bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Closed for Xmas.

    Amy Welborn has a series of posts sparked by the news that a particular mega-church in Kentucky decided to close for Christmas to give its staff the day off.  Here’s her first post about the KY church.  Here’s a second one, in response to a post by a Canadian Presbyterian who blogged his disappointment that his own church would have no Christmas Day service.  Here’s a third, highlighting commentary by an "excellent Scripture scholar."

    When I first read these posts and the news articles that accompanied them, I was immediately sympathetic to the Protestants who criticized the churches for not having Christmas services.

    Then I realized that the criticism was not so much because they weren’t having Christmas services, but because Christmas happens to be on a Sunday this year.  The criticism was mainly:  "Hey, they canceled Sunday services because of a holiday!"  And certainly that is a problem.

    I thought that was weird.  Don’t Protestants usually go to church on Christmas Day, whatever day of the week it falls on?  Or is that just a Catholic thing?  (Late Christmas Eve services count as Christmas Day services, btw, under the same logic that lets us go to Mass on Saturday evening to keep our Sunday obligation.)

    Let me tell you, even after thirteen years, I still have a lot to learn  about being a Christian in the United States.

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  • No guilt allowed.

    Good post on guilt at Family Scholars Blog:

    For a long time in our culture we have focussed on adult rights and freedoms, which strangely enough carry new burdens of responsibilty for the child. The wise, resilient, and oh so competent children of divorce, are expected to cope and take responsibility for “looking after” and protecting the feelings of the oh so vulnerable adult against a bad conscience. And to remain silent about their own experience. Or to put it another way, there is a role reversal of responsibilty between the adult and the child.

    Guilt is the card that out trumps any other. There is no greater social sin than to raise issues that makes someone, somewhere feel guilty. And the moral focus then shifts to the question of the words that create guilt, rather than the actions, which created the guilt in the first place. It also changes the spotlight from the social problem to the person who raises the issue- shooting the messenger.

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  • Mourning, but not IRL.

    For years — first on Usenet, now even more easily with e-mail list services like YahooGroups, we’ve seen the proliferation of Internet support groups and communities.  People united by nothing more than a common interest and a common language can meet, discuss, learn from each other, lean on each other, no matter how far apart they live.  We get to know each other in an abbreviated fashion:  we know the writing style, we know what subjects amuse and infuriate them, we understand the sense of humor.  All this never hearing a voice or seeing a face or meeting in person. 

    Once, after my mother died, a woman I’d "known" from email for seven or eight years looked me up and called me on the phone.  It was unexpected and such a strange sensation — the voice wasn’t right somehow.  I’d "heard" her in my mind for so long.  Her voice is pixels, a sig file and a wink 😉 at exactly the spot where I know it will go.

    Our language hasn’t caught up with these relationships.  Are these people friends?  "Online friends?"  Did we "hear" a rumor or read it?  "I was saying just yesterday…" or typing?  How long have we "known" them? 

    What happens to our sense of community and of empathy when we have close emotional ties, or think we do, to people we have never seen, touched, or heard — people we likely never will?   It’s surely a challenge that our social natures have never really known. 

    This past week, a woman I have known through an internet email list for at least five years suffered a terrible personal tragedy — a childbirth went horribly wrong.  Her baby died and she herself was near death; perhaps she will never bear another child.  As the details came out, passed from computer to computer along a long chain that somewhere included a telephone and a human voice, I felt such a strong longing to do something.

    Deep within all of us there is an urge to comfort the grieving.  Grief cannot really be comforted with words, in my experience, although everyone wants to say something.  So our primal instincts are to touch, to give, to be present.  We do things like bring casseroles because we know it is so hard to remember to eat when the world seems to have stopped.  We go to funerals and memorial services because we know that presence is something that comforts mourners.  We reach out and touch hands.  We come and mow the lawn.  I remember my father-in-law washing the car for me before my mother’s funeral, so that it would look nice in the procession, and also he shined our black shoes.  These physical things might not even be noticed in the midst of grief, but they will help, in real ways.  And they are what we crave to give.

    But if we are not friends "IRL," as they say (and isn’t it telling that Internet-only must mean… not your Real Life?), especially if some anonymity separates us (understandably), all we can offer is words, and words are pretty empty and sad little things in the yawning maw of grief. 

    People manage, anyway.  A knot of supporters from one of the lists has started a Paypal fund to buy her a laptop she can use during her convalescence.  Some of them are planning to drive or fly hundreds of miles to be with her at the funeral — they have decided to tear down the odd wall of Internet-only communities, entering into her real life. 

    I won’t be doing that, for a variety of reasons… but it does leave me with this strange sadness that has nowhere to go but here.

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  • The forgotten Christmas carol.

    Today at Mass during the Offertory (inexplicably; this is Advent) we sang Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child, a.k.a. "The Coventry Carol" after its tune.

    You don’t hear that one very often outside of church, and not really very much in church, as lovely as the tune is.  (Here’s a link to the tune at Oremus.org — link plays music.)  I sing it only with great difficulty, myself.  How strange and haunting:  the lullaby of the grieving mothers of Bethlehem, on the day that Herod slaughtered the Holy Innocents:  the carol that accompanies the Flight into Egypt, and is its dark other side.

    Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

    O sisters too, how may we do, for to preserve this day / this poor youngling for whom we sing?  Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

    Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

    Herod the king, in his raging, charged he hath this day / his men of might in his own sight, all young children to slay.

    Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

    Then woe is me, poor child, for thee!  And every morn and day / for thy parting nor say nor sing ‘Bye, bye, lully, lullay.’

    Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

    I remember hearing the carol as a child and not really absorbing anything other than the refrain.  I always thought it was a lullaby for the Baby Jesus:  what other "thou little tiny child" is there to sing about at Christmastime?  I didn’t know about them, and they have disappeared these days from our Christmas story, but… some fifteenth-century English tune-smith did remember the mothers of the forgotten little ones of Bethlehem, and we should be thankful for him.

    The Christmas story is indeed a joyful one, but in the midst of it there is a great terror and sadness.  December 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents:  remember it, and sing Lully, lullay.

    (Matthew 2:13-18:  Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you: for Herod is about to search for the Child, to destroy Him." And he rose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt have I called My Son."Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation:  Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they were no more.")

    UPDATE:  It’s possible that the Coventry Carol was chosen because this upcoming weekend, in honor of Our Lady of Guadelupe’s feast Monday, our parish is hosting a special pro-life Mass. 

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  • Oh, and how I got started with the Liturgy of the Hours.

    I mentioned in my last post that I’d been praying the Liturgy of the Hours for a while.  Anyone else interested in starting?  Here’s some background and how I did it.

    The LOH is the daily prayer of the Church.  Lots of people, including almost all priests and religious, pray some or all of the hours every day.  Ever heard of "Matins," "Lauds," and "Vespers?"  These are some of the Hours, or "Offices."  (Think of Frere Jacques:  Sonnez les matines is a command to ring the bells for the Matins prayer.)  There’s a table here explaining which is which and giving a little background.

    Morning Prayer takes me maybe fifteen minutes, including the Invitatory (which is always prayed before the first office of the day).  Here’s the basic outline.  All is to be read or sung aloud:

    • Introductory prayer.
    • The invitatory psalm, always Psalm 95. 
    • Sing a hymn (a suggestion is provided).
    • Psalmody in three parts:  usually a psalm, a canticle (that is, a Scripture reading that is song-like), and another psalm.
    • A three-line "responsory" taken from Scripture.
    • Another reading, this one more prosaic, from Scripture, often from an epistle, followed by a short period of silent reflection.
    • The "Canticle of Zechariah" is always read (Lk 1:68-79)
    • A series of petitionary prayers, ending with the Our Father.
    • A concluding prayer.

    The whole thing is entirely prescribed in the breviary, although you are free to add your own petitions.  This is especially nice in times of spiritual dryness, because the universal prayers of the Church spilling forth from our parched lips still are spoken, are given power by our assent, are still heard and still unite us to the divine will.

    Back in engineering school, we were allowed to use our textbooks during examinations.  The sweaty silence of midterms was set to a backdrop of constant, nearly-frantic rustling of pages:  page by page back to find the appropriate equation, turn a sheaf of  pages forward to the appendix of steam tables to search for enthalpy of water at such-and-such a temperature, then back to the inside front cover where we’d penciled in a list of useful constants…  By the final exam our textbooks were hairy with Post-It tape flags and handmade index tabs to put the information we needed at our fingertips.

    A peculiar nostalgia for those years sometimes returns to me when I pick up my breviary.  On feast days and solemnities, and outside Ordinary Time, certain of the prayers and readings are replaced with special ones from particular sections of the breviary.   One finds oneself looking up today’s date to see if it’s a feast day, finding that day’s saint in the back of the breviary, paging back to the psalms of Sunday, Week I but keeping a thumb in the Proper of Seasons in order to read the proper antiphons, going to the section called "Ordinary" to read first Psalm 95 and then later the Canticle.  Fortunately, the thing comes with attached ribbon bookmarks.  (Also, my breviary is stuck all over with Post-It repositionable index tabs, and I’ve penciled a few reminders in the inside front cover.)

    OK, so how to get started?  First, buy a breviary.  You have three basic choices:  Big (four volumes), Medium (one volume), and Short (travel-size, abridged).  I recommend the one-volume (medium) breviary for beginners.  The one I use is this one (I think — mine looks a little different, but it’s the same publisher.) 

    You might be able to figure it all out with the breviary alone, in combination with Internet resources or maybe with help from someone else who also prays the Hours.  But there is another resource, one that really helped me despite my initial misgivings. 

    Let me say this clearly:  The Divine Office for Dodos is in bad need of a good editor.  But let me say it gently, too, because I am in great debt to Madeline Pecora Nugent, its author.  It is the only guide to the Divine Office that I have found.  She gives you everything you need, in very tiny little baby steps, to understand how the whole thing works and get into the rhythm of the Hours.   I really wish that someone at, say, Ignatius Press or TAN Books (or the …For Dummies people) would pick up this book, mark it all up, repackage it and reissue it, because it could be a very, very good guide if it were properly edited. 

    My point:  Don’t let Nugent’s writing style keep you from extracting the useful information and tips out of her book.  Take a look at the Amazon reviews: everyone criticized her style and humor but she still got five stars.  (Oh, and don’t bother sending the clip-out coupon away for the Bouncing Bookmarks and Restful Ribbons.  Instead, invest in some of these.) 

    Even though Morning and Evening Prayer are supposedly the crucial Offices for someone who can only pray a couple of them, the next one I’d like to try to add to my life is the Office of Readings.  This one includes, along with the psalms, two lengthy readings, one from Scripture, one taken from the writings of Church fathers or theologians or saints.  My one-volume breviary only has an abridged Office of Readings, just a couple of dozen different ones.  If I manage to incorporate the Office of Readings into my regular life, to the point where I have to start repeating myself, I’m going to reward myself.  I’m thinking: a brand-new four-volume breviary with a different reading for each day of the year.

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  • Liturgy of the Hours.

    A while back I blogged about A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot.  It’s on my mind today because I finally got it back from a friend who had borrowed it, and I mean to reread it.  In short, it’s a guide to help you get your priorities in order:  God, health, marriage, children, work.   It’s probably the most effective get-your-life-and-home-in-order tool I’ve ever tried, especially in combination with the routines developed by the Flylady.

    I’ve been neglecting my Rule for a while.  But one aspect of it has stuck, to my great astonishment.  When I developed my Rule I decided that I would make time to pray some of the Hours.   And despite all the other laxities that have crept into my life, I’ve managed to keep up Morning Prayer, almost every day. 

    This is not, I swear, because of a great deal of dedication on my part.  I’ve almost been forced to do it.   I have actually noticed that I have a better day if I pray the Morning Hour before I do anything else.  (Well, almost.  The first thing I do is get myself a cup of coffee.)

    Nor do I mean that I am more spiritually content or have a purer heart or any sort of thing.  I mean this purely empirically. Pray Morning Prayer:  get stuff done, get through homeschooling, read stories to children, house is cleaner, dinner is done on time, general feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.  Don’t pray Morning Prayer:  dawdle around on the Internet far too much, neglect my stuff, yell more at the kids, get homeschooling half done before giving up, resort to plopping kids in front of The Incredibles, dinner gets started late if at all, end day feeling resentful and generally unsatisfied.

    Why?  Why?  I could spout pious maxims about the importance of putting prayer first, but my scientist brain casts about for another reason.  Is it the comfort and transition of a waking-up ritual?  Is it the sort of mental state, semi-thoughtful, that it puts me in?  Is it just because it prolongs the morning coffee as I have to sip between stanzas and antiphons?   

    The effect seems to be independent of my state of prayerfulness.  Sometimes I really enter into the prescribed prayers and psalms; they strike chords in my heart and seem to be speaking right to me, or they seem to express my own soul’s true lament or praise or petition better than I could have myself.  Other times my lips move and I say the words as if out of mere obedience, I seem to have said the same thing fruitlessly before many times, and my mind wanders constantly to the concerns of my upcoming day and my long to-do list.  Yet it doesn’t seem to matter.  Even just going through the motions improves my day.

    Lots of times I pick up the breviary with contentment and look forward to the few minutes of prayer.  Some days I don’t have that contentment or that anticipation.  But I pick the thing up anyway because I will be sorry if I won’t.  It’s like, oh, making breakfast for myself or something.  I don’t always feel like cooking, but goshdarnit, I have to eat.

    Astonishing, I tell you.

    UPDATE:  Interested in learning to pray with the Liturgy of the Hours, a.k.a. the Divine Office?  Click here to go to the next post, for some background and tips for getting started, that is, how I did it.

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  • Diversity, from the pulpit.

    So, a year ago we left the university parish we’d been at since we got married, and deliberately fled to a trusty orthodox parish with an adoration chapel and all the smells and bells.  When we did that, we experienced an abrupt change in homily focus. 

    At the university parish, we were constantly exhorted to avoid prejudice and discrimination, particularly against those of a different race.  I can barely remember a homily exhortation against any other sin.  (There were other topics, for example plenty of explication of the Gospel readings and lots of God-is-good stuff.  And there were some discourses about the dangers of materialism and various antiprogressive economic policies, and encouragement to do things like volunteer in soup kitchens.  But the only exhortations I remember were against racism.)

    At our current parish, there are lots of exhortations against things.  Racism is one of them.  Materialism is a sizable chunk.  But also against pornography, divorce, contraception, abortion, too much television, the sanitization of religion from the public sphere, parents afraid to discipline their children in any way, selfishness, negligence of prayer life, irreverence towards the sacraments, etc.

    I can’t help but notice that in both cases, the homilist  was, is… well, excuse the cliche, but I mean to say "preaching to the choir."  I’m not saying it’s his fault.  Both parishes are the sort that attract people from all over the metro area, rather than only those who live in the parish boundaries.  (The college students are a special case.)  So maybe it’s a case of people flocking to hear homilies that help them feel satisfied that they are doing the right thing. 

    Not that we can’t still be challenged by them.  Even though I’m right on board with our parish priest on the whole pornography-divorce-adultery-contraception-abortion-bad-bad-bad bandwagon, his homilies still challenge me to strive for greater holiness.  I’m sure that we’re in a more challenging place now than we were before.  Perhaps this is because there is a greater diversity of exhortations.   

    Speaking of diversity:  It strikes me that racism is a pretty easy thing to rail against from the pulpit.  Not only that, but for many people — not everyone, but many people — especially in the educated, urban/suburban, largely white, middle-to-upper-class and college-student audience of the university parish I mention — isn’t it a pretty easy thing to hear from the pulpit?  Does it really challenge that demographic (which I freely  includes me) very much in daily life?  (a) Everybody already admits that racism is bad.  (b)  Most people in that demographic don’t interact deeply on a daily basis with people of a different race unless those people are very much like them in numerous other aspects, e.g. also educated and also well-to-do, perhaps employed in the same industry, etc.  We’re still a pretty segregated society when it comes to neighborhoods and schools and social circles.  Most of us can get along without having to fight racism in our hearts and actions every day, unless it’s part of our job (e.g. public school teacher, social worker, customer service in a part of town we don’t live in…) If they have to strive at all against racism, I suspect that it’s largely an interior struggle, and very easy to ignore. 

    Likewise, at the parish I’m at now, it’s like an NFP convention or something.  Young families, including us, have gravitated there to see every Sunday the almost legendary spectacle of a priest who preaches against contraception from the pulpit.   I suspect that for these families, who fill the pews to bursting, it is easy rather than challenging to hear that sort of message.  It is for us.

    Would the parochial system, rigidly enforced, make more sense?  No more choice of where to belong?  Each parish drawn from its own neighborhood, regardless of politics?  All of us subject, for better or worse, to the pastor bestowed on us by the archbishop?  Maybe overall — if all the pastors were uniformly good enough. That is, if "he’s not a very good pastor" meant only that he wasn’t a talented preacher, or that he was a bumbling manager of parish employees, or that he is hopeless at raising money.  As it is, it sometimes means he doesn’t teach the truth, or he teaches falsehood.  An uninspiring preacher or a church that can’t afford to keep the air conditioning on — those things can and should be borne in Christian submission.  But when the parish priest or the DRE teach error, we parents at least have the responsibility to flee.  Thank God we also have the right.   

    Because it wasn’t preaching against racism that made us leave the first place; it was negligence, if not abuse, of the Holy Eucharist.  And we couldn’t bear that anymore. 

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  • “Crunchy Cons.”

    This is the next book about American political culture that I want to read. 

    When a National Review colleague teased writer Rod Dreher one day about his visit to the local food co-op to pick up a week’s supply of organic vegetables (“Ewww, that’s so lefty”), he started thinking about the ways he and his conservative family lived that put them outside the bounds of conventional Republican politics. Shortly thereafter Dreher wrote an essay about “crunchy cons,” people whose “Small Is Beautiful” style of conservative politics often put them at odds with GOP orthodoxy, and sometimes even in the same camp as lefties outside the Democratic mainstream. The response to the article was impassioned: Dreher was deluged by e-mails from conservatives across America—everyone from a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican to an NRA staffer with a passion for organic gardening—who responded to say, “Hey, me too!”

    … At a time when the Republican party, and the conservative movement in general, is bitterly divided over what it means to be a conservative, Dreher introduces us to people who are pioneering a way back to the future by reclaiming what’s best in conservativism—people who believe that being a truly committed conservative today means protecting the environment, standing against the depredations of big business, returning to traditional religion, and living out conservative godfather Russell Kirk’s teaching that the family is the institution most necessary to preserve…

    Crunchy Cons is both a useful primer to living the crunchy con way and a passionate affirmation of those things that give our lives weight and measure. In chapters dedicated to food, religion, consumerism, education, and the environment, Dreher shows how to live in a way that preserves what Kirk called “the permanent things,” among them faith, family, community, and a legacy of ancient truths.

    Amy Welborn mentioned it on her blog today and Rod Dreher showed up in the comments.  He wrote,

    I interviewed a bunch of folks for it, and had them talk about the way they lived their lives as conservatives that put them outside the mainstream of American (esp Republican) life. What I discovered as I reported the book is that almost all the people who identify as conservatives but who live this countercultural way are religious. It was a trip to be on the phone with an Orthodox Jewish woman from Massachusetts who was going on and on about how much she loves this Pope Benedict, and how the countercultural stands he takes fills her with admiration.

    Anyway, the book is organized into eight chapters, each exploring this sensibility as it expresses itself in various aspects of our daily lives. The first chapter defines the phenomenon. Then we get into Consumerism, Food, Home, Education, The Environment, and Religion. The final chapter is called "Waiting for Benedict," a title I got from the final two paragraphs of the Thomist philosopher Alasdair Macintyre’s book "After Virtue." Macintyre says that our culture is so fragmented now that recovery in the short term is not really possible, so the only thing for men and women of virtue to do is to create their own communities, like the monks of the fifth century, did to preserve the faith and civilization against the coming of the Dark Ages. Macintyre says the world needs a new St. Benedict to inspire communities of virtue in the same way.

    My view is that the only way any of us are going to preserve for ourselves and our families our faith and our values is to live intentionally countercultural lives, and in turn to build up our own communities. I don’t advocate neo-Amishness, but I do advocate more or less seceding from the media and the mall, but not in a fearful sense; rather, I find positive joy in the good things we have, and believe that we’ve got to work to create communities where those things are preserved and affirmed, even celebrated, in our families and communities.  [emphasis mine – E.]

    I have resisted the label "conservative" for years, but all this appeals to me… I might be willing to call myself a crunchy con! 

    I read Dreher’s article — the one that spawned the book — soon after it appeared in July 2002.  An excerpt:

    After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.

    We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.

    All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain.

    The underlying quality that crunchy-cons and …. crunchy-libs(?) are both seeking, implies Dreher, is authenticity.  Another anecdote I like:

    Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her "natural" ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — "and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!"

    Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. "That’s supposed to be right-wing," she wrote. "But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government."

    I can relate, oh yes.  Especially to the homeschooling connection.  Despite my protestations, I can’t deny that I’m a "religious conservative" in the pop-cultural sense, although it’s more precise just to identify as an orthodox Catholic.  (I mean, does "religious conservative" imply that I’m opposed to the teaching of evolution or that I want public-school teachers to lead students in prayer?  For the record, um, no and no.)  And yeah, part of the reason I homeschool is because the school environment isn’t conducive to developing moral values.  But it’s not just morality I value here — I want each child of mine to develop a skepticism towards pretended authority, a strongly independent mine, and confidence in the goodness of his own self as well as that of others.   Not to mention the fact that I want to give them so much more intellectual freedom than I had as a child.  These are, cough, liberal concerns (but shouldn’t they be everyone’s?)

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  • Another great kid lunch: Pink Spaghetti.

    OK, here’s one for feeding a crowd of kids:

    • Cook some spaghetti, but not all the way.  Leave it a bit too firm.
    • Make some really watery, simple tomato sauce.  We sauteed one chopped onion in olive oil, added about two ounces of crumbled leftover meatloaf, and then threw four 15-oz cans of diced tomatoes into the pan, undrained.  Also there was some broth in there.  But it could have been just the canned tomatoes, heated up.
    • Stir the drained spaghetti into the watery sauce so that it absorbs some of the water.  Salt to taste.
    • Add scoops of a smooth, whole-milk ricotta cheese (I recommend Sargento brand) and stir it in until it’s a creamy, rich consistency (with chunks of tomato) and a lovely pink color.
    • Serve to many children.  And to yourself, ’cause it’s really lovely this way.  Some minced fresh parsley would be nice if you have it, but not at all necessary.

    Ricotta’s cheaper than parmesan, too!

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  • Proper beef stew, part two.

    A few days ago I blogged about how I’d finally learned how to make a proper beef stew, and included a recipe.  The secret appears to be baking the covered pot in the oven rather than on the stovetop.

    That recipe was a somewhat complicated French one.  Wednesday I tried a "classic American" beef stew using the same technique.   It was much simpler, based on "Beef Stew with Bacon" from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, but employing the daube technique instead of the stovetop simmer:

    • 4 oz       portabella mushrooms
    • 1            boneless beef chuck eye roast (I used plain chuck), 3.5 lb, in 2-inch   cubes
    • 1.5 tsp       salt
    • 1     tsp       ground black pepper
    • 4 Tbsp      olive oil
    • 4 oz           smoky, salty bacon, snipped into small pieces
    • 5                large carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
    • 2 med        onions, sliced
    • 2 large      baking potatoes peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
    • Some garlic — probably 4 cloves.  I don’t remember.
    • 2 Tbsp      tomato paste
    • 1/3 c          all purpose flour
    • 2 c              red wine (I used a boxed Merlot — classic American, remember?)
    • 1 qt            beef stock
    • 1 c              frozen peas
    • 1/4 c          minced fresh parsley

    Heat oven to 325 F.  Heat bacon and olive oil over medium-high heat; cook until bacon is crisp.  Remove to paper towels.  Crush one garlic clove and cook in the hot fat for a minute, then remove and discard  the garlic. 

    Season beef with salt and pepper.  Brown in batches in hot fat and set beef aside.   Brown the carrots, onions, mushrooms, the rest of the garlic minced, and tomato paste in the pot, 2 minutes.  Add flour and stir 1 minute.  Deglaze pan with red wine.  Add broth and beef and potatoes, and bring to a simmer.  Cover and place in oven for 2.5 to 3 hours.

    Remove from oven.  Allow stew to settle, 5 min.  Skim excess fat off the top.  Stir in parsley, peas, and bacon and serve.

    Comments:

    I deliberately omitted the thyme and bay that Bittman called for in order to test something more like my grandmother might have made (except she probably wouldn’t have used so much garlic.  The depth of flavor was still remarkable.  The sauce was beautifully thick, again more so the second day (when we fed it to Hannah and the other Mark in an impromptu potluck.)

    Were I to make this stew again:  I think I might have left the potatoes in larger chunks, as they had almost disintegrated at the end of the long cooking time.  I also would have added something green, maybe green beans, a vegetable that I think is very nice when long-stewed.  A little cabbage might have been good too:  The other Mark claimed that he desired to mix sauerkraut into it.  Maybe he was wanting something acidic?  Perhaps I should have kept the sour little capers, or added tomatoes at the end.

    I also think I would add back the anchovies called for in the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.  They really add a lot of depth of flavor.  Alternatively I could have spiked the stew with Asian fish sauce (nam pla or nuoc mam). 

    The next thing I want to try is making one that’s gluten-free.  Hannah suggests that potato starch might be the best flour substitute, as it thickens things in an appetizing way (unlike, say, arrowroot or tapioca, which turn stuff kind of mucilaginous) and also has decent browning characteristics.

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    1 comment on Proper beef stew, part two.

  • Mistakes.

    Today, towards the end of schoolwork, Oscar burst into tears and threw his math worksheet on the floor.

    What is it?  I came over to look.  He shook his head and pointed.  Under the direction "Color the triangles red," he had colored the first shape — a square.  It’s okay, I said.  You know what the right answer is.   Just exx it out, and then you can do the rest of them.  It’s not a big deal.  But he kept sobbing and crying that his paper was ruined.

    I gathered him up in my arms.  Honey, you made a mistake.  That’s all — just a mistake.  It doesn’t mean your whole paper is bad — you’ve already done a lot of good work on that paper.  People make mistakes all the time.  Don’t I?  I searched my memory for an example.  What if I put too much salt in the soup?  Should I just throw all the soup away?

    He said, no.  I guess you would just eat it anyway.

    Bad example, I guess.  Well, first I would try to fix it.   I wouldn’t throw it away, because there’s still good stuff in there.

    He sniffled.  When I make a mistake, it makes me think that I am a bad boy.

    Where did he get that idea?  Carefully now; don’t want him to think that good work doesn’t matter, but at the same time, that coloring a square instead of a triangle is not going to land him in San Quentin.  Oh, that’s not right.  You are a good person.  Everybody makes mistakes.  Even really good people make mistakes. 

    I pulled back so I could look in his eyes.  It is important, very important, to try to do your work well.  But that doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes.  And it’s okay to make mistakes.  The important thing — do you know what’s the most important thing about making mistakes?  Can you guess?

    What?

    The most important thing is — well, two things.  First of all, to see when you’ve made a mistake and to try to fix it if you can.   Second, to remember when you’ve made a mistake, and then you can try not to do it again.

    He put his head on my shoulder and was quiet for a while.  When he spoke, he said:  I think that people who don’t want to please God don’t care about their mistakes.

    Maybe so.  It’s good to care about your mistakes.  But you mustn’t let that stop you from doing things.  Now, what will we do about your paper?

    I don’t know.  It’s messed up.

    I think there are two things you can do when you make a mistake on a math worksheet, I offered.  You could try to erase it, if you can.  Or you could just exx it out.

    I can’t erase the crayon, he murmured.   I was about to suggest something else when he brightened up.  I know!  he said.  If I draw a black line here — he indicated the diagonal of the red square — it will make TWO triangles.  And then it will not be a mistake anymore, because the triangles will be red!

    I told him that was an elegant solution.  Together we chose a black pen, bisected the square, and admired the two red triangles.  Then he finished his worksheet, with no more problems.

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  • Advent: Waiting to celebrate.

    Advent is my favorite of the seasons, perhaps because we’re called to live it so differently from the world.  Most "holiday" parties take place during Advent; most holiday cards are sent during Advent; most of the trees are put up, most of the outdoor lights are lit, most of the cookies are eaten, most of the carols are sung, during Advent.  Not to mention the holiday displays, which appear before Advent even begins.*

    Although we can enjoy those things in charity, it’s a good idea for us to avoid contributing to this general hubbub.  We fast before the feast.  Advent is a time of prayer and penance and waiting; a "little Lent."  In the Eastern Church the fasting is pronounced:  meatless days, for example, except on the great solemnities and feasts that fall in that season.  In the Western Church we haven’t been called to such obligatory austerities, but it is still in the spirit of the season to put off the celebration until Christmas Eve. 

    So what can we do?  The easiest is just to take care to do all the ordinary things during the Christmas Season, not before.  Wait till Christmas Eve and afterwards to eat the Christmas cookies.  Sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel" and "O Come Divine Messiah;" save "Angels We Have Heard On High" for after Christmas.  Have your Christmas party on January 3rd instead of December 15th.  Mail your Christmas cards after Christmas.  Leave the tree bare till Christmas Eve. 

    I don’t want to spend Christmas Eve baking cookies and writing Christmas cards.  Well, no problem.  Advent is a time of preparation, isn’t it?  Cookies freeze well, so bake them early and put them in the freezer.  Write the Christmas Cards during Advent but mail them after Christmas.  Shop during Advent and give during Christmas.  Not so hard. 

    Add to the "putting-it-off" spirit by some Advent traditions such as the family Advent wreath, and there you go — getting in the spirit of the season. 

    My small self-deprivation this year is to decline all sweets, especially Christmas cookies, until after Christmas Eve Mass.  It’s small, especially since we’re not a sweet-baking family, but it helps me.

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    *Let them all be anathema, except let there be a special dispensation for craft-stores.  People need extra time if they’re going to MAKE Christmas stuff.

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    2 comments on Advent: Waiting to celebrate.

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