A Weekend With Ruth

Soon you will tire of these posts where I post pictures of fun things I've done with friends and family and you'll want something serious. I don't blame you. Unfortunately (for the serious reader), my life is filled with such visits. Fortunately (for the forbearing reader), they will come to an end when the summer is over. Summer is a great time to celebrate bounty. (I'll share pictures of my garden bounty with you soon.) And I'm realizing there are different kinds of bounty. This summer has been flush with friends and family bounty. My dear friend Ruth--a friend for 10 years now!--came for a visit last weekend, and I have some pictures to prove it. I hope you enjoy the photos and are reminded to thank God for the friends and family in your own life.

 

Ruth and I spent the afternoon and evening at Manito Park closer to downtown Spokane on Sunday. We enjoyed the beautiful flowers, warm evening, and had a picnic dinner in the garden you see behind us.

 

 

After the picnic dinner, we went to Riverfront Park downtown for the Royal Fireworks show in which a Baroque band performed music on a floating stage in the Spokane River with a fireworks show at the end. We sat with my housemate Pam, her two friends, and my friend Katie and her husband Ben. We had about an hour before the concert started, so we were experimenting with funny pictures. It was a delightful concert and the fireworks show was amazing!

 

Ruth brought me these wonderfully colored pot holders from Guatemala where she spent a month earlier this summer. I've put the pot holders on the wall in my dining room because I can't bear to have them not displayed. They're so great!

 

We did some other fun things, too, like hang out with people from my church, watch Wives and Daughters, make pesto lasagna, go to Green Bluff, and more, but the pictures above are a good representation. I'm so thankful for Ruth's visit!

 

I hope you're getting to spend some lovely time with family and friends this summer!

A Visit With Mom and Dad

My parents drove into town Wednesday, July 10 and stayed until Monday, July 15. I was able to take half of Thursday and all of Friday off work, which was great! This is my first summer working full time, and I'm telling you, it can be rough at times. :) Whitworth's Annual Institute of Ministry was also happening the Wednesday and Thursday my parents were in town. The evening worship services are free and open to the public, so my parents and I enjoyed two wonderful worship services. The preacher, Carolyn Gordon, was fantastic! I can't wait until the podcasts are up on the Whitworth website, so I can listen to her sermons from Monday and Tuesday evenings, too. If you get a chance, listen to them. You'll be challenged, encouraged, and amused.

Wednesday and Thursday, my parents and I did some fun things, like hosted an ice cream social with some of my parents' friends from college, enjoyed ice cream at Doyle's Ice Cream Parlor where my mom and her friend used to take boys in college and make them drink a monster shake (which they still have!), and enjoyed an enchilada dinner with three of my housemates. My mom calls this the ice cream vacation because we had ice cream every day. Part of this is because I'm making good use of my new ice cream maker. The other part is that all three of us just really, really love ice cream!

On Friday, we embarked on our big day trip to Canada. We've all been to Canada a number of times, but not since I've been in Spokane. The drive up there is a mere three hours through some gorgeous countryside. We left at 7:30 AM on Friday morning, and our first stop was to eat muffins and look at the Pend Orielle river at an overlook. Our second stop was at Sweet Creek Falls, which turned out to be this beautiful, Columbia-River-Gorge-like waterfall:

 

Our crossing into Canada was easy and quick. About 10 minutes into Canada, I burst into laughter. Like tears-rolling-down-my-face laughter. It was all because of my dad's behavior with the Canadian border guard. He made us look so suspicious! My dad took my laughter graciously. Here's the grand Canadian flag:

 

Our end destination was the city of Nelson, British Columbia. The picture below is just a tiny view of the mountains and beauty surrounding Nelson. We started off at the Visitor Center where we had the pleasure of talking with a delightful young woman who's a student in Geography at "U Vic" (University of Victoria). She gave us some great advice. With her help, we had lunch at a beautiful little park, walked along the waterfront, got milkshakes, and visited an eclectic coffeeshop. My dad decided to hike to Pulpit Rock across the bridge you see in the background in the photo. While he hiked, my mom and I sat in the park at the waterfront. She read, I wrote in my journal, and we both people watched. It was a great spot to observe families. The main center of town has some major hippie influence, so it was nice to see a different side of the city. Being in a different country made me think about nationality. There didn't seem to be any difference between the people we were observing and us except that they say "Eh" and prounouce "ou" differently. Does nationality even matter? I didn't come to any conclusions, but it's interesting to think about.

We left Nelson around 4:30 or 5 and decided to take a little detour to Crawford State Park back in Washington. We drove 12 miles to get there only to find that the park was closed. Fortunately, we serendipitously turned off onto a side road and found a lovely campground by a river that had big picnic tables. We had great food (old favorites like chicken salad and pasta salad) and enjoyed sitting in the peaceful campground. Here's the pasta salad:

 

They might hate this picture, but I think it's hilarious. :) We were feeling pretty tired on the road back and went to sleep practically right after getting home around 9 PM.

On the road out to Crawford State Park, we saw three beaver dams in the water. It was awesome! We didn't see any beavers, but I guessed it was because they were inside their dams eating toast and kippers (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe anyone?).

On Saturday, we met my friend Margy at Petit Chat bakery. It was delightful to talk with Margy and enjoy pastries together. After that, we drove up to Green Bluff to (as you can see) pick cherries! We picked exactly enough pie cherries for a batch of sour cherry jam. The picture below is my mom showing my housemate Pam and me how to pit cherries with a paper clip. So easy! We also picked Rainier and Bing cherries, all from Cherry Hill Orchard, whose owners go to my church. After Cherry Hill, we walked around Eleven Acres Farm and chatted with the farmer and enjoyed the new microbrewery at another farm. It was lovely to be relaxed at Green Bluff. I'm usually on a mission and fail to enjoy the process of picking food that farmers have so carefully cultivated.

 

On Saturday afternoon, we had some down time and then enjoyed raspberry lemonade with Dottie, my college mentor and friend. Saturday evening we enjoyed a steak dinner with broccoli, watermelon, and this delicious orzo "risotto" from one of Mark Bittman's cookbooks. My coworker mentioned a couple weeks ago that she broiled steak and loved how it turned out. My dad loves steak, so I used the last $20 of my June grocery budget to buy two quality New York strip steaks from Egger's. We were not disappointed. The broiling method worked wonderfully and the meal was delicious. 

 

On Sunday, we had a big waffle breakfast with cherry compote, went to church, hung out in the afternoon, and went up to church again for a concert and hot dog dinner. Oh yeah, and we also cleaned the ice that had been building up in my chest freezer. That was quite the process! In the end, it was pretty easy, but I was so glad my mom and dad helped me out. I would never have had the gumption to clean it on my own. Everything's all neat and tidy in the freezer now and is being filled as we speak with fresh raspberries. 

 

On Sunday night, I brought out all the leftovers from all our meals and found that we each had enough left for meals for another week. It was such a pleasure to make meals for my parents. Foolishly, every meal I made for them except two were new recipes. It could be unfortunate that every new recipe I tried worked out splendidly. :) I discovered soba noodles and liked them so much, I'm going to make another soda noodle dish tonight with zucchini, cabbage, and green onions (from my garden!).

 

After breakfast together on Monday morning, my parents drove back to Portland, and I drove to work. It was a lovely weekend together. I'm so grateful for my parents' companionship. 

Made-From-Scratch Wontons

Last Saturday night, my two friends from church and I gathered to make wontons from scratch! Margaret, at whose house we were meeting, had made wontons with friends once before, so we had a potluck style dinner and she showed us how to form the wontons. We made nearly 50 wontons! Below are some pictures from our time together.

Here are the wontons ready to go out to the fryer:

Bethany frying up the wontons and me looking weird: 



Our wonderful spread ready to be eaten and enjoyed! 

We had two different kinds of wontons. The wontons in the middle of the table are stuffed with pork, shrimp, mushrooms, green onions, and water chestnuts. The wontons at the end of the table are stuffed with cream cheese and green onions. We also have apricot and cherry dipping sauce, lemongrass, baby corn, and ginger rice from Trader Joe's, and fruit salad. Yum!!

We had a lovely evening and had leftovers for later, too, which I ate for Sunday and Monday lunches. For dessert, we enjoyed my second batch of ice cream: homemade strawberry ice cream with Green Bluff strawberries. Thanks for reading!

What's something you like to make from scratch?

"Homeward Bound": A Book Review

I just finished an excellent book called "Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity." The book has many facets, but the primary theme examines why many women have recently embraced traditional values, such as being stay-at-home mothers, crafting, canning, homesteading, keeping chickens, buying local, gardening, and much more. The book examines the root causes for the rise in New Domesticity and delves into the lives of those who practice some aspect of this societal trend. (I'm not missing the fact that I took freshly-baked sourdough bread out of the oven half an hour after finishing the book.)

The three biggest root causes seem to be 1) the feminism of the 60s and 70s that encouraged women to work and be free of domestic duties, 2) the uncertain economic times we live in that have caused widespread distrust in corporations and government, and 3) dissatisfaction with the 9-5 jobs that offer no personal fulfillment or flexibility. Author Emily Matchar thoroughly explains how New Domesticity provides answers to these causes.

When I first started reading the book, I found it ironic that interests that had arisen naturally for me through the influence of family and friends were also part of a greater societal movement. I didn't look at a single DIY blog on gardening or canning or cooking when I first started doing these things, but somehow the zeitgeist of the times moved me. I didn't have any great moral pulpits to mount as I started to can, garden, and bake bread, but rather genuine interest in these domestic arts and now a love for supporting my local community. With two years in the work force and three years of canning and gardening under my belt now, I agree with much of what Matchar believes is best about the New Domesticity movement:

"New Domesticity comes out a deep desire for change in the world. We don't want to trade our souls for our careers, and we don't want to live in a culture that encourages us to do so. We want to embrace the richness, creativity, and comfort that can be found in domestic life...We want to live in a more sustainable way, both economically and ecologically. We've realized that the consumption-crazy Standard American Lifestyle isn't good for the earth and it isn't good for us. We want to focus on what really matters..." (249).

However, as with every movement, there is a shadow side. As I was talking to my housemate about the book, it struck me that New Domesticity is simply a secular way of living out the Christ v. Culture paradigms in Richard Niebuhr's book "Christ and Culture." (Thank you Whitworth Core classes.) The paradigms Niebuhr describes are Christ Against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ Above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ Transforming Culture.

Matchar's biggest problem with the New Domesticity movement is that it encourages many educated, middle class families to make decisions that put the individual good (or individual family good) over the common good. These trends include homeschooling, not vaccinating one's children, denigrating work outside the home, and seeing DIY (Do-It-Yourself) projects (e.g. raising one's own chickens to combat the evils of factory farming) as a way to combat the world's ills. Basically, it's an "Individual Against Culture" paradigm that's becoming a legitimate subculture in the United States. Matchar calls it "troubling hyperindividualism," which is already a characteristic of Generation Y. The same criticism could be made of the Christ Against Culture paradigm. It's better to cut oneself off from the world than to try and change it.

There is a very basic, human tendency in the Christ Against Culture paradigm, which is why I think we see the same trends in the secular world, too. Ultimately, I think Matchar's advice is spot on for both New Domesticity and Christianity. She writes: "The key to making all this work...is to be expansive rather than exclusive" (249). And Christians can be expansive in a way that no other group of people can because we serve a God who is expansive. There are limitless possibilities for the ways we can engage the culture, broken and suffering though it is, so that we can "invite the world" (250) into God's expansive family instead of quarantining ourselves from the world.

I highly recommend Matchar's book. Even if you're not involved in the proponents of New Domesticity yourself, the book will undoubtedly give you an understanding of this significant cultural trend and will reinforce the importance of keeping Christ firmly in the center of your life, domestically-focused or otherwise.

An Agenda Conflict

How often is it that a day doesn't turn out quite like we expect it to? I awoke yesterday morning at 5:30 AM and listened hard. Thunder and rain on a day that was supposed to be 90 degrees. Thunder and rain on a day that had me at Green Bluff at 7 AM picking strawberries to avoid the heat. Heck, it's a Saturday! If I don't have to get out of bed at 6:30 AM, I won't. I woke up again at 7 AM to make sure it was still raining. It was, so I stayed in bed reading blogs at Her.meneutics on my Kindle for another hour. I was up at Knapp's Farm a little after 9 AM. From the bluff, I had a magnificent view of the surrounding hills as I picked strawberries. Sun occasionally beamed down on us hard-core strawberry pickers, braving the weather's caprice, but on the horizon lightning lit the sky and thunder roared.

Strawberries are hard to pick, so the $20 I had saved of my grocery budget--precious money--was still at $14.50 after I paid for my strawberries. I had a respectable number of strawberries, too, for picking them by myself and often being distracted by the lightning and funny little kids around me. I made a stop at another Green Bluff farm and while I was in the building, it started to rain steadily. I was so thankful I had caught the hour and a half of sun in the day and felt sorry for those who had just arrived at Green Bluff. My flat of strawberries became even more precious.

I drove back into town and took advantage of the cooler weather by fertilizing my garden. It rained lightly while I was out in my garden, and I loved it. The rain was my friend as I got down at eye level with my plants and got to see the emerging green globes of tomatoes, unfurling broad leaves of beans and feathery foliage of seashell cosmos. When I had finished working in my garden, Dottie, ever gracious, unwittingly fed me a lunch of tea, buttermilk muffins with strawberry jam, and shortbread. We sat inside with all the windows open and listened to the merry hum of rain.

How pleasant it is to sit together with no deadline and no agenda but to enjoy conversation and the funny turn of the weather. The conversation--hardly anything more than talking over the week behind us and looking forward to the weeks ahead--was as refreshing to me as the rain is to a thirsty ground. I realized, too, that I had no agenda for my strawberries. My only two goals for them were 1) to crush up two cups for jam, and 2) enjoy them.

Agendas and plans and schedules can only go so far, unlike the control-freak nature of my personality would like me to believe. The weekends are refreshing to me because my time isn't dictated by routine and schedules like it is during the week. I love routine, but the un-ending wake-up, go to work, work, come home from work, unpack lunch, pack lunch, do stuff after work, what-it's-bedtime-already? routine was wearing on me this week in particular. The antidote is a Saturday of flexibility and unconcern for the amount of time it takes me to do a task. I planned to finish picking strawberries by 11 AM. I filled my box by 10:30 AM. Great! I used the extra time to drive the long way through Green Bluff. It's not hot like I thought it would be? Great! I spent time in my garden. It's lunchtime, and I'm eating chocolate covered shortbread? Great! Who needs a well-planned and neatly Tupperwared lunch anyway? I have money left in my grocery budget? Great! I bought expensive New York steaks at Egger's for a meal with my parents in July. I like to take the weekend days as they come, to form the agenda moment by moment.

I think we learn in Scripture that the Kingdom of God is about a different agenda than we humans expect. And because of this, I need to learn something from the mistakes of the stubborn, agenda-pursuing Pharisees and their frequent misunderstanding of Jesus' heavenly agenda. Jesus isn't conquering the Romans. But he is freeing captives from bondage to sin. Jesus isn't exalting the Jewish people. But he is humbly pointing us to the only one who deserves to be exalted. Jesus isn't restoring the temple to its former grandeur. But he is restoring broken humanity to the quiet grandeur of intimacy with God.

So maybe it's not so much that I need to be free from having an agenda. Rather, whether it's a week-day agenda or a weekend lack thereof, I need to be aware of when God's agenda and mine conflict. And when that happens, Lord, give me the grace to abandon my agenda for yours.

My Garden, Year Two

This is the second year my college mentor has given me space in her vegetable garden for a garden of my own. This year, I was much more savvy in my planning, so I'm expecting (and praying!) to have a better harvest than last year. We're off to a good start! I thought I'd post some pictures of my garden here to get you oriented to what I've planted. It's always fun to have pictures from the beginning of a garden and I'll be sure to post more when the garden is in full production in August/September. Here are two views of my garden:

 

The picture above shows all the plants expect my tomatoes and one cucumber. In this main part of the garden, I planted potatoes (front left corner), beans, tomatoes, a cucumber, carrots (which I had to replant once), peas, basil, rosemary, chives and green onions. I also planted marigolds, hollyhocks, cosmos and zinnias because I love having fresh flowers. I have a couple volunteer plants from last year that sprung up, including dill, calendula (a flower), snapdragons, a nasturtium, and parsley. As I was weeding today, I pulled up tons of baby hollyhocks and snapdragons that had re-seeded themselves. :) Here's a couple close-ups from the garden:

 

Dottie, my college mentor, and I also decided to try experimenting with straw bale gardening this year. Straw bale gardening was invented as a way to garden successfully even with poor soil. The Mohrlangs have an empty lot next to their house that will be the future home of a Whitworth professor when he gets around to building a house on the lot. In the meantime, he let us use his property for our straw bales. I decided to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and a pepper plant in my straw bales. Here's hoping they thrive! The first picture below is our whole straw bale garden. Dottie's bales have dirt on top of the whole bale while mine just have dirt directly around the plant:

 

A Romanian Rainbow pepper plant:

 

This is a view down the row of bales. You can see a Siletz tomato in the foreground, then a Black Krim tomato, a couple zucchini plants, and English cucumbers at the very end. I also planted two Sun Gold tomato plants given to me by a co-worker, and a lemon cucumber plant.



I love having a garden. I like thinking about God giving Adam the job of stewarding the earth in the Garden of Eden. Gardening is labor intensive (if my sore back after weeding is any indication), but it's also freeing to dig my hands into the dirt after a week of sitting at a desk in front of a computer. It's good to use my hands instead of my head and my whole body instead of just my fingers. Pray with me that my garden grows and that I can be generous with the fruit it bears!

Have you planted a garden this summer? What did you plant?

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!