Mother may I? Yes you may!

The 8 year old had Scarlet Fever last week, and then came down with Pink Eye this weekend. In response, I've been cleaning like a madwoman in the hopes of ridding our home of whatever is thinking of hitting us next.

So, today was spent finishing the laundry, dusting the house, dusting the ceiling fans, vacuuming, sweeping the tile floors and then getting ready to mop the floors.

I hate mopping the floors. I love it when they are clean, smelling of Dr. Bonner's peppermint soap. But I hate to mop. I'd finished the kitchen and was dreading mopping the bathroom and entry way, when the same 8 year old asked if she could mop the bathroom.

Yes, she wanted to. I granted permission.

Then she asked if she could mop the entryway. Again, I granted permission.

I went to the laundry room to continue doing the laundry. She came down and asked if mopping the floors could be her responsibility. Yes, she wants to do them.

Needless to say, she is now in charge of mopping floors.

Woo Hoo! I am a happy woman!

Welcoming the Spring

I spent a wonderful week in Northern Illinois for Spring Break. No, I don't have memories of the surf gentling luring me to sleep, or tan lines to remind me of a restful break. I do, however, have some great pictures from my Kids with Kids Daycamp at the Learning Center at Angelic Organics.

I spent 3 days with human kids as we watched for signs of birth from our family of goats. And we were not disappointed! On Thursday afternoon, we watched as one of our girls gave birth to twin kids. They were later named Thalia and Latte. This is Thalia being born:

I'm human again

I've been sick with the flu. So sick, that I couldn't even enjoy reading. Definitely too sick to cook.

But, I'm better now, and ready to get back to it. I've been wanting to try new recipes lately, and in the spirit of Lent and Every Monday Matters, I'm going to try something new each week.

I found a wonderful recipe in my Moosewood cookbook for Southwester Corn and Potato Soup. This is a sweet potato soup. Now, my daughter and I love sweet potatoes, but The Boys are not big fans. However, I think this recipe has enough other flavors that everyone will love it. I'm going to bake a loaf of fresh bread to accompany it.




If you are experiencing the first signs of Spring, this soup may not appeal to you. But here is Northern Illinois where the crocus are still safely below the surface, and the daffodils are nowhere to be seen, this soup will be a perfect cold weather meal.

Update: This was a winner. The colors were beautiful, and after tossing about half of it in the blender, it turned into a wonderful creamy soup. It was just a bit sweet, but also spicy...a wonderful combination on a cold, damp evening.

I can't think through this flu!

I hate it. I've been home sick all week, and have done little more than flip through the television stations. I have a huge pile of overdue library books that I wanted to read, but they are all just too much for me.


So, today, I finally got my butt off the couch, gathered up the books, grabbed some cash to pay off the overdue fines, and returned them.

And, checked out one of my guilty pleasures...Sophie Kinsella. I'm heading back to the couch now to begin "Shopaholic and Sister." Kinsella's books are funny, over the top, and just what I need to help make me feel better. I'll get back to my Booksense picks when I'm really over this flu. Until then, I need easy reading!

How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (It's called The Golden Compass in the US) X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X (okay, maybe not absolutely everything, but much of it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (my son is now reading it in HS and I think I want to read it again.)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X (thought I would hate it, but loved it!)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis XX (Read the whole series, multiple times)
34 Emma - Jane Austen X (went through a "Jane Austen" thing some years ago)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De rnieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X (But not a big Atwood fan, sorry Sugar Mags!)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X (This is both the worst and best book I've ever read. I absolutely hated the first half, but kept at it because my Professor Joe Bessler Northcutt recommended it. The second half made it all worthwhile!)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (attempted it, but never made it to the end)

So, I've made it through 48 so far. There are some on the list I've never heard of, some I have no intention of reading, and some that I am immediately addding to my list.

In particular, I want to read "Of mice and men" and "Grapes of Wrath". I think they will both resonate in powerful ways with what we as a nation/world are going through economically right now.

As I said above, I want to read Catcher in the Rye again, and I also want to read "Love in the time of Cholera."

Disappointing to see how few female authors are listed. I would have added Edwidge Danticutt and Julia Alvarez for sure. And how does a list like this ignore Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison? I would also add Jhumpa Lahiri.

What have you read, and what would you add?

It's a man's world

I joined my husband yesterday for an area clergy meeting. Yes, I am an ordained UCC Minister. It was a bit shocking to walk into the room of a very large, downtown church of a very large city and find only male clergy at the gathering. They even said, "look, he brought a girl". A girl, not a woman. Ick.

But, it was good to be among other clergy who are wrestling with the life, teaching and stories of a first century peasant living in an oppressive empire, and what it means for those of us who are trying to follow in the way of this peasant as we participate in a new oppressive empire.

It was good for me because I was reminded who I think Jesus was, and what his significance was, is and will continue to be. As I said at that meeting, "I think every story is a story about restoration to community." And I do.

Resurrection? Yep, the community of followers did not drift away after his execution. Rather, they banded together again and spread the message of welcoming the outsider.

Healing of the leper? Yep, the man no longer has to proclaim "unclean, unclean" as he navigates his community. Rather, he is told to proclaim that he is clean, approachable, a member.

You name it, I will see it through the eyes of restoration of community.

I've always said that I believe that what I am about is reading our sacred stories as though they are alive, and our lives as sacred stories. I see this sacred story lived out here in my school district. I've begun working as a substitute teacher and aid this year. I am often called to be an aid in some of the cross-category classes. As I work with these students who are in wheel chairs, or hearing impaired, or on the Autism spectrum, or slower learners, I remember the days of my childhood when children who were different were put on a bus and sent to a different school. Taken from their community, their neighborhoods, and sent to learn somewhere else.

Now, these students are in their own communities. They are in the traditional classrooms for different parts of the day, enjoying being chosen as a partner for bowling in PE, playing with their classmates in Home Center in Kindergarten, helping to put the supplies away in music. Just part of the gang, part of the class.

Yep, restoration of community. I'm not sure I see it all that often in the Church. But I sure see it in our public schools. And I am grateful every day that my children and your children get to live it.

Simply Red

I am on staff at a learning center for an organic farm in northern Illinois. I was fortunate to also have the opportunity to work with the farm crew for several weeks this past fall. The vegetables on this farm are gorgeous! I knew that chard was pretty, and that herbs can be quite attractive. But I didn't know that broccoli could look so majestic, or that cabbage could be quite so large...think Little Shop of Horrors!

I realized that, while my family eats a much wider array and quantity of vegetables than many, there are still so many that I am just not accustomed to preparing. And cabbage is one of them. I don't remember eating it as a child, I don't remember my mother fixing it. I just somehow missed all things cabbage (except for coleslaw at a restaurant).

But, cabbage is such wonderful winter vegetable. It is harvested in the late fall, even here in Northern Illinois, and it can keep for a month easily in your fridge.

So, earlier this week I made a lovely cabbage salad with a nice little head of red cabbage. I looked at a variety of recipes online and in my cookbooks, but opted for just slicing and dicing what was in my crisper. Here it is...

1/2 head of red cabbage, thinly sliced
1/2 yellow pepper, chopped
bunch of green onions, chopped
stalk of celery, chopped

I then made a simple lime dressing (based on the Lime-cilantro vinaigrette in GRUB)
2 T lime juice
1 t dijon mustard
1 t parsley flakes (I didn't have any cilantro)
2 t pure maple syrup
sea salt to taste
3T Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Toss together, and let the flavors blend. Tasted good that day, tasted even better the next.
My 8 year old daughter gave it a try but didn't like it. My husband said it was definitely a keeper.

Did you know that cabbage has more vitamin c than oranges!