Today over at Busted Halo you will find me talking about which part of liberation theology has stuck with me throughout the years. Please no one alert Gustavo Gutierrez. I’d be so embarrassed if he knew I was taking his life’s passion and work and whittling it down to my desire to eat better and not yell at my kids.
Blog
Cookbook Review: The Food You Crave
The Food You Crave from Ellie Krieger is a cookbook I’ve had for years. It was on sale at Half-Priced Books so I snagged it. I had no idea that it would become such a staple in our life. I cook at least two recipes out of it every week. This is especially a good January cookbook when we’re all trying to get on the healthy eating train.
Up until I bought this cookbook, I thought most recipes from cookbooks needed a lot of tweaking. I had used lots of Rachael Ray’s cookbooks and if I followed her recipes to the t, they usually came out bad. Not so for this book. Krieger does an amazing job constructing very solid recipes. Follow it exactly and usually it will turn out fantastic. Even the worst recipes are not bad, just bland, but I have only run across a few of those (lasanga rollups and stuffed peppers).
Even though our kids have food allergies, we’ve been able to make substitutions in her recipes without a whole lot of work. However, I haven’t tried many of the breakfasts or desserts because I just go to the Allergy Mama for that.
Where this book really shines is the sauces and the salads. I ate salad before I got this cookbook, but it was always the same buffet-type salad with iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes and sesame seeds. The salads in this book are amazing. The dressings, perfect. Because of this book, in the summer we eat salads as our entree most days because I don’t have to turn on the stove or oven and they are so darn tasty. Even the girls will chow down.
Also, what I appreciated about this book was the little tips she gave. For example: Did you know that when you drain and rinse canned beans it removes more than 40% of the sodium? You can do that for anything canned.
My favorites from this book:
- Lemon Chicken and Orzo Soup (subbed out the eggs for cornstarch)
- Cornmeal-Crusted Roasted Rataouille Tart (I have no idea how to make this dairy and egg-free, nor would I try, it is the most delicious thing I’ve ever made. No joke.)
- Crab Salad on Crisp Wonton Cups
- Grilled Thai Beef Salad (the girls eat this like it’s pizza)
- Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing (we cheat and use a little more bacon. Good winter salad.)
- All Day Breakfast Salad (Mine and B’s fav, better in the summer with good tomatoes)
- Salmon Cakes with Ginger-Sesame Sauce (I could drink this sauce – her lemon-mint tzatziki is pretty good, too)
- Fish Tacos (really it’s the Chipotle Cream that makes them so good)
- Her Honey Mustard recipe
After I had this book for a while, I went back to Half-Priced books and bought them outof copies. I’ve been giving them out as wedding gifts because I love this cookbook that much.
So click on these links and try out her food. Oh, and we’d be happy to come over and help you taste it 🙂
Authentic Moment #3: Lebron and “The” Shot
I have never seen such an unabashedly excited reaction.
Our Story: How We Met
In Oct 2013 we celebrated our five year anniversary. As we were driving back from Dallas this past Saturday from a work training, we spent most of the car ride trying to remember some of the details of our dating life. They are so fuzzy. We couldn’t even agree on when we had our first kiss. Goodness, we’ve only been married five years and we already can’t remember so many things that I hope to remember when we’re eighty. With that in mind, I decided I better get some of this down on paper because God knows what we will remember at our ten year anniversary. This is the story of how we met:
It was the summer of 2004. For the three years before that me and two of my best friends from high school had gone on a summer mission trip to a little Catholic school — St. Peter Indian Mission School
. Our home parish would load up some vans full of our youth group and drive us over to Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. There we would put on Vacation Bible School for K-8. But in 2004, our church decided to add a high school retreat for the high schoolers that lived on the reservation we served. Me and C and S were the only ones in college so they asked us to put it together and see if we could get some college guys to come along. My friend, S, who went to UT (Austin), called up Kraft and asked him if he knew of any guys in the Catholic fraternity that might be interested. Two guys signed up immediately but instead of put effort into looking for anyone else Kraft thought, hmm, free trip to AZ, why not? and he signed up, too.
Fast forward to the day before we left for St. Peter’s. Kraft and his two friends drove in to S’s house and me and C went to go meet them. Kraft tells me at the time they had no idea they were going to see anyone except S. They were not expecting to meet any new girls yet; they just thought they were going to crash at S’s house until the morning when they had to leave. We could totally tell. When C and I walked into S’s kitchen, the looks on the guys’ faces was so classic deer in the headlights. Later Kraft told me he was so embarrassed. He said that if he knew he was going to meet some girls he would have not worn what he was wearing. But we quickly all hit it off and were cracking up over some Subway sandwiches.
We all got along so so well. I remember just laughing and laughing that whole week. I didn’t feel any feelings of romance toward Brandon but I liked him right away. I loved how much he loved his faith and he was funny. Oh yeah, and I thought he was such an endearingly dorky guy. All three of the guys would sit around and argue about liturgical things.
The retreat we ran that week went great but it was exhausting. All the kids stayed with us overnight all week so we never got a break and they never, ever slept. For the whole week.
Of course the kids being high schoolers, they were very interested in our love lives and decided to take it upon themselves to play matchmaker. They paired up my other two friends with the other two guys and then they paired up Brandon and I. At this point, I still didn’t have feelings for Kraft in that way but (he told me later) he was so excited that they paired us up. The kids spent the rest of the week pretending that we were married to each other.
At some point during the week I realized that Kraft liked me. He would just always find a reason to be around me (not that any of us could get very far from one another), but he would always end up sitting next to me at lunch or during Mass or on a bus ride. I didn’t like him like that but I also wasn’t weirded out by it. I was so comfortable around him and could say anything to him. It was nice to make such a good friend so quickly.
By the end of the week, other than being exhausted, the six of us all really loved each other — not in the romanti
c sense but a true sense of camaraderie, of being family. We flew back to Houston and I’m pretty sure that Brandon made a deal with the person who was sitting next to me to move it so he could sit next to me. We talked and laughed the whole trip home and right as the plane started its descent, he finally worked up the courage to ask me….
for my AOL instant messenger screename and email address. Omigoodness, he was/is such a dork! He couldn’t even ask for my number but it was so so cute. To this day I want to make and sell shirts that say: “Hey baby, what’s your email? Let’s IM sometime.”
From My Point of Pew: 01.19.14
Readings for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
.
From Fr. Jim’s homily – he started by emphasizing how important it is to realize God’s gift to us in our very existence. We must recognize the dignity that each person has and the dignity that we have just by being human. To never ignore someone or pretend they don’t exist. That’s why he says hi to everyone he comes across as he walks down the aisles at the grocery store. Because it’s the only thing he can do, recognize that they exist and are standing right next to him. And through Baptism we are transformed from ordinary people to people of God. People that have a calling and a mission. Part of everyone’s mission is to recognize the dignity of each person. But imagine if every Christian in the world understood his/her individual vocation and then actually lived it.
Remember to join in the conversation and leave your point of pew in the comment section.
***************************************
What is “From My Point of Pew”? Read here.
Gift Ideas: Duck Books
Yes, yes, it must seem odd to be in the market for children’s books specifically about ducks but so is my life. Teresa and ducks are a match made in heaven. If, upon her first sighting of a rubber duck, she was able to walk (or even stand) and they had seen each other from across a grassy field, it would have been one of those running-in-slow-motion-until-in-each-others-embrace kinds of meetings. In fact, her first words were duck duck. So it is, I have become a bit of an expert in children’s duck books. Mostly board books, but some longer picture books. Not to keep you on the edge of your seat any longer, here are my favorites in no particular order:
Authentic Moment #2: Wedding Tears
We were at a friend’s wedding a while back. The groom had lost his father at least a decade earlier. There was a beautiful bouquet of flowers on a se
at in the front row meant to honor him. During the ceremony, the priest spoke the father’s name and prayed for the couple to live their lives in the same spirit in which he lived his. The groom’s eyes welled up for a second but he controlled the surge of emotion. His sister, a bridesmaid, maybe unaware of this tribute, eyes instantly bloodshot from the sheer force exerted trying to push back the wave of tears. Eyes red, lips pursed, unable to blend the sorrow and joy of the moment, resolute tears streamed down her face.
********************************
What does “authentic moment” mean? Read here.
A Pilgrim in the Land of Quinoa
The other day I was sitting at dinner and had the truest realization I have had about my parents in a long time. We (as in me and the two of them) are immigrants in this world that we live in. We inhabit the world of the mostly white upper middle class. All three of us have worked to find our place here. We are happy and fulfilled. We’re not sell-outs. We do more than pay lip service to our roots but we will always be non-natives here. We will always understand things just a little bit differently, we will say things differently, we will love things differently.
It is not in our nature to do some of the things we are trying to do. I have tried for years now, at least seven, to eat healthier and to eat local produce. To become a 
turnip lover and organic beet juicer. But it has never stuck. I’ve tried to make healthy food for our family. I have never ventured too far into Mexican food territory because only someone who has grown up eating La Lupe’s cooking can appreciate the true horror of enchiladas fried in olive oil and made with fat-free cheese or tacos made with high fiber, whole grain tortillas.
The other day my parents came over for dinner. That night I made Lemon Chicken and Orzo soup with a hint of fresh thyme. It was delicious. My dad ate two bowls. I consumed a heaping bowl of it. Then I put the girls to sleep and came back downstairs to find both my parents eating a plate of chicken mole with rice and beans leftover from a dinner my mom made a few days before. I was offended. My delicious soup of which you ate two bowls wasn’t enough to satisfy you? Wasn’t enough to make you full? My first impulse was to give up trying to help my parents eat healthier. They want to. They try to. But they never stick with it longer than a few weeks.
As I was feeling righteously indignant, I felt the pang of hunger in my stomach. I was still hungry, too. Dammit. I really want a plate of mole and rice and beans, too. But on principle I didn’t serve myself.
I’m familiar with that eating cycle, too. I’ll be disciplined enough to cook food like this for a few weeks: crab salad in wonton cups, garden risotto, curry butternut squash soup. But I will hit a point where I am achingly hungry and I almost tackle the lady that sells tamales around our neighborhood when I see her walking toward our house. Because in my gut, I know I am a pilgrim to this locally grown, seasonal produce land. In my veins courses the blood that calls for hydrogenated fats and high fructose corn syrup. Our people have for too long subsisted on this diet. My body yearns for it.
And so it is with almost every part of me that I try to fight back against my instincts. It takes all the strength I can summon not to yell at my kids when they say they don’t like mole, it takes orchestrated body language to show them that I love the sweet potato and apple quinoa I have placed before them, and it takes a herculean effort to not buy the delicious flour tortillas from the Mexican bakery and eat them slathered with butter all day long.
So we beat on, boats against the current of our childhood, of our most primal reactions, of our earliest lessons. And maybe, like my parents, I’ll spend my lifetime eating a bowl of fancy pants soup and then, right before bed, drink charro beans cold out of the fridge. But I think the desire to eat better does in fact mean we’re eating better. And while balancing the lard and the lychees, the cajeta and the kale, the Knorr Suiza and the nutmeg is hard, I think it is good. So I will continue to navigate these waters and try to find a middle ground with some semblance of grace…and possibly a butter mustache.
Book Review: Fearing the Stigmata
The author is Matt Weber, a twenty-something Catholic who hosts the weekly Catholic TV segment “A Word with Weber”. This book is a compliation of vignettes from his life as a young adult.
The observations (more like Catholic inside jokes) he makes about Catholicism are right on as are his theology and sense of liturgy. He doesn’t reveal anything too personal or initimate but you can see that he is a good man and a nice guy. I agree with another review I read online — reading this book is like having a beer with an endearingly dorky, funny Catholic guy who went to Harvard.
I’ve read some of Matt’s stuff on Busted Halo and his writing can be sidesplitting. He does the same here:
A prayer while he is in front of a statue of Mary:
Lastly, please do not physically manifest yourself in this statue because a) I’m not sure I’m the guy you want to be talking to and b) I’m not sure I can handle being spoken to in direct statue form…keep my heart calm and my pants dry.
After Ash Wednesday, he would call the proceeding days Pimple Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. (So true!)
He takes on the subject of appropriateness of instruments in liturgical music:
If you have strict notions about church music — pre-Vatican II era — and you just fainted, I apologize. Being “the harmonica guy” from church over the past few years has brought me a lot of joy.
He has a chapter that compares faith and church to wellness and the gym. I agree.
I think Matt Weber is a gifted humorist. I am glad he is out there in the world trying to help Catholic young adults not feel weird. It is a needed ministry. As a young adult, I feel weird all the time. It is difficult deciding what kind of adult you want to be. Do you want to accept the interests and passions that you have or do you try to bury them making yourself something you think you should be? Matt shows us that we can embrace ourselves, quirks and all, and it can lead to a good life.
In his next book, I would like to see him apply his humor to a longer and more singular narrative. As I was reading I found myself wanting to hear him speak more at length about a subject or delve a little deeper into why he loves the Church so much. He touched on the fact that being Catholic at Harvard was kind of a challenge but he brushes this under the rug quickly by saying that most people were open minded. This would have been an interesting angle, getting into the details of where his Catholicism came up against the New England intellectualism that Harvard is so famous for.
When I read the chapter about how he played balloon volleyball with cloistered nuns as a family tradition every year, that’s when I realized that this book is not aimed at giving the reader concrete ideas of how to remain faithful during the young adult years. It is definitely not preachy. Instead he wants to offer glimpses of his life that show that being a faithful young adult does not have to be boring. Matt follows his faith in his own unique way and has a blast doing it.
This book is an amusing quick and light read. Each chapter is short – three to six pages and only takes a few minutes to read. Especially since the chapters aren’t linked together, I found myself reading a chapter here and there throughout the day.
Enjoy!
Figuring Out What I Don’t Like
This seems like a duh thing but I have to be very purposeful when figuring out my actual opinion of things. There are so many things influencing what I think and what I do that sometimes I think I love something because that’s what all people like me love when really, I hate it.
It seems elementary, but I spent most of last year trying to prioritize and figure out what things I really think are important and what things I do because I feel like I should do them.
Here are some things I found:
- I hate sewing.
- I hate exercising.
- I hate drinking water.
- I hate going to confession.
I made this list, now what? Well, why do I hate these things?:
- I love crafts and I am pretty good at DIY projects. A long time ago I took this to mean that I should love to sew because that’s what crafty people do. But I don’t like to sew. Not even a little.
- Kraft and I have been running with a group that is training for a half-marathon in February. I love the group runs on Saturday but I don’t like running during the week. What I realized is I don’t like running by myself. I like working out with other people. I need the accountability and the support.
- Kraft and I have always loved drinking sodas. When we started running I bought us some Siggs to help us stay hydrated but I never really picked up the habit of drinking water. The cap on the Sigg is not the easiest thing in the world to drink out of. I promise I’m not a diva, but if I don’t enjoy drinking plain water that much, it’s gotta be really easy for me to do or I’m not going to do it.
- As for confession, that’s not entirely true, I don’t hate confession. I love going to confession but I hate the actual confessing part. I hate going to a priest who doesn’t know me or my struggles and I hate using vague, sterile language to describe my own personal sins. I always feel like I did it wrong or like I cheated. I love being absolved. And sometimes we need a drive-thru kind of confession, but I want more.
I do believe that the good things in life are worth a little extra work, a little more forethought, a little more sacrifice. That being said, there are so many things that require us to be disciplined and so many things that are out of our control, why don’t we fix the things in our control. If we can make it easier for ourselves to keep up healthy habits or make good choices than we are so much more likely to choose to do the right thing.
Here are some things I plan on taking action on:
- Stop agonizing over sewing projects. Yes, it would be neat to make clothes for the girls but not if I hate life while I’m at it. Instead, to flex my creative side, I’ll find some crafts I might actually enjoy like this or this. I will buy Halloween costumes for my kiddos.
- After the half-marathon, I’m going to go to a lot more Zumba classes. There is a studio just down the street from our house and it is the most fun I’ve ever had exercising. It’s so energizing. Right now I’ve only been going once a week, but I hope to go a lot more. And at $3 a class, it’s a real find.
- In terms of drinking more water, I scavenged around our kitchen to find some other water holding devices and I found a free cup we got from a bank. Apparently I love straws because I guzzle water from this all day. I’m pretty sure I refill this about 5 times a day.
- Confession. That was a little trickier. I’ve thought about finding a spiritual director/confessor for a while. Well, more than a while. Like for the last 7 years. I’m finally so fed up with it that I emailed a priest I’ve worked with before and asked him if he has time to meet with me. We haven’t been able to work out a meeting time yet, but at least it is forward progress.
Forming habits, especially really good ones, is hard. There’s no need to make it harder on ourselves if we can help it. There are plenty of hard things that we have to deal with. (Like babies who refuse to sleep in past 5am.) So I’m going try and make better the things I can so I can be more patient with the things I can’t.