Behind the Surface

It was going to be the Easter dish of my greatest Instagram fantasies.   I was going to use Heather Ardnt Anderson’s lamb shank and farro recipe except I was going to give it more of a Levantine twist. I would replace the farro with freekeh , a smoked, unripe rubbed/cracked wheat popular in the Levant, North Africa, and Turkiye. And since I love chickpeas, I’d add those too, making it reminiscent of qidreh , the Palestinian lamb shank dish I’ve made for the last two Easters. Since the assortment of spices called for in the recipe was already part way there, I would swap them out for advieh e-polo (Persian rice seasoning—fresh ground myself). Plus I still had a cup or two of leftover frozen lamb stock to which I had originally added too much mastic (along with baharat, the levantine spice mixture). Adding frozen vegetable stock to meet the four cups called for in the recipe would dilute that lamb stock a bit but still give a hint of something otherworldly. The whole thing would be ...

(Workshop of Andrej Rublëv, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Note: I first published this post twenty years ago today. While obviously I was not able to attend today's Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation in person (and only managed about twenty minutes of an online service this morning before life forced me to deal with more mundane matters), I couldn't help but think of this old post since I'm actually trying to observe Lent for the first time in many years. My faith has changed during these two decades. Reading this now, there is still the faint whiff of the new convert five years after leaving Evangelicalism for Byzantine-rite Catholicism. I would write this differently today. But only slightly so.  It feels odd not to be fasting on Great and Holy Friday. But, it's one of those once in a lifetime occurrences when the Feast of the Annunciation falls on this somber day. And in the Eastern Church, we don't move dates. So, tonight we commemorated ...

Burningword Literary Journal : “Not Another Tragic Fattie” In sixth grade, a boy tried to make fun of me for being fat. It did not go as he expected. Instead, he was the one who ended up being marginalized. I’ve always remembered it over the years as him being ostracized because he made fun of me. But I suspect I was mixing up correlation with causation. It’s likely he was also a dick to others. So the class decided collectively, if unconsciously, fuck that asshole . I wanted to write about this memory to push back on the idea that being fat is always tragic. That the fat kid is always bullied and miserable. Most memoirs and novels I’ve read with fat characters focus on fatness as the result of trauma (overeating to create a larger, protected body) and/or the trigger of trauma (childhood bullying). But sometimes one is just fat. It’s not positive and beautiful. It’s not repulsive and wretched. It just is. Like being short . Or neurodivergent . Or having red hair .   There was one o...

  I’m probably typical among GenXers in learning to bake via the Toll House cookies recipe on the back of the harvest yellow package of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. I have a vague memory of my mom and I in our kitchen that seemed tiny even to my six-year-old self, her showing me how to crack eggs, measure flour, and spatula the cookies off our blotchy brown cookie sheet. But as with so many things when it came to my mother, I was left to my own devices soon afterward. Which has given my kitchen practice a bit of a FAFO flavor—making it all the more fun. “There is no room for imagination in cookery,” says Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables . “You have to follow the rules…” Ah, but once you know the rules, oh the scope for the imagination! And an ineffable but relatively quick sense of satisfaction at creating something delicious and maybe even beautiful with your own two hands.  This started as a basic oatmeal raisin cookie recipe from my old Better Homes and Gardens co...

(Silly blueberry bush, it's January!)     It is not uncommon to have a break from the seemingly interminable Portland rain in mid to late January. After months of dim, gray-white skies, the sun feels almost aggressive, with a glare that is blindness in the afternoon even as we all luxuriate in its heart’s heat. Sometimes we even get temperatures in the upper 50s, teasing the bulbs with spring only for the most gullible daffodils—or blueberries (such as mine above)—to bloom and then die in a February cold snap.  Between melting and freezing, my own soul’s sap is quivering with a tentative spring. Though at 53 years old I’m more in the autumnal time of life rather than winter. Still, a spring time out of time’s covenant. My pedometer may continue reading only 300-400 steps/day (especially since starting the Estradiol patch in August 2024), but I seem to be doing more with those steps. A bit more cooking in the kitchen. A bit more trimming and planting in the garden. An...

Why, hello there. It’s been awhile. Such a long while that you’re not even here (yet?). It’s been over a decade, after all. A lot has changed on ye old Internet.  Ah, but not Blogger. It’s still here and almost the same as it was when I started blogging in 2004. Sure, like any long-neglected place it's required a bit of cleaning up.  Changing the template. Getting rid of sidebars full of dead links. Reacquainting myself with the interface (now including such luxuries as a function to view the site in both desktop and phone view).  But, like, don’t you know all the cool kids are on Substack now (and the even cooler kids are on Ghost and beehiiv)? Yep. I’m aware. My inbox is a daily gauntlet of newsletter posts. And that’s all from just the free tiers.  But, like, don’t you wanna make money from your writing like they do?  Nope. Not unless I can make mountains of the stuff. And we all know that almost no writer is doing that .  Here’s the deal. I’m sick . Lik...

No, I'm not returning to blogging. At least not yet. I'm still far too ill (though slightly better than I was when last I posted). But I have been doing a little housekeeping off and on over the last year. Several months ago I put every one of the 500+ posts into draft status until I had time to sort through them all and decide what I might want to keep. More recently I chose to return to published status many of my "greatest hits" so that anyone new stopping by had an idea of what this blog -- and me, to some extent -- have been about. A couple of posts were re-published as if I had only just published them rather than simply returned them to the state in which they had already been, perhaps causing some confusion with RSS feeds.  I do apologize.  Most of all, I hope you have been well, dear reader. I have missed you and hope I may return soon.