larameekidd.com

Since my exam list posting last November, I passed my exams, did summer traveling, started fieldwork, presented a paper at AAR, TAed for a class, officially became a Ph.D. candidate (ABD woohoo!) and celebrated the solstice season holidays. This fall semester managed to be particularly hellish especially since fieldwork has been mucking with my sleep schedule. I’m hoping that with the proposal defense behind me, I can breathe a bit easier this semester by focusing only on fieldwork and auditing one seminar (on religious reading, I couldn’t say no). This may turn out to be wishful thinking, but I still maintain after all my years of schooling that fall semesters are way worse than spring semesters.

But for the last week or so I’ve also been busy rearranging the data on my hard drive to get some more performance out of my computer. I’ve placed some big files on my new external hard drive, freeing up about a third of my computer, but that necessitated backing up a lot of things online (which took about a week). This is all of course just a way to compensate for the fact that I’m not ready to buy a new computer and for the fact that at least a third of my hard drive is filled with music that I refuse to move.

And today I moved my pictures onto the external drive, which prompted me to update my flickr account. So, if you are interested there are new sets on flickr for the cabin trip 2009, my parent’s 39th anniversary party, other summer activities, Carl and Cayenne’s wedding, and holidays 2009. And as an incentive to having you go there, I’ll say that there are several babies in those sets: Elise Kidd, Liliana Kidd, Addison Gutherie (only one in the crocheting set, I actually haven’t met him in person yet!), Gabriel Bloy and Luc Sim-Laramee, all who arrived in 2009.

Also on flickr there is a set of my crochet and knitting projects, with which I have also been quite busy. In 2009, after completing 4 baby blankets (at least, I’m not sure if I’m forgetting any), I got tired of crocheting large things and moved on to smaller, quicker things and more challenging knitted things. I made slippers for the Kidd family (6 pairs), completed my first pair of knitted socks for Sharon, made Christmas baby booties (4 pairs, plus a few extra). And in the last week or so, I crocheted some wristwarmers and knitted a cabled neckwarmer for Robyn and Damian. You can see all these things in the crocheting and knitting set on flickr and on ravelry if you have an account (all except a few baby blankets and booties that I seem to have misplaced the pictures for). Next up I might actually start knitting some things for myself, but there are at least a few wristwarmers and booties that might happen in between.

So, here’s to an equally productive 2010, which will be underway as soon as I stop organizing/procrastinating and get started on my writing deadlines for next week. Hopefully I’ll resurface again before January 2011!

In honor of the first week of crisp fall weather here in Atlanta (after two weeks of devastating rain-estimated 22 inches), I’m feeling inspired to write about my currently reigning favorite cookbook, Simply in Season published by the MCC.

We purchased this book a little less than a year ago at Ten Thousand Villages pre-holiday season sale. We were shopping for Christmas gifts, hoping to knock out our list before having to do any traditional shopping, and I thought the book would be a good gift for my pollyanna draw. A few weeks later, we ended up finding a better gift for my pollyanna (pollyanna seems to exacerbate my pathology of the perfect gift, even while it alleviates the need to find one for everyone). So, I decided to keep the cookbook for ourselves, especially since it had numerous recipes for the squash and sweet potatoes that I’m up to my ears in at this time of year. While I had pretty much used up all my squash by the time I had purchased the book, I felt it was worth adding a cookbook to our stack if only to have new recipes for next year’s squash.

I’ve been in love with this cookbook ever since! It basically takes the More With Less approach and merges it with the ethos of eating seasonally and locally. While I grew up with many of the More With Less recipes (as well as Diet for a Small Planet), I haven’t been cooking out of More with Less for some time. I could never quite put my finger on why I never used it, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I search for recipes based on what produce I have and need to use up. So, any cookbook that does not have a good index of ingredients is pretty much useless to me. Simply in Season, is as you would expect, organized by seasons, including an all season section that focuses on dried foods and other things available all year round. The seasons are color coded on the edges of the pages, making it easy to find things without using the index and there’s a list of recipes in the beginning of each season, so flipping back and forth is minimized. In addition, the layout is very easy to read, with often only one recipe per page, with much larger print than More With Less and paragraph breaks for each step of the recipe. But even beyond all this, Simply in Season updates More With Less in ways that are hard to describe beyond noting that most recipes call for butter rather than margarine. Food tastes undoubtedly change over time, and while that can mean that old recipes and tastes come back into vogue, and I can’t help but feel like Simply in Season is a More With Less for my generation.

Now, after using this cookbook for almost a year, I’m just as sold as when I first got it. I have almost completely broken the habit of going to the store to buy produce in order to use the produce that I have in some recipe I found at Cooksillustrated.com (subscription required for access to all of the recipes). Sure I still go to cooksillustrated, and I use my other cookbooks, but I use this one the most especially since so many of the recipes contain that perfect ratio of something-you-really-want-to-eat vs. easy-enough-to-do-on-a-weeknight-without-crapping-out-and-ordering-a-pizza. The cookbook truly celebrates each season and it was great to be caught up in that joy as moved through our CSA share along with the book. And I have to mention that more than half of the spring desserts feature rhubarb, so even though it’s not grown around here, I was lured out of my rhubarb pie orthodoxy and try some new things.

And now that it’s fall, oh frabjous day, butternut harvest stew, chard cheese bake (made with radish greens instead of chard), savory squash bread pudding, stuffed squash, pumpkin sausage pasta, winter squash bars!!! I usually forgo the apple recipes, because I just end up saucing all my apples anyway, but apple salads might be in order too. And winter is just around the corner, I’ll soon be making the nutty sweet potato waffles, which doesn’t call for any white flour and is the first recipe I used from the cookbook last year. I made it again and again and will continue to make it again and again, as soon as I start getting sweet potatoes again!

So, looking back on this almost year of Simply in Season, this book has been a veritable boon from the Goddess and it has definitely helped us to eat less and less convenience foods. That and my perfecting of granola bars and muffins using spent grains from Josh’s brewing, but that’s a whole nother blog post…

Or at least trying to… Here’s a list of the books on my exam lists just in case anyone is curious about what I’m reading. Or if not, it will at least function as an excuse for any anti-social behavior I may exhibit between now and March. I’ve marked with an asterisk ones that I do not own in case anyone wants to lend them to me, though the library has been working passing well as long as I play the recall game.

Religious Studies Methods
Classical Methods and Critical Questions

*Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion.
Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy
*Durkheim, Emile. Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Doniger. The Implied Spider
*Eliade. Patterns in Comparative Religion
*Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies
Geertz.. The Interpretation of Cultures
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth”
*Malinowski. Magic, Science and Religion
Masuzawa, Tomuko. The Invention of World Religions.
*Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
*Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process
*Orsi. Between Heaven and Earth.
Patton. A Magic Still Dwells.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion.
*Smith, W.C. The Meaning and End of Religion

Methods and Theories of Practices (Ethnography, Ritual, Performance)

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Can there be a feminist ethnography?”
*—. Writing Women’s Worlds
*De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
*Clifford, James and George Marcus. Writing Cultures
Bauman, Richard. “Performance” in Folkore, Cultural Peformances and Popular
Entertainments
Tambiah, Stanley “A Performative approach to Ritual” in Culture, Thought, and Social
Action: An anthropological approach
*Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions
–“Performance” in Critical Terms for the Study of Religion
*Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
*Briggs, Charles. Competence in performance: the creativity of tradition in Mexicano verbal art.

Religious Reading

Boyarin, Jonathan Ed. The Ethnography of Reading
*Griffiths, Paul G. Religious Reading
*Malley, Brian. How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism
*Neal, Lynn S. Romancing God
*Wimbush, Vincent. Ed. Theorizing Scriptures
*Van Doorn-Harder, Pieternella. Women Shaping Islam: Reading the Qu’ran in Indonesia

Literary Theory/ Philosophical Hermeneutics

Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics, Book VI
Adorno. Aesthetic Theory
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine
Austin, J.L. How to do things with words
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
—.“Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” & “Discourse in the Novel” Dialogic
Imagination
*Benjamin, Walter. The Task of the Translator.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc
—. On Grammatology
Felman, Shoshana. Scandal of the Speaking Subject
*Foucault, order of things
Gadamer. Truth and Method
*Heidegger. Being and Time
Kant. The Critique of Judgment
*Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception
Ricoeur. The Rule of Metaphor
*—. From Text to Action
*—. Oneself as Another
*—. “Preface to Bultmann” in Conflict of Interpretations
*Schleiermacher. Hermeneutics and Criticism
Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations
—. On Certainty
*Dilthey (Still Not Sure how to select which from him)

Gender in U.S. Religion (20th Century)
In this list, I have drawn together works that represent mostly ethnographic approaches to women’s religious identity in the U.S, centering in Protestant Christianity and including a category of works that engage relevant issues in Catholic Christianity and other religions. The question that drives my selections centers on how conceptions and constructions of gender are central to the construction of religious identity and vice versa, especially concerning the differences between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ forms of Protestantism. Another axis of questioning, which runs through all of the works but is more explicit in the works on the African-American community, is the question of ‘agency’ and whether or not religious tradition empowers or hinders women’s activism. This question of agency connects to issues I’m exploring in other exams around the conception of the autonomous self.

Conservative Protestant Christianity
*Bartkowski, John P. Remaking the Godly marriage: gender negotiation in evangelical families. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
*Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalism and gender, 1875 to the present.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
*Ingersoll, Julie. Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
*Griffith, R. Marie. God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Mainline Protestant Christianity
*Chaves, Mark. Ordaining women: culture and conflict in religious organizations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Davie, Jody Shapiro. Women in the presence: constructing community and seeking spirituality in mainline Protestantism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Lawless, Elaine J. Wholly Women, Holy Women: Sharing Ministries of Wholeness Through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993

African-American Protestant Christianity
Frederick, Marla. Between Sundays: black women and everyday struggles of faith. Berkeley: University of Los Angeles Press, 2003.
*Riggs, Marcia. Awake, Arise & Act: A Womanist call for black liberation. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1994.
*Townsend, Cheryl Gilkes. “If it wasn’t for the women”: black women’s experience and womanist culture in church and community. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.
*Wiggins, Daphne. Righteous content: black women’s perspectives on church and faith. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Other Traditions
Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Davidman, Lynn. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Orsi, Robert A. Thank You St. Jude: women’s devotion to the patron saint of lost causes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
*Rouse, Carolyn Moxley. Engaged surrender: African-American women and Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Feminist/Womanist/Global Women’s Theologies (Alphabetically)
I am focusing in this list on how gender and social constructions of identity bring issues of epistemology and method to the fore in theology. In particular, the category of experience as a source for Christian theology highlights the how knowledge is shaped by social categories of gender, race and culture. At the same time, I am interested in the way in which theologies that deal with gender and race also wrestle with normative sources in the Christian tradition and how that wrestling highlights the question how authority is constructed in religious identity. These theologies wrestle with the authoritative tradition
both in terms of looking for liberative elements and rejecting destructive elements, showing how religious norms shape identity along with race and gender and culture.

*Cannon, Katie G. Katie’s canon: womanism and the soul of the black community. New York: Continuum, 1995.
*Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
*Gonzalez, Michelle. Afro-Cuban Theology: religion, race, culture and identity. Gainesville, Fl: University Press of Florida, 2006.
*Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta Scholars Press, 1989.
Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. En la lucha-In the Struggle: elaborating a mujerista theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
*Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.
Jones, Serene. “Women’s Experience Between a Rock and A Hard Place” in Horizons in Feminist Theology. eds. Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Davaney. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. pp. 33-53.
Kwok Pui-Lan. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.
McFague, Sallie. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982.
Oduyoye, Mercy Amba. Daughters of Anowa: African women and patriarchy. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Beacon Press, 1983.
Saiving, Valerie. “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow eds. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.
Stuart, Elizabeth. “Experience and Tradition: Just Good Friends” in Elisabeth Hartlieb and Charlotte Methuen eds. Sources and Resources of feminist theologies = Quellen feministischer Theologien = Sources et resources des théologies féministes. Pharos ; Mainz : Matthias-Grünewald, 1997.
*Stuart, Elizabeth. Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships (London: Mowbray 1995).
*Terrell, Joanne. Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African-American Experience. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998.
*Weems, Renita. Just a Sister Away : A womanist vision of women’s relationships in the Bible. San Diego, CA: LuraMedia, 1988.
*Welch, Sharon D. Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A feminist theology of liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985.
Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: the challenge of womanist God-talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

Feminist Theory
My selections in feminist theory are focused around questions of autonomy and heteronomy in the shaping of the self and in constructions of feminist epistemology. Even more specifically, I have selected standpoint epistemology and constructivist/performative conceptions of gendered subjectivity as loci in which I find questions around the traditional view of the autonomous self. These questions also touch on an axis of tension between the conceptions of the social and the individual, which is reflected in debates about autonomy in constructions of liberal society.

*Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Studies in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla. “The Generalized and the Concrete Other”
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of identity, Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge.
—. “Besides Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” in Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. 17-39.
—. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
—. “Violence, Mourning and Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. 19-49.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
*Fineman, Martha. The Autonomy Myth.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1.
Harding, Sandra. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology.” Feminist Epistemologies. Eds. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. New York: Routledge, 1993. 49-82.
Harraway, Donna. “The Persistence of Vision.” Writing on the Body. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 283-195.
Harstock, Nancy. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” Discovering Reality. Eds. Sandra Harding and Merrell Hintikka. Dortrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel Publishing, 1983. 283-305.
*Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Gillian C. Gill, Trans. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
—. Sexes and Genealogies (selections)
*Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency
*Le Doeuff, Michele. The Sex of Knowing
*Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition.
Young, Iris Marion. “The Ideal of Impartiality and the Civic Public,” Chapter 4 in Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
*Zerilli, Linda. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.

20th Century American Protestantism
The organizing principle is around communities and interaction with culture as well as evangelicalism, mainline protestantism and general trends in American religion in the twentieth century. The questions that structured my selections and which are guiding my reading at least initially are questions around how we represent the ‘varieties’ within major religious trends and how we come up with the categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ to begin with. Focusing a bit more on ethnographic accounts of American religion along with some of the more generalized work allows me to focus on the interplay between the particular or idiosyncratic and general categories.

*Ammerman, Nancy. Bible Believers
*Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.
Bellah, Robert. Et al. Habits of the Heart
*Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
*Hutchison, William r., ed. Introductory Essay in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
*Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience.
*Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
*McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity
*Miller, Donald. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
*Nelson, Timothy J. Every Time I feel the spirit.
*Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Marketplace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
*Roof, Wade Clark. American Mainline Religion
*Smith, Christian. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998).
*Smith, Christian. Divided by Faith.
*Warner, R. Stephen. New Wine in Old Wineskins
*Warner, R Stephen. “Place of Congregation in Contemporary Religions Configuration” in American Congregations
*Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II.
*Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community
*and “I Come Away Stronger”; How Small Groups are Shaping American Religion

Christian Thought, Modernity and PostModernity
Modernity is sometimes characterized as being ushered in by the Enlightenment’s disavowal of the authority of revelation as a pathway to knowledge in favor of rational objectivity. The enlightenment placed a premium on the human potential to know without external help and revelation then becomes the knowledge that comes from outside rational thought. Western Christian theology has weaved in and out of the subsequent development of Western philosophy particularly around this question of what are valid claims to knowledge. This course will investigate this interaction through a few of the major figures in both Western theology and philosophy. Initially, the debate characterizes faith as opposed to reason, faith being allied with the irrational and reason with rationality. Within theology, the debate is often understood in terms of the different weight the sources of tradition, scripture, experience and reason have in Christian thought. Also the debate about theology’s relationship to culture becomes a way of understanding how the challenges of Enlightenment thought should be dealt with. In late modern and post-modern Christian thought, feminist and liberationist approaches question some of the presuppositions of Enlightenment thought and continue theology’s engagement with the evaluating what are valid claims to knowledge in secular and Christian terms. This course endeavors to give a broad (though not necessarily comprehensive) introduction to theological epistemology and to encourage students in evaluating claims to knowledge, in Christianity and without.

Kant. What is Enlightenment?
Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics?
*Hegel. Phenomenology of the Spirit (selections)
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling
*Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity
Marx. Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, Part 1

Schleiermacher. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers
*Barth, Karl. Letter to the Romans
The Barmen Declaration
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology: Vol 1
Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol I Seeing the Form
Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith, esp Intro, chaps 1,2,5
Second Vatican Council. “Dei Verbum”

Brunner. Revelation and Reason
H. Richard Niebuhr. Christ and Culture
*Farley, Edward. Ecclesial Reflection
Tracy, David. Analogical Imagination
*Browning, Don. Fundamental Practical Theology (selections)

*Cone, James. A Black Theology of Liberation (poss selections from God of the Oppressed)
*Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is
Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness
Guterriez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation.
*Boff, Leonardo. Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church
Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church

Secondary Works
Dulles, Avery. Models of Revelation
Avis, Paul ed. Divine Revelation

On second thought, I’m not sure that salad can be the new sandwich. Sandwiches just cannot be replaced. I was reminded of this last week when we went to the new sandwich shop in Decatur, the 5th Earl Market. This place rekindled my love for sandwiches through its very name, a nod to the fifth earl of sandwich and its vaguely medieval theme. The sandwiches are suitably ingenious, hot and cold, and there is a respectable selection of salads (one with beets and blue cheese, so they know what’s goin on). They also have an awesome selection of beers and what looked like tasty baked goods (out of bounds). I was a bit disappointed with the quality of the bread, not that it was bad, but it wasn’t as exciting as one might expect for a serious sandwich shop. But next time I’ll ask and see if there are other options. (Or once again, I might be spoiled by Philadelphia food…a phenomenon I can’t really explain.)

In any case, in order to pay homage to the sandwich, making restoration for my earlier slight, I would like to here recite the sandwich song. The version that I quote here includes the well-known chorus by Bob King and verses that I think Gabriel wrote. According to wikipedia, it was actually the 4th Earl of Sandwich who is credited with creating the sandwich, but Gabriel’s version of the events are plausible, being that the 4th Earl of Sandwich was a naval man.

Sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine.
I love sandwiches, I eat them all the time.
You can eat them for your breakfast, you can eat them for your lunch.
If I had a hundred sandwiches, I’d eat them all at once.

One day the Duke of Sandwich
was leaving on a boat.
He wanted a bready meaty thing
something tasty he could tote.
Well the cook he was indignant
and the history books do note
he made the first bologna sandwich
and he shoved it down his throat.

Sandwiches are beautiful…

Orders for new sandwiches
from foreign countries poured
and the nobles they ordered sandwiches
that they could not afford
so the lords they started cooking
and the cooks became the lords
and they made up brand new sandwiches
whenever they got bored.

Singing, sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine.
I love sandwiches, I eat them all the time.
You can eat them for your breakfast, you can eat them for your lunch.
If I had a hundred sandwiches, I’d eat them all at once.

It’s only natural that after getting fresh produce from our CSA for several weeks, after the beginning of the harvests from our garden and after being put on a medically prescribed low-carb diet that my world is beginning to revolve around salads.

For a while, I have been a connoisseur of restaurant salads. You can tell a lot about a restaurant by the salad offerings. Of course, the greens used are the primary indicator of the level of the restaurant. There is a basic expectation that an above-diner level restaurant will use something other than iceberg lettuce (besides the wedge salad which seems to be coming back in vogue) and indicate what kind of greens on the menu. But then there is another level of salad that evidences certain ingenuity in finding the right combination. You never know when you will find that different but perfect salad, could be a hole in the wall place or the fanciest restaurant. This ingenuity is a art form that is somehow best expressed in the french term for tossed salad, salade composee.

Until the present, while I had left my mother’s iceberg-cabbage-green pepper salads behind (sorry mom), I still had a felt that I lacked some talent in putting together a salad at home without a recipe. Our salads at home would often be lettuce and tomato with an occasional cucumber. Faced with more options at the food court, I would often pick a random assortment of toppings and then be dissatisfied with the result. It went further downhill when I came to Emory since their self-serve salad bar somehow just turns my imagination off and does less for my appetite. They finally started offering baby spinach but their romaine lettuce always looks rather mangy and I never make it past the beginning of the line. But the recent restriction on my carb intake (think diabetic) has thrust me into a new place with salads.

I’ve begun to think of lettuce as the all-purpose base for whole culinary worlds, replacing the bread or pasta with lettuce for the canvas. My Cook’s Illustrated Best 30-minute recipe book has helped me by reminding me of some dinner salads and cooksillustrated.com has helped with good tuna salad recipes (which can be eaten on anything) and the beet salad. Cook’s Illustrated had proved their salad ingenuity to me actually with their fruit salad recipes. Recognizing that fruit salad is often a haphazard affair, they came up with some amazing pairings that are designed for eye appeal as well as for the marriage of flavors. I’ve made their strawberry grape salad with red wine-balsamic reduction (which tastes like chocolate!). I’ve been lusting after the nectarine-blueberry-raspberry salad with champagne-cardamom reduction and the plum-fig with brandy-cinnamon reduction, but alas fruit, alcohol and sugar are restricted in my current diet.

Here are some of the salads we’ve recently eaten (or are going to eat):

Tuna salad with balsamic vinegar and grapes on lettuce
Taco salad
Salad with grilled beets, fried shallots and goat cheese
Italian chef’s salad salad with fennel, roasted red peppers, artichokes, salami and parmesan (this was not as great, mostly because I discovered that I don’t like artichokes)
Salad with sausage and white beans
Chef’s Salad
Salad with roasted veggies and italian cheese salad (from whole foods)
The usual everything must-go salad (hold the beets)
Tomato salad with fresh mozzarella and pesto (again from the garden)

The other day, I finally developed a smidgeon of that ingenuity I’ve been looking for, since the above were mostly inspired by recipes in some form. This ingenuity was facilitated by an accidental discovery of the pairing of ham with caesar dressing a few days earlier. My chef’s salads always seemed to evoke the epitome of how my salads were random mishmosh dissatisfactions. And then as I was preparing the ham for lunch, I had a stroke of genius. I blanched some fresh green beans from the garden (since we didn’t have enough for two for dinner and I didn’t want to squander their freshness by waiting for some more) and threw them on the salad with my ham with caesar dressing stolen from the food court to be added later. My salad sense in full effect, I decided to pass on the tomato, feeling that its addition would ruin the combination.

I’ve been thinking, if I get really good at this, I could open a salad restaurant. This would be fundamentally different from the saladworks type places where you select the toppings and they allow you to indiscriminately throw things together. I would rather be offered suggestions of salads composed with aplomb that surprise and delight. This salad restaurant would offer appetizer, dinner and dessert/fruit salads plus daily specials. This would be on the order of Joe’s (or Lulu’s) Pie Diner in the recent movie Waitress where they serve pies of sweet and savory varieties and the special is thought up daily by the resident pie genius, Jenna. One of the motifs of the movie is a shot looking down on a pie being made with Jenna’s voice-over explaining the inspiration for the pie and its ingredients. She daydreams about pies in reaction to the events in her life. “Pregnant Miserable Self Pitying Loser Pie… Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambé of course” or “Earl Murders Me Because I’m Having An Affair Pie… You smash blackberries and raspberries into a chocolate crust” or “I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong And I Don’t Want Earl To Kill Me Pie… Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana.” Some day I’ll have that kind of genius applied to salads. Or I’d settle for someone else opening up such a salad restaurant where I could eat new salads every day. Anyone interested in opening a restaurant?

and blanketed Atlanta with a bright yellow coverlet of pollen. Someone had asked when we moved down here whether the name of our neighborhood, Oakhurst, derived from a preponderance of oak trees. I answered then while we have a lot of oak trees, I didn’t think we had any more oak trees than other neighborhoods. This has been definitely proved by the fact that the entirety of Atlanta is covered in oak pollen, not just our neighborhood. I noticed it first at twilight, so I thought there was just dust all over everything, but the next morning revealed a radioactive looking landscape. The situation just got worse and worse because of amazingly mild weather and no rain. It was so warm and pleasant that I had left the windows in our apartment open for almost a week. After about the fourth day of this, I realized that in so doing, I had let all the pollen inside. I picked up papers that had been left on my desk and they felt like they were covered in chalk dust. Two days later I went to clean up the kitchen and realized that it was all over the dishes in the drain rack and all over the stove. It seriously is like living in a classroom pre-whiteboard days that had not been cleaned ever, and so the yellow chalk dust just accumulated and accumulated. At the height of it, the pollen count for our area was above 2000 while a normal level (I think even for this time of year) is around 100 or 200. Apparently, thankfully, neither Josh nor I are allergic. Especially since this apparently happens every year.

It has since rained and the pollen is beginning to be washed away, but I took some pictures at the end of last week to document this oddity. I meant to take some pictures on campus since it was most dramatic to see the marble steps of the buildings with yellow edging and film, but I kept forgetting to bring the camera to school. So, I took a little walk to the coffeeshop last week with the camera. The pictures can be seen on my photo page at this site (see column on the right) or at my flickr page. The pictures don’t always capture the eerie yellow that distinguishes the pollen from dust, but I think you’ll get the idea.

Every once in a while, I get a flash of clarity or a sudden feeling that everything in my brain has come together with a soft click. These are usually the moments when I feel a need to post something, so you can see that it is a relatively infrequent occurrence. It’s even more infrequent that the ‘click’ I feel is as palpable as it was last week. I swear I heard it. Like the sound of the wheels catching and aligning in a combination lock. Maybe this is evidence for Steve Huber’s theory that I am actually a robot, who knows. But a wooden robot maybe…this click was not metallic.

Two days before our car broke down Josh and I sat down at filled at a “Dignified Living Assessment” for his work (ie a budget) and made some decisions and goals about the coming year. One of these was to save money for and look for a house/condo to buy around Christmas next year. Another was to curtail our ‘dining’ spending, which is out of control chiefly because my impulse food buys at school. So, I resolved to bring more of my food to school, which would bolster my lenten resolve to fast from refined sugar. I’ve been struggling with overeating for some time and having a monetary restriction helps me more than anything else.

So, when we got the word that are car was completely dead on Thursday, several of the layers that needed to come together were already in place. The layer that was added by the car dying was of course that now I will be walking and biking so much more than before out of necessity. Josh and I were both working at home on Thursday and because easy food supplies had run out, we cooked for lunch and ate the same thing for dinner. The final click came when, after dinner, I discovered that there were sweet potatoes that I forgotten about.

What do sweet potatoes have to do with anything? When I was first cooking for myself during my sophomore year of college, I used to cook a bunch of sweet potatoes on Sundays to have for lunch and as snacks throughout the week. I was kind of an eccentric eater, but I ate very very cheaply and pretty healthily. With that moment of sudden discovery of the sweet potatoes while being resourceful about what was in our kitchen, coupled with the imminent biking and the budgeting, I had a very vivid sense that I was suddenly back in that time period and/or in the time before Josh and I got married in Philadelphia. And suddenly I felt like my eating habits and transportation habits were recalibrated.

If I have any interpretation it is that my life has slowly acquired something like layers of decadence (or at least what my brain considers decadence…whether or not a car is actually a necessity here in Atlanta is another story) over the years and throughout last week it seems like each of them might have been stripped out of my consciousness. And although not having a car will certainly complicate our lives right now, something deep in my brain has been liberated by its removal.

Or maybe its just the confluence of the above events or even the above coupled with some moments of clarity I’ve had about my work over the past week or two. I’m taking a class that is helping me develop the rationale for my project and mujerista theology is really coming to the fore. So I decided that I’m doing a language exam in Spanish instead of German. This was a liberating decision for me because it seems like one of the first practical/praxis oriented moves I’ve been able to make in a long time. Plus I was taking the German exam for very ‘guild’-oriented reasons. Then, today, (and I’m so happy about this that I could scream) I found out that will probably be able to get a job this summer as a research assistant compiling stories about how women across religious traditions have used religious resources to combat economic injustice. This opportunity meets a lot of my concerns about the summer: that I find something productive to do so that I don’t go crazy literally, that I be paid since I don’t get my stipend in the summer, that hours be flexible since I have a couple of really important weddings to go to this summer, and last but not least that it be something useful for my research. It makes me feel like my project makes sense and that it will be useful and interesting.

So, I dunno. Maybe there is something chemical that makes me have these periods of clarity. Maybe if I could rewind the last couple of weeks I’ll find that I was eating better (not sleeping better I don’t think). Or maybe it’s the spring coming already, when something perennial in me is revived, and I can feel it stirring beneath the ground even now. Spring really will be here shortly in Atlanta, but can I really be acclimated to the seasons here already? Or maybe I’m a robot. A wooden one.

There have been several occasions to sample traditional southern foods since Josh and I have been down here. And while I enjoy most of it, I’ve not been crazy about all of it, since I don’t eat fried foods and have never really liked fried chicken and since I don’t take caffeine, so I can’t drink sweet tea. And really, where we are, there are few other kinds of fast food places besides fried chicken chains. My underwhelmed reaction to these things reminds me how much of a northerner I will always be. However, I have to report that I have definitely fallen head over heels for biscuits.

I ate biscuits from scratch a lot growing up but I really don’t think I had any idea of how much of a different, or shall we say, heightened phenomenon biscuits are here in the south. When we came down to visit we had gone to The Flying Biscuit and thought the biscuits were good. But then I discovered breakfast biscuit sandwiches. It’s like bagels in New York or egg sandwiches in Phila. There is this place called Pastries A Go Go (I haven’t the foggiest why it’s called that) where every once in a while I indulge in bacon egg and cheese on a biscuit the size of a bagel. It’s the fluffiest softest most wonderful thing ever.

So, tonight I was looking for a recipe to use up some buttermilk and I decided to try some whole wheat biscuits. And I have to say, I was quite impressed. I’ve never made biscuits before, but these were pretty dang close to the biscuits from Pastries a Go Go and better than I remember the ones at The Flying Biscuit. And Josh has just eaten a third biscuit even though he pronounced that he had heartburn from eating too much after the second. Maybe there’s hope for this unreformed northerner yet…

PS I want to repost this link from Bonnie’s blog because it may very well become my new addiction: though I think they could have come up with a better name.

One last thing… I want to confirm that I am in fact living in a cabin in the woods.  I saw a great big owl sitting on my landlord’s swing set the other day as I walked through his yard.  An owl.  Not a barn owl either.  I can’t for the life of me find a picture online to figure out what kind it was.  It doesn’t seem to match any pictures of owls in North America that I’ve seen.  So maybe Josh’s theory is right….our landlord’s daughter Quinn must have been admitted to Hogwart’s?

Okay, now that I finally got that other post out of the way, I need to announce my new tattoo idea. For a while now, I have been thinking about a new tattoo for a couple of reasons.

First, as I’ve grown older, I have graduated out of the types of clothing that show off my tattoo (namely, spaghetti strap tops). Since the genius of getting it on my upper back was that I could show or not show my tattoo if I wanted, I’m feeling disatisfied at not getting to show it off since it’s kind of hard to find low back, non-spaghetti strap, non-formal wear tops. I mean, c’mon, what is the point of having a tattoo if no one besides your spouse or partner sees it on a regular basis (all you girls with tattoos in unmentionable places, yes I’m talking to you). That’s not hard core. So, I’ve been thinking about getting something on my upper arm or shoulder, since I do wear sleeveless tops quite a lot. But as of yet, I had had no epiphanies as to what in the world else I would want to get a tattoo of. I thought long and hard about my first one expecting it to be the only tattoo I ever got. And I’m still not quite into the idea of more than one tattoo…it gives me a Parkers’ Back kind of blotchy dissatisfaction to think of it.

Second, I thought I would never wish I didn’t have a big cross on my back, figuring that a simple cross would never lose its appeal for me like I might with some other symbol of Christianity that I dreamed up myself. However, I have become uneasy with the way Christians almost fetishize the cross as the locus of salvation at the expense of the resurrection (see previous post). I know partly this is because of being “under the sway” of womanist and feminist theologies recently that criticize traditional atonement theories that seem to glorify death, violence and victimization. And I could argue that the cross functions as a symbol (and therefore is not the same as wearing an electric chair around your neck), but why is it that we do not as Christians have a symbol for the resurrection and the cross is made to do double duty? (The empty tomb would be worse, a symbol of death made to carry the signification of life?)

But the other day, it finally hit me what I must do (no, I didn’t drive a tractor into a tree, setting it ablaze in order to have a burning bush experience). Hopefully, I can describe this. My vision is of a swirl of flames, feathers and possibly leaves starting from the base of the cross on the right weaving across it at the crux and then back to the right at the top, encompassing it and ending up on my right shoulder. The symbolizations are thus: I was thinking about how an image of the cross sprouting leaves would symbolize life from death (as well as a sprig from the stump of Jesse), how the phoenix is a symbol of resurrection which arises from the flames, which symbolize the Holy Spirit (like so many denominational crosses. In fact, the swirl I have envisioned might be drawn from the UMC cross. Click here for a picture of it. ) Hmm, maybe if there is both leaves and flames that do not burn them there is a burning bush symbol too (and Isaiah 43…). I want the sense that these symbols of life overwhelm and encompass the death symbol of the cross and an oversignification of life.

So, what do people think? I still have reservations about leaving behind the simplicity of the cross. And about the fact that I would have to basically be wearing a halter top for one to see the whole thing. One of the things I liked about the cross is that a low back v top/dress would frame it nicely and give you the whole picture. And I haven’t decided whether there will be color or not, or whether the symbol of the phoenix will be the over arching symbol (like will there be more features of the bird besides feathers). And clearly I’m going to need some help drawing it. Any takers? Recommendations of amazing draftsmen/women (besides Michael Guess who might be getting a call from me anyway)?