Bread, Wine, Salt

What do you think of when you think of oatmeal? It is sweet powdery packets mixed with boiling water, or microwaved with milk? Is it flakes cooked to thin paste on the stovetop? (Was that leading the witness?) Is it nutty, chewy wholesome steel-cut oats, finished with butter and a bit of honey, or some dried fruit? (That was definitely leading the witness.) If oatmeal makes you think of peaches and cream packets or those flakes, I humbly suggest you try the other kind. It's possible you're intimidated by it. It takes too long. It's more expensive than the flakes. You don't own a spurtle . Now, I am not an oatmeal expert. I was born in Texas, not Scotland or Ireland, and the portions of my family that were from those lovely oat-filled places moved to the mid-West of the United States and assimilated long before I was born. But I do know that not only are steel-cut oats better for you than the packets (which are really no better nutritionally than cold c...

I had to assemble enough food to hold a toddler through lunch.  It had to keep at room temperature and all fit inside one container since I am the queen of losing container parts. The wrap on the top is whole wheat with avocado inside, and the foil packet on the bottom is a peanut butter and jelly wrap which I kept isolated because I didn't know what the allergy situation was at the sitter's house today. The container is a Ziploc from Target.  I like these a lot. I present it here as part of " What's For Lunch" Wednesday. "  It's pretty typical of what goes into a packed lunch for the small folks around here, though if I were going to show you a truly typical lunch there would be mini-ravioli and mixed veggies in there.  Maybe next week.  If you have to feed small kids, or if you have to feed yourself lunch on a regular basis I recommend checking out the adorable lunches over there.  Some of them are super-simple and much, much cuter than mine.

Last week I attended a board meeting for a proposed public charter school in my neighborhood. It was quite an education, as was the chatter on the mailing list in the days that followed. The discussions had me thinking about the purpose of public education, and the importance of adding a good school to the system, even if the neighborhood school is already good. I have a lot to say on the subject, but I don't have my thoughts on schools in particular all sorted out.  So here's a piece from my personal archives (an old blog now locked away) that touches on many of the same issues. originally published 14 September 2006 Last Friday, All Things Considered offered up this commentary by Bill Harley on the budget of his small town, and how voters choose to spend their money. He focuses on the library. His thesis is that if libraries didn't already exist, we wouldn't be able to get them started now. No one would agree to pay more taxes so they could share books. Book p...

Chocolate Pie Not that unproductive is always a bad thing, mind you. I was out of town for the weekend, and without phone, internet or television. I didn't even have a chance to work in a kitchen. (I would have been baking communion bread, but there was a communication breakdown and I didn't know my services were needed. We used leftover dinner rolls instead.) I was going to bring my laptop and work on a buff and polish of an old essay from my personal archives to share with you, but I brought my sewing machine with me instead. I am more fluent with words than with thread, and my time might have been better spent at the keyboard, but I had a project that needed to be finished. (It's not finished. I keep running into problems. I'm tempted to blame the machine, but it's probably me.) So instead of something new and thought provoking I offer this, my most viewed picture on Flickr. If you Google "chocolate pie recipe" and look at images it...

On Saturday we made our annual pilgrimage to the nearest set of mountains to buy apples and pumpkins from people who have real orchards and real pumpkin patches and then have a picnic and walk in the woods. It was a gorgeous day and the woods were just right. The trail we always walk is quite short, chosen years ago by my father because it had the virtues of parking spaces, picnic tables, proper toilets and some history which could be learned, along with some ecology, via the self-guided tour sheet that is found in a little box at the trailhead. Frankly, I'm not sure how a single walk in the woods could better describe my father's requirements for a family trip. The guided tour has not changed since I was a little girl. And when the tour is relaying the history of the family who lived in those woods there isn't much in need of change. But the ecology of that little piece of woodlands has changed quite a bit in the quarter century that I've known them. The wo...

When the weather starts to turn in Autumn, I like things that are warm, and warming. I love making soup. Normally, when I say I'm making soup I mean a specific vegetable soup that requires a full afternoon of puttering around the house and occasionally tending the soup. There isn't always time for that. So I make other soups. This one has the virtue of being simple and fairly quick, assuming you have average knife skills and you know vaguely where things are in your kitchen. (I just barely meet those qualifications.) And what says Fall better than pumpkin? It's also smooth and creamy and comforting. The smooth does require blending. I use an immersion blender, which you really should put on your wish list if you don't have one, but you can use whatever soup blending technology you have available. A note on spice mixes: People Who Are Very Into Food will tell you that pre-made spice mixes are evil and you should toast and grind your own spices. And they...

There's been a lot of press about bullies lately, and the children and young adults who suffer from bullying. Sometimes we don't call the perpetrators bullies. We call them bigots, especially when the people being bullied are homosexual. Those young men weren't being bullied just because they were gay, they were being bullied because they were reduced to a single word. In the case of suicides that have been getting press recently, the word was “gay” (or maybe one of the other less attractive words for the same thing.) But the word can be different. It can be “geek” or “skinny” or “ugly” or “stupid.” When we reduce a person to a single word we dehumanize them. “Ugly” isn't a person, and “Gay” isn't a person and so it's okay to treat them as less than human. (As an aside, sometimes that word is “girl” in which a person is reduced to a word describing her gender and is therefore not interesting as anything other than the sum of her body parts as use...