Resources For Community Building

Friends from the Baha'i Black Men's Gathering enjoyed the fellowship in our home during our 17th Intensive Program of Growth on the weekend. Both days were filled with outreach projects in the Hilltop community here in Tacoma.

The thrust of our presentation is to offer services to families, in their homes and neighborhoods in an effort to build a more unified and secure environment for everyone, especially children and youth.

If the children can have a systematic level of care throughout their formative years it places them at a distinct advantage to grow in more positive and loving ways. Families awaken to the potential of their children, and hope and achievement are activated within the child, youth build social skills when involved in service projects, and everyone gets connected at a deeper, more spiritualized level. It is hoped that this approach will not only bring about a more committed level of care for families, but that it will ultimately build resources for neighborhoods and empower people who have been disheartened by poverty and crime.

Once a child lives with hope and understands their potential to create a better life, they must have a support group within the neighborhood, composed of families of all backgrounds and persuasions, of any religion, with the goal of working together to build a better community. That is the primary goal of our Intensive Phase of Growth. It is our job to provide the resources and get the programs in place.

George took 43 videos and 87 photographs over the weekend which are in our Flicker account. One can listen in on the consultation, enjoy the music (Jonathan performs an African chant), and even imagine the aroma in my kitchen!

Meals were provided for the weekend, but I did manage to make an unusual bread pudding. I'd made a sweet-potato cookie for Feast which was an utter flop so I didn't serve it. Rather than throw all of the cookies away, I broke them up and added them to bread, milk, eggs, butter, vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon, and placed some raisins and fresh peaches on top, and baked the whole thing.
The sweet-potato bread pudding turned out great! It just goes to show that disasters in the kitchen can become heavenly when transformed...and that was basically the whole point of our weekend. Spiritual transformation builds healthy communities.

I'll close with this photo of my friend Nancy. She brought me the sweet-potatoes - about 2 gallons of them pureed and sweetened. Nancy is Hawaiian, and always wore her beautiful black hair long, which is the custom. So when I saw her with her head shaved, I was shocked. This was so unlike her! When I asked her about it, she said one of her close friends was undergoing chemotherapy and she wanted to provide support. So she shaved her head to show her friend that she cared.

No Chicken Soup Here

George came home from work on Friday complaining of chest pain and tightness. He brought his lunch box in from the car and said he hadn't eaten all day. Said he had a fever.

I immediately thought of his asthma but knew this was probably something else, maybe pleurisy. I told him to drive to the Multicare Emergency Clinic over on 26th and Pearl, about 4 or 5 miles away. I wanted to make sure it was not swine flu or something.

While I cleaned up my kitchen - I was in the middle of canning green beans - I waited for him to return. But no phone call. It wasn't until almost 9:00 that he called, using a fireman's emergency phone. They loaded him up into an ambulance, and as he mentioned that the initial assessment was pleurisy, I said, "Well, I figured that."

I wasn't too worried about him, but he had to leave my car in the parking lot at the clinic, and that concerned me, so I told him I'd walk over there in the morning and pick it up. End of conversation, end of worry over George.

I went to bed, thinking I'd pick him up at Tacoma General the next day. Locked the doors, left the light burning in the den...and darn it, it is spooky sleeping all alone in a quiet house! All of a sudden I was all ears, alert to every sound in the neighborhood, the guys partying across the street, the cats standing-off and hissing in the back yard, cars driving by sending vibrations through the house. I turned up the sound machine to the sound of rain, and pulled a comforter around my ears.

Sometime after midnight I heard the bedroom door open, and George said, "It's just ME". He (didn't want to get shot) didn't want to frighten me. He crawled into bed, mentioning that he walked home in the dark....uphill....through Hilltop, about three miles. He said it was tough at first (well, yes, I guess you could expect that with pleurisy!) and he thought about flagging a taxi that drove by. But, the neighborhood walk was done so quickly, he just kept going.

He slept late the following morning, and I got busy in the kitchen. I cut up a butternut squash and made soup.

That done, I made a sauce for my home-made ravioli parmesan.
These ravioli are made the day before and left to rest overnight.
They are stuffed with home-made farmer's cheese and Swiss chard.

On Sunday I got out my tagine, made a broth for pot-roast, and let the beef simmer all afternoon. I made biscuits to sop up the sauce. He really liked this meal, saying that the aroma was 'killing him' all afternoon. Finally about 4:00 I served him a bowl before I headed over to pick vegetables in my garden.

I've been canning cabbage slaw, both green and red, and also a bean-cauliflower-carrot salad.

A friend brought over about a gallon of sweet-potato puree, so I froze it in quart size packets, ready for cookies or a pie. This is a good time of the year for pumpkin cookies. I made some of those for a coffee break, using the sweet-potato puree, and George packed some of them in his lunch today.

He is doing fine, and following doctor's orders. He's got his appetite back and is enjoying all the left-overs.

Drowning In Beans

Walter, Markel and Peggy came over last night for our Devotional, and while the guys discussed religion out in the living room, Peggy stood by my sink and stove while I chopped Romano beans and canned them. I told her I was drowning in beans.

The last two quart jars I simmered until just barely cooked, then I sealed them and didn't process them, as I want to use them within a few weeks for a marinated salad. They sealed with a loud pop while she and I visited in the den.

I'd spent the day cooking - made some cream cheese to spread on toast, roasted a large tray of vegetables to put on top; made cornbread, served with honey; then made a big pot of squash soup.

I don't know why I call it that, as it had turnips, chard, eggplant, beans, potatoes, garbanzos, carrots and celery, onions and garlic. However, I'd initially intended just squash soup, using a large butternut I had on hand.

I chopped these chard stems and threw them into the pot, too. I'm going to use the chard leaves for the innards of a Sardinian ravioli called 'Ravioli con Verdura' which is stuffed with ricotta and greens. I'll use my home-made cheese and the chard.

This was one of the paintings that Walter brought for the Devotional. I had to scrunch down to look at the detail. He'd laced some of the lines with gold paint, and the effect (with all of the outrageous light in the room that George needs to make a photograph) was nice. I recall adding gel sparkle to a few of my food photos in my cookbook, to enhance the sparkle on the edge of a crepe. Artists try to bring things alive, and that sure worked.

Feasting Like There Is No Tomorrow

We heard that some colder weather is headed this way, so we picked more of the produce from my garden. What is shown here will be used for squash soup, root soup, salsa and roasted vegetables. Some of it will be prepared and frozen, to be enjoyed later.

I've been reading through some of my cookbooks for recipes, especially those from the Mediterranean: Lots of fresh vegetables, fruit, whole grains, seeds and nuts, fish, meat as flavoring, and olive oil. Add to this a little home-made farmer's cheese and yogurt, and you pretty much have our diet. Wonderful God-given abundance and flavors that are unforgettable.

However, the greatest inspiration for 'feasting like there is no tomorrow' is Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations".He celebrates and explores ethnic food and the culture that shapes it. His energy and joy are contageous, and have had a tremendous impact on my cooking.

This past year Bourdain visited Sardinia, the homeland of his wife, Ottavia Busia. They sat outside in a patio overlooking the Mediterranean, browsed a local food market, and had a magnificent meal in the home of a family friend.

What wonderful platters of food: the hand-made pasta called Malloreddus served with wild boar; the salt-cured fish roe called Bottarga sprinkled over spaghetti; and all varieties of fish, shellfish, and lobster. As the platter of Malloreddus was served, and the Bottarga, Bourdain said, "If you could smell this you'd be happily biting and snapping your way through your TV screen."

Bottarga, the egg roe from silver mullet, is cured in salt then waxed until it hardens. It is sliced and fried in olive oil with garlic. Part of the Bottarga is shaved into a powder, which is sprinkled onto the oiled pasta. No sauce is used, as the fishy aroma and flavor of the Bottarga is all that is necessary.

I couldn't find fish roe locally, of course, but it can be ordered online. I used a substitution: Smoked Salmon, on sale at Tacoma Boys. I shaved it thin and then put it through my food grinder so that the end result was a light powder. To brown it and crisp it up like bacon I oven-roasted the shaved powder until it was a light brown.

Then it was sprinkled on top of cooked, oiled (Olive Oil) bucatini #6.

I roasted tiny eggplants, carrots and onions from my garden, and mixed them into the pasta. Simple, easy, so good.

I also roasted some of my butternut squash, and added eggplant alongside, dotted with walnuts. This was a bedtime snack.

I saw my physican this week for my annual check-up. He always hands out a print-out, of suggestions and tips. He recommended that I read "The China Study" by Dr. T. Colin Campbell. A nutritionist and research scientist, Dr.Campbell concludes that people who ate the most plant-based foods are the healthiest and tend to avoid chronic disease, and people who ate the most animal based foods got the most chronic disease. He cautions: Change your diet and dramatically reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

This has got me wondering where Bourdain, crazy in love with pork, (and years of drug usage), has done so well - he looks so energized, happy and healthy. I guess he says it the way it truly is: "I've had three or four full lives already most of which I was surprised to find I survived! This is like bonus round undeserved probably, but like some insane pinball machine, life keeps kickin' out extra points, regardless of how I played it."