Always My Undoing, Plus Idioms

Visits to my father-in-law's house result in massive overeating of rich, salty and/or sugary foods. Happy Father's Day! We had meringues (awesome), huge slices of black forest cheesecake (wow), and generous slices of the best pizza outside Italy (amore). We were sent home with cheesecake and baked French toast covered in sugared pecans. You see the problem. It's especially dangerous to stay with them for a few days, as we did over Christmas. I happened to notice today that my father-in-law's waistline has grown more generous in the year he's been married to the producer of cookie, cake, French toast, and cheesecake wonders.

Uncle Sam tells me I ate more calories than I expended today. No shit, Uncle Sam. That said, I'm very glad I got up early to exercise, or I could be in even more dire straits.

One of my first ESL tasks is to notice all the idioms around me. Fall behind in your work...keep your eyes peeled (that one makes me squirm anyway)...eyes are bigger than your stomach...G. and I say, "You idiom!" when we catch each other saying one.

Calcium Dreams and Sweetness

I seem to sleep better and have sweeter dreams when I take my calcium supplement before bed. (I discovered this by forgetting to take it in the morning a few days.) Try it. Let me know what happens.

Sweeter than calcium dreams, sometimes too sweet, is apricot nectar. I froze little ice cubes of it last week, wanting just a frozen splash of the pretty juice at a time. This morning, waking thirsty from last night's volleyball, I blended a few cubes with soymilk. It's SO. Delicious.

Festival Day

was terrific fun. I shaped and fried many, many dumplings. Chef and I had a rotating brigade of high school students. It was somewhat unfortunate that as soon as the kids got into a dumpling groove, their teacher rotated them to another duty and sent us a new group to start over.

I stayed in the kitchen until my guests arrived. We marveled at the mandala, listened to our monk talk to a packed lecture hall, took in the high school dance troupe's performance to benefit the organization. (I had been mistaken, thinking we were to see traditional Tibetan dance.)

The whole event was to benefit the school my sangha runs in a remote, impoverished mountain area where many Tibetans settled. Lobsang calls it both "school" and "orphanage", which gives you an idea. His talk was quite heartbreaking. The stories of these children were worse than the most macabre vision of Dickens. The photos of the shacks, the 85-year-old woman supporting her two orphaned grandchildren by hauling rocks 12 hours a day... But the changes in the children's faces after a month at the school are undeniable. They learn to smile.

My Mom had a hundred million questions that I could not answer, as usual: Where do the monks live who aren't affiliated with a monastery? Do they have divinity degrees? (I'm pretty sure that the monastic educational system is just Totally Different in Tibet and India.) I can't remember another example from the multitude of questions, for the questions probed the kind of concrete-thinking, "how" details that simply float out of my abstract mind. I offered what information I could about Buddhist belief and practice (which didn't seem to interest my mom all that much) and apologized for not having more answers. On Mother's Day, no less! My mother was very gracious but assured me there would be more questions nonetheless. (My Dad was interested in Buddhism itself, but especially in finding himself in a state-of-the-art high school. Once a principal...)

Dinner was delicious, especially the beef curry. Two Tibetan cooks--just two!--worked from 10:30 AM until 6 PM preparing the feast which, in addition to the beef, included grilled chicken, vegetable lo mein, jasmine rice, salad, and hot hot hot sauce on the side. My kitchen contributed dessert (the carrot fudge) and chai. The Tibetan cooks were just such nice guys, friendly and shaking my hand, no matter any language barrier. The Tibetan chef taught us his way to fold dumplings, which was better than the way we'd been doing it, so we switched. I began to think that the Chinese government could not have violently deposed a nicer people.

I was very tired, so we left before the Tibetan music concert. No matter, collapsing on the couch to watch a bit of "The Vicar of Dibley" was really what I needed that that point. Today, I feel a little of that sadness that a very happy event has passed and we are back in ordinary life. I'm trying to remember the Zen teaching of "no coming, no going".

PS I have photos, but they are on film. Someday you will get to see them.

Being Tibetan

Tomorrow is the long-awaited Compassion Festival sponsored by my sangha! The monks have been working on the sand mandala for a week. I saw it today, almost finished, and it is stunning, beautiful, glorious, gorgeous, touching.

Late this afternoon, I went to the high school hosting the mandala and festival to help with food prep. I was surprised to find pretty fliers on the school's doors advertising dharma talks our monk gave for students throughout the week. The high school was massive, the main office closed, and no map to be found. Some students pointed me in the right direction. I wondered how I would know when I was approaching the right place.

I need not have worried. At the foot of the stairs, I heard recorded Tibetan chants and saw the bright yellows and greens of Tibetan Buddhist banners. There were four or five cinnamon-robe-clad monks. One was working on the mandala, measuring the edges with a compass. His sneakers peeked out from beneath the red robes. People clustered around the mandala for a glimpse. Were they parents of high school students, or just people who lived in town? I paused for a moment, bowled over by this work of art, deeply afraid of sneezing. Further down the hallway, I saw Lobsang, "our monk," answering questions, and his best friend, Amdo (another monk), at his elbow. At last I spied a woman wearing an apron dusted liberally with flour, and asked where the kitchen was.

I expected to slog through boring hours of chopping, but I was essentially treated to a cooking class on stuffing and shaping Tibetan dumplings. Chef Viktor, our leader, seemed impressed with my work, and the high school cafeteria manager half-jokingly offered me a job. It was great fun to socialize with the sangha members who were there, but meeting Chef Viktor was the real treat. He made sure that his volunteer cooks tried the carrot fudge (ohmygod, like the best carrot cake you never had) and enjoyed the samples of reject dumplings. When the other cooks cleared out and I stayed with just a few others to clean, I had the chance to chat with Chef. He grew up in Mozambique, has lived in 7 countries in 3 continents, and has studied the cuisine of all of them. He uses only Succanat for sweetener and has fascinating insights about the mineral and nutritional value of sweeteners. We both admire Jacques Pepin.

I also enjoyed the cleaning, the pulling long streams of cling wrap across trays. It reminded me of my college work study days in the Kosher Kitchen. I missed the Beatles compilation we used to play during cleanup.

As we cleaned and tidied, Lobsang and Amdo entered the kitchen. Lobsang does not know my name, but often greets me with a warm bow-handshake-hug, a fusion hello which always delights me. Chef explained that he may not return tomorrow, as he lives far away, and a Tibetan who speaks no English was slated to be running the kitchen. (I had already volunteered to lead the crew to fold the remaining 150 dumplings and fry all 300 if Chef couldn't return. Chef was glad to have me when I mentioned my high school summers frying up clamcakes.) It turns out they found another Tibetan chef who does know English, and Lobsang charmingly requested Chef's return tomorrow. You can't say no to a monk, especially one as charismatic as ours, so Chef and I will be manufacturing the dumplings together in the morning.

The food we made today is just the snacks to sell in the afternoon. The evening's dinner for 300 will be prepared by the Tibetan crew tomorrow. I wonder what time service will really happen. It's scheduled for 6. Based on my limited exposure to the Tibetan sense of time, I would guess we will eat somewhere between 6:45 and 9.

As we walked out, Chef told me the mandala is so beautiful it made him weep. We looked at it from the second-floor balcony, mesmerized by the colors and intricate patterns. Two high school girls were departing from extracurriculars at that time. They leaned over to look at the mandala again. "It's sooo beautiful," one whispered in awe.

My parents are coming up for the festival, too! Yay!

Facebook Is a Time Suck, and Other Notes from the Weekend

• Facebook. It sucks me in. It also just plain sucks, in a sense. But I can't turn away. I will probably use it intensely for 2 weeks and then never log in again. Like I did with Friendster.
• The Best recipe for PB Cookies Anywhere Ever is Peanut Butter Crisscrosses, page 303 of The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook.
• We are still scraping ancient wallpaper glue of the bathroom walls, and still hoping it isn't carcinogenic.
• Thanks to a groovy idea in Domino Magazine (I got a free subscription for some cross-promotional reason I don't quite understand), I made a master grocery list containing the major things we usually buy, in the order they appear in the store. Before shopping, we can cross out what we don't need and write in anything extra we do need.
• I threw off my anticipated timelines by being accepted to a graduate program way faster than expected, and now I'm looking at registering for courses and applying for financial aid rather than prepping for the GREs, and it's got me a little unbalanced, like, nightmares about forgetting to do my social studies homework and being the only 35-year-old (older than I really am) in a class with 15-year-olds, who incidentally are all the old high school friends I found on Facebook this weekend.
• I like Nia. We had a dancin' Beltane celebration Friday night. Awesome.
• I tried to mail my sister some gluten-free mixes purchased at the local Trader Joe's. The enthusiastic bagger/manager handed me a list of all the many gluten-free products Trader Joe's carries. I thought, what the hell, and threw the list in the package to her. I've been to the post office no fewer than 3 times this weekend, but the package to my sister is still not mailed.
• The Best of the Colbert Report: funny stuff. Its mood is less cynical than The Daily Show.
• Finally, Jacques Pepin has had a fascinating life. I highly recommend his autobiography.

Dreamscape

Chefs Ming Tsai and Jacques Pepin are teaching me how to make casseroles. Ming's creation is rather like a mooncake, with a characteristic flaky, stamped crust on top, only filled with red pork and gelatinous pork fat. Mssr. Pepin's has a bechamel sauce, into which we are putting broccoli and cauliflower. Because of all the fat in the dishes, I'm feeling grateful I did aerobics earlier when the moon was full. Jacques is about to add some sort of meat to the casserole when the air raid sirens start going off.

Damn alarm.

I keep hitting snooze and drifting back into the dream--Ming is trying to tell me something, and it's more real to my consciousness than the sirens and the room beyond them--but my husband helps me get up.

How to Amuse the Proprietors of the Indian Market

I used my last masala chai teabag that G's friend had brought back from India. Last time, I had to wait until Arun returned home, and then back to Boston, for more tea. This time, I was more savvy. I saved the last 2 teabag wrappers (in case I lost one of the wrappers).

At the Indian grocer, I made a beeline for the tea section. I held my green wrapper up to the mostly red and gold boxes. I found no matching packaging; the closest design was on an herbal cough remedy. But I did spy the words masala chai on two boxes. One box showed a beaming Indian woman against a garish yellow background. The slightly more expensive box showed an illustration of tea and spices against a garish yellow background. I chose the latter.

We dodged the cute children running around and begging their parents for sweets (Indian cuisine does sweets really well) to approach the register. I held up the tea box and the green wrapper and asked the store proprietor if they were the same thing, explaining the backstory. He grinned and consulted with his wife. They concluded that it was same thing, different brand.

They appeared highly amused.

PS. I'd been trying to find a perfect make-your-own recipe for chai for years, until God revealed through the hand of Arun that there existed teabags where this is already done for you--perfectly.

Fusion Leftovers: Greek Quesadillas

Warm olive oil in skillet.

Take leftover flour tortilla. Cover half with feta cheese and the extra chopped yellow bell pepper that was not used in last night's quinoa salad.

Notice that there are jarred whole kalamata olives from an indeterminate date of purchase still sitting in the fridge. Remove from fridge. Open jar. Sniff. Decide that brine acts as a preservative, so all will be well.

Fish a few kalamatas from jar. Rinse. Slice, removing pits, and then sprinkle slices over feta-bell pepper mix to taste.

Fold over tortilla.

Place in hot skillet. Cook until cheese becomes warm and soft, and tortilla is golden and crispy.

Enjoy.

The Vegan Gourmet

In college, we loved the vegan restaurant in town. On the occasional Sunday night, I would trek alone to the far ("sketchy") end of Main Street to treat myself to dinner. I sat at a small, square table with a white tablecloth and a single flickering candle, soothed by the simple decor, enjoying a secret dinner to myself. The prices were college-student friendly, about $15 for generous portions of gourmet vegan food. I am not a vegan and, barring some unforeseen conversion experience, never will be--but I loved the cajun tempeh, the tahini-carrot spread on homemade bread, the astounding salads, and ohmygod, the vegan cakes. Once a year, all the workstudy employees from the Kosher Kitchen* would have lunch there, in deference to the vegans on staff. It was no sacrifice for the omnivores. The flavors were intense and unusual, and the chef was not shy about using oils and decadent amounts of tahini. I always left feeling satisfied without feeling stuffed. Spring in my step, I would bounce contentedly back to Church Street, Washington Street, or High Street.

Our sophomore year, the vegan restaurant moved to a better location at the other end of Main Street, amped up the decor, and added a few fish and cheese dishes to its still-mostly-vegan-menu. College students muttered that their place had become "bourgeoisie". Although I preferred the original, Zen monastery-meets-storefront look, even as a young liberal I didn't see that the vegan restaurant had "sold out" so much as "stayed in business by diversifying". But, I also chose one of the most liberal colleges on the East coast and then, finding aspects of it ridiculously liberal once I was there, elected to study dead, white Greek men. Take that, early 19th-century biracial womyn's poetry majors!

Before my husband was my husband, or anything other than a buddy, we were college roommates with a group of friends. I remember when G's longtime girlfriend broke it off during winter break of our senior year. He was sad, then...he started dating. I remember, late that spring, when he fretted over where to take a girl from his tennis class for a date. "Maybe we should go to the vegan restaurant for coffee," he said, "Because I like soymilk in my coffee." Now he doesn't drink soymilk in his coffee. He prefers powdered "creamer," a mystery to me.

Years later, after meeting again in California, coincidentally moving to neighboring towns in Massachusetts, falling in love, moving in together, and, at long last (to my mother's impatience), getting married, we visited campus one summer and made a stop at the vegan restaurant. And they were selling--a cookbook! Yes!

Which is all a very long preamble to telling you what I made for dinner tonight, a vegan feast. Herbed, breaded tofu cutlets that had been marinated in red and white wine, garlic, a touch of soy sauce, and a generous portion of dried sage; quinoa salad with sweet, diced yellow bell pepper and carrots, parsley, sesame oil, rice vinegar, and sesame seeds; and (my own creation) kale braised with ginger and pine nuts, with a squeeze of lemon on top. We drank oolong.

It was delicious. We were sated, but not stuffed.

*Nope, I'm not Jewish.