the greatest of these is love

Pardon me.  Have you seen the movie "Crash"?  Very much the way it starts by flashing around to seemingly unrelated stories, I am going to start with two apparently independent vignettes.  Just like the movie, it will all come together in the end.

*~*~*~*~*

A little while back, Christians worldwide celebrated their holiest holiday, the one that gives irrevocable substance to their beliefs - Easter and the holy days preceding it.  Long story short, the man bold enough to call himself the son of God breaks bread with his friends and then tells them that the next time he will eat with them will be "on the flip side."  After a night of ardent prayer in a garden in Jerusalem, one of his "friends" leads those who would arrest him to Jesus, beginning the end, so to speak.  The next 24 hours will find this supposed Messiah tried, beaten, and hung on a cross, crucified until dead.  The miracle, though, upon which Christians base their faith and find their salvation, is that after resting in a tomb from a Friday afternoon until a Sunday morning, Jesus rose, bringing veracity to all his claims and reconciling a broken relationship between humanity and a pure deity.

I have no idea who named all the holy days, but as Easter approached this year, my cousin's wife inquired if anyone knew what the word Maundy meant (as in Maundy Thursday, the night that Christians remember The Last Supper and take part in a sacrament begun on that night 2000ish years ago).  I'll admit, I referred to the expertise of the internet to help me answer her, but upon finding this article, I remembered things I learned in seminary.  "Maundy" is taken from "Mandate."  Let me explain further:

After humbling himself and washing his friends' feet in a symbolic act of what he was about to accomplish on a far larger and bloodier scale, and after instituting the sacrament of Communion by offering his friends his body/bread and blood/wine and asking them to remember him when they dined together, Jesus gave them one last mandate.  "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (Gospel of John, 13:34-35 ESV)

*~*~*~*~*

Do you know who Beth Hart is?

I've mentioned her before, but lately she's been taking up a lot of space in my brain and in my heart.  I believe I have come to decide that she is truly the greatest performer of my time for what she does.  There are two reasons for this:

1. She seems to have perfect pitch - she never misses a note!
2. She is so completely honest and raw... she pours every part of her heart into her music.  I saw an interview with her when she said that she wrote when she was sad and toured when she was not, more or less.

Having lost myself in hours of YouTube videos over the last several weeks, I've seen her live performances from all over the world, in all kinds of venues from stadiums to dive bars, and multiple versions of her more popular songs.  She is a consummate performer - she enjoys every moment of what she does (even in a bittersweet, maudlin kind of way) and recognizes at every opportunity how lucky she is that she gets to sing her heart for a living.  She is so real.

She is a storyteller and I love that.  Through her songs and the tales she uses to introduce them, I learn more about her and her life and her inspirations.  She has written the most sincere love song I've ever heard and the most painful plea for love, too.

Beth did not have the fame she deserved in the USA, so she does most of her touring overseas, throughout Europe.  She very clearly feeds off of the energy of her crowd, so she interacts with them frequently throughout the concert.  She loves it when her crowd sings along, they obviously love when she talks to them, and there is always this intense intimacy between her and those in attendance at her shows.  I hope to be so lucky one day.  

As I've been vicariously participating (via YouTube), I noticed a trend in her closing song.  It is not normally the same song, though they are almost always incredibly personal and sometimes heart-wrenchingly painful songs.  One can almost imagine Beth's fans leaving the concert in a contemplative way not unlike the worshippers at a Maundy Thursday service.    

After concluding her Wroclaw (Poland) concert with the song that made her [at least somewhat] famous, she sincerely thanks her fans for being "so nice to me."

Maybe I was in a particularly melancholy mood while watching this one night, but I thought to myself, "what kind of pain makes a person thank total strangers for being nice to her?"  It was enough to push tears into my eyes, thinking of all I knew she had been through from reading up on her and watching interviews with her.  Divorced parents, possible abuse, a heroin user by age 15, when she was 22ish her old sister, who she holds in high regard, died from AIDS, which she caught from a dirty needle.  It took Beth years to care enough about herself to clean up (and the love of a good man).  Her self-esteem is still just awful and my heart aches for her.

In her adult years, she reconciled the broken relationship she had with her father, who left when she was still young.  When she wrote one of her more recent albums, 37 Days, she asked him what his favorite song was.  He told her he didn't know why, but it was this one:

She told him she knew why - Because he is an addict, just like her.  Clean or not, it is a continuing struggle, laid bare in this song.  "God knows I can't change me; I've tried and tried... it's been a long time at the bottom.  Spent a lot of time way down there.  It's been a long time at the bottom - I don't know how I made it here."

*~*~*~*~*

So how do the two parts of this post "crash"?  Really, it's quite simple.

You don't know what another person is going through or has lived through.  You don't know their joys or the pain they carry unspoken.

Be kind.  Love one another.

sweet and simple success

So, despite last night's relative failure (not really, but it didn't live up to my hopeless perfectionism, so...) I strapped on my holiday-appropriate red-n-white striped apron again.  I guess it's kind of like getting right back in the saddle after being thrown?

Well, maybe not as painful, although you may find it painful to observe my "clashing" stripes.  By pure lucky coincidence, I happened to be wearing horizontally-striped socks and I thought it was a funny combination with the vertical stripes of the apron.  If you disagree, remember what your mother taught you about what to do if you don't have anything nice to say.

I have plenty of nice things to say tonight - we'll start with the cookies.

My first "nice" statement is to point out how lucky my colleagues are that I am a woman of my word (and that by telling them I was baking I created built-in accountability).  Mister and I each had one small cookie to test their quality and were completely impressed.

In addition to being attractive on the outside, these cookies are "charming and delightful" and a pleasure to be around.  I do not expect them to last very long tomorrow - they are just the right amount of sweet, aided, in part, by the cinnamon sugar in which I rolled them before plunking them down on the baking sheets.  However, the generous amount of Earth Balance that began the batter contributed to an incredibly buttery taste and texture - you could liken these to a combination of those Dutch butter cookies so much like shortbread, and honest to goodness sugar cookies.

They are, in a way, sugar cookies - The recipe, filched gracefully from realsimple.com is for Brown Sugar Drop Cookies but my increasingly OCD self couldn't deal with the ugly little deposits of dough on the sheets, so I rolled them into buttery little balls and then dunked them into cinnamon sugar before pressing the down a little onto the sheet.

Time to pack them up! Before Mister and I eat them all...

glitter and good will

If you look back over posts from Decembers Past, you'll find I don't usually have time to enjoy The Most Wonderful Time of the Year due to working like a maniac.  Since I find myself working a retail position this holiday season, I figured I would once again miss out on the fun due to a busy schedule.  It has been plenty busy but since I am now in the city from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep again, I still have enough leftover time and energy to enjoy the holiday - how welcome a relief!

I hope you found my last post more inspiring than depressing or mean.  I expect this one to be of a far more light-hearted nature.

In years past, as in, those that came before full-time jobs and adult responsibilities, I used to love the weeks leading up to Christmas.  Everyday I would open my eyes in anticipation of a snowfall that usually didn't come.  At night I would decorate the envelopes in which I would send off treasures - Christmas cards and sometimes invitations to a grand party.  One year, I even managed to have a formal party - I wore a full, floor-length gown of midnight blue georgette and satin!  I was the most dressed of all my attendees, but they did humor me and dress to the nines.  Although I'm not yet back to the point of being able to host a lavish, gilded soiree, I have decorated my home for the first time in many years and tonight I covered myself and my dining table with the glitter that fell from the Christmas cards I was addressing in my finest script.  It feels good to have a box full of treasures for mailing!

In the hopes of pulling you into my Holiday Spirit, let's have a Picture Parade!

Here is a tiny ceramic nativity scene.  It seemed like the best place for it was beneath the tree, since I do consider the birth of my Savior to be the greatest gift of all.  Despite that truth, I will probably have to move it when I start putting presents beneath the tree (which I hope will start happening this weekend!).

Anyone remember Beanie Babies?  This is my angelbear beanie - its name is Halo II (good name for a friend, right?) and we share a birthday (even if we are 22 years apart).

I have a lovely angel ornament who is currently too big and heavy for my little Charlie Brown tree.  Fortunately, this year we have a mantel and a fireplace and I think she looks just lovely suspended there, just beyond the tree.

Santa's keeping a close watch over my watercolor of Lake Tahoe (I think he'd rather locate his toy shop there).

Initially, I thought I'd clear off the mantel completely and put up green garland, maybe with some lights and ribbon, then weave some candles and other Christmas decor (like my tiny nativity scene) in, but then I looked again and saw what a beautiful job Mister had done, arranging one of my favorite wedding photos amidst some candles and other works of art created specifically for us, and I thought I would rather just augment his work.  So, I added another Santa.

Eleven months of the year, this guy lives inside the santa box above.  He's a painted ceramic snowman lantern.  Think about that.  A snowman lantern.  It's a little twisted, don't you think?

"Hey, what should we set on fire?"

"How 'bout this snowman over here?"

I mean, really?  What thought process goes into making a snowman lantern?

Nevertheless, I love it and will keep him burning as long as I keep finding tea-light candles.

This is a little pewter nativity scene candle.  Again, with the irreverent things to set on fire, but anyway... my father-in-law gave me this little token at my first Greek Christmas.  He did so because he didn't know if the hostess, Yiayia (Greek for Grandmother), would have included me in the gift-giving and he didn't want me to feel left out.

So I love it.

That's a little tin pail, painted up to resemble Santa.  It appears Santa is like the Beans-n-Rice of my decorating world - can't have too many versions, can I?  This one makes a great candy holder, so there are individually-wrapped peppermints in there right now.  Candy canes may or may not be next.

Angst was feeling a bit uncertain about the decor changes.

In fact, he was pretty sure he wanted nothing to do with all these sparkly, lit-up things.

 Oh.  Wait.

Dangle-y things?

grinchy mcscrooge

What is up with kids these days???

Yes, I've become one of those stodgy old geezers that says things like that.  Hear me out, though - in the "olden days," stodgy old geezers were called by a different name - Elders - and people showed them reverence and respect simply because they had managed to live long enough to get gray hairs.

I work with a bunch of people who are, on average, 10 years younger than me.  While this is usually something we don't notice, I can't help but wonder if it is a generational difference that allows me to love Christmas in all its trimmings - the music, the food, the scents, the decorations - and that causes them to adopt an attitude of apathy at best and downright mean-spirited, steal-your-sunshine hatred at worst.  I don't know when this happened since I was too busy to enjoy Christmas the last two years, but it seems that without exception, my colleagues display a total bah humbug attitude toward the holiday season: while I look forward to the isolated 4 weeks each year that I get to listen to Christmas music, they hate it and complain relentlessly about having to listen to it.

I've had it.

What happened to holiday cheer?  Where is the "most wonderful time of the year"?  Why doesn't anyone "buy into" that anymore?

I think most people are quick to blame the heinous over-commercialization of the holiday for all this Anti-Christmas sentiment.  I can understand how it must feel like Toys-R-Us opening at 9pm on Thanksgiving and the ads for holiday shopping season starting right after Halloween can take away the charm and sentimentality of Christmases past.

I think that's only part of a much bigger picture.  I've been thinking a lot about this because to me, Christmas is a joyful time of year - I love Christmas.  I look forward to it the way a child does, but not in anticipation of presents - rather, I linger on every sight and scent, I enjoy every single day.  I smile when I see the first snowflake decorations tied to the lampposts in Philadelphia and the sight of Headhouse Shambles and Rittenhouse Square all lit up for Christmas makes my heart swell.  I feel joy when I walk past a tree or window display of a storefront.  I actually love Christmas shopping because I know that I have all the excuses I need to "spoil" the people I love.  The only thing I really don't like about Christmas is the time that I have to wait between buying a gift and giving it because I love the joy a small token of love and friendship can bring to a person.

Why don't other people have that joy?

From looking around me and doing some serious thinking (who, me?), I think that a bigger part of this new "bah humbug" trend is the deterioration of relationships - relationships with your family, possibly your colleagues or friends, but yes, relationships.  Whether people admit it or not, I think that is why so many young people hate Christmas.  I know people who hate Christmas just because it means they have to see their family and deal with all the drama - when your family is built around dysfunctional relationships, it doesn't feel good to spend time together.  When we place all our worth on being in a romantic relationship, it "ruins" Christmas if that person dumps us before or around the holiday season.

Honestly, friends, what it comes down to is this: a lack of connection to, respect for, and relationship with the Savior whose birth Christmas celebrates removes any last vestige of holiday joy. [Before anyone reading feels the need to bring this up, I am very well aware that the Church strategically selected December 25th due to the celebration of a popular pagan holiday and that December 25th is not actually when Christ was born.  None of that changes the fact that this is the designated holiday to symbolically celebrate the miracle.]

This time of year you hear ads on the television and on the radio, reminding you to "keep Christ in Christmas" or remember the "Reason for the Season" and it's easy to roll your eyes and say it's hokey, but if we refocused the holiday and remembered why we celebrate it, we might find a joy that transcends holiday shopping madness (I freely admit to hating mall shopping during December, despite my love of buying gifts), gives us strength to put aside differences and hurt feelings and gather with our families at the table, and most importantly, gives us a worth that will never be matched by another human being's love.

So what's wrong with kids these days?  They were not raised in a Christian society, so Christmas has never been anything but a secular, universally celebrated, shopping holiday and another excuse for their family to make them miserable.  The songs that I love to listen to remind me of the incredible love God showed by allowing himself to be born as a human infant to poor, unwed parents so that he could live among us, as one of us, and ultimately give his life so that we would no longer be separated from him.  They remind me of the traditions my family has kept and the new ones I have adopted with the family I married into.  They evoke warmth and love and golden images of happy people being nice to each other.

The songs they hate have no meaning apart from reminding them how useless Christmas is now that they aren't children looking for something special under the tree.  As we [as a secular society] have successfully removed God from every facet of society that is not the cloistered halls of a church, we have lost our holiday traditions and the little things that can touch our hearts and make us remember that we have a lot of love to give.

I have a lot of love to give.  Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones from me and mine.

still alive - be thankful!

I know other bloggers have gone far longer than a week without a post, but I am not normally among them so it feels like forever.  I hope you'll excuse my absence, considering how busy I've been preparing for Thanksgiving and Black Friday - or I should say it like this:

1. the first Thanksgiving (or holiday at all) that I've hosted in my own home!
2. the first Black Friday I've worked retail in fifteen years.

Fortunately, both went off pretty well, yet both were fairly stressful in the days leading up to them.  Additionally, I just haven't felt like I had anything interesting to say.  I realized recently that one of the reasons I've found blogging to be so much fun and so fulfilling in the first two years of this little blog was because I was still learning how to cook new and interesting things, so I was always trying to make something I hadn't made yet so I could come up with a unique post.  Over the last several months, I've found myself perfectly happy to repeat "favorites" from the last few years, and although I only rotate recipes every few months, I still didn't have anything interesting to say about making "this" dish again.

Here is a quick recap of my Celebrate Vegan mini-menu:

The two pasta dishes (Pasta with Shallots and Chard and Pasta with Red Peppers and Basil) were just like I remembered them - relatively easy with a ton of flavor.  Neither of them made as much as I thought I remembered, but believe me, with Thanksgiving coming up, there was no place in our fridge for leftovers anyway.

I made one new recipe from the book I wasn't able to make before because it needed tweaking for Mister's intestinal safety, the Jambalaya and it was quite tasty and fake-meat-alicious!

So let's switch gears.

There's a lovely song by Josh Groban (which you can hear a beautiful cover of here) with the following lyrics:

Some days we forget to look around us.

Some days we can't see the joy that surrounds us.

So caught up inside ourselves, we take when we should give,

So for tonight, we pray for what we know can be,

And on this day we hope for what we still can't see.  

It's up to us to be the change,

And even though we all can still do more...

There's so much to be thankful for.

I'm thankful for a great many things, not the least of which being how well my first Thanksgiving as the cook and hostess turned out!  Here was our menu:

When my parents arrived, we set out mixed olives, veggie crudites with Muhammara (from Celebrate Vegan) and store-bought dill dip (thanks, Mister), and Spanakopita (from The Accidental Vegan).  The main course was a Torfurky Roast which Mister has wanted since his first non-meat-eating Thanksgiving and I was thrilled to be able to give it to him.  Alongside the Tofurky was mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli, and my mom's becoming-famous salad, then dessert was Apple Pie with Vanilla "ice cream" by So Delicious.  Dad brought two delightful bottles of my favorite wines - Apothic Red and the 2009 vintage of Georges deBoeuf Beaujolais-Villages, as well as a four-pack of mini-champagnes "for after work."

Oh?  You wanted a picture parade?  Okay!

I began my preparations on Monday or Tuesday night, starting with the Muhammara dip since it would taste the best after sitting in the fridge for a few days.  I figured it was best to make it the same night we had Pasta with Shallots and Chard since my home already stank of an onion sibling (and since I already had the book out).  After simmering three chopped red peppers with a chopped onion and sliced garlic for an hour, I dry-toasted some walnuts,

And then placed everything in the blending machine...

and pureed it until it was mostly smooth and homogenously orange.

After it cooled a little, I scooped it into a "tupperware" and stuck it in the fridge, to be forgotten until Thursday.

Wednesday night, I intended to make the spanakopita because I've found that it sticks together better if it's made the night before it's eaten.  So I chopped up a shallot to substitute for the revolting onion in the recipe and sauteed the onion and spinach while the lentils cooked.

Added the brown lentils (I'm not actually sure why, either)

and then a big heap of crumbled feta tofu,

and stirred it all together.

This is where it gets fun.  By the time I started making this, I'd only worked one eight-hour day at work (the others went long in preparation for Black Friday) and after that 8-hour day (of being one half of the sales force, since one person got sent home with an eye infection) I had a 2.5 hour hair appointment (oh, how I missed you, Candi KaBoom!), so I really wasn't on my most... "with it" behavior.

I realized after all the work of assembling the spanakopita, including gluing sheets of phyllo together with olive oil while listening to the darkly angelic voice of Amy Lee through my earbuds, that I had missed one step of the two-step process required to preheat my ancient oven.  So, finding (at 2am) that my oven was still cold after it was "preheating" for 30 minutes, I covered the spanakopita with plastic, put it in the fridge and went to bed.

It came out just fine when I baked it the next morning.

Then came the piece de resistance.

Mister's long-awaited Tofurky Roast, complete with wild rice stuffing.

I put it in a little Corningware casserole dish and surrounded it with quartered potatoes and carrots, then poured half of the sage marinade over it and stuck that puppy in the oven.

It's not a real puppy, by the way.

appetizers - from the top: Muhammara, Dill dip, olives

more apps: Spanakopita, crudites

The Torfurky, all basted and roasted and ready to eat!

Sides: mashterpaters, roasted broccoli, and the canned
cranberry "sauce" Mister insisted we needed

I realized in a panic a few days before Thanksgiving (and a few days after I constructed the menu) that I had completely neglected to get/make gravy.  In an incredible (and incredibly fortunate) coincidence, my dear Mama Pea posted this recipe to save my butt.  It was good and easy to make in a pinch, but a little too thick to become a regular occurrence in our home, so next year we'll think ahead and find something a little more pourable.

Next year?

That's right!  It seems my parents enjoyed themselves enough to consider sharing the holidays - with any luck, that means I will always host Thanksgiving and they can have Christmas :)  In any case, thanks to my hard-working dishwasher and helpful husband, it didn't take all that long to clean up after dinner, allowing me to get to bed by nine(ish) since I had to be up at 3am to go to work.

In case you were wondering, Philadelphia is incredibly quiet and peaceful (and dark) at 5am.

perfect timing!

I never realize how many e-magazines and other lifestyle websites have my email address until this time of year.  This past week, I've been bombarded with emails from Real Simple, Martha Stewart, and probably some others, on how to have a healthy, happy, full-of-variety, outside-the-box-but-still-traditional, cholesterol-free, chocolatey Thanksgiving.

I do actually intend to pick through each and every email, especially since I get to host Thanksgiving this year!  This is mega-exciting for me.  One of the biggest reasons Mister and I moved from our old closet to a slightly larger one (think "dressing room," folks) is because I love to entertain but had no space to do it in our old apartment.  I am so excited about Thanksgiving, I've even managed to block out the anticipated trauma of Black Friday (the first time it's mattered in 17 years).  I will be wandering off shortly to sift through emails and websites and.....

My new cookbook which arrived just today!  Woo hoo!  This is probably one of the best Mondays ever: my make-up came out great and garnered several compliments from customers, my dad came to visit and we made plans to have Thanksgiving at my home this year, I sold more than anyone else in the store (closest person "behind" me was over $2000 behind), and I came home to Celebrate Vegan, the long-awaited second cookbook from Philly's own Urban Vegan, Dynise Balcavage.

I'm sure you can imagine the sole source of next week's menu.

I will be posting a review of this book, just in case I haven't already enticed you into purchasing your own copy.  Hey - Black Friday Christmas is coming!  Time to make those lists!

Ironically, I made my favorite recipe for Sloppy Joes last night, and I remember thinking, "Gee, I hope I get my new cookbook soon...I love these sloppy joes, but I could just drool thinking of those new recipes [that I haven't beaten to death and will do again tomorrow night]."

In fact, tonight's dinner was Farfalle Rotini with Cabbage and White Beans from Vegan on the Cheap and when I saw that I had the new Celebrate Vegan and a pile of shallots, I almost abandoned dinner to remake this sure-to-be-classic/heavily-rotated recipe.  I was too busy daydreaming to take pictures of tonight's dinner, but let me assure you, the most interesting part was Angst wishing he could overturn one of our dishes and steal all the "slimy," wilted cabbage.

It's a good thing I have so many more tasty things left on this week's menu, because I'm already looking forward to plotting next week's (and Thanksgiving! so off I go).  Sweet dreams are made of this!

SIN & my BIG FAT Greek Easter

Do they still have the Seven Deadly Sins?  If so, I fear I'm going straight to Hell - do not pass go and do not collect $200.  How else can it go when my entire celebration of Jesus's act of reconciliation involved gluttony?  Well, okay, maybe not the whole celebration, but the part that occurred outside of the church.

After church, we dined with my in-laws (17 of us total) at Estia on Broad and Locust.  It was an extravagant affair to say the least.  Honestly, I would be lying (another sin, surely) if I didn't admit that my favorite part of lunch was seeing all of our family again - it doesn't happen frequently enough.  I'm pretty sure (unfortunately) that the last time I saw my parents-in-law was Christmas - and if that's not a sin, I don't know what is.  Mister and I had a little gift for our nephews, as well, and there is something priceless about watching children take turns pulling off the wrapping paper so they can share every part of the gift - they're good at being brothers.  So my true delight was in the people; my beautiful SIL, a cousin who brought his new lady friend, my little angel baby.  Of course, another priceless moment was when my father-in-law parked himself across from me, attentive waiter behind him, and asked if I would like some "voov," while making a drinking motion with his hand.  In my momentary ignorance, I thought he had learned a new Greek word for "drink," possibly "wine," but once the waiter nodded, noted, and walked away with my FIL, I realized he had just enlisted my assistance in drinking a bottle of Veuve Clicquot!  It helped wash down the huge amount of food that covered every square inch of the table (and some of the round ones) - fried zucchini, various spreads (baba ghanoush, muhammara, hummus, tzatziki) with bread, pita, and crudites, as well as amazing marinated peasant salads of red and orange tomatoes, red and green peppers, and cucumbers.  I barely had space for my entree and resolved, next time my entree will merely be a salad.  There were also three decadent, huge Greek desserts and Greek coffee.  I love Greek stuff - I'm so lucky to be married into this family!

After 15 hugs and kisses, we excused ourselves to run (in heels) to the train station.  We hopped on the train just as it was about to leave us, and 45 minutes later found ourselves in my dad's car.  Once we arrived at the house, I could finally relieve my purse of the jar full of rice, spices, and cashews that I'd carried to church and lunch.  Mom and a cousin were industriously chopping tomatoes for bruschetta while the littlest cousin hunted for plastic candy-filled eggs in my parents' verdant backyard.  While Mom and I started cooking, my dad showed everyone photos and video of me as an infant and toddler, then took the whole merry party down to the basement to play with his bordering-on-obsession trainset.  It takes up the entire basement.  He cut holes in the walls to let the trains go through "tunnels."  I told Dad he has to take this stuff down before he gets decrepit because I don't want to deal with it.  We all figured, though, that the littlest cousin, presently 2 years old, should at least be a teenager before this becomes an issue, so we'll just hire him and some friends for pizza.

Once the Black Bottom Pineapple Tofu on Coconut Cashew Rice (from Vegetarian Times: Fast and Easy) was done cooking, Mom and I set up the table and called everyone away from the fun to eat dinner.  My plate was delightfully colorful!

Taking up the majority of the plate was the tofu dish, accompanied (counter-clockwise) by a delightful strawberry-walnut salad my mom made, as well as an apple-sweet potato roast.  What a lovely springtime meal, don't you think?

So tonight is the first night of the new menu.  What menu?  Glad you asked:

1. Chili and Polenta Casserole also from Vegetarian Times: Fast and Easy, and hopefully, it comes together as quickly as they say it does, because this is going to be a busy week, methinks.

2. Pasta Marinara with Kale and Beans - although this will be accompanied by a new recipe for you (yay!), don't get too excited - it's going to be a cheater recipe (with a rockstar name).

3. Spring Vegetable Curry from The Accidental Vegan - why not?  It's spring and Mister Loves Asparagus.

4. Cajun Red Beans and Rice, also from The Accidental Vegan, because it's my fav-fav-favorite rice-n-beans recipe. 

5. Yakisoba, also from The Accidental Vegan, which was dinner tonight.

It's a little bit bland, but there is a subtle aftertaste of ginger and not quite enough garlic.  Of course, I wanted to use my new toy - a ginger grater, so I grated the garlic and I don't think I got as much out of each clove as I do when I press it.  It did a fantastic job on the ginger, though, so well done, Essene!  Best $5 I ever spent (especially after flirting with the $20 Microplane Special People Grater/Zester at Williams-Sonoma when I picked up the gifts for the nephews).  That $15 will go toward the Buy-Natalie-a-4qt-Saute-Pan fund.  Attempting to "toss" a pound of noodles with the veggies and sauce tonight in my 3-qt pan was quite an adventure and pushed me over the Suck-It-Up-and-Spend-the-$$$ edge.  After the rent gets paid :)

green beer goggles

I don't actually like beer.  I think that is both a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand, beer is normally pretty cheap and easy to come by (although it takes way more beer than can fit in my belly to have any effect on me).  On the other hand, it doesn't taste very good, and by avoiding it I am also avoiding pointless calorie use and involving myself directly in scenes like this:

Apparently, shortly before I arrived home from work, there was a huge Irish band across the street, complete with a bagpipe choir and a marching band drumline.  Mister said the drums were making the apartment shake, which did not make our wee kitty happy.  They started up again while I was cooking dinner.  Mister started moaning but honestly, they weren't that bad - I kind of got a kick out them, as long as they kept it brief.  They did.

I never had the traditional corned beef and cabbage before I stopped eating animals, mainly because my family is not Irish and we didn't eat cabbage.  I don't even know what you do to beef to corn it, but it sounds kind of gross.  Nevertheless, I did feel the need to do something Irish and cabbagey for dinner tonight, so I made my own version of vegan corned beef and cabbage (with a little help from my friends).

That's some pretty purple cabbage just steam-simmering away with some garlic and caraway seeds right there.  While it was cooking, I reflected on a memory I might have made up, but I think I remember my mother telling me about the time my sister, as an adult, wanted to make some traditional German meal that involved cabbage and how it stunk up the whole house.  As I inhaled the sweet scent of my cabbage, I wondered just what a person has to do to cabbage to make it smell as bad as other people think it does.  I think the answer is: boil it.  I think as long as you refrain from boiling it for hours, it is just fine.

In place of the corned beef, I sliced a package of Tofurky kielbasa on the bias and then did a quick saute in a bit of olive oil.  Once it was lightly browned, I turned off the heat and finished cooking the cabbage.  Finally, I artfully arranged the "beef" over a bed of Red Cabbage with Caraway Seeds from The Urban Vegan.  

It was a delightful combination of sweet and savory, a little crunchy and a little chewy.  We happily finished it all up while discussing how some famous people manage to have long, fruitful, and relevant careers (think Madonna, Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, Steven Tyler) while other celebs enjoyed a phenomenal career until the had some kind of major meltdown and never quite make it back to normal (for example, Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, Mariah Carey).

I love Mister's and my dinner conversations.

'twas a few minutes past Christmas

See, I already know that I won't finish this post until after midnight... with all the excitement, I got a late start.

What excitement, you ask?  Well, I got a bunch of sharp knives for Christmas - how's that?  It's supposed to snow tonight, so when I wake up tomorrow, there may be a decent bit of my favorite white powder on the ground.  In fact, we have a red weather advisory on weather.com, which impressed Mister enough for him to ask if we have enough food to last a couple of days.  Now I know he's delirious - even if we didn't, the city doesn't shut down for a foot of snow.  I know, because we got a lot more than that last winter and we never starved.

Just in case all that isn't exciting enough for you (really? you need more excitement than knives?), believe it or not, Santa brought me a new cookbook:

oh yes - Merry Christmas to me

My mother nearly had a heart attack when I told her the nature of the cookbook.  I did my best to avoid the D word (diet), but eventually, Mom figured it out and asked me why on earth I would want a cookbook like that when I obviously don't need to lose weight.  After promising I would eat double portions of everything I make from the book, I explained that I already own all of Isa's books and didn't want the weight-loss-oriented nature of this book to prevent it from joining its siblings on my shelf.

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and enjoyed whatever you did.  I certainly enjoyed the time I got to spend with loved ones over the last 36 hours.

The festivities began at my in-laws' home for Christmas Eve lunch.  Much laughter and food spread across the table and I didn't remember to photograph one darn plate of it.  For shame - it was as attractive as it was tasty.  We went home for a mid-afternoon "nap" and then met my parents-in-law at church for the candlelight service.

I learned something new from my FIL - "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was written in Philadelphia when a pastor, recently returned from a trip to the Holy Land, looked out over Rittenhouse Square (where the church is located) and thought it greatly resembled Bethlehem.  After church, we took advantage of the location and availed ourselves on the hospitality of Branzino, an intimate Italian BYOB about a half a block away.  We laughed and dined until 11, at which time they returned us to our humble home, landmarked by our tiny tree up in the window shining its little lights for all the people who were not wandering around our neighborhood.

After getting one of the first decent nights of sleep I've gotten in six weeks, I was still startled awake by my alarm.  Mister and I made it to the train just as it was arriving, and as we headed west, a gentle snow began to fall.  The train takes us through the Main Line of Philadelphian suburbs, so there were a few stops decorated for the holiday.

okay, it probably always looks like this, but I appreciated its red-n-greenness considering the whole Christmas color scheme

Arriving at my parents' home, I was ushered into the [2nd] living room the moment I removed my coat - they recently replaced the carpet and had it repainted.  It looks gorgeous, but especially with the 2nd Christmas tree (we've had two for years, a homey/cozy one and a more styled one), so I ran around the house snapping pictures of how pretty my mom made everything.

I'm a little sad that my piano has been relegated to that common role of displaying photos, but you have to admit, this scene could deck the pages of a home design/decor magazine.

dining room by sunlight

dining room at another angle, by "candlelight"

"the stockings were propped up against the fireplace with care"

our "real" tree, with our motley collection of ornaments

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out

Mom's Dickens Village

Of course, Angst's archnemesis was there, looking for trouble...

Coffee was brewed, muffins were eaten, presents were opened...
Wine was poured, hors d'oeuvres set out, and Mom and I made Kwanzaa Stew.
Bellies were filled, more wine was poured, and pictures...many, many pictures were snapped.  A few favorites:

pretty sister

me, Mom, sis

I think this is foreshadowing.  If you replace the recliner with a wooden rocking chair and put him on a sunny veranda somewhere, I see my dad in the future, in his retirement, rocking the Old Folks Sunglasses - you know, the ones that fit over your glasses.

In reality, he was watching something in 3D on his special new TV, just like Mom and Sis in this picture.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!