I find myself reading and following several blogs of LGBTQ Christians, mostly Catholics, these days. That is not a cross that God has given me to bear, but I have spent a lot of breath and incurred a lot of heart ache in the past few years as I struggle to put myself in the shoes of my friends who feel Different, while I simultaneously try to hold fast to the teachings which I know are life. But I believe that the "issue" of the apparent conflict between the Church's teachings on sexuality and the struggles of LGBTQ persons does not simply draw us as matter for compassion, while us lucky straight people can simply hum and nod in pity for the poor gays. The conflict is compelling because we do sense that there is something deeply wrong here, but perhaps we then shrink back from it not out of disgust with our fellow men, but from the fear that while casting flashlights about in this labyrinth, we may strike something reflective which bounces the light back onto our own tangled and overgrown hearts.

I have been moved by what I have read on these traditional, orthodox Christian, LGBTQ blogs because these people have skin in the game. The dissonance between straight/mainstream Christian attitudes, LGBTQ struggles, and Christ's love is more than an academic or political problem to them. They are hanging on for dear life to Christ, despite attacks both from the mainstream gay community and from within their churches, because, as the Apostle Peter said, surely trembling, Lord, where else would we go? You hold the words of truth and life.

My struggles start to look very fluffy in the light of that resolve. My comforts are abundant and my efforts are anemic.

Here is my favorite of the bloggers, a Catholic wife and mother, philosophy/theology nerd, and fantasy writer, who used to identify as a lesbian, and now (I think?) recognizes herself as still gender-queer.

Here is an interview with one of the editors of Spiritual Friendship, along with Orthodox priest Fr. Josiah Trenham.

Huevos Rancheros

Well, I done went and told all the women under 40 in my church how to find my blog, so hi guys! Every time I think someone I know is reading my blog, I have to go back and read it through their eyes. Good thing I don't have too many readers or I'd get sick of myself.

I have been tres fatigue (Rachel! That means "really tired" and it's pronounced "trey fatty-gay!") recently and my kitchen is a wreck. It's very small so it doesn't take much to wreck it, and I get discouraged when it looks bad. When I'm languid I'm lazy obviously so yeah, it's bad.

I have three unbaked pans of this huevos rancheros breakfast casserole that I just sort of made up sitting in the refrigerator for church tomorrow. I am sharing the recipe now, not having tasted it yet, but I will let you know what everybody thinks. I have to confess that most of the time when I post a recipe on this blog, I sit down and write it while the dish is simmering or in the oven or whatever, before I forget what I did. So yes, I usually post the recipes before I taste them. (Unless I say "I made this last night and it was great!") But so far they've all turned out great, EXCEPT for the Lenten Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. Don't make that. It was bad. I never went back and told you that.

EDIT: It turned out great!

So here's what I would do to make just one of these possibly really good casseroles.

In New Mexico this would be made with sublime roasted Hatch green chiles. Everywhere else you'll have to settle for the canned stuff. It's not even 1% as good but still, my eyes started to water a little bit with tears of bitter joy when I opened the can and smelled even the hint of Hatch. A glimpse of heaven.

For three casseroles, I mixed three 7 oz cans of chiles in a 12 oz jar of tomatillo salsa that I happened to have around. Tomatillos are bright, acidic little green tomatoes that go very well with the smoky deep chile flavor. You'll find the two paired often in New Mexican cuisine. But if you don't need to stretch your chiles, no need to adulterate!

Huevos Rancheros Breakfast Casserole
6-8 corn tortillas (Our favorite brand in the whole world is Milagro. Mexican grocery stores, in the midwest, at least, seem to have them consistently.)
(2) 7 oz cans green chiles, if you're not in the Promised Land 
8-12 eggs (how hungry are you?)
3 or 4 cups of grated cheese (a big block,) such as Pepper Jack, Cheddar, or a Mexican queso
1 can black beans, drained
a bit of oil to fry the tortillas

Fry the tortillas in lard or coconut oil. Let them cool and then rip them into several pieces each. Cover the bottom of a casserole pan with half of the tortilla fragments. Dump all the beans in the pan and spread them around evenly. Spoon half of the green chiles evenly over the beans, and sprinkle with half of the cheese. Cover with the rest of the tortilla fragments, then the rest of the green chiles and then the remaining cheese.

Whisk up the eggs in a bowl or big measuring cup. Salt and pepper them to taste. (That means to your liking, it doesn't mean taste the raw eggs to see if you like them.) Pour the eggs over the whole thing. Some people don't break the yolks, which is yummy, but I was hoping the beaten eggs would permeate all layers of the casserole rather than just sitting on the top. That seems easier to divide into small portions for many people.

Let it all sit in the fridge overnight.

Tomorrow I'm going to bake the casseroles at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes. I'll check back in with you after church.

Also, I would definitely garnish with green onions if they had not been oddly absent from my grocery store today! Cilantro seems like a decent thing to do. Avocado and sour cream are also recommended.

Manhattan Clam Chowd....er

You can't call it chowdah if it isn't from Maine. My husband was suspicious of this soup because he grew up spending summers in Maine, and his family lives there now. So a tomato clam chowder just doesn't sound right. If I had just called it "Tomato Clam Soup" he might have felt differently. But Manhattan Clam Chowder sounds so fancy!

It's really easy, cheap, and you probably have all the ingredients. The only thing that kept my version from being Lenten was the lard I used to saute the vegetables at the beginning. You can use olive oil or just soften them with a little clam juice or water.

Manhattan Clam Chowder (Can Be Lenten)
1 Tbsp lard, olive oil, or butter
2 stalks celery, sliced thin
2 medium onions, diced
2 biggish carrots, halved lengthwise and sliced thin
2-5 cloves garlic, minced
2-14.5 oz cans of diced tomatoes
2 cans of minced clams
3-5 large potatoes, cubed
dill
salt
pepper
Tabasco or Tapatio to finish

Do I even have to tell you what to do? It's so easy. Saute the vegetables except potatoes until they are soft. Add the tomatoes and the juice only of the clams, along with the potatoes. Add a couple of cans of water so that you have enough liquid to cover the potatoes. Salt generously, because the potatoes need it! Bring to a boil and simmer until potatoes are soft, about 30-40 minutes. Add the reserved clam meat and seasoning.

Now, if you are really fancy, you will use the last 10 minutes of simmering to steam some REAL LIVE clams in their shells! Ooh la la.

Sorry that this is just a recipe blog now! I'll get back on this horse someday. 

spanakoriso, three ways

It's fall, blah blah. The leaves are orange. Actually, some are still green here, even though it's November 2! I'm confused.

I've been hankering after spinach recently so I made this Greek Spinach and Rice dish. It's terribly simple and cheap. Here is the recipe straight from Greek Cooking For The Gods by Eva Zane.

Eva Zane's Spanakoriso
2 pounds fresh spinach
1 cup uncooked rice
2 medium onions minced
1 small garlic clove, minced
2 bay leaves
2 cups beef broth
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
1/2 cup olive oil
salt and pepper

Wash and dry the spinach, and tear into pieces. Saute the onions, garlic and rice in olive oil until the onions are soft and golden; add tomato sauce, and stir; add spinach, bay leaves, salt and pepper, mix well and add beef broth; cover and simmer over low heat for 20 minutes.

I didn't have fresh spinach so I used two 12-oz bags of frozen spinach. Although that sounds like it should be less than 2 pounds, I think it was weighed when frozen, so in fact it ended up being more spinach-heavy than I think it was supposed to.  We are out of olive oil so I substituted butter. I will go to confession tomorrow I guess. Additionally, I have no idea what she means by tomato sauce; perhaps paste? I didn't have that either, so I just dumped in a can of diced tomatoes. I would recommend using pureed tomatoes next time so that you don't have chunks, but my results are still very tasty.

Here's the way I made it, with the ingredients in the order in which they are used:

Mallory's Non-Lenten Spanakoriso
2 tablespoons butter
2 medium onions, minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup uncooked jasmine rice, rinsed
(1) 16 oz can tomatoes, diced
 (2) 12 oz packages frozen chopped spinach
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
2 cups homemade chicken broth

Saute onions, garlic and rice in butter until onions are golden and soft. Add tomatoes and stir. Add spinach and cover to steam and melt the spinach a bit. Add remaining ingredients, cover and simmer about 25 minutes (longer to let the rice absorb the moisture from the frozen spinach.) Stir as needed, but cover it quickly so the rice can cook. When the rice is puffed up and edible, it's good.

This is how I would make it if I were fasting from olive oil, meat, etc and didn't want to use a barbaric oil like coconut or sesame in a Greek dish.

Mallory's Theoretical Lenten Spanakoriso
Same ingredients as above, except substitute veg broth or water. 

Cook the onions, rice and garlic in a little bit of broth (no more than it takes to moisten everything) to soften the onions. Then proceed as above. You may need to add more salt to make it taste good.

I garnished my bowl of spanakoriso with kefir (you can use yogurt), lemon juice, salt, pepper, and like four drops of olive oil from our empty can. More olive oil would have been better! One time I added parmesan cheese, I don't know why, and it basically became a risotto. It strikes me that ground lamb or sausage would also be a good addition if you are very hungry and want this to be your main dish. But if you stick to the Greek method, you can't go wrong.

brief confessions of a former future philosophy Ph.D. student; LOTR

At my job, I stare at a computer all day, so I haven't felt like blogging at home. It's difficult to get in the mood for writing at work, even though I do have some time for it, and every time I've thought "well, I'll break the silence with a little anecdote that just happened," the old fashioned internet browser doesn't let me click in the typey screen. Sorry!

Since my last post, whenever that was, I have been re-reading Lord of the Rings for the first time since high school. I always meant to come back to it after college but honestly, it's taken me three years to lighten up enough to read a novel with elves in it. Maybe that's not exactly true, because I believe there is at least the fear of some wood-sprites in Kristen Lavransdatter. Nonetheless it's definitely been more pleasure than I've allowed myself in years. And before you think I'm some kind of repressed wannabe philosopher (sometimes I think that,) I have to say that I obviously enjoy literature, and I've read more literature than philosophy since graduating from SJC. And I enjoy philosophy and theology too. But I know at times I've approached reading these things as if it's something I'm supposed to be doing, instead of something I truly feel like doing. Sometimes I even don't read anything because I don't feel up to the tasks I've set myself.

But not Lord of the Rings! It makes me feel like a tremendous dork to be carrying it around town, but I love it. The primary struggle for me has been getting the damn movie out of my head. I haven't watched it since high school either, but looking back it just seems like it was done so literally.  I was at a certain Orthogal's apartment this last weekend and complimented her roommate on a lovely ink painting of a city in the mountains, with some winding paths and craggy trees, etc. She said that her parents spent more money than they really should have to buy it in the seventies or eighties because it "reminded them of Middle-Earth." I kept staring at the picture and after a few minutes, commented that it was so cool that they could be just reminded of Middle-Earth. The picture just tickled their fancy and made them think about Tolkien. It could have been any place in Middle-Earth, and you know what? It didn't have to look like New Zealand. In the same way, I have much fonder memories of the somewhat cheesy seventies Rankin and Bass Hobbit than of Peter Jackson's movies, and I think it is because the cartoon format allowed for more imagination and mystery.

These days, it's a little harder to look at a painting and be reminded of Middle-Earth, because we now have such a specific idea of what Middle Earth is supposed to look like! I struggle so much to imagine Frodo and Sam as anyone besides the boy from Flipper  and "Rudy." 

But thank God, there are episodes of the book that have not been committed to film! Although I was probably annoyed with this as a teenager, I am so glad that Peter Jackson cut out Tom Bombadil! I felt such relief as the hobbits were rescued by Tom from the clutches of the Old Willow, because I was simultaneously being rescued from the tyranny of the screen. Today I read the episode of Sam and Frodo's stay with Faramir under the waterfall, and I was so pleased that with Tolkien's clues, I was able to construct it myself. Moreover, I was reading it in my parents' living room, looking out the window at the same raggedy old pear tree that sheltered me when I first read Lord of the Rings. I was able to return to the impressions of my teenage imagination. And with such a peaceful upbringing, in a countryside basically quite similar to the Shire, how did I envision such grand journeys? How did I imagine the fragrant, dry hills to the east of Mordor before I had ever been to the high desert of New Mexico? To what could I compare the halls of Rohan when the grandest building I had seen was probably a government building in Indianapolis? How could I understand this book at all when I had never seen a single mountain? Reading the passages which are protected from the dull, universal control of the film was a return to my tender, youthful hopes. Now I realize that Lord of the Rings awoke a wanderlust in me that certainly led me to enroll sight unseen in a college 2,000 miles away.

It's still pretty warm, but the air is getting a little crispy around the edges. Last night was a marvelous evening for doing my errands on my bicycle. (I never realized my hometown was s'damn hilly.) I braved sections of the road that I hadn't covered before and saw three students! Two of them were playing in the street and didn't notice me, and one is apparently the daughter of the owners of the carniceria/taqueria where I tried to get cilantro (her father gave me the one pathetic remaining bunch for free.) When you teach every single second and third grader in town, you musn't ever dress skankily or be drunk in public. I even feel bad riding around without a helmet; I'm setting such a bad example!

At the taqueria, I fell for coconut juice again. I always get it confused with coconut water, which actually tastes good and would be great after a bike ride, unlike coconut juice which is slimy and too sweet. So with an un-resealable 18 oz can of coconut juice to use up, I made this cake.

Note: I was really appalled today when I had some of the very sweet chocolate milk served in the cafeteria at school and realized that sugar is the second ingredient. So I didn't use sugar. But you could. In that case mix it in with the dry, not the wet, obviously.


Vegan/Lenten Pineapple Upside Down Cake 

Preheat oven to 350.

Make 2 flax "eggs" with 2 tablespoons flax meal and 3 tablespoons liquid (I used the damn coconut juice.) Do this first so it can coagulate a bit.

In the bottom of a 9x13 pan, spread around:
1-2 tablespoons coconut oil
20 oz can of crushed pineapple (DRAINED; reserve liquid)
1-2 tablespoons ground ginger (I just grated it right over the pineapple)


In a big bowl, whisk together:
2.5 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

Make a well in the dry ingredients and add:
1/2 cup coconut oil
1 1/3 cup liquid (mine was leftover pineapple juice and most of the coconut juice)
1 tsp vanilla
the flax eggs
~1 cup sweetener (I used honey and molasses)

Mix dry and wet. Pour batter over pineapple stuff. Bake for 40 minutes. 

Disconnected pieces of news about my life

Well, it's been a while. This morning I'm typing at a card table by our kitchen window, overlooking a little playground at an unused elementary school. My computer is surrounded by squash and zucchini and Rousseau's Emile. I am drinking my second Labor Day cup of coffee and the fan in the window is sucking out the scent of burnt oatmeal. I have set off the smoke alarm at least three times in the first two weeks in this apartment. The stove is electric and I just can't get the hang of it.

We moved from slummy southwest Indianapolis to sweet, green Crawfordsville. We aren't teaching at the little Orthodox school any more. Someday I will write about that lesson. I work in a little public school not four blocks from this little apartment, and it's horrible because everything is built on assumptions that I completely disagree with or at least question seriously (except for "It is good to help children",) but it's wonderful because the teachers and aides are so kind and devoted, and the children are raggedy, raw things who give me adoring hugs and high fives whenever they see me at Wal*Mart.

Matt is piecing together several little jobs, like substitute teaching, tutoring, teaching a homeschool Latin class, working on a farm stand and occasionally picking tomatoes, possibly building a fence for one of the priests, cleaning a bank, etc. Once he gets it all oscillating harmonically I think he will like his rhythms. He is working hard at applying to Ph.D programs in philosophy, so he walks over to Wabash college almost every day to take advantage of a scholarly, air-conditioned library.

We walked to Vespers this weekend. It's 1.4 miles according to Google. A nice walk if you're not bringing something to coffee hour or portaging your raw milk home. We do so much wheeling and dealing with our crunchy church family that we usually need the car on Sunday.

I don't have to prep at all for school because I'm an aide. I get home at 2:45 and I have the rest of my life to do what I want. I am working on sketches for an icon of Christ, which is inspired by Manuel Panselinos' Christ Enthroned:

and the Hilandar Christ:

 It's for my grandmother, who is old and failing. I hope it will be a comfort to her. She is Baptist but I know that she loves Christ and if I paint him truly, she will love the icon. She is an artist herself and has painted so many beautiful things for me. I've repaid her in scribbled thank you notes and brief phone calls. It's time for a real gift.

I have much more time to read now too. I devoured The Master of Hestviken, by Sigrid Undset. After a YEAR, I'm almost done with Emile.

 Here is a great essay about writing. I am fully aware that I am not a writer and I like to hear that practically nobody else is a writer either.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-writer-as-reader-melville-and-his-marginalia