A Little Bit Country

I realize I’m a bit late on the indie bandwagon but I have become quite suddenly OBSESSED with the Avett Brothers’ newest album, “I and Love and You.” (To be fair, I loved “Emotionalism” several years ago, thanks to my friend, James.)

As this whole album thrums through my workday, bringing me much joy and off-key sing-a-longs in my office, I keep finding myself hitting the “play” button over and over on this song, savoring each lovely strum and key and note. The striking lyrics resonate with the traveler in me (and the anti-hipster in me scoffs at the continual mentions of Brooklyn). And let’s be honest here, ladies, these are some seriously gorgeous, beardy banjo hunks of folk-singing lovin’.

I have also recently come to terms with my food blog obsession, which has come to a crescendo in my discovery of Pioneer Woman. This sassy, city-turned-country gal is such a compelling, funny and spunky writer, I literally spent hours on her website last night and am planning on ordering her cookbook as soon as I get paid tomorrow. I stumbled across the story of how her and her husband, a cowboy she affectionately calls Marlboro Man, met and fell in love and several hours later, snapped my laptop shut and spent the rest of my evening misty-eyed and drooling ever so lightly in the glow of this romance that is so giggle-inducing and (in her words) “hiney tingling” that it’s strange to think it’s true.

The diehard romantic and foodie that I am, I think Pioneer Woman and I could be friends — well, we could if she didn’t live in Oklahoma on a ranch and I wasn’t just some random girl in Michigan, sitting in my studio apartment, eating Chex Mix leftover from Christmas for dinner and sighing emphatically every few minutes.

Yes.
This is my life.
Welcome.

[Photo credit here.]

Hymnals + Paths

One of the many things I love about my church community is that there, gathered in the midst of an old mall where everything is stripped down and industrially bare, we often sing old hymns. I grew up as a child in a very traditional church in Ohio, with big stained glass windows and well-worn hymnals, where clapping too loudly seemed to startle cute little old ladies in hats (bless ‘em). Nearly every song we would sing would require me to mentally chase the song through all its verses, having horrid flashbacks of piano lessons as I tried to follow the notes, and I’d end up out of breath and cranky. I’d collapse in the bright orange pew, sitting next to my mother and would often proceed to fall asleep on her lap. Though hymns were a little hardcore for an eight year old, as I got older I began to appreciate their beauty and their King Jamesly-ness.

Though where I am today is elsewhere from the childhood I remember, I love the bridge those words provide between these two branches of the same tree. Whether you identify more with the ladies in the hats who prefer the solemn stained glass or you connect with someone like me who is seeking God through another path, it is unifying to know that we come together through these old songs.

This is one of my very favorites:

“His Love Can Never Fail”

I do not ask to see the way
My feet will have to tread;
But only that my soul may feed
Upon the living Bread.
‘Tis better far that I should walk
By faith close to His side;
I may not know the way I go, But oh, I know my Guide.

(Refrain)
His love can never fail, His love can never fail,
My soul is satisfied to know His love can never fail.
My soul is satisfied to know His love can never fail.

And if my feet would go astray,
They cannot, for I know
That Jesus guides my falt’ring steps,
As joyfully I go.
And tho’ I may not see His face,
My faith is strong and clear,
That in each hour of sore distress
My Savior will be near.

(Refrain)

I will not fear, tho’ darkness come
Abroad o’er all the land,
If I may only feel the touch
Of His own loving hand.

And tho’ I tremble when I think
How weak I am, and frail,
My soul is satisfied to know
His love can never fail.

(Refrain)

Words: E.S. Hall, Music: Christopher Miner

Lazy, Hazy, Crazy…But Mostly Just Lazy

The past several weeks, during my free time, I am going to openly admit that I have been a big, cushy, snuggly pile of LAZY. In the extreme stress of work and an increasingly busy shift in the everyday rhythm of my life, my free time has found me exhausted, wearing slippers and curled up in my cozy little hiccup of an apartment with movies, drinking endless pots of tea and casually finishing up a knitting project or two.

[photo source here]

Part of me feels guilty and like a big, fat time-waster.
Part of me thinks, “Who cares?”
Part of me knows that this tired/lazy combo comes skirting along every year during this point of winter and it won’t last.
Part of me feels judged by my growing pile of books that haven’t been cracked in a week or two.

I have many parts of me.
And right now, all those parts are just going to shut up and enjoy being lazy for a few more hours until it’s back to work tomorrow.

Be lazy.
It’s okay.

Divine Roasted Potatoes + Staving Off Wanderlust

So I made a goal for myself for 2010.

I don’t normally make goals but in my enthusiasm to try new things, I decided to break that habit and tentatively make one. So my first goal was a modest one: try one new recipe every week. I have cookbooks and binders and bookmark folders full of recipes that, for the most part, have lain dormant and sadly untouched. This needed to change.

So I’m kicking the habit in 2010.
And so far it’s been going well.

Last night, after an incredibly exhausting day/week at work, I came home with renewed energy at the thought of trying my new recipe of the week: Pascale’s Perfect Roasted Potatoes, courtesy of Clotilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini.

I will be honest about one thing right up front: roasted potatoes freak me out because mine rarely turn out well. I will now be honest about two more things: these were a snap to make and after my first bite, I quite nearly wept (true story) because they were so good (and because I’m nearing a point of delirious exhaustion). They were crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, golden, perfect, buttery ambrosia. It was Potato Nirvana.

And I do not exaggerate, friends.
I do not exaggerate at all.

Without further ado and with the anticipation of many “oooh!”s and “ahhhh!”s, I give you:

Pascale’s Perfect Roasted Potatoes
(originally found on Chocolate and Zucchini)

• 1.2 kilos (2 1/2 pounds) potatoes (waxy or floury — both types will work equally well) [C's Note: I used organic Yukon Golds, which gave mine an incredibly buttery flavor with zero butter]
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil or duck fat [C's Note: I used soybean oil, which worked wonderfully]
• sea salt

Serves 4 generously.

Preheat the oven to 210°C (410°F).

If your potatoes are smooth-skinned, scrub them well and peel them in alternative stripes so that strips of skin remain. If, on the other hand, the skin of your potatoes is rugged and grainy, peel it off completely (no need to scrub) then rinse the potatoes well in cold water.

Cut the potatoes into even chunks, about the size of a bite. Place them in a saucepan large enough to accommodate them, cover with cold water, and add a teaspoon coarse salt. Set over high heat, cover, bring to a low boil, then lower the heat to medium and cook for 5 minutes.

As soon as the water boils, pour the fat into a rimmed baking sheet, and place the sheet in the oven, so the fat and baking sheet will heat up.

After the 5 minutes of boiling, drain the potatoes — they will not be cooked at that point — and return them to the saucepan. Place a lid on the saucepan. Holding the lid firmly shut with both hands (the saucepan will be hot, so wear oven mitts or use dish towels), shake the saucepan vigorously for a few seconds, until the surface of the potato chunks is fuzzy; this will help the formation of a crust.

Remove the baking sheet from the oven, pour the potatoes onto the sheet, sprinkle with sea salt, and stir well to coat with the fat.

Return to the oven and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, flipping the potatoes halfway through, until cooked through (when you insert the tip of a knife in one of the pieces, it should meet no resistance), crusty, and golden. If you want a little more color on them, you can switch to grill mode for the final few minutes.

Serve immediately.

……………………….

So while reflecting and savoring these marvelous potatoes, I began wondering if there wasn’t something further to my recent enthusiasm for cooking more than normal. As I examined my thoughts (never an easy or short process), I realized that my wanderlust has been kicking up a hefty amount of dust lately. It happens, in its most severe form, this time of year, every year, mostly because of sentiment — it was this time exactly that four years ago, I stepped off a plane onto English soil and fell into the worst and most irreversible love — the love of the open road, the love of places far away, the love of movement and motion and wandering. Travel was in my blood and it would never leave.

So now, in my position of home-bound contentment and being unable to zip off for a quick vacation, I am cooking to do battle with my wanderlust. Instead of dreaming of Sunday roasts at rustic inns on the River Thames, I will make Yorkshire pudding in my kitchen (and rewatch my favorite BBC miniseries).

Trout Inn, Wolvercote, Oxfordshire

In the battle of potatoes vs. wanderlust, the score is as follows:

Spuds, 1
Antsy Pants, 0

But seriously…try these potatoes.

Thinking of Romano

“My God does not cause evil. God is not a vengeful and retributive being, waiting to strike us down; instead, God is in the very midst of this tragedy, suffering with those who are suffering. When evil strikes, it’s easy to ask, where is God? The answer is simple: God is suffering with those who are suffering.” – Jim Wallis, Sojourners

Our group in 2002 after we flew back into the States. See if you can spot me in the front row.

I’ve never been to Haiti before.

However, I did spend a week in high school on a mission trip in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti. I have been thinking back to that trip and remembering a Haitian guy I met while I was there named Romano (his first name was pronounced “Say-rah-dio” but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to spell that). He was in his early 20s (an “older man” in my eyes) and I’ll openly admit I was utterly smitten with him in that 17 year old girl kind of way. He had beautiful, glowing dark skin and a huge white smile that got me all flustered every time he beamed (which was often). He was connected with the church we were working with and immediately, our little youth group took him in as our own. With his humor, graciousness and deep, deep humility, he was soon making jokes and eating rice right alongside all of us.

He was incredibly smart, spoke four languages (French, Creole, Spanish and English) and I remember being naively stunned how someone so young, from such a poor country, could be so highly educated. He had grown up in a characteristically poverty-stricken part of Haiti and somehow had gotten the chance to go to college. He was in college in Santiago (the city we were in) at the time, studying to be a pastor. His kindness was seen in all he did, in every word he spoke and every moment he took to get to know all of us. In maturity, in love and in grace, he was worlds above and beyond most people I had ever met back home. Even though he grew up in an environment of abject poverty, he was leveraging his education, his chance to “get out,” to become a pastor so he could go back and work with his people in the middle of all their pain.

He would let me practice my French with him and try not to laugh as I botched every other word up. I would ask for hammers or talk about my family in stilted, elementary French and he would smile and encourage me. He always called me “Caro-leeeeena” and would roll the word off his tongue like a beautiful pearl. I would usually just giggle and try not to get weak at the knees and drop whatever bucket I was holding on my foot.

I haven’t thought of him in years. All I have of him is a picture we took on our work site, where I look tiny and incredibly pale next to this glorious ebony statue of a man. Today, I wondered for the first time if he is still alive.

My heart aches for my brothers and sisters in Haiti; my prayers are with them as they suffer. In my own way, so many miles away, I weep and suffer with them — for where they are, there is God. To help, you might go here or here.

Flowers + Dirt

“But I won’t regret because you can grow flowers from where dirt used to be.”
-Kate Nash, “Merry Happy”

[A lesson 2010 is already teaching me...if it was possible for years to do such a thing. There is beauty hidden within every.single.thing; a deeply organic silver lining.]

Words + Tunes

I have a little problem, cats and kittens.

I keep finding more quirky, whimsical, foodie, well-photographed, stylish, funny, radically cute blogs and my Google Reader is getting out of control. I love all these blogs so much that I hate the idea of skimming over them just because 8,000 of their cousins are impatiently in line behind them.

At some point, I will have to cut myself off. Though knowing me, that point will probably be never.

Bwah.

So here’s what I’m going to do — this won’t solve my problem but it will at least [possibly] rope you in and cause you to also have this problem. Compulsion loves company. I am going to provide you with a list of some of the blogs I’ve been tickled by the most lately. Maybe then you can get addicted too and we can complain together.

Read and be merry!

A Beautiful Mess

Chocolate and Zucchini

From Scratch

Kitchen Scraps

Smitten Kitchen

Sprouted Kitchen

Life According to Celia

Peonies and Polaroids (I may partially read her blog because she calls her readers her “chickens” and I think it’s wildly adorable)

Also, I am just really digging these three songs at this exact moment so sample these too (every activity needs a soundtrack):

Horizons

It is a new decade and as I take my first steps in 2010, my mind settles into thoughts of horizons. I look out and think what might be on my horizon in the coming year and I smile as I realize that I have no idea. I have many suppositions, of course, but in my experience, those never lead to much. I can have hopes and longings and plans but those tend to fall apart and come back together again in ways I could never imagine.

So my horizon this year is flexible, fluid and every nuanced shade of gray. In my head, it sort of reminds me of the beach scene in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” But instead of laying on ice with crazy blue hair, I am standing in the sand, barefoot, stretching my arms out into the night air, unable to feel the cold, even though I am in a place that is cool and gray. All I can feel is continually curious and engaged with this peculiar story that God continues to tell with my life. All I keep looking at is this horizon in front of me, mesmerized at all that lies between us.

I will venture a guess that everyone’s horizons are different. When I look towards mine, it is always pulling me west. So many nights, more than I can count, I will be driving, usually at dusk, and as my car moves towards a receding, fading horizon, something jumps in me to press my foot on the gas and just keep driving west until I reach the ocean. I mentally calculate if my bank account could last me ’til California and I breathe deeply as I can almost feel the sand between my toes, the salty waves spraying onto my bare legs. But in my practicality, in the life that I have chosen for now, a life in which I am happy, I still always feel a sense of sadness to reluctantly pull into my driveway.

My horizon pulls me towards the places I always want to go, places I craved even before so many that I love lived amongst them. What is it about horizons that connect to such a deep internal place? They seem magnetized poles, stuck in the ground, one after another, in a line stretching on to infinity. I don’t think I will ever be immune to the ways that mine pulls me and I can’t tell you why it is west. It has just always been that way. While I can’t explain it, I still know that even in the assured knowledge that I will never find the end, I will spend my days happily running anyway.

But the end isn’t really what’s important, anyway. The middle is the most important part and I don’t want to waste it focusing on the ending. I’m not looking for a life of endings or a life of beginnings, but a life of middles. That’s where the story lives, it’s where my story and your story are being told. When you read a really great story, it’s not usually the beginning or the end that matters so much; it’s what the characters did in the middle. It’s what they did in the tension, in the moments when everything falls apart, when they fall apart, in the parts where they succeed and fail and discover humanity and brokenness and healing. Their horizons pull them into so many places that make no sense and hold truth in their lies and sometimes feel so beyond that they don’t know if they can take it anymore. But even then, even in the deepest, blackest darkness, a horizon always holds light, even if it’s only a pinprick or a promise of a sunrise.

I am drawn to my horizon because its beauty lies in what stretches between me and it. When I look over an expanse of ocean, it’s not the hazy indigo line where sky meets water that pulls me. It’s the miles and miles of ocean in between. Those are what I love the most and what I dream of as I sadly turn the key in my car and go inside. Perhaps tonight, as I close my eyes and listen to the cars pass by on the street, that mechanic whirring might fade into a quiet lapping of ocean swells.

Happy 2010.
What does your horizon look like?

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

-Wendell Berry (1973)

Paper Cranes and Poets

I am staring at the pressed wings of a paper crane that I found in an old notebook. I trace my finger over the folds and creases of this origami bird that someone gave to me at a coffee shop once and remember. I was sitting there, reading a book, and suddenly this paper crane dropped onto my table. I looked up to see someone quickly leave and recognized that it was a guy who had been sitting a few tables away from me. I didn’t even have time to say thank you before he was gone.

There was no phone number, no ulterior motive. It was just a bird; what one of my favorite professors in college would have called a “senseless act of beauty.” I wonder now, perhaps a bit foolishly, if somehow this person knew that birds are my favorite? Probably not. But every time I run my fingers over the wings of this simple, folded piece of paper, I feel beautiful and loved. I look at it and remember that every tiny fold was done with a desire to make some small, blonde girl he didn’t know smile; some girl he couldn’t have known would find that bird three years later and would still smile.

I will always keep this bird pressed between pages scrawled with notes from Pablo Neruda and N.T. Wright, sermon notes, taped postcards and pictures that feel like so long ago. It belongs amongst the intimacy of all these lovely thoughts and truths; I will always need to look at this crane and glimpse beauty.

“The poet is in a sad state of wanting and not being able. He hears the flow of great rivers, passing by in silence, with no one else to hear their music. On his brow he feels the coolness of the reeds, swaying in their No Man’s Land. He wants to feel the dialogue of the winds that tremble in the moss…he wants to penetrate the music of the sap running in the dark silence of huge tree trunks…he wants to press his ear to the sleeping girl and understand the Morse code of her heart…he wants…but he cannot.” – Federico Garcia Lorca (1928)