so much more valuable? When we think in tandem, our ideas multiply exponentially.

So the “village” isn’t a place to agree or to rub each others’ metaphorical egos. The village is a place of our own making, where we feel safe to share our scariest and most magical selves. It’s where we live– cry, hide, and grow.

And, for me, the best part about the village is that it is filled with people who help me FINISH THINGS!

You can #reverb10, too! It’s not too late! Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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Zen and the Art of Tedium

Elizabeth — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:51:37 +0000

A conversation about boredom at Scoutie Girl yesterday got me thinking again about the daily tasks that constitute part of the “work” of my life.

Not the least of these is feeding a family of six. Not the worst of them is laundry. Some I despise for no particular reason, like emptying the dishwasher. Whenever my mom comes to visit, she gets up early and empties it for me. She says it is easy to put things away in my kitchen: I organize mine just the same way she organized hers.

The work of daily life is the work I often do on “autopilot”, as Tara notes. It can be quite mindless and tedious and runs in a never-ending cycle.

Taking Tedium to Heart

One of my favorite and most-thumbed books in my house (and that is saying something) is Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Daily Life. It’s filled with quotes and photos of joyful life.

But most of all it is a gentle redirection: away from autopilot and toward a more mindful experience of life, regardless of the task.

The chapter on “Work” defines then deconstructs the Protestant work ethic. This chapter alone will give so many of you the language to define your own angst and guilt related to your work experience. It reminds us that the Calvinstic theology that our founding fathers subscribed to “held that only a certain number of people in the world are destined to be saved or chosen by God.”

“Although there was no way to tell for sure whether you were part of the elect, you COULD tell if you were not. Any signs of sloth, lack of prudence and above all lack of worldly success were sure signs that you were not of the chosen.”

– from “Chop Wood, Carry Water”

It is easy to see how we fall into the trap of dissatisfaction with our lives and our work– whatever that may be — if our ultimate motivation is only to be driven by someone else’s definition of success.

Tara’s point about achieving “depth of work” aligns with the authors’ point here about “right livelihood”: Finding work that ignites passion, allows us to constantly learn, attaches us meaningfully to a community, and is right for us will creates a space of mindfulness. Ironically, it will ultimately achieve what the Calvinists sought as well: a committed work ethic.

Regarding the Dishwasher

Within the scope of all work, of course, there seems there are tasks we all dislike. For me, this is when be able to achieve mindfulness is MOST useful. By seeing the bigger picture of my family — and the reasons for why I chose to be a mother — I can more easily fulfill the small duties related to that role.

Tip: To be more mindful, personally, I use ujjayi breathing, a technique I learned in yoga. It’s hard to spell, but not hard to learn. I also quickly adjust my posture to return to mountain pose alignment. Both are quick physical reminders for a more mindful moment, especially during those less meaningful tasks that fill our days.

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Where the Wild Onion Grows

Elizabeth — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:42:39 +0000

Wild onions grow everywhere here. I smell them through the moon roof on those particular weekend days when men are at home in their kingdom yards, busy mowing alone and in harmony.

If I made this up, forgive me, but I think maybe someone told me that a long time ago this entire area was once an onion farm.

No houses rubbing shoulders. No air-filled cauldrons with polyester cats spinning around them in the Halloween evenings.

This would have been in the brush of time before the acorns and maple helicopters conspired to take over and fill every crevice. This would have been when men broke rocks out of the earth and stacked them on eyeballed boundary lines between theirs and another’s.

This would have been when men were men by the time acne spread across their cheek and their work took them no further than the back 40.

Wild Again

The onions made themselves at home. No matter the weather or the plantings. No matter the earth gutted by building materials and cement foundations. The bulbs waited, still, in the warm earth and recovered the long winter.

Onions leaned against the crowding fescue. Onions disheartened by chem-green assaults but never dessicated.

The onion, once a domesticated spirit, reveals itself every year with pungent scent to greet the New England winds. Wild and untamed.

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On Seeming Effortless

Elizabeth — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:54:33 +0000

Cinnamon rolls have to be one of my favorite foods.

Over at Pioneer Woman this morning I was drooling at her recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookie Sweet Rolls. The recipe even starts from the yeast, and not from a blue can you tear paper off of and bang on the counter’s edge.

Man, I like Ree’s blog almost as much as I like the idea of making those rolls for myself and my family. I mean, look at the amount of effort it took to take the photos of that process. That is thoughtful attention to detail.

I reckon I can see why Ree gets hundreds of comments on her blog… she does good work and she makes it look so effortless. Usually that is the sort of person I want to have killed, but for some reason, Pioneer Woman speaks to my soul. I mean, have you seen the way she treats a toothpaste tube?

Anyway, we all have some skill like that. That something we twiddle away at mindlessly while other people stare helplessly, longingly. Playing the guitar, knitting a sweater, downshifting into third.

Just this morning, when I am craving a hot sweet roll, Ree has got one over on everybody.

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A Portrait of Modern American Feminism

Elizabeth — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:23:32 +0000

A Guest Post by Karin Kuczynski-Holmgren

It’s a small cottage on the water in Bridgeport, Conn., a peaceful setting despite the overgrown parking lot and chainlink fence that surrounds it.

Just beyond the rows of parked Hondas and Priuses, the harbor twinkles with reflected factory lights. This vegetarian restaurant is called Bloodroot, run by a collective of women, and I haven’t been here since high school, with a Ms magazine and a paperback collection of essays by Dworkin, Faludi, Steinem, Pagila, Roiphe in my backpack.

In 15 years, the décor hasn’t changed. The cobwebs in the rafters look familiar. Gathered around the table, this could be a staging ground for revolution, political intrigue, or at the very least, serious conversation. Shelves in the bookstore reveal a specialty niche: feminist, new age, multiculturalism, gender studies.

No filler music. The windows are open to let in the autumn sounds and breezes.

Small groups of people sit together under the beamed ceiling, grasping hands across the table, sipping water or wine. A gray-braided sprite greets us at the door and takes our order. Menus are handwritten on the walls; you need to walk the floor to decide what to order.

“No waitresses,” the owner says. “Just listen for your order to be called. ”

And bus your own table. Women may cook here, but there’s no serving. We order– escarole soup, green salad, and a local pinot grigio– then pay, cash preferred. We spot our friend, Annie – leaving soon for California – and join her, wishing for her career in acupuncture.

Portraits of women look out from the walls in black and whites or sepia tones. They gaze straight and determined into the camera, carved jawlines and a weariness around their eyes. You see that photographs taken when work lasted sun-up to sundown. At Bloodroot, customers are strengthened by its sense of community, built on the backs of these women, and fortified by a whole, vegetarian meal.

Work Done, and Not Done

The kitchen workers talk over quinoa, butternut squash, and farm-to-table salad on mismatched plates. They were all over 50 years old. How much has changed in the socio-political space for women since this place opened? Did this tiny restaurant influence their lives, the lives of their loves ones, the local political climate? Surely, they could measure the changes – in milestone laws, events and even in the crowd of customers on a Wednesday night. How did their opinions change with time?

Here sits the old guard, original revolutionaries and their stew. What are they thinking? Are they uplifted by Connecticut’s civil union passage? Did they cheer when women governors were elected? Now women surpass men in sheer numbers at undergraduate colleges. Girl Power succeeded against Raising Cain, right?

The women seemed subdued.

My thoughts turn to my friends at the table. Out of the group, only 4 of us were under 35. The rest, older. I didn’t see any young people in this restaurant. Did they know about this place? Did it not interest them, with the odd location and old school feel? They have no Facebook page or Twitter account; just a barebones, 90’s-style website. They aren’t working to attract a younger crowd. And frankly neither is Feminism The Concept.

Old School Feminism has given me and my generation choices. Many choices. Overwhelming choices – from education to career, to have children or not, to choose and union with any partner. To rise up, sometimes only to a glass ceiling, but slowly, slowly, it’s changing.

But what is Feminism The Concept today? Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Hill. Are these the modern feminists and role models? Who are the modern feminists?

Old school feminists complain that modern women and young girls have forgotten the hard work and efforts of the prior generation to lift us up from the Mad Men working world. We don’t pay due homage when we wear belly-baring shirts and Jimmy Choos. They expected not only gratefulness, but someone to take the torch and carry on.

Is there anyone to do this?

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