Za'atar bread

Once again thanks to Bint Rhoda, we have added a marvelous Arabic dish to our rotation: Za'atar bread. We have been making it (three days in a row) with naan from Costco. Za'atar is a Middle Eastern spice mix that really jazzes things up. It's made with thyme, ground hyssop, and sesame seeds, and has a savory, slightly tart flavor. It might sound exotic but my za'atar bread got rave reviews from a picky old guy with very vanilla tastes, so don't be afraid of it. I had been thinking about ordering some za'atar online to stock my Middle Eastern pantry, but on the way back from an appointment with my midwife, I passed a Middle Eastern grocery and did a u-turn to dash in for some za'atar.

I asked the nice Iranian lady, "Hi, do you have any... za'atar?"
"What?"
"Um... Za'atar?"
"What?"
"You know, it's a spice blend with thyme, sesame, and sumac...." (I fumbled on that one.)
"Oh, Za'atar! It's over here."

Every time!

So check out za'atar bread. It is quite a treat, especially if you can find some good tomatoes and cucumbers to fold up inside. (I usually don't buy tomatoes this time of year, but found some good ones at Costco.) It's one Lenten (+ oil) dish that I can't imagine improving with any animal products. That is saying something. Buy your za'atar online at Penzey's if you don't live in a cosmopolitan area like Northern Virginia.

Blessed Lentils to you

Here we are again. You're probably about to eat a lot of lentils! Here are some delicious ways to do that.

Mujjadara is an old standby for us. I had never heard of it until I married Matt. He grew up in an Antiochian church that was 90% Arabs, and this was a popular dish during Lent. The cute little family story I always heard was that his mom was crazy about it and used to call it "mmmmjjadara," but he and his sister called it "yukjjadara." Probably because his mom burnt the onions (on purpose... a strange Lenten craving.) When he told me about it I was intrigued, and just looked up how to make it. My first few attempts were terrible and indeed, worthy of the name "Yukjjadara." The recipes weren't very good, I guess. I always had a hard time getting the lentils and rice to cook evenly. But when I finally found Bint Rhoda's recipe above, it was perfect the first time. Soaking the rice is imperative!

It's a very inexpensive dish except for the gallons of olive oil that you should use (I go cheap... Trader Giotto's lowest quality.) The only tedious part is chopping the onions. If you want to make it more of a one-pot meal, you can add some other finely chopped veggies like cabbage or cauliflower. I don't know if that would be strictly authentic, but those vegetables are common in Arabic cooking, so I don't think it's too kooky, and whatever, it's Lent, and you're hungry. This dish is extremely filling and satisfying.

Last week I decided to soak a bag of lentils and cook from it for a while. The first thing that I made was this awesome Butternut Squash and Lentil Soup . I used half of a kabocha squash that I already had prepared and otherwise followed the recipe, except that I omitted fennel seeds as I didn't have any. I also used a potato masher to squash the squash a bit, making the soup a little thicker. It's sweet, smooth, and hits the spot on a cold day.

Next, I lazily left the rest of the lentils on the counter and found the next day that they had sprouted a little bit. I decided to take advantage of God's gift to procrastinators and kept rinsing and draining the lentils throughout the day until I had some pretty nice sprouts going. I found a recipe for a cold sprouted lentil salad here and as I chopped veggies and doused with oil, I hummed happily to myself, thinking how good it was going to be and how I was going to write this blog post on the subject of Lenten lentil dishes. But the joke was on me when I found the salad utterly horrible and could not finish it without adding sour cream and ground beef. Matt, who is not breastfeeding and pregnant, said he thought it was okay by itself and bravely finished the bowl.

Finally, I fried the rest of the sprouted lentils with onions, garlic, and cabbage, along the lines of the second recipe on that page. I had a few marvelous tacos with this stuff and one quesadilla. I recommend the taco treatment for fasters (salsa, avocado, cilantro, lime, maybe some rice?). The lentils have a fresh flavor, but also enough savory chewiness to work in the taco setting. I won't say They taste exactly like carne asada! but they are still good.

It's a good strategy. Have a bowl of sprouting lentils and a bowl of soaking grains (like rice, kamut, barley, or wheat berries) on your counter at all times, and with the help of a rice cooker, you'll probably be able to come up with healthy Lenten meals with a minimum of planning and active prep.

Now I miss my big bowl of sprouted lentils. Matt got a little tired of hearing "Well, there's lentils..." every time he was hungry. But I'll give him a little break and try again next week.

Some good things.

The Food of My People is my favorite food blog. We need more food blogs like that, and fewer food blogs like this. (Oh my goodness, I see that she has her own show on the Food Network now.) TFOMP's recipes are not really easy to follow, because they are written in a narrative form, and there are no pictures, and he's religious about ingredients. But you will enjoy reading his recipes, if you are a certain kind of person like me, and you may learn something. I won't go so far as to say that I made his Cauliflower and Pasta Soup, because I included a few abominations. But I wouldn't have made the cauliflower and pasta soup that I did, which was very good, if I hadn't read his "recipe."

Bint Rhoda's Kitchen is my second favorite food blog. Well, maybe it's my favorite functional food blog with actual recipes and photographs and stuff. She's a Palestinian native who rediscovered her heritage in the kitchen when she got into Weston A. Price Foundation methods, which she realized were there all along in the way that her mother and grandmother cooked. She's the only WAPF blogger that I really read anymore, because the rest are just so shrill. I've become a little dissatisfied with this desire of most of the Nourishing Nazis to get back to Traditional Ways of preparing food, but with a typical American vagueness about where those traditions are to be found. It's a little like American converts trying to do Orthodoxy without any contact with Old World Orthodox. You can get it technically correct but there's just something a little off about it, because there's no contact with that living river of tradition. Same with food. You really have to feel sorry for us, because we wish we had Serbian or Korean or Israeli grannies who taught us how to ferment things and rapped our knuckles when we nicked sarmali/malfouf/halupkis before dinner, but unfortunately our grandmothers were very excited about microwaves. (I don't blame them.) Anyway, Bint Rhoda is a refreshingly authentic and positive source of recipes that are part of a continuing culture. Plus, she seems like a very sweet person.

The post I linked to above is about stocking a Middle Eastern kitchen. She says that it's easiest just to pick one cuisine and stock for that. I agree, but what would we choose? The strongest ethnic identity in our family comes from Matt's Armenian grandfather, but he didn't cook. I suppose if I had to choose one regional cuisine to cook exclusively, it would be a toss-up between Middle Eastern and Eastern European. Matt is not as big of a fan of beets and pickles as I am, so I suppose it would fall to Middle Eastern in the end. There's a good variety of fasting and feasting food, and with a few extra spices we could slide over into Greek cuisine too.

GZT shared this recording of Martynov's Beatitudes in a comment and I am for some reason not able to reply, so I'm replying by sharing it with everyone here, because it's very nice. I discovered the arrangement when I somehow stumbled upon this recording by the Russian folk vocal group Sirin. I think I still prefer Sirin's version, just because the voices are a little sweeter, but that's just me. Wouldn't it be lovely to arrange it in English and sing it in church? Wait, scratch that. I'm sure the translation would be awkward, actually, and a five minute version of the Beatitudes would require a lot of standing around by clergy and acolytes either before or during the Little Entrance. Better to just learn the Slavonic and sing it to my baby. Matt can sing second soprano. Teehee.

One other thing. I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter again, just like everybody else in the world, apparently. I recommended it to a friend and when she talked about how much she liked it, I thought "Yeah! It's great!" and picked it up again. Then my sister-in-law said she was reading it and apparently so is Anna of Orthogals fame. Something in the weather I guess. Anyway, it definitely holds up on a second reading, especially after a few more years of marriage and having a child! I was full of dread during the entire first book, thinking, Maybe she won't make all these terrible choices this time.... but she went and did it again.

First post on new blog

I've started writing in my new blog about learning and teaching Greek. It isn't very fancy! But here you are.

http://barbariansguide.blogspot.com

wintroverted

Haven't posted in a long time because I've been feeling wintroverted. Also because I'm pregnant and I didn't want to say anything yet, but most of what I felt like saying had something to do with that.

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Dumped FB the other day so that I can spend Lent (slash the rest of my life???????) studying Greek, praying the Akathist to the Mother of God, Nurturer of Naughty Little Babies, and just being in my real life more. Also I need to find an absurdly cheap 2 bedroom apartment for us to move into in the next six months.

Me: Hi, I'd like to find an apartment in the D.C. area.
Apartment finding lady: Cool, what's your price range?
Me: (highballing) About $1200?
Apartment finding lady: Okay, are you looking for a studio then?
Me: Um... how about two bedrooms?

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Matt reads a chapter of the Bible to us every morning (that's all Squirmy can handle) and we've started reading it in the Septuagint too. I stumble through guessing based on what I remember from the story and he helps with grammar. It's a good way to learn. Of course, I remember a lot from school and I have a very knowledgeable fellow at my elbow, so I can't recommend it to anyone starting cold. But materials need to be prepared for people to be able to do such a thing on their own. This article got Matt and me hooked on interlinear preparations for teaching classical languages. Check it out because I have to go chase my baby away from the stairs again.

for the record...

My six month old son is having some sleep problems; therefore, so too my husband and I are having some sleep problems.

He's in a crib with one open side, jammed next to our bed. I give him a bath, say prayers and nurse him down between 6 and 6:45. He usually goes to sleep pretty well, and stays asleep until 10 or 11. He wakes up, I nurse him again, and he goes back to sleep until midnight or so. From then on he's waking up every couple of hours, if not more frenquently, only going to sleep again when nursing. He wakes up pretty much for good around 6 and kind of plays by himself in bed if we're still asleep. That part seems fine since I put him to bed about 12 hours earlier. It's just the stuff in between that kills me.

He does not transfer well from the bed where I nurse him to his crib. Part of that is probably the feeling of the cold crib blanket on his face; sometimes if I lift him up with blanket where we were nursing underneath his body and face, he makes the transfer.

So I think we have two problems. The first is that he can only go to sleep while nursing. The second is that he wakes up when I put him in his crib. That is as far as my analysis has gotten. Another possible problem is that we are waking him up with our movements (the feeling is definitely mutual,) but we don't have another place to put the crib.

We tried the Ferber thing for a while, where you let them cry (not scream) for about five minutes, and then go and comfort them with singing or back patting, but not holding or nursing, for a couple minutes, and continue that until they learn that all they get out of crying is a pat on the back. That seemed like it was working for the initial bedtime, but then he would wake up every hour after that until we went to bed, as if he were only sleeping rather grudgingly. (We're sort of in the middle of one of these struggles as I'm writing this.)

Then we felt terrible and concluded that Dr. Sears was right all along and we should just go with our instincts, which tell us (me at least) to nurse and soothe your poor little baby when he cries, not to ignore him. That feels right in my gut, but I don't know that guts are the only decision-making facuties to employ in parenting. Dr. Sears doesn't really have any answers as to how to stop co-sleeping. Surely after eight or nine kids he should have something to say about that.

Also, eff Facebook again, I'm so over it. Ain't nobody got time for that. That's my new catchphrase (although it's from an old meme,) and I use it in response to almost everything that isn't essential to loving and taking care of the people I'm responsible for right now. Ain't nobody got time for that.

New blog idea

Sometime a couple of weeks ago I decided that I'd like to start learning Greek again. I studied Attic and Homeric Greek for a year and a half in college, a million years ago, and have made a few sallies in relearning it since then. Matt has kept up with it fabulously and is able to read Plato pretty well now without prohibitive labor, and I am jealous. I'd say I stayed more familiar with it than most of my classmates because right when we stopped studying Greek, I became Orthodox, so it's remained important to me, and I still know enough to make it worthwhile to look up Bible verses and stuff. But my ability to actually read it is long gone.

I asked myself how this attempt to study Greek again would be different from other unsuccessful resolutions, and somehow I came up with the idea that I should blog about it. After about a week and a half of thinking about it and talking to Matt and my best friend (who was a classics major at Reed after transferring from SJC) about it, I decided that this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to basically pretend that I'm teaching a class in New Testament Greek. I found it very easy to learn Latin by teaching it for two years; the onus of explanation kept me accountable to really understand what I was learning and the schedule kept me on track. I've thought for years that I'd like to be able to teach Greek to our kids, and perhaps to teach it in a school or co-op someday as well. Now seems like a good time to develop the material for a course.

After studying Greek and French at SJC, and developing courses in Latin and Greek at the Orthodox school, Matt and I have come to believe that the best way to learn a classical language is through a mix of deductive and inductive approaches. A deductive study of a language consists in learning the grammar and vocabulary by memorization and exercises. It usually proceeds in a cumulative fashion, and seeks to eventually provide mastery of all the grammatical forms and concepts of the language. One practices reading the language by translating sentences that are written using only forms and vocabulary that have already been convered. It is thorough, but it is boring.

The inductive approach is to simply jump in clutching a dictionary and start reading, largely without understanding at first, but slowly amassing vocabulary and a working knowledge of the way the language works.

Our favorite way of teaching is to introduce the grammatical forms systematically as in a deductive approach, but to always spend part of the class reading an original text in the target language (we liked using Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, daily gospel readings in Greek and the Latin Vulgate, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.) We give the students some of the vocabulary words, expecting them to figure some recognizable things out for themselves, and point out the grammatical forms that they recognize. As we continue, we give them less and less help, and they see the forms they're mastering in action.

In order to teach in this way, the teacher has to have enough knowledge of the language to be able to pick out the forms and vocabulary to be given, and has to be a savvy enough translator to guide the students in their own translation. It doesn't require perfect fluency and expertise, but I think it would be hard for an inexperienced scholar and teacher to prepare this material themselves.

So that is where my blog comes in. I will be studying Greek using a textbook (probably the very thorough Hansen & Quinn, although I might look for one specific to koine Greek,) and explain the grammar concepts in my blog posts, as if I were to teach them to another adult, who would in turn teach them to their students. I will also post a portion of some Greek text every day (or with some degree of regular frequency,) with glossary and grammar help appropriate to the level that we've attained in our deductive grammar study. I'm leaning towards using the Acts of the Apostles, since as Matt said, reading the Gospels is just a little too much like looking straight into the sun.

The goal is to amass enough material, written at the right level for a reasonably clever and motivated teacher or parent to be able to teach New Testament Greek to their students, with the goal in mind of being able to read the New Testament without much help by the end of a year or something. Ultimately perhaps I will turn it into a curriculum for Orthodox schools. That's a long way off but I want to keep that in mind so that I can be organized as I go along.

I won't start until January, because the Greek books are at my parents' house in Indiana. But I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about it. Any ideas? How about a name for the blog?