May 18, 2010
Given what a cold and damp Spring it has been here is a recipe that I have been perfecting to accompany the drizzlyevenings when you need something warm and nourishing to take the chill off! Enjoy.

RED LENTIL SOUP WITH GROUND PEPPERCORNS, CUMIN AND SWEET RED PEPPER

Makes 6- 8 generous servings
3 T olive oil
1 lg onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, finely chopped (I like lots of veggies in this soup)
1-2 carrots, finely chopped
3 C red lentils (can use French lentils instead)
1 sweet red pepper, finely chopped
50 + peppercorns, ground, add more if you like peppery flavor (Tellicherry are nice)
1 t cumin seed, ground (use ground cumin if yu don’t have seeds)
1 t turmeric
½ t or more to taste, crushed red pepper
3/4 C chopped cilantro
8-10 C chicken broth (my favorite is “Better Than Boullion” brand)
2-3 cloves garlic, finely minced

In a large pot or dutch oven sauté , over medium heat, onions, celery, carrots in 2 T olive oil until softened, (5-8 mins). Add the garlic at the end of the sauté.

Add the rinsed lentils and chicken broth. Cook 30 -40 minutes (longer if you like or need) uncovered over medium- low heat, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, grind the perppercorns, cumin seed and crushed red pepper in a coffee grinder. Heat a small sauté pan and add the remaining T of olive oil. Add the ground spices and raost until fragrant and yet not burned. Add the spices, chopped sweet red pepper and turmeric to the simmering lentils.

Continue to cook adding the cilantro about 5 mnutes before serving.
Blend 1/3 of the soup (optional) to create a creamier consistency.

ENJOY! Great for a damp, chilly early Spring or Fall evening. Excellent the next day for lunch!!

May 18, 2010

I hardly know where to begin. My last blog entry came shortly after I had arrived back home having traveled to northern Arizona, visiting Flagstaff, Navajo Country, Canyon de Chelly, and Sedona. I was all set to write about our time in Sedona…to share my impressions of a place of extraordinary beauty that I’d not visited in some 15 years.
Yet somehow, in the wake of things that have occurred since then I became stuck, thinking that my small impressions of my trip seem so minuscule in importance compared to what we are in the presence of now: the oil gush disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, executives of BP, Transocean and Haliburton falling over each other to place blame and point fingers anywhere other than their own culpability; the ongoing suffering as Haitians struggle to rebuild and reconstruct their lives, their county, their economy; the daily suicide bombings and killing of innocents in Kabul, Pakistan, Baghdad; the failed car bombing in Times Square, the perpetrator having been caught only moments before his flight was to take off from Kennedy Airport, apprehended due to of a lot of luck and some fast investigative work; the volcanic eruption in Iceland which underscored our frail vulnerability compared to the immense force of Mother Nature; the ongoing fighting and blood on the streets of Bangkok; the absence of a capacity for civil discourse which makes it seem as though our government and Washington is profoundly broken.

I could go on and on. Each morning, as I, like millions of others who wake up to listen to the morning news or read the morning paper, am met with events that can feel like we, as a culture and a civilization, are cascading out of control. I move through my days with a sense of heaviness and sadness, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, a feeling of powerlessness. It is Spring outside, the season of birth and rebirth, yet in some ways I feel I am in mourning. So I do what many others do: try to add something positive each day, something to the side of ‘light’ in the small part of the world I touch. I am reminded of the quote from Mother Teresa, when she said “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Meanwhile, in the garden it’s been a ‘herky jerky’ Spring thus far: hot summer temperatures one day, and cold and overcast the next. The blueberry bushes are setting fruit, my pea plants are waist high, the newly planted raspberry plants are doing beautifully, much to my delight. The asparagus are coming in faster than we can eat them…so I have the pleasure of giving them away. The same is true for the lettuces and spinach. Yet, last Friday, while I was not paying enough attention, the afternoon temperature rose quickly and I lost four small Japanese cucumber seedlings, fried to a crisp inside the greenhouse which I had failed to properly ventilate, and earlier in the week the night time temperatures produced an unexpected frost that nailed two peppers plants and a small zucchini plant which I had thought were safe to put in the ground. For some reason the other squash plants survived, thankfully. And thanks to a long growing season I will be able to start over again with the cucumbers. Life and death in the garden.

‘Creation Spirituality’
The last week in April I had the pleasure of attending a weekend workshop offered by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation which is located in Bethesda, Maryland. (http://www.shalem.org/ ) The guest presenter was Matthew Fox, (http://www.matthewfox.org/) a former Dominican priest who was ‘silenced’ by the Catholic Church for his 'radical writings', author of 28 books, a true visionary and proponent of “Creation Spirituality”. I had purchased a copy of Matt’s book Original Blessing in 1989, yet had never actually read it. (His idea being that we don’t come into the world with ‘original sin’, but rather ‘originally blessed’.)So I was very excited to hear what he had to say. As he spoke about our interconnected to all of nature and quoting from the mystics,theologians and Native Americans,(Meister Eckhart, Hildegard de Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Chief Joseph) and many others who believe that the Divine exists in all of creation, it suddenly occurred to me ‘so THIS is MY spirituality’. Having navigated away from the Catholic Church by the age of 13, I didn’t have a name for the beliefs I so cherished and held to so firmly, yet here, in the words of Matthew Fox and the others, was precisely what I had been cultivating through my own direct experience for the past 30 or 40 years! It was a theology with deep roots, that organized a cosmology that viewed all life as sacred, and placed human actions in it's midst, not apart from Nature, hence pointing to an ethics of behavior and choice. (My words) For me this was an epiphany and I felt so comforted and confirmed to be in such profoundly good company!

So what about that trip to Sedona? Well, very simply I was appalled, no, aghast, at the rampant development that has occurred amidst the fragile environment of the beautiful red rocks: million dollar adobe style homes built way up into the hills surrounding the rocks, a Hyatt and a Radisson ,complete with ‘water features’ lining the once scenic highway that meanders through the rocks as you come into town, downtown clogged with new construction and bumper to bumper traffic, T-shirt and ice cream concessions, and sidewalks filled with tourists. No longer a sleepy ‘new age mecca’ for those seeking the curious influence of the magnetic vortices and the sacred stillness of the rocks and canyons, Sedona has become a tourist attraction, a sad example of a lack of thoughtful planning and zoning that could have preserved something beautiful and irreplaceable. Fortunately, you can leave all that behind as you wind your way out of Sedona on Highway 89A, climbing up through White Oak Canyon, as breath taking and splendid as ever!

Next stop: ‘Camp Gone to the Dogs’, June 6-12 , 'TEDDY’ and Mary go on the road!