Recent Highlights

Happy Advent! I have a couple highlights from the past week that I want to share with you with a couple pictures to illustrate.

For the second year in a row, my office had a Christmas decorating competition last week. We formed the office into three areas and the employees into three teams. My team decided on a "Christmas land" theme complete with a Christmas photo booth as you see in the photo below. And, we WON! It was exciting. :) My co-worker took a short video of the decorations that you can watch here. I think we won because the judges (from my old workplace, Partners!) loved posing at our photo booth so much.

I have to admit that I was partially dreading the competition (which is terrible because I'm the event planning head!), mostly because the task seemed daunting. Of course, I shouldn't have worried because my co-workers had great ideas and skill. It's been so fun to turn on all the Christmas lights in the mornings when I first get to work.

 

For the second year in a row, my church has had a women's retreat at Camp Spalding/Clearwater Lodge, which is the main Presbyterian camp and retreat center in the Spokane area. It's just about 40 minutes north of my house in the beautiful pine-wooded, lake-filled countryside. The photo below is looking across Davis Lake towards the distant mountains from the room where we had worship sessions. We experienced most of the outdoors through big windows because the temperatures have been in the teens for the last couple days. I took a walk on Saturday afternoon and it look my legs 30 minutes to thaw--no kidding! You can see in the picture below that the shore of the lake has iced over.

 



 

My friend Margy and I drove up to camp on Friday afternoon and joined about 45 other women. The whole weekend was lovely. There's something about being away from home in a retreat setting that gives women the freedom to share more freely and deeply. We had some great moments of laughter and of sharing our stories together. After dinner on Friday night, we split into six groups and had to create a Nativity scene with the materials we had available at our tables. The photo below is the Nativity scene my group created. Someone commented that the sheep looked like ghosts, which I have to agree with. The yellow rays from the star was just the plastic that held in a package of paintbrushes. How cool is that? We had some very creative women in my group. I appointed myself Chief Glue-Gun Operator since it requires very little creative energy. :)

 

I decided to drive up to Trader Joe's today to take advantage of the dry weather, since the only Trader Joe's in the area is about 30 minutes from my house and up a big hill. I went in with a list and left with only two items on that list. Oops! At one point, an employee asked me, "Are you finding everything on your list?" because I was staring at it perplexedly. I gave him a wry grin and said "Yes, thanks." On my mental list, that is. I found that the meal I had planned to make no longer sounded good, so I did some quick meal planning in my head and ended up with what you see below. The veggie broth, barley, pearl onions, and parsnips will become a Pearled Barley Broth from one of my favorite veggie-centered cookbooks. The Merlot will be cooked in a five-hour meat sauce to go on the pasta. The dried apricots (which are incredibly delicious!), cranberry-covered goat cheese, carrots and cucumber will become my lunch for the week. Tomorrow's lunch will be dried apricots and cranberries, a hard-boiled duck egg (from my cousin), crackers and the goat cheese, and the veggies. Yum! 

 

Time in general seems to fly by, but the Advent/Christmas season always zip by particularly quickly. I wonder why. I'm trying my best to savor Advent, the unique season in the Church Year of longing, anticipation, introspection, and joy. I'll leave you with a couple verses from one of my favorite Advent songs, Holy Is Your Name, a traditional Scottish hymn.

 

 

My soul is filled with joy as I sing to God my savior:

You have looked upon your servant, you have visited your people.

 

Refrain: And Holy is your name, through all generations!

Everlasting is your mercy to the people you have chosen, and Holy is your name.

 

In your love you now fulfill what you promised to your people.

I will praise you, Lord, my savior, everlasting is your mercy.

A Final Garden Update: Potatoes, Oh My!

I've had a blog idea brewing in my head for two weeks now, but I haven't quite got to a place where I'm able to put my thoughts into words. For now, I wanted to share with you the final update of the year from my garden. It was a wonderful year. Here's a tunnel view of part of my garden:

 

A lot of what you can see above were volunteer plants, like the parsley, nasturtium (yellow flower), and alyssum (white flower) in the foreground. Below, you can see the huge stalks of cosmos that grew WAY taller than I expected. You can also see my bean patch and the potato foliage in the center right of the photo.  

 

I spent about 30 minutes digging potatoes yesterday and harvested a wonderful amount of Red Norlands and Rose Finn Apple and Russian Banana fingerlings. It was so much fun to dig around in the garden in the nippy, sunshiney fall air and pull up hidden treasures from the dirt: rose-tinted and golden yellow fingerlings and bold red potatoes.

Here are the potatoes spread out on newspaper in my basement to "cure" for a couple days. Curing potatoes helps them keep better in a cool dark place in the winter. I thought this picture was funny because it looks so much like a science experient! I can't wait to expand my science experiment into the kitchen...yum, chemistry!

 



 

I tried to take the picture below to show how tall my cosmos are. You can sorta tell. :)

 

I thought the texture of the petals on this calendula were beautiful. The fringed edges almost remind me of a lion's mane.

 

I was in my garden to harvest today for perhaps the last time this season. Each night, the temperature dips down a little farther. The heat in my house has finally ticked on, and my bed has three layers of blankets. The trees are starting to tint crimson and gold. I picked all my green tomatoes today to try ripening them inside. I cut all the blossoms left on my zinnias and snapdragons and added to them nasturtium, cosmos, and black-eyed Susan blooms in two Mason jar bouquets. The simple beauty of consistent flower bouquets in my house for the past three months has been a particular joy. I love that my garden can be a place of combined beauty, utility, and wonder. I pray I can take the wonder and beauty of creation into the hunkered-down winter months until the winds of change bring us the new life and green stubble of spring.

 

Thanks for enjoying my garden with me this year!

Early August Garden Update

My garden (for the most part) is growing well this year. This post will show how far things have grown since my last garden post. My dad had the idea to juxtapose pictures of the garden in June with pictures of the garden now. I've done that with the first four photos. Here's the contrast with how the straw bales have grown:

 

We put black plastic in the center to keep the weeds down and it's worked well. We had some trouble with aphids on the tomatoes, so Dottie asked a man at a nursery what to do, and he said the straw bales need to be fertilized once a week. Dottie has been graciously adding fish emulsion (or, as she says, fish poop) on all the bales once a week, and I have also added granular fertilizer twice and will again this weekend.



 

Here's the main part of the garden in June. Everything looks so tiny!

 

 

Explosion! In this picture you can see hollyhocks (far left), bush beans, three varities of potatoes, cosmos, snapdragons, and you can faintly see basil in the middle of the photo. I also have four tomatoes, a bush cucumber, and some lovely volunteer nasturtiums behind the hollyhocks.

 

 

Here's the same patch as above, but from a slightly different angle. My cosmos bolted up, but the zinnias didn't do as well this year. I also planted carrots twice with nothing to show and my peas didn't do well. Dottie and I are wondering if something in the soil is bad, since it seems to be a certain patch. Any gardeners out there want to give their thoughts?

 

 

Here I have two lovely lemon cucumber plants. My family grew these when I was growing up, so my sister and I have always loved them. I've already picked one small cucumber, and I'm hoping to have a couple to take to my family when I visit next week.

 

These are Juliet tomatoes in the plot behind the hollyhocks. The Juliet is a thin Roma variety that Dottie loves to grow, so I thought I'd try them out this year. So far, so good! I'm also so excited because my heirloom tomato "Ananas Noire" that has big multicolored slicing tomatoes is looking so healthy! It has dark green foilage and the little green tomatoes are starting to appear. I'm praying the August heat will be enough for them to grow big and flavorful.

 

 

An baby English cucumber in one of the straw bales! Looking good!

 

A beautiful, delicate Seashell Cosmos. The cosmos have grown well this year, and I've already used several of the blooms for a flower bouquet. I love having fresh flowers in the house!

 

That's the garden tour for August! I'll have another report in early September. Oh, I can hardly wait! How's your garden coming along?



The Week in Review

Last week, I bought something really cool at Costco:

We had a June birthday celebration at work this week, so I made this (Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Cups):

 

With these:

The verdict? Delicious! I can't wait to make more batches of ice cream throughout the summer. It will be my go-to dessert. It was fun to share my first-ever batch with my co-workers, as they all have a hearty appreciation of food. This was the first fun thing of the week that I'm going to share with you.

The second fun thing was "cooking" a meal for 25 people on Friday night. My co-worker Emily has been involved in the start of a new college ministry in town that's being spearheaded by several current Whitworth students. Every Friday night, Thrive (the name of the ministry) meets in a church building downtown for dinner, worship, a message, and small group discussion. Because Thrive is just getting off the ground, they don't have the funds to provide dinner every week, so they've been soliciting help from friends and members of local churches. I had extra tithe money from housesitting in May, so I volunteered to make dinner for this week's Thrive gathering.

The catch is that the church building, which used to be an art gallery, has no sink, stove, or oven, so the meals prepared for Thrive need to be creative. Fortunately, God has provided me with many opportunities to coordinate food for bigger groups, so it didn't take me long to come up with a menu: cold, sliced ham from Egger's Meats, bread from Costco (multigrain and rosemary olive oil), and carrots and sliced cucumbers with Sabra hummus. No dinner would be complete without dessert, so I made vegan/gluten free cookies (made with bananas, peanut butter, and oats for substance) and a chocolate sheet cake with peanut butter frosting. Every day this week, I've been preparing some part of the meal, so packing up and transporting the meal downtown on Friday was a breeze. Here it is all packed up and ready to go:

 

I was nervous about the evening and how it would all come together, so I asked my parents and several friends to pray about it. The biggest thing was that the two people I knew weren't going to be there. Providentially, Emily connected me with her friend Anneliese, who was going to be leading Thrive that evening. When I was driving downtown looking for parking, I passed the building the first time and when I came back around, a car was leaving the spot right in front of the building. Praise the Lord! The other miraculous thing was that I didn't get a parking ticket, as I only had enough change for an hour of my time. :)

 

It was a piece of cake (hehe) to set up the meal. Anneliese, her friend Amanda, and I had time to pray for the evening before it started. People trickled in steadily until 6:15, and I enjoyed talking with handful of people. The meal came off splendidly. There was enough for all and a manageable amount of leftovers. Actually, I had almost the whole cake left which was disappointing until I tried it when I was back home. I'm telling you, it is delicious!

 



You might be surprised to know that the vegan/gluten free cookies were also good. The leftovers are in my freezer, ready to emerge at some fortuitous occasion.

Speaking of fortuitous occasions, the third thing I want to share with you about the week is that I finally saw a LIVE MOOSE!

 

My family has been to all the prime moose spots in the United States--Yellowstone, Vermont, Maine, Yosemite--and we never saw a live moose. My church hosted a bike ride on the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes today through the beautiful lakes of northern Idaho. As my housemate Pam and I were riding along, we saw the moose chowing down across the lake. It was awesome! The ride itself was also lovely. Here are some pictures from the trail that entirely fail to capture the beauty we witnessed:

 



And that's a wrap! Have a blessed Father's Day tomorrow!

Life Around the Table

For a while, I was going through a dry spell with reading. I hardly read anything except cooking blogs and then only scanned through recipe after recipe. Then I house-sat and couldn't get the Wifi password to work. You might call this a saving grace. Besides hosting several groups of people, I also re-discovered my normal hankering for reading. My housemate asked me tonight: "How many books do you normally have checked out from the library?" Without hesitation, I answered, "About 30." Many are fated to only ever sit in stacks on my desk, bookshelf, and nightstand, but, if a book is lucky, I'll actually read it.

Such was the case with a new book called Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table by Shauna Niequist. I just finished the book today and loved every sentence of it. Shauna, if possible, loves food even more than I do. It was a comfort to read the book and know that I'm not the only one in the world whose love of food veers towards obsessive. (Just ask my friend who went with me to Trader Joe's yesterday.) Better than that, Shauna grounds food and meals solidly in the living out of a faithful Christian life. You don't have to be a foodie to do this. In fact, I have a friend who hates cooking. But when it was her turn to host the Children's Ministry Committee from church, she made us a wonderful waffle, bacon and egg meal. Whether or not she enjoyed putting it together, there's no doubt that the meal unified us and prepared us for the discussion and prayer portion of our meeting.

Bread and Wine is full of stories from Shauna's life. Most of the stories were things I could relate to whole-heartedly and have experienced numerous times in cooking: spontaneity, inconvenience, unexpected mistakes and successes both, meaningful conversation, working-with-what-you-have meals, and simple, memory-evoking pleasures. Shauna also made it clear that it's okay for meals prepared for other people to be flawed. Perfection isn't the goal; fellowship is. I was comforted by this. I've often had friends over for dinner and have been more concerned with how something I cooked turned out than with the people at my table. Besides, what's life without a little imperfection anyway? It's why we try again (and again and again).

I always have cooking experiences from which I can draw useful spiritual lessons. One in particular stands out from recent weeks: making baklava with my friend Janie. She was making two trays of baklava for two different events, and I'd always wanted to make it. I came over to her house one Wednesday evening, and we got to work. After melting something like seven sticks of butter, we unrolled bundles of filo dough, impossibly thin and delicate. Following the complex instructions carefully, we layered the filo dough and brushed it liberally with the melted butter. Every once in a while, we'd spread a pecan-sugar mixture in between the layers. In the middle of the directions, we realized that we were going to run out of filo dough. Fortunately, mishap though it was, no one will ever know that we used 20 sheets of filo instead of 30.

When all the layers were assembled, it took us a good 15 minutes to score the baklava into narrow diamonds, so the honey-sugar syrup could soak into every crevice. By this time, it was nearly 9 PM, and I had to work the next morning, so I didn't get to help Janie complete the baklava. However, at work the next day, I had a visitor stop by with a package:

 

 

Biting into the honey-soaked squares of baklava made the work of the night before worth it. Actually, I take that back. Walking around my office and sharing squares of the baklava with my co-workers made it worth it. It was seeing my co-workers' eyes light up and hearing the crackle of the baked filo dough as they took a bite that made the often inconvenient work of making the baklava worth the effort. It's a tactile way of connecting one person to another. It's a blessed sharing and receiving.  

 

Shauna writes: "This is what I want you to do: I want you to tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. I want you to throw open your front door and welcome the people you love into the inevitable mess with hugs and laughter. I want you to light a burner on the stove, to chop and stir and season with love and abandon...Gather the people you love around your table and feed them with love and honesty and creativity. Feed them with your hands and the flavors and smells that remind you of home and beauty and the best stories you've ever heard, the best stories you've ever lived."

 

All I can say to that is: "Amen!" Go and do likewise.

Spring in Spokane

I have so much to write about, but tonight is just to share some pictures with you to celebrate the beauty of spring in Spokane. All photos were taken in the garden at the house I'll be house-sitting at for three weeks starting this Tuesday or Manito Park on the South Hill.

 

Happy Spring and Happy Mother's Day to the mothers out there! I am praising God for the beauty of spring and the loving care of my own mother today. I hope you are, too!

Sehnsucht

Recently, I've been missing England. It could be because I'm neck deep in season three of Downton Abbey. Or because I never get a decent cup of tea here except at my college mentor's house. I even had a dream recently that I was in England with a giant list of activities planned out. Having studied abroad in Great Britain, I know exactly the places to which I would (and wouldn't) return.

I particularly thought of England today for two reasons. The first is that when the weather is good, I drive through the countryside to get to church, which is about 15 minutes north of my house. There is one spot on the drive where the Little Spokane River looks a lot like a spot my study group hiked to in Wales. Here's a photo from the hike:

 

There is also a walking trail down to the Little Spokane River about a mile from my house. I walked to the river on the trail this afternoon. There's something about the rushing water and the leaf mold smell and the fresh, clean air of the trail that brings beautiful memories to the forefront of my mind: memories of my grandpa's farm and the Columbia River Gorge and the walks I took in England in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. I think these places are the building blocks of many of my most poignant memories of creation's beauty.

 

 

When I was shielding my eyes from the bright sun and looking out over the river and the marshes and trees this afternoon, I identified the emotion I was feeling. Sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis is known particularly for his use of this word. Sehnsucht at its essence means a yearning or longing for beauty and goodness that cannot be satisfied through human experience. Lewis uses the term sehnsucht as an anchor for his autobiography Surprised by Joy, pointing to instances throughout his life in which he encountered beauty that left him longing for more. At the river today, I realized that God uses Sehnsucht for the purpose of drawing us to the end of ourselves. When we yearn for beauty beyond what we see and experience on earth (the nagging Sehnsucht), we realize that it is the beautiful reality of the Trinity--Living God, Word-Made-Flesh, Life-Giving Spirit--for which we ultimately long.   

 

The second reason for thinking of England today (by now you've likely forgotten there was a second point!) is that I made Cornish pasties (pass-tees) for dinner from an English cookbook called River Cottage Every Day. River Cottage is also the name of an English cooking show I watch on YouTube. When I tell people this, they usually make a strange face and say something like "Why would you want to watch an English cooking show?" Whatever your stereotype of English food is, the Cornish pasty is a tradition that's worth keeping. River Cottage Every Day has recipes for three pasties, so I made the vegetarian filling with lentils and butternut squash (and a little too much mustard, but oh well). They looked so lovely and authentic that I had to take some photos:

 

 

Like a pasty, you got all the "meat" of this blog in the middle. I'm sure that you, too, have experiences both of beauty and of Sehnsucht. As always, I'd love to hear your experiences in the comments section, over e-mail (even better), or in person (best!). May the beauty of this life always draw us into the beauty of God and may we be especially aware of beauty as signs of spring begin to emerge!