Testy and Cantankerous

Man, am I in a crappy mood. I ought to be sitting on my porch, waving a cane, and yelling at kids to get the hell offa my lawn. I think I’d enjoy that today.

Last week’s soup was Cabbage Stew with Meatballs. It was an invented recipe (shhh), and came out kind of awesome. Sales have been quite strong.

This week, there will be no Soup Group, as our cooks have been commissioned to make a chocolate dessert for some club, instead. Maybe it’s because I’m irritable and crotchety, but I don’t get it, and I don’t think I’m going to participate.

The way I see it, the Soup Group makes soup, and we sell it, and the proceeds benefit the clinic in Baghdad. Dessert is not soup, and these dessert proceeds won’t be directed to the clinic in Baghdad. Some guy just figured, oh there’s ladies working in the kitchen on Wednesdays - let’s ask them to make some dessert for us.

It’s not a request that should have been honored. But because I couldn’t think of a response other than “Fuck no” (which would not have been appropriate), the other ladies cast their votes without my input, and they decided to go with it.

And, perhaps because of this mood I’m in, I’m actually feeling a little annoyed every time I think about it.

Clearly, it’s time to get back to yoga. Or something.

What has been making me smile, regardless of my generally evil disposition: There was a moment last night at the Haiti Relief event when I was out on the dance floor with a new buddy (who was tearing it up, by the way), and I realized that the vastly white, middle-aged crowd surrounding us was singing along - literally, every single word - to the song “Disco Inferno”. Not just the chorus, beloved. The whole song. Loud and clear.

It was hilarious. A really funny group-sing moment. Ha.

...And then the moment passes, and I’m a crotchety old bag again. Oh well.

This Week's Soup: Southwestern Corn Chowder

We’ve got your green chile, we’ve got your roasted red peppers, we’ve got your cilantro, and your cumin, and your crushed tomatoes. I love this soup.

There’s a lot of chit-chat at Soup Group.

It transpires over the clatter of knives, and the rushing of water, and the roar of the fans. I listen to it from my typical station, at the burners at the far end of the kitchen, facing away from the other volunteers, and straining to hear over the sounds of my saute.

Once we’re cooking, it’s not like the others very often address me directly about anything other than the soup at hand. My back is to them, and I’ve got the fire on, you know. I’m not exactly receptive to the initiation of a conversation with someone behind me and across the room. Plus, they know gobs of people in common. And we all have family and extended family to talk about. So one standard conversation is made up of various status updates, an intra-group survey of what’s going on with who, and since when. By now, I know most of the characters in these stories a little bit, at least by reputation, so it’s a pleasant enough undercurrent to the prep and cooking. It's funny - they know I’m listening, and yet these moments have a non-participatory quality, like I’ve got on a radio show, or I’m eavesdropping.

Yesterday was different. I was in the thick of things, shoulder-to-shoulder with the other volunteers, helping with the chopping, and Sher asked me if I’d seen the movie Leap Year. I told her no, and she said:

“Well, you need to see it. It’s set in Ireland, and they do all the old songs.” And she starts singing “The Belle of Belfast City”.

This is only one reason I love Sher.

You have to understand, this wasn’t a casual referral. Sher was alerting me to this rich source of classic Irish ditties because she knows I got my Irish citizenship last summer. (My dad’s dad was born in Belfast, and Ireland has an aggressive repatriation policy.) To Sher, a proud Irish lass, citizenship means I need to get on my song-learning, among other things.

Love Sher. And I couldn’t agree more.

Go have a listen. (This version includes the chords, so your guitar can embrace her paternal heritage, too.)

This Week’s Soup: Classic Chicken Noodle

Tantalizing aromas of rosemary and tarragon, tender morsels of chicken, the comfort of egg noodles, and a rich and flavorful broth. Good for what ails us.

But oh, the idle shit-talking.

It’s so easy to criticize. Today at Soup Group, I once again was the subject of a dozen needless second-guesses.

When I say that the Soup Group made “Classic Chicken Noodle Soup” today, please understand that “Classic” is a marketing gimmick.

After all, “Classic” is a fairly meaningless term when it comes to a dish like chicken soup. Whose “classic”? My “classic”? Yours? My “classic" very easily could be different from your “classic”, if your mama is from Sweden and my mama’s from South Louisiana. Both you and I think our mama’s “classic” chicken noodle soup is delectable. And potentially we’re both right.

Meaningless term.

But the word “Classic" adds a little something, in the eyes of our customers. More than a year ago, we realized that our “Beef and Vegetable Soup” didn’t sell nearly as well as our “Hearty Beef and Vegetable Soup” sold. Our customers appear to be drawn to an embellished title just like they're drawn to our international titles, like “West African Chicken Peanut” and “Moroccan Lamb Harira”. Good sellers all.

Responsive producers that we are, Soup Group has taken to employing descriptive language for promotional purposes. We’re using adjectives to sell soup.

Classic Chicken Noodle Soup. Good enough.

Leave it alone, Soup Group.

But no. They want the word “Classic" to be prescriptive.

Tomatoes? In the “Classic” Chicken Noodle Soup? they scoff.

For my part, I'm not going to get caught up in what "Classic" means, what I mean by Classic, versus what you mean by Classic, or what our customers might think of as Classic. I don't need to get caught up in that. I'm prepared to deliver on a more fundamental level. Our recipe will deliver on what is promised by every concept of “Classic": This chicken noodle soup will feel familiar, it will be delicious, and you will find it deeply satisfying.

Leave it alone, Soup Group.

They don't leave it alone. They make little comments, they express little doubts, and the way they finally make peace with each little criticism is to say to themselves, and each other, “Well, if that’s what the recipe says...”

I’m not above employing it myself. “Well, that’s what the recipe calls for...” I’ll say. Jalapenos? they'll ask. Why jalapenos? “It’s in the recipe,” I’ll murmur. And they are comforted.

It’s entirely true that it’s in the recipe. But what they don’t seem to understand is that I am the one who makes the recipes. It’s part of my set of weekly duties that include recipe selection and conversion and dissemination. In addition, I try to make sure that our recipe is accurate and delicious.

For some reason, when I started doing the recipes for Soup Group, accuracy in recipe conversion was my first goal, and it took some time to achieve it. It took time to get my brain to do math again (fractions!), and it took time to develop sufficient attention to detail, including a triple-check protocol, to ensure that our time in the kitchen wouldn’t turn out drastically screwed up in expensive and embarrassing ways.

Soon enough it became apparent that accuracy alone wasn’t the whole story. Some of our soups turned out better than others, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out which elements made for a tastier final product - browning, for example. Fresh herbs. Homemade stock. But even after I knew better, I’d follow a recipe exactly when I was converting it to bulk.

I’d be thinking to myself, “That would taste better if you browned the onions”, or “Why doesn’t this recipe call for a can of green chiles to add a little character?” At home, I would follow my instincts and cook it differently when I was making food for Handsome or guests. But when I was making recipes for Soup Group, I’d go ahead and copy the recipe’s instructions as they were written.

Our customers weren’t having it. I noticed in pretty short order that it was the recipes I’d had doubts about that resulted in disappointing sales.

Time to start doctoring it up, I decided.

These days, I go through the original recipe and think about cooking it, step by step, and consider what might be missing, what might be overdone. I think about what I’d do at home, and I make adjustments accordingly.

(While I view this approach as an investment in our future success, I'm also trying to spare myself the criticism that invariably comes my way when the soup doesn't turn out well.)

Many of my Soup Group friends still get nervous on the journey. That’s why they take refuge in the idea of a recipe, I guess. And why they can't stop voicing these little criticisms.

I, however, reject the notion that some cookbook is necessarily more valuable than our Soup Group's years of experience cooking our soups, in our kitchen, with our shoppers, and our cooks, and our skillets and pots and spatulas and ladles. At some point, even I have to give myself some credit for our body of work, this hands-on experience. Seems to me that trusting yourself and trusting the food should trump using a recipe as anything more than a guideline. We're making soup, here. There's a lot of room for success.

So leave it alone, Soup Group.

By the way, I was totally vindicated in that today's soup is delightful.

This Week's Soup: Spicy-Sweet Apple Wine Soup

A special selection for the holidays.

Wednesdays, I mostly come home from Soup Group smelling like sauteed onions. Last Wednesday, when we made the wine soup, I came home smelling of Christmas: cloves and cinnamon and honey and burgundy wine. It was a delightfully aromatic cooking experience.

The soup freezer is full, and Soup Group is on hiatus until January, freeing up us volunteers to handle our Christmas preparations and bask in the enjoyment of the holidays. Personally, I'm going to be spending time making gifts and enjoying company and, apparently, recovering from excessive revelry. Ah, the holidays.

Frere had a birthday party last night and it impacted my morning today, if you feel me. Turns out I'm not a grown up, as evidenced by my inability to refuse a drink. Foolish girl.

Nice party, though. I never know what to expect with Frere. Or, rather, what I expect from Frere, frankly, is to embarrass me. All too often, I'm right on the money: The house will be messy, from clutter, or neglect, or any one of a number of home improvement projects left unfinished. The food will not be ready until hours after the invite time, even for a dinner party planned days in advance. Worst of all, Frere will make mean commentary about me, or give me backhanded compliments in front of his friends.

So why go?

I'll do you one better at the end of 2009: Why include him as a part of my life at all? He is incredibly narcissistic, he stresses and exploits my parents, he has a hands-off parenting style that is truly disturbing sometimes. He makes epic bad decisions, monumental both in scale and in impact. He is nimble and swift like a ninja when it comes to avoiding accountability for his personal failings. He's kind of a jerk.

There is a long list of my complaints with Frere, beginning, maybe, with the time he tried to drown me in a water fountain at age 3, and spanning thirty years' worth of bullshit at varying levels, including an extremely rude interaction he had with The Handsome Man just last month (since which time I've been avoiding him).

But he's mon frere. He's my brother. And no matter what proclamation I might make in anger about excising him from my heart like a malignant tumor, it's just not possible.

Not because of my exhaustive love for his three perfect daughters, who give my life a whole other beautiful dimension than I would have known to ask for or miss in their absence.

Not because of the way my mom worries after the relationship between her only two children, and her heartache when she knows Frere and I are not getting along.

Not even because of the fact that Frere wants me in his life and, in his own way, values and likes me.

No. Those are all good reasons, I guess, but the thing that really keeps me in his life, or keeps me keeping him in my life, is that he's there regardless. As A described it so perfectly, "You keep bumping into him in your head." Yes.

And then there's the likelihood that one day, he will be all that remains and all that I'll have of my natal nuclear family. That was a happy place for me, a safe place, and a very specific place. My growing-up experience feels to me intimately unique, like nobody else could ever understand it. (Ironically, I think everybody feels that way about their growing-up experience.) It's where I first felt like I made sense. My family was a context that didn't just surround me, it explained me, it was part of what made me who I am.

Frere's my older brother - he was there for all of it. He understands. The tv shows we watched, the rules we flouted, the songs we sang, the tricks we played, the fears we shared, the fevers we endured. When I'm talking about my childhood and I say "We..." (as in "We loved that place!" or "We hated that guy!") I'm referring to "me and Frere".

And because Frere's my older brother, he was also the bossa me. I didn't eat cheeseburgers until I was 10 years old because Frere told me they were nasty...and that was sufficient recon for me - I didn't in all that time feel the need to try one for myself.

Our views and choices and even our recollection and framing of past shared events differ dramatically now, but...

There is no me without him. That's just a fact.

I had a good time at Frere's party. And when his friends toasted his best aspects, I was happy to raise my glass.

This Week's Soup: Indian Green Pea with Coconut Milk

Gobs of green peas double-pureed with potatoes, onions, veggie stock, coconut milk, ginger, green chiles, coriander, roasted cumin, cilantro, lemon juice...

It was a pain in the ass to make. But the vegetarian raved about it, so maybe we got some payoff.

Tonight the family celebrated my niece X’s 9th birthday at...wait for it...Casa Bonita! (At least it wasn’t Chuck E. Cheese.)

Frere and I regularly hosted our birthday parties at Casa Bonita when we were small (through, like, 1985 when Celebrity Sports Center and its sweet-ass water slides became the venue of choice). For all the years we held our “Destination: Casa Bonita” parties, Frere and I and all our little friends thought it was great and so much fun.

Frere’s children are just as enamored of Casa Bonita as Frere and I were as kids, so I’ve been back a few times as an adult. My niece Fine, who is now 14, had birthday parties there as a kidlet. I’ve gone with out-of-town guests who come thinking it’s something they want to see (they are frequently disappointed, though it’s a disappointment you can laugh through).

On the whole, Casa Bonita is remarkably unchanged from 25 years ago: the strolling mariachi band, the waiter-summoning flags on the tables, the terrible food, the cowboy cliff divers, the rampaging gorilla, who gave me a thrill tonight as he dashed past me and Handsome on the bridge.

Nowadays, I don’t really dig on skee ball. (I totally used to.) A glow-in-the-dark necklace doesn’t make my week. (It totally used to.) And the joint is located in a strip mall, people. It’s impossibly gaudy. The food has always been bad beyond belief.

But the kids were gleeful and adventurous, and even Handsome and I giggled our way through Black Bart’s cave before we left.

Plus, we scored the pink party pavilion at the top of the ramp -- remember the ramps? -- all to ourselves.

Pretty sweet.


Daddo enjoying the festivities
Photo credit: The Preferred Daughter

Today's Soup: Hearty Beef Minestrone

Rich, flavorful stock plays host to a crowded gathering of tender cubes of beef, red kidney beans, pasta shells, green peas, green beans, celery, carrots and tomatoes, seasoned with onions, garlic, fresh basil, fresh parsley and bay leaves.

My Soup Group colleagues are a cultured bunch. They support the visual arts, music, dance, and especially theatre. I realized today that several of them hold subscriptions with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. So naturally, theatre reviews feature frequently in our soup-making conversation: what shows we've seen, what shows we want to see, what shows we recommend the others go see.

(Arts patronage is only the tip of the cool, cool iceberg that is these ladies' spare time activities. They travel internationally, they get outdoorsy in the mountains, they host anniversary blowouts. They all have other volunteer obligations that they take seriously and where they make a serious contribution. They're passionately committed to their families. I'm taking notes.)

Today Elizabeth announced that she had been to see Spring Awakening at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. We were instantly interested. Mom said she'd heard that the NYC production had received mixed reviews, and Jodi piped up that she'd heard a review on National Public Radio that the show was pretty strange. All of us were eager to hear from Elizabeth what the story was about and what she thought of the local production.

It only got more interesting when Elizabeth began by saying that she had left, walked out, at intermission.

People just about stopped working. I know I put down my spatula and turned around to look at her. Elizabeth is a dedicated patron of the arts, so even a schlock production wouldn't put her off that much. Furthermore, she's worldly and a little tough, I think it's safe to say. She has not yet struck me as the type to shy away from ugly truths. What on earth could this musical have done in the first two acts that would provoke an Elizabeth to leave without seeing the resolution?

Well, she said the play dealt with themes of adolescent sexual awakening, incest and child abuse; and she talked about the juxtaposition of quasi-19th-century costumes and modern rock music that she didn't connect with. We waited for her to say more, because so far, to me at least, that didn't seem like enough to run off someone like Elizabeth. And indeed, she went on to say that the deal-breaker was what she described as a very graphic rape scene early in the play, maybe in the first act. And with that explanation, our soup group seemed to understand.

I understood. I mean, I can understand that you don't want to look at some things, some times. I overheard Elizabeth saying a little later that there are ways to convey violence without explicitly enacting it for the audience. And that is certainly true.

It got me thinking, though.

For one, I got tangled up in the unanswerable question of "what makes good art". Sometimes there's an artistic bravery in presenting negative things in all their graphic realism. Sometimes art makes a greater impact when the audience is allowed, encouraged or required to use their own imaginations to fill in some of the blanks. There's no one way, no "right" answer. And to my mind, asking the question is only a philosophical exercise anyhow. We as a people should always leave room for artistic license - I believe it's vitally important that society grant artists the freedom to express their vision. (I'm pretty sure that's what I believe. There is art that tests this value of mine.)

Elizabeth's tale of walking out also got me thinking about the responsibility to self that any one of us might have to look away sometimes.

And about the tension between the personal responsibility to look away sometimes, and the social obligation not to look away. (Ever?)

And about the privilege it is to have the option of looking away.

And about the role of censorship in art and in media.

I saw a girl die on YouTube. I'm more than embarrassed that I don't know enough about world politics to remember which nation-in-conflict she lived/died in. She might have been Palestinian, she might have been Iranian. She was very pretty, and there was war in the streets, and she was just a bystander, but a stray bullet struck and killed her. It killed her in front of her dad and her brother and someone videotaping the violence. We see her fall and her eyes glaze over. We see the men with her cradling her and begging her to respond, and we see them begin to howl when the blood starts pouring from her mouth and her nose and maybe from her eyes, too.

I shouldn't have watched that, I immediately thought to myself when it was over. And I'm not talking about government censorship, here. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been available for watching. (Separate issue.) I'm saying that my own personal peace-of-mind patrol should have been on higher alert and stopped me from pressing the "play" button.

But there is a question that raises for me, and it's a question similar to the one that gets raised in arguments about government censorship: If something terrible is happening, why should I be protected from seeing it? How is the fact of an event's atrocity the argument that I shouldn't see it? If anyone has to bear witness, then why should I be spared? If it's reality, and I want the truth...

Why should I protect myself? Why should I look away?

Why do we look away? I'm reminded of images of the burning towers on 9/11/2001, and how the networks edited out the people who were jumping/falling from the windows on the upper floors. The fact that people were dying that way is completely brutal. And maybe on top of all of the other horror and carnage and shock of 9/11, we didn’t need to see people falling to their deaths.

But what’s that language - “didn’t need to see”? Why don’t I say what we mean: “Maybe on top of all of the other horror and carnage and shock of 9/11, people’s minds and psyches wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe we would have been irreversibly damaged by seeing it.”

It's to some extent an individual matter, though, what’s damaging. Because to some extent it's a question of what the human mind can stand, that is, what any one human mind can stand. There do exist some broad, obvious parameters that we mostly agree on as a society about what's highly disturbing - for example, apparently, the broadcasting of Americans falling to their deaths as a result of a terrorist act. Most often, though, individuals themselves make the best judge of what their own mind/psyche/spirit can handle.

(I am aware that this doesn't even address those who don't have a choice about what they're exposed to, who have no control over their exposure to whatever daily horror might be engulfing them. And that's not a separate issue.)

I guess a lot of us have learned to put some limits on what we take in. (Those of us with a choice in the matter, anyway.) Of course, on the far end of that spectrum are ostriches - those who bury their heads in the sand so they don’t have to see what’s scary and acknowledge that it's happening.

I can't help but think that maybe we should strive to be stronger than that. Stronger of heart, stronger of stomach, sounder in mind.

Shouldn’t we?

I’m not going to link to the video of that girl’s death in the streets because I tend to avoid linking to anything that’s notable because of its negativity. I’m not going to participate even in the promotion that comes from saying, “This is so gross/wrong/horrific, have a look.” This ain't a news outlet.

I am going to link to a really thoughtful and thought-provoking short film called “The Falling Man” that addresses the absence of jumpers/fallers from the images of 9/11. It’s tough stuff, but maybe just tough enough. Consider it in the vein of a healthy workout for a spirit striving to be strong enough to handle a range of life’s realities.

Um, No Soup Group This Week

Did that need saying?

It's a holiday tomorrow. We're taking the Holiday Week.

Oh, hadn't you heard of the Holiday Week?

It's what the busy and reasonable women of Soup Group do with their non-urgent volunteer activities on the day before a national holiday. Like, "Well, obviously we won't be having Soup Group during Thanksgiving week..."

Because we've all got a lot of other shit going on, what with it being the week of Thanksgiving and everything. They're a bunch of moms and grandmas, my Soup Group. Hello? They're busy during Thanksgiving week. And reasonable people such as these soup friends of mine are not going to pile one thing on top of the other. No. We're going to manage our lives intelligently and plan ahead: we cooked extra soup last week, the freezer is full.

No Soup Group this week.

But do have a happy Holiday Week. I hope you get things done.

Top Ten Reasons I Do Soup Group

So why is Soup Group a priority for me?

Well, the first answer is that it's my mom's group. She didn't start it, but she was one of the original soup-makers, three years ago now, and she participated in Soup Group for a year before I started. I was very surprised back then that Mom had gotten involved and stayed so committed to this volunteer project. It's hands-on work, the soup-making, and Mom's volunteer (and professional) contributions have always been much more administrative or managerial. She served on the vestry at our old church, for example, and when I was growing up, it seemed that most of her volunteer obligations were in the form of oversight and planning committees.

Soup Group is straight-up manual labor, dude. It's (at least) three hours on your feet, crying onion-chopping tears, flushing red from the heat of the stove. Now, it ain't heavy lifting, for the most part, and it's largely risk-less. No one has lost a leg at Soup Group, or even, thankfully, been burned badly. But it's tiring.

So why do it?

Following in no particular order, are my top ten reasons for doing Soup Group:

10. I'm learning so much about cooking! Cooking from scratch, cooking with more experienced cooks, cooking in bulk quantities. I feel enriched by my growing knowledge about something I love so much (i.e., food).

9. Soup Group is woman time. Soup Group is a female space, with the occasional male volunteer hour simply serving as the exception that proves the rule. So I get my girl talk and that camaraderie for the morning.

8. I enjoy spending time with my elders. The rest of the Soup Group is made up of ladies much closer in age to Mom than to me, and none of us pretends anything different. I like how they boss me around. I like to hear their stories and their perspectives, which are different than mine. I especially like to have all this go down in a kitchen environment. Reminds me of time spent with Meemo, with Grandma.

7. My participation in Soup Group is a concession to God, who maybe would like to see me "in church" more often. This way, I'm technically "in church" every week for Soup Group. No, I'm not attending service, but I do feel like I'm following the letter, if not the spirit, of some law (that still matters to me, apparently)...

6. I feel good about supporting the clinic in Baghdad. If there's war and destruction taking place in my name, I want to be intentional about something positive happening in my name as well. And if our soup proceeds are meager while the destruction is great, then at least I can say that the soup proceeds came from my heart and my hands, which you can't say about the destruction.

5. Our soups build community among the church parishioners. While we're cooking, the priests and the Sunday School teacher and people attending Bible Study all pop in the kitchen to breathe our fragrant air and find out what's the soup of the day. On Sundays, (I hear tell that) people are reminded about the soup during the service, and discuss it during reception. "We" give updates to the congregation on how much money has been sent, and we read aloud the notices and post the pictures that we receive from the clinic. It's a shared effort.

4. It's a neat group of women. Sher always has a joke; Mom hums and sings to herself; Rhondda brings an almost businesslike, level-headed practicality; Elizabeth is wonderfully direct; Irene feels like a good friend; Jody is subtly perceptive and so kind. I like how diverse our personalities are, and how similar our values. I like that we manage to make decisions through an informal (if sometimes grudging) consensus. I like hanging in there together with them.

3. Nobody besides me wants to do the recipes! They'd be willing, in my absence, to do the selection and conversions and inventory and list-making. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen. But they're really glad they don't have to.

2. Volunteering is the right thing to do. When my mind elects to wander over the territory of my faults, community service is conspicuously absent from the landscape. I get to tell myself I'm doing some good.

1. It's one more way I get to spend time with my mom. I love her.

Today's Soup: Thanksgiving Corn Chowder with Bacon

A dairy-free chowder, this soup is rich with veggies and seasonings including potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, home-roasted red peppers, mild green chiles, fresh cilantro, thyme, cumin, chili powder and paprika. Perhaps surprisingly, it's not spicy at all. Flavorful and truly delish, this recipe is one of our Soup Group specialties.

Sometimes I get nervous about making soup at Soup Group, and will consider ditching. In the land of Soup Group, it's my job to identify each week's soup recipe, convert it - as is usually necessary - to bulk yield, and develop a shopping list based on needed ingredients and our existing inventory. All this takes place before each Wednesday's cooking session. And it means that I am the one to blame if the recipe turns out crap, like if I forget to include or recalculate an ingredient (each of which has happened), or if the cooking instructions are unclear, or if the cupboard doesn't hold the expected ingredients, or if the flavor of the soup doesn't turn out right.

And it's not that the Soup Group ladies are mean or cruel about these failures when they happen (which is infrequent, these days). And it's not that I don't have experience with "pressure" situations - multi-million dollar projects, special events with multiple moving parts, the care and feeding of VIPs. No, it's the shame. I could have done better. I should have done better. It's just literacy and arithmetic, after all. And then I feel stupid for feeling ashamed. It's just a volunteer job, after all.

But anything worth doing is worth doing well.

How much angst and anxiety have been caused by the internalization of that saying, I wonder. Plenty, in my own life. But I think that commitment to excellence (or, to basic competence) also has spurred me on to success in any number of arenas that really matter to me. And that's the trick: exorcising your drive for excellence only in the areas that really matter. This starts with bothering to identify what are the areas in your life that really matter. After that, the task is just to treat those areas as your priority.

No Soup Group This Week

The church freezer is full of soups:

Flu-Fighting Chicken Soup
Spicy Sausage & Lentil Soup
Harvest Sweet Potato & Onion Soup
Texas-Style Turkey Chili

We are at capacity. We will not make another 40 quarts of soup this week, not even 20 quarts. This week, we must focus on SELLING the soups we already have. So no Soup Group on Wednesday.

And that's fine, but I wonder what will be my monumental cooking experience for the week. There's something lovely to me about spending time in front of a stove with multiple burners going. I enjoy the planning. I enjoy the focus. I enjoy the results. :)

It sure ain't the typical night's experience at our house, though. There's just not enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. It continues to surprise me that nobody is clamoring for admission to home-cooked dinners here at Roslyn Street. But they're not. To be fair, family says yes whenever we ask them. But Joe's friends would prefer to go to bars. (Totally inscrutable to me, as I HATE most bars and love to have a reason to stay home.) My friends, meanwhile, are these super-busy, successful professional women who...don't get it. There is no place in their lives for braising for eight hours, for example, so it's like they're uncomfortable with my efforts at same. Doesn't she have anything better to do, they seem to be wondering to themselves as they graciously decline my offerings of seconds. That's another thing: My girlfriends tend to be watching their weight. Beautiful women with oodles of personality, smarts and humor. But: No thanks, I haven't been to the gym all week, they'll demur.

What's your gym got to do with me?

Which is why I like feeding Handsome's friends. If I can lure them to dinner, they'll throw out a diet real quick in the face of some perfectly seasoned, falling-off-the-bone tender ribs. As it should be.

I need to know more eaters, maybe.

Today's Soup: Texas-Style Turkey Chili

A colorful and fragrant blend of pinto beans, “minced” turkey, red, orange and yellow bell peppers, carrots, celery, herbs & spices, garnished with fresh green parsley on top. So nice.

Today, when Mom came to pick me up for Soup Group, she stayed a while. Our intention was to go to church early in order to get those dry (soaked overnight, but previously dry) pinto beans on the stove to cook. Instead, we ended up hanging out at my house because Mom had been calling but not reaching St B’s office staff, to make sure the building was open. And while Mom felt confident that someone would be there to let us in, she did not feel sufficiently confident to make the journey all the way to church -- 20 minutes from her house. My house, on the other hand, is en route to church for her, and is just 10 minutes away from St B’s, which feels much more pounce-ready.

We were recalling a time last year (it was last soup season; maybe it was earlier this year, but it was last soup season), during a snowstorm, when Mom and I had brought all of our good intentions to St B’s an hour earlier than Soup Group usually starts, and THE CHURCH WAS LOCKED. Nobody was there. We knocked and stewed and then finally just went back to the car to wait until someone showed up with a key.

Come to think of it, maybe Mom and I should have a key. We’re all the time wishing we had a key to get in the church, a key to get in the cabinet where we keep the knives, the code to the copy machine. Okay, it’s totally NOT all the time. And the truth is, there are at least three other people in Soup Group who have a key/code for these things. So, as an entity, the Soup Group is very well-equipped.

It’s just there are these times when Mom and I are trying to do the right thing...

So anyway, today this meant we had some time to kill at my house. That was a good thing, because, well, because I love my mom in my house, for one. She’s all kinds of good vibes. Usually on Wednesdays, I just keep an eye out and go meet her at the car for my pickup, so it was nice to have her inside alone on a Wednesday for a change.

But also, she hadn’t seen my “new” coffee table. She and Dad got a new coffee table a couple of weeks ago, and that meant that the old coffee table was in play. She offered it to me, I said yes, and she and Uncle D delivered it to me last week or so. And you know what? It just about completed my living room decor. You’ll see, the next time you come over. You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And you’ll know exactly where the room still needs another lamp, or an objet d’art (I’m obsessed with that term today!), or something, because even though the coffee table is great, but there’s something missing in there, even still.

However, there in the living room IS my sweet-ass black guitar. (Her name is Coriander. Nobody knows that but me and The Handsome Man. And my old guitar teacher, if she remembers.) Mom goes something like, “Oh, are you still messing with that thing?”

And I’m like, Her name is Coriander.

Just kidding. I’m like, “Yeah, totally. You wanna hear a song?”

Now, nobody gets that treatment. Mmm, let me rephrase. Handsome and Mom get that treatment. Don’t you come over here thinking that I’m going to offer to play you a song. That’s an unusual privilege.

I’ve been working on a policy that I wouldn’t REFUSE anyone a song, if they asked for it. But after today, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Or, to be a part of my own solution: after today, I’m thinking that’s EXACTLY the policy that needs to be in place. Or, more even, that I need a policy that says ALL visitors MUST be subjected to AT LEAST ONE song on the guitar.

Anyway, she sez, yeah, she’d like to hear a song. And even after I finish my soup notes, and she reaches Carol by phone, and we’re ready to head out the door, she sez, “Right after you play me your song.”

(That’s pretty awesome. At the time, I was caught up in the moment of Oh shit, now I have to play her a song. But here in retrospect, that’s a pretty awesome mom, all these years later. If she had been faking it in 1980, she wouldn’t still be subjecting herself to my fingerpainting, all these years later. Ack. A life of unconditional love.)

So I played a song for my mom.

I played a song for my mom, and I sweated it, dude. The songs that I know how to play on my guitar are, at this point, only the songs that I have composed. These songs by The Preferred Daughter can be divided into three categories: personal, really personal, and not suitable for public consumption. And since I have only about one song per category (heh), that represents a fairly limited repetoire. [How do you spell repetoir? It’s rejecting repatoire. Bullshit - how do you think it’s spelled?]

Mom has heard me play guitar before. (How many people can say that? Three: Handsome, the guitar teacher, and her interloping husband.) A year ago, maybe, I played Mom my love song to Joe. So today I played her my love song to the little baby spirit who’s going to choose us, “us” being me, Handsome, Mom, Dad, our family, this life. My heart fills writing that sentence. Why would I think I could play that song for anybody but Chaco and the next-door-neighbor dog?

But I played that song for my mom.

And my fingers trembled. My right ones, strumming, were much less reliable than my left ones on the frets. My playing is normally not great, admittedly, but the shaking interfered. I was wishing, very early in the song, that I could rush through it, and I was consciously working against that desire, you know, out of respect for the song. And I was chastising myself, throughout, for choosing to play such a personal song. Like I had options. I wondered if she would know what I was singing about. I wondered what she would think of it.

I didn’t look up once. No, despite the good efforts of Mrs. T, my hallowed seventh-grade speech teacher, I did not look up once. I did not polarize my audience. But I notice just now, here, writing this, that nowhere, then or now, did I worry about my voice. In fact, my singing might have been a little shaky and probably was a little soft in places when the strumming went awry (JANGLE went the wire). But check me out, giving myself a break. Yay, guitar.

And thanks to practice and our sweet baby Jesus, I somehow got through it. (Did she SEE my fingers shaking? Oh, shame.) Afterwards, Mom very quietly said something like, “That was very nice.” And we got up and we went off to Soup Group. (Me still shaking, yeah.)

Ha -- I know Soup Group is back in full swing because they’re openly second-guessing me again. *Sigh* But let me confess that I do love to spend time with people who are preoccupied, each in their own way, with making food taste delicious.

Then, as we were leaving, Elizabeth "introduced" me to Judy Ward, who was, to her credit, like, um, YEAH, I’ve met Crystal. Like 20 years ago, she didn’t say. We’re all ladies here.

Good day.

(Yes, of course I see that I have to post the song. Get offa my back.)



* seventh-grade speech teacher

Today's Soup: Harvest Sweet Potato & Onion

Sweet Potato, Caramelized Onion & Apple Cider Soup with Fresh Sage and Toasted Walnuts

Made in a blizzard!

On Wednesdays, Mom and I make soup, delicious soups, in bulk, in the industrial kitchen of our church, with a group of other volunteers. (I say "our" church, when in fact I haven't attended a service at St. B's in more than a year. But I was confirmed there. And Joe and I were married there. And it is my parents' church, and they're very active there. And the real old-timers there have known me since I was 16. Plus, I've been making soup there every Wednesday for the past year and a half. So, yeah, "our" church.) The soup is frozen and sold to "our" parishioners with proceeds to benefit a medical and dental clinic located in the heart of Baghdad. The clinic is affiliated with St. George's Episcopal Church in Baghdad but exists to serve (and employs) people of all faiths.

Typically, Mom and I carpool to St B's. My house is en route from Mom & Dad's house to the church, so on most Wednesdays, Mom drives to my house and then I drive us (in her car) to the church. The distance between our houses is usually a 7-minute drive in morning rush hour. Today it took Mom at least twenty minutes to get to my house -- slushy and slippery and snowy, like it was. Then -- ha! -- when I got to the car with my first load of soup-making gear (just the sack of recipes and my purse, really), Mom said that SHE would be our driver for the 10-minute trip to St B's! Of all the unprecedented impulses! And in a blizzard, no less! Like hell, as Mom would say. After muttering my way to and from the house for the second load of soup supplies (2 gallons of my homemade veggie stock), I was prepared to say a firm No Way. But she apparently had come to her senses and was already making her way to the passenger seat.

Phew.

Everybody --including Mom -- agrees that she's a terrible driver. An unusually bad driver. Competent, don't get me wrong. But why would she ever be behind the wheel while there was another licensed driver in the passenger seat? There is not a good answer to that question. Which is precisely what I was muttering to and from the porch: How exactly would I explain this car accident? "What do you mean your mom was driving?" everybody would ask.

So I drove, and I was completely justified in my driverliness when a big ol' SUV did a 180 in front of us heading west on 13th Ave at like 15 miles an hour. Very disturbing, but I was doing all the right things, (i.e., maintaining a safe distance and traveling speed, basically, people. It ain't deep.) so we were fine. Your man in the SUV swerved because he tried to switch lanes while he was going too fast -- yeah, even 15 mph was too fast for the conditions.

Then, when we got to church, the only other ladies at Soup Group were the ones who walk to church, living within close proximity like they do. They were very impressed with Mom and me for being so intrepid and arriving even before they arrived. But they were very worried for us three hours later as we all headed off in near white-out conditions. Mom offered folks a ride home, and Elizabeth was like, "No, thanks." It was the kind of day when it really was a better bet to travel on foot for short distances / side streets.

Such a relief to get home safely. And very nice to get a message saying that my dentist appointment had been cancelled. (By that point, news outlets were advising people to stay home except for only truly necessary business. My teeth, to date, are in great shape, and this appointment represents the second of two cleanings this year. I can reschedule.) I shoveled the walk, played with Chaco (who was beyond enthusiastic about the piles of snow), and took a long hot shower. It is impressive how much hot water is necessary to clean out the smell of caramelizing 40 large onions. That's three shifts of four pans of sliced onions. And a good deal of shampoo. And a bathrobe and easy chair for the rest of the afternoon.

Snow day!