The Feast

We live in a culture where it is expected that you can get whatever you want, whenever you want it. This is true in many areas, but I want to focus on the area of food today. If you live in the US or Canada and are willing to pay for it (most people are), you can get any food you want from any nation on earth at any time of year, and fast, too. You can have fresh strawberries in January (nevermind that they don’t taste quite so “fresh”), a whole dinner ready in 5 minutes from a little box, and if you want a little something sweet, you can grab a box of Krispy Kremes on your way to the checkout. We want everything “gourmet”. Birthday cakes aren’t quite as special as they were when we were 4, because we can pick up a cake from the Walmart bakery any night of the week and eat it after dinner for no reason at all, other than that we happen to like cake. Nathan commented to me after Christmas that even Christmas dinner didn’t seem like a big deal because we eat that kind of food (though not in those quantities!) all the time. I could go on. But my point is that for centuries before us, and still, to a greater or lesser extent, in the rest of the world, “special” food was and is reserved for special times. Even in Germany, which is very much a “Western” country, it is difficult to find fruits and vegetables out of season and Pfeffernuesse, Stollen and Gluehwein are only available in November and December (of course, you can make your own any time of year, but who would? - they’re Christmas foods!). If you live in a small town and want tofu, you might need to travel to a big city to get it. And certainly in more remote and/or poorer areas of the world, daily fare is very simple and based on things that are cheap and readily available - beans and rice, for example. But then, bring on a reason to celebrate and out come the delicacies! A special homecoming, wedding, harvest festival, Christmas… expect a real feast! Except most of us in this continent would only see it as a big meal… nothing special about it, because we eat “special” food all the time.

I want to reintroduce The Feast in our family. By eating more simply on a daily basis, sticking mostly to seasonal fruits and vegetables, eating locally produced whole foods, and drastically reducing the amount of sugar in our diets (the expense of honey, molasses and Sucanat* over refined sugars helps us eat less of it), we will not only save enough money throughout the year to throw real feasts when we have reason to, but those feasts will be looked forward to and savored because they are full of foods we don’t eat all the time. I want birthday cake to be special, not just because it has candles on it, but because cake is a special food, requiring time and more expensive ingredients than our normal fare. I want it to be special because we don’t just enjoy sweets whenever we want. I want food to be a real part of the celebration, not just something to fill our bellies like any other day. I want special occasions to have a meal that reflects, to a very small extent, the incredible feast that will be set before us at the marriage supper of the Lamb, which will be far beyond any comparison with even the best earthly feast you ever had!

The picture is from the movie Babette's Feast, a great classic and good example of a real feast!

*SuCaNat = sugar cane natural: evaporated sugar cane juice granules that retain the nutrients of the sugar cane

To Your Health!

As mentioned in a previous post, we decided this year to cut refined sugars and flours out of our diet ("refined" modifies "sugars" AND "flours" - my sister asked me after she read the first post why we weren't eating flour anymore). No, we haven't gone wing-nutty... just maybe a little health-nuttish by current cultural standards. We met a couple who eats super healthy but who is quite normal otherwise, and on top of being "normal", they aren't vegetarians. Nothing against vegetarians on my part - I'm not a big meat eater anyway - but Nathan, well, the man needs his red meat. So when this couple, in the process of talking about all the health benefits of eating unprocessed stuff, asked if we might be interested in going in with them on a cow (as in the already slaughtered, made-into-steaks kind), Nathan got intrigued. A week of serious sugar craving (it IS addictive, you know) despite the fact that we were still getting some from the last few "bad" things we were trying to get rid of, followed by another two weeks of more minor adjustments... but this week we are feeling pretty good and I've had more energy the past couple days than I've had in months, even though I'm getting less sleep... and I'm really enjoying trying new recipes with new grains... A small portion of our tax refund will purchase us a grain mill so we can buy our grains in bulk and mill them fresh in our kitchen (even whole grains loose a substantial amount of nutrients a few days after milling) - okay, maybe we are wing-nutty:-)... but I've done a little grain milling in our coffee grinder and the muffins I made tasted better than the same ones made with store-bought flour (and it's cheaper to buy the grain in bulk than the flour).

More on our reasoning, and some recipes, in the coming days (or posts, anyway)...

Now don't worry... we're not into legalism - so if you invite us over for dinner, we'll gladly eat whatever you fix!

Toddler Antics

Today Susanna acted like the two-year-old that she almost is: this morning she carried my rings (which I had removed for bread kneading) into the living room and temporarily lost them for me (they were later recovered). Then she decided she wanted to wash her hands in the bathroom sink while I was preoccupied with Jacob... and proceeded to fill my make-up case with water while she was at it (I am still in the process of drying everything out). Then she opened the fridge, took out the carton of hard-boiled eggs and dropped them all on the floor (fortunately they weren't raw, but even hard-boiled eggs break when you drop them!). And then she opened a drawer, found the negatives from our wedding, tore the envelope and dumped them all out in the drawer (no damage other than the envelope, but a mess all the same). But it still made me smile before she went to sleep when she insistently informed me that a parrot says "Polly cracker! Polly cracker!"

*Edit*: I forgot to mention that she also found the Comet I had accidentally left on the back of the toilet and dumped half the contents into the toilet, then proceeded to "clean" the toilet...

Tagged In Fours

Okay, okay... I don't usually do these chain things... reminds me too much of those silly 80's chain letters that were supposed to net you millions of dollars, postcards, recipes, friends, etc... but all they ever succeeded in was make everyone you sent them on to rather annoyed at you;-) However, seeing as these tag games don't claim any rewards other than "fun" and seeing as my blog posts have been rather few and far between, and since I've been tagged by a blogger I highly respect, I'll do this one. JUST this one, so don't any of you other taggers start sending me new ones!:-)

Four jobs I've had:
-Data Entry Clerk (among other places, at Humana, where I learned just how crazy the US health insurance industry is - no cynicism there;-))
-Waitress (I'd do that one again)
-Research Assistant for the U of T linguistics department (my major)
-File Clerk

Four places I've lived:
-Louisville, KY
-Toronto, ON (the place I consider "home")
-Ephrata, PA (most of my childhood years)
-Baltimore, MD (and born near Chicago, so that's ALL the places I've lived)

Four vacations I've taken:
-Virginia
-Germany
-Florida
-Quebec
(I've also been to Vietnam, the Phillipines, Rwanda, Kenya and Kazakhstan, but those weren't "vacations" - I was doing ESL teaching/missions work)

Four (or not) vehicles I've owned:
-Toyota Camry (though I don't actually drive it)
-a sturdy pair of legs

Four blogs I want to tag:
well, considering my intro, I shouldn't propogate these things;-)

Had to post this one! (sorry it's not a new one for you family members:-))

On Remembering

It's about time for me to head to bed (per New Year's resolution #1: move the bedtime WAY back from 12:30 - we've made it back to about 11:30 at this point - so that I can get up early enough to have devotions before our crazy toddler becomes a distraction and get Nathan some breakfast before he heads to work, seeing as #2 involves drastic improvements on our eating habits, mostly with regards to the cutting out of refined sugars and flours, which may be explained more fully in an upcoming post, although I make no promises - how's that for a whole blog entry just in the parentheses?:-))...

But before I do so, I just want to say that we have been incredibly blessed with two healthy, beautiful children, who, despite all the difficulties associated with child-rearing, are much more than we deserve or even hoped for... some friends of ours found out a few days ago that there is very little chance of them ever having biological children, and as we grieve with them in their suffering, I am reminded how often we take our own children for granted... I am reminded how little I ever even think about the fact that for the last part of highschool and first couple years of university, I was struggling with the possibility of never having children... how rarely do I look at Susanna and Jacob and recall the days of walking through the park on the way home from class and feeling sadness as I watched kids playing with their parents because I was losing hope of ever being able to have any children of my own... in my case, God caused my body to begin working properly (and it was God, because the doctors never could figure out what was wrong in the first place) shortly before Nathan and I started dating, so worry over infertility was never a part of our relationship... but it was certainly a part of my life for several years and yet, I seem to have moved on... forgotten...

Isn't it just so easy to get what we want and then forget the struggles that came before the having? How often do I take any and every blessing for granted? Lord, may this time of weeping with those who weep spur us on also to remember and praise you for all you have given us!