What’s for supper? Vol. 261: Thornton Wilder can make his own sandwich, how bow dah

What’s for supper? Well, I’ll tell you.

First I must once again beg your pardon for how little I’ve been writing. Last time I said was going to tell you all about our exciting progress on fixing up Damien’s bob house office, and there has been exciting progress, but then he — well, essentially got fired for being too good, and then got a better job literally ten minutes later, and it’s been a whole thing. So that, too, was exciting.

But first the basement flooded repeatedly, and while that was going on, our only toilet absolutely disassembled itself, and we had to tear up the entire bathroom floor and replace it, and it turned out some of the wall was also no good and had to be removed, and that was a whole thing. We do have a working toilet again, but the sink is still in the yard, there are exposed wall joists, and I have set up an impossible situation for myself involving angled tiles and quarter round, and there are several distinct . . . shambles situations . . . .in the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room. 

Here’s fateful screenshot I took of my calendar and happily posted on Facebook, rashly tempting the fates. A friend commented, “Just wait.” Hours later, the toilet went kablooey

But I didn’t want our last bit of summer to turn into nothing but stress and renovations, so we really pushed and, in between fixing stuff, went to see a drive-in movie (Jungle Cruise, or more properly, Jungle Crungle, on account of how highly crungly it was), and a concert, and of course everybody had to be driven to work and to their friend’s houses and hwhatnot, and Moe was in Our Town, right in Peterborough which the play is based on; but it got rained out, so then we went back a couple of days later, and then we went to the ocean, and while we were at the ocean, suddenly there came a lot of totally unpredictable work deadlines! No way of predicting this!

And I am supposed to be finalizing plans to have my parents’ house cleaned out and getting the kids to meet with the person who’s going to train them to work on a farm, and also talk to someone about vaccines, and do something about a scholarship situation I don’t really understand, and also teach two kids to drive before school starts.  I don’t know when school starts. Not yet, I am guessing.

But other than that, I think I am all caught up! Except for the bathroom floor. And every time I go out, I keep lugging home roses on clearance, and free pallets to build a garbage enclosure and stuff, because there is a big part of me that still believes that, if I paint myself into a corner, I’ll get stuff done. And I’m usually right.

However, every time someone asks me where all the toothbrushes are, I keep saying, “On the treadmill,” and for some reason, I’m fine with that.

Also mostly fine with the hallway stacked up with large sections of bathroom wall plaster with salvageable tile stuck to it. You know, we were going to have a labor day party this year, but maybe not after all.

Consequentemente, I do not have a lot of innovative dinner recipes to share with you this week. When I look through my camera roll, it it showing me . . . other things. Not meals. Here are some things I thought it was worth documenting these last few weeks, instead of my dinner plate:

The dress I wore for a Zoom speech I gave for NFP week. Honest to God, people pay me to talk. I took this photo because I was happy to see I can zip up this dress again. I still have a ways to go, but yay me! This is especially impressive considering how much take-out food we’ve been resorting to these past few weeks. I blame the child tax credit advance thing. 

Here’s  board game I decided not to purchase at an antique store I browsed with Clara while killing time between confession and Mass. 

A very specific bumper sticker that is apparently for sale, which I also did not buy, even though it is true

 

A rather handsome grasshopper. I guess I needed to step outside for a bit after the toilet went kablooey. I shall call him “Gawain.”

Oh yes, here is my murderboat. The geranium is doing well this year. 

Oh look, we did have a yummy meal! Pulled pork, biscuits, and coleslaw. I remember this because the pulled pork was fantastic and I did not write down what went into it. 

Good biscuits, too,

and here is the recipe:

Print

moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

So the rundown of what we actually did in the bathroom is this:

Pulled up the flooring, underlayment, subfloor, and insulation, which was all wet.
Pulled out some wall tiles and drywall.
Removed toilet and vanity cabinet.
Removed some rotten wall studs and replaced them.
Sprayed moldy joists with concrobium and let it dry.
Put in some mysteriously missing heating ducts.
Put in new insulation.
Cut and installed new DryPly subfloor.
Cut but did not install hardieboard for wall. 
Gave subfloor two coats of RedGard.
Installed new vinyl flooring. 
Installed new, insulated toilet with rubber ring instead of wax. 

There was a lot of lying on the floor with your nose in the sewer pipe, gouging away at wet plywood with a crowbar, and there were also various plumbing complications that I did not understand, that Damien dealt with. I’m not sharing photos because honestly it’s just exhausting to even look at.

We have some kind of bizarre plumbing situation because our well water is very cold, which makes the tank sweat, causing excessive condensation. And even though there is a window and a fan in the bathroom, the whole room is just very swampy. And we did have a catastrophic bathtub leak a while back that we were not able to deal with in a reasonable way, and honestly, our only real option is to set the house on fire, but that is a project for another day. Right now, we are aiming for a solid B- repair of the part of the floor that is visible if you don’t think about it too hard, and that is going to have to do. 

It took days and days and days, and we absolutely 100% do not know what we are doing. As I mentioned, this is our only toilet, so we worked very strategically, and ended up dropping the kids off downtown with a wad of cash for many hours, instructing them to avail themselves of as many public bathrooms as possible while they could. Then we did the same thing the next day.

Changing pace, here is an actual good meal: Korean BBQ steaks, sautéed pepper and onion, and pineapple.

I used this Damn Delicious marinade and Damien grilled the steaks outside. Absolutely magnificent steak. The marinade has grated pear in it, and I can’t say I could taste it specifically, but that was some very good meat. 

At one point, I suddenly couldn’t stand to ignore Corrie’s hair anymore,

and spent an hour and a half Doing Something About It

Phew.

Here’s the dog at the library concert.

He does like John Philip Sousa, as who does not, but what he really likes is dragging his balls across the grass under the impression that he is technically still “down” while still sneaking over to go be with the kids playing in the sand pit. 

I will spare you the next 46 pictures of the bathroom progress and Home Depot. I went to Home Depot so many times and I felt so sorry for myself. I also went to Aubuchon and Harbor Freight many times, and at one point straight up yelled at them because they are a hardware store that did not carry either buckets or shims, which is ridiculous.

In situations like this, people always suggest that they actually prefer visiting their local mom and pop hardware store, where the people are actually very friendly and knowledgeable and want to help. This is an excellent idea, and I would someday like to do the same. Our local hardware store is literally called “Mother’s Hardware” and it is literally closed. Like, always. Like there is probably some hour of some day when it is literally open, but I literally do not know when that might be, or how it stays in business. So off to fucking Home Depot I go, and I guess I’m what’s wrong with the world. Oh, the reason I needed a bucket was so we had something to poop in, which probably accounts for my mood. I did get to teach Corrie the womanly art of peeing in a Solo cup, which she thought was hilarious. 

Lucy shaved her head, and why the heckamadoodle not

And we had. I knew this was a food blog, deep down. You can see it has sun dried tomatoes, fresh basil, red onion, dry salami, thinly-sliced garlic, and freshly-shredded parmesan, wine vinegar and olive oil, and butterfly pasta.

Oh, and black olives.

Here is Benny’s shopping turn. She made some extra money by cleaning out the car, and spent most of it at the Dollar Tree

Here’s a picture I took of a chipmunk while I was waiting for Damien to finish running.

We went out of for a run together. I got all suited up, and I got my ibuprofen and my special anti-chafing stuff and my water and my special socks and everything, and we stretched, and we warmed up, and we took about two steps and I was like NOPE. So I went for a 1.5-mile walk, and then I went to go sit down and take fuzzy pictures of chipmunks while Damien ran.

Here’s a picture of Freud’s mother, in case you, too, were wondering

Here’s a diagram of the most unreasonable sink countertop in the world.

Those measurements are correct. I have been trying to find something, anything, to fit underneath it, so we can stop brushing our teeth in the kitchen sink. You will say, “Just go to IKEA!” but we do not have an IKEA and they do not ship to us, so shut up. Yes, I have considered just using industrial metal shelving as a stopgap. The toothbrushes are on the treadmill. 

Here’s a game of Go Fish with ol’ Poker Face

Here’s the picture of Moe, who built the stage for and had a small part in Our Town with Gordon Clapp, who, if you recall, was Greg Medavoy in NYPD Blue.

I have never read or seen Our Town and honestly, I really hated it. It was very well done, but it made me feel terrible. I’ve been talking it over with Damien and there’s definitely more to it than I first realized (my first reaction was “Hallmark card nihilism”), but it still was not precisely what my spirit craved, what with all the dead people and agnosticism. I think there are probably people out there who need to be reminded that life is fleeting and there is meaning in transitory, ordinary moments, but I am not one of those people. I am all set. 

[more Home Depot shots, redacted]

Here are a dozen Italian subs I made for the beach. They were just meat and cheese, but they were still pretty good. 

I didn’t get very good pictures because there is something wrong with my phone battery. 

We had a really nice time, a wonderful time. At one point, this dude refused to come out of the water when the lifeguard was blowing his whistle, so they had to call in a special lifeguard with a badge, and they threw him and his family off the beach. Never seen such a thing. Probably has a MOLON LABE bumper sticker.

At one point, we lost Corrie, but she immediately found a nice Hispanic grandmother who took her hand and kept her safe. At another point, we didn’t know where the middle girls were, and Benny said they were on the rocks, so we went to the rocks and were surprised and alarmed to find that Benny wasn’t there, so we went back to the blanket, where Benny was. I don’t know. We just don’t sleep anymore, and have become morons. At another point, I went down to the water to look for Corrie and I couldn’t find her, because I was looking for a little girl, and she is not; she is big. Then I felt so bad, I just about died. But it passed eventually.

We bobbed around in the waves, had fried dough and frozen lemonade, toddled around in the tide pools, played skee ball in the arcade, defended our food from the maniac seagulls, and left before anyone really melted down. On the way home, I guess someone hit a utility pole, and it fell across the road and lit on fire, so a two-hour ride was extended by forty minutes, and boyyyyyyy was I tired. When we got home, I cried and cried, and I don’t even know why. I mean, I guess I was tired. Oh, I am so tired. At least the shower was working.

Yeah, I guess that’s my problem with Our Town. You do not have to tell a mom that human love is about stuff like making twelve carefully-wrapped Italian sandwiches that will just get gobbled up and forgotten, and that’s where our immortality lies, because you want your kids to have gone to the ocean. We have already figured out that the ancient pyramids had more going on than the treasure records of kings. Who doesn’t know that? I already know how fleeting it is. I already know my little girl isn’t little. I already know it’s killing me. I’ve already learned how to live with it. I guess the whole “dead people have special knowledge that the living can’t possible comprehend” kind of pissed me off. You know who knows this stuff? Moms. Because we’re up making sandwiches at midnight. And dads know it too, because they’re lying on their ears hacking away at the toilet pipes. But moms are thinking about it. I don’t know. Anyway, I could have done without the play, and maybe if Thornton Wilder had made his own sandwich, he could have figured it out for himself without making everybody sit in the rain. 

Here is a chipmunk from yesterday morning.

Yesterday I ran a mile and a half and couldn’t stop thinking about the cold leftover Mexican food I decided to get up and eat at midnight the previous night, and rather than do another lap, I was like, NOPE, and I went to sit down and take blurry photos of chipmunks while Damien finished running.

I didn’t even try to go running today. I haven’t even put a bra on. I’m just sitting here in stretchy clothes wondering who’s going to write the one more essay I have due this week. Who’s gonna fix my bathroom wall. Who’s gonna ride your wild horses. Who’s gonna tell Thornton Wilder to make his own damn sandwich. 

And that’s what’s for supper this week. Today we’ll be having fish tacos and shrimp tacos. Yesterday I started reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the kids, just because there’s only so much “this is not how the summer was supposed to go” I can take. We got up to the part where he just picks up his head and rides away, and, not being made of stone, the kids are interested. So there.

We were all out of ideas, so we tried the rosary

My husband and I agreed: It’s not that it’s magic, or anything. It’s definitely not magic. But it’s unmistakable: Saying a decade of the rosary together every day is changing our lives. Not drastically. Just a little bit. But undeniably.

We are not the kind of couple you’d look at and say, “Oh yeah, they’re big into the rosary.”

I never liked the rosary. I was never sure if I was supposed to be focusing on the mystery, or the prayer, or my intentions, or some combination. It was what you did as a penance, or because your parents made you. I never knew if I was supposed to be coming up with some brilliant new insight into the life of Mary, or finding some kind of spiritual comfort in the familiarity of the *lack* of brilliant new insight, or what. And darn it, I always lose track and end up saying either nine or eleven Hail Marys.

But more and more often, dealing with the problems that naturally come with full lives, we found ourselves saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just don’t know what to do.” And while there is some relief that comes with realizing your own limitations, sometimes we really did have to do something, and we were just at sea. We do both know how to work our way through a set of beads, though, so at very least it seemed like a rosary couldn’t hurt.

We already go running together most days, so we decided to make a decade of the rosary part of the routine. Since we’ve made it a daily practice, literally come rain or shine . . . well, things have been better.

Surely, part of the improvement is attributable to human psychology: When you decide to commit to doing something to make your life better, that in itself helps. By making an effort, you’re signaling to yourself that you’re worthy of effort and worth taking care of; and this is a thought that, repeated often enough, is very likely to improve your outlook on life. It’s a self-fulfilling self-help routine.

But that doesn’t explain everything.Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image via Maxpixel (Creative Commons)

 

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

What’s for supper? Vol. 260: In which I say tomatermorts

It’s been a while! We’re in a bit of a summer fun frenzy and going on a lot of day trips and side quests, so I’m busy and confused. There are only a few food photos on my phone and lots of zoo, planetarium, concert, birthday, swimming, yard project, and campfire photos (along with flat tire, dumb dog, flooded basement, calamitous kitchen, and ER parking lot photos). We also bought a used ice fishing house and Damien’s converting it into an office. More on that later, you bet.

I’ll just do highlights of the last few weeks’ suppers, to bring us up to speed. And you know, I’m pretty impressed at what yummy meals I made. My secret is that now I have more time and more money. And that’s my secret. 

Here’s what we had:

Buffalo chicken wraps

Another meal-turned salad-turned wrap, like the chicken caesar wrap of last edition. I cooked some frozen buffalo chicken tenders and served them on pita with tomatoes, lettuce, crunchy fried onions, and blue cheese dressing. I think there was also shredded pepper jack cheese. 

Not mind-blowing, but tasty, and a good addition to the rotation. 

Taquitos and cowboy caviar

Aldi’s chicken taquitos are really tasty. They include discernible bits of meat and the flavor is nice, and they get crisp in the oven. Plus they are called “Casa Mamita” which makes me laugh, because you have to say all their food names with a German accent. 

I made a big bowl of what’s apparently called “cowboy caviar,” which is one of those completely unnecessary cultural phenomena, like a Polaris Slingshot, or neufchatel cheese, or the state of Arizona. Cowboy caviar itself is delicious, but I’m talking about that name. They should have named it literally anything else. The zoo has an anteater named “Giacomo,” so that proves we have more freedom than we may realize. 

Anyway, I made it with  . . . well, I didn’t write it down, but squinting at this photo, it looks like tomatoes, avocado, green peppers, scallions, corn, black beans, and red onions. Probably cilantro. I think I made the dressing with white vine vinegar and olive oil, but I honestly don’t recall. There are tons of variations of this dish, so if you mooch around on Google, you’ll get the idea.

I skipped the chips and just had extra cowboy caviar. No ragrets.

I also tried not one but two TikTok recipes. I’m too old to be on actual TikTok, but I found websites that describe what may be found there, without any danger of having to see sassy nurses dancing and pointing to things. I went with the tomato feta pasta bake and the suggested cream cheese sausage balls.

The first was a win. It’s a very easy dish to make. You throw all your vegetables in a pan with a few seasonings and olive oil. As you can see, I added onions and basil. 

Then you chunk some feta and stuff on top and just bake it. People tell me the secret is to use the kind of feta that comes in brine, so it melts well.

It’s done when the tomatoes are squashy and the feta is toasty.

While that’s cooking, you make a big pot of pasta and then throw it all together and mix until the feta is a creamy sauce, and throw some lemon zest in there just for nice. 

I wish I had roasted it just a tiny bit longer to make those tomatoes really piping hot and collapsed, but it was very, very good. Tonys of melty flavor, very filling and pleasant. I might add the basil after cooking next time, so more of the flavor comes through. 

The little meatballs, made of sausage, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, and bisquick, were easy enough to make (although it took a LONG time to get the ingredients blended), and they were fine.

but if something is going to taste, and be, that fatty, it really needs to be magnificent, and these were just fine. (To be fair, I didn’t make the suggested dipping sauce, so maybe that would have made a big difference.)  We only ate half, and I froze the rest so I’ll have a quick meal on hand, but I won’t bother making these again. The feta pasta was a hit, though. Very happy to have a new meatless meal, with tons of variations possible.

Chicken shawarma again!

Well met, old friend.

Jump to Recipe

I marinated the chicken overnight and just threw the onions on top of the meat before I cooked it. This is the way. 

Served with pita, garlicky yogurt sauce,

Jump to Recipe

feta, tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives. Still the tastiest low-skill meal around.

Mexican beef bowl

Actually, all the bowls were dirty, so we had Mexican beef plate. This is sounding less and less like an actual recipe, and more like one of those foods that can’t quite bring itself to be specific. I wish I could remember what I saw, but it was something like “chewy munch snacks” and it did not inspire confidence. But anyway, this is an actual recipe and quite a delicious one.

Jump to Recipe

The marinade is simple but excitingly tangy and rich. 

I served the marinated meat strips with rice, fried peppers and onions, a mixture of tomatoes and chili peppers and black beans, slightly charred corn, and cilantro, sour cream, and lime wedges. It was so much food I forgot to eat corn chips, which is saying something. 

Looks like I have one more photo: 
Chicken caprese sandwiches

Grilled sliced chicken on baguettes with tomatoes, fresh basil, and fresh mozzarella, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and freshly-ground salt and pepper. If your stupid refrigerator freezes your cheese, you can defrost it gently by submerging the sealed package in warm water for a while. The vital part of this dish is the fake Pringles in a violent shade of orange. This is the way. 

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Chicken shawarma

Ingredients

  • 8 lbs boned, skinned chicken thighs
  • 4-5 red onions
  • 1.5 cups lemon juice
  • 2 cups olive oil
  • 4 tsp kosher salt
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp pepper
  • 2 Tbs, 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 entire head garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Mix marinade ingredients together, then add chicken. Put in ziplock bag and let marinate several hours or overnight.

  2. Preheat the oven to 425.

  3. Grease a shallow pan. Take the chicken out of the marinade and spread it in a single layer on the pan, and top with the onions (sliced or quartered). Cook for 45 minutes or more. 

  4. Chop up the chicken a bit, if you like, and finish cooking it so it crisps up a bit more.

  5. Serve chicken and onions with pita bread triangles, cucumbers, tomatoes, assorted olives, feta cheese, fresh parsley, pomegranates or grapes, fried eggplant, and yogurt sauce.

 

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Yogurt sauce

Ingredients

  • 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
  • 5 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 3 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc. 

 

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Beef marinade for fajita bowls

enough for 6-7 lbs of beef

Ingredients

  • 1 cup lime juice
  • 1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1 head garlic, crushed
  • 2 Tbsp cumin
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp paprika
  • 2 tsp hot pepper flakes
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 2 tsp pepper
  • 1 bunch cilantro, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together.

  2. Pour over beef, sliced or unsliced, and marinate several hours. If the meat is sliced, pan fry. If not, cook in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. I cook the meat in all the marinade and then use the excess as gravy.

With God Under the Bed: Darwin’s immediate book meme

Speaking of books, let’s do this thing about what we’re reading! (I can’t remember why I wrote “speaking of books,” but apparently I was when I started writing this. Well, there are worse things to speak of.)

1. What book are you reading right now?

Meh. I’m in the middle of a bunch of books and not happy about any of them. 

Whisper My Name by Ernest Hebert

is a sequel to a book I loved, The Dogs of March. The series takes place in Darby, a fictional version of the exact spot in NH where I live, and boy does he understand what it’s like here. Dogs of Winter was like Faulkner meets Hemingway. Whisper My Name is veering a little bit into Walker Percy-style “man meets troubled girl, and va va voom” territory and it’s making me itchy, but I guess I’ll keep going. 

Also re-reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, about terrible people in Academia,

which is making me laugh out loud but feel bad about it. I just finished scene where he makes several choices about how to deal with the fact that he set his boss’ wife’s guest bed on fire and it just about murdered me. The protagonist has a habit of swiftly and privately making grotesque faces that express how he feels about people he encounters, and that reminds me, it may be okay that we’re supposed to start wearing masks again. 

Also re-reading Morgan’s Passing by Anne Tyler.

If you haven’t read an Anne Tyler novel (and there are about 700 of them), I would recommend Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant, where I think she was at her full powers — the least prone to precious quirky self-indulgence, and the most fearless and tender toward people doing dreadful things for understandable reasons. (Homesick Restaurant has scenes of child abuse.) Morgan’s Passing is pretty good, but I think she’s a little too patient with Morgan and his midlife problems. I just want to kick his ass.

1a. Readaloud

Just finished The Princess and Curdie.

The kids had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it, as is appropriate for George MacDonald. I know I’ve complained before about the profoundly Victorian unreadability of some of his sentences, and I’ll do it again. Just say it, man! 

But the Curdie books are probably the most accessible of his, except for The Light Princess, which is the easiest to read and also the most coherent and straightforward story. The Princess and Curdie is a sequel that’s better than the first book (The Princess and the Goblin), which we also read aloud. It has such good images in it: Young Curdie and his aged father meeting each other halfway up a hill, and if you saw them from a distance, you wouldn’t immediately know who was climbing and who was descending. This idea is carried forward when Curdie is given the power to identify what it is that people are becoming by touching their hands. Some hands feel human, but others feel like the paws or hooves or tentacles of animals. And the reverse is also true: There are fabulous avenging monsters in the story, who are apparently working out their salvation and becoming human again.

You can see how MacDonald’s great admirer C.S. Lewis was influenced by (or at least agreed with) this idea that, by the way we live, we carry heaven or hell within us even before we die. This idea is in The Great Divorce and The Last Battle and probably several others. 

Anyway, between that and the imagery of the great princess purifying her beloved children by heaping burning roses on them, and weeping as she does it, I’m glad we read it. BUT THE ENDING. If I had remembered it ended that way, I would simply have skipped the final page. I was reading the book to the six-year-old and the ten-year-old, and some of the teens were listening in. The ending is basically: The young princess grows up and marries the hero and the kingdom is wonderful. But they don’t have children and then die, and then there’s a bad king, and things get worse and worse until he literally undermines the kingdom and it all crashes down and everyone dies, and then no one even remembers it existed. Well, goodbye!  Generally, I respect authors to do what they want with their stories but there was no preparation for this happening, other than a general feeling that the story was a broad analogy for humanity in general. Truly unnecessary and the kids were rightly horrified. Boo.

Up next: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by Tolkein.

The Green Knight movie comes out soon and it looks absolutely swell.

I read the Sir Gawain by Marie Borroff to the kids many years ago (that’s the one we read in college), in our last year of homeschooling, and they were spellbound. I remember skipping all the other lessons for the day because they wanted me to keep reading to the end.  But [sighs until dead] it was a lot easier to spellbind them in those days.

Here’s how the Tolkein begins:

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, and the most true upon earth–
it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred
who then laid under them lands, and lords became
of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles. 

More fun to read aloud than ol’ George MacD, anyway! Heck, maybe I’ll pay the kids to give the first few chapters a fair shot. And then buy them movie tickets. Those poor children, how they suffer. 

2. What book did you just finish?

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

At first this struck me as a rather heavy handed “Have you ever seen such cruelty” kind of book, ala Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea or Tracy Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, but it grew on me, and I was impressed at how the author brought two stories together. It follows the lives of two girls in Afghanistan, one born in the late sixties and one in the late seventies. The prose is a bit movie storyboard-y at times, but it’s very sincere and creates a strong mental image of the setting. A painful and beautiful read. As far as I know, it’s a faithful rendition of the history, and fleshed out my skimpy understanding of the era before 9/11 (but it definitely reads like a novel, not a sneaky history lesson). The reading level seems aimed at smart middle school or high school age, but it includes fairly graphic scenes of rape and violence, so reader beware. 

I also recently finished The Shadow Guests by Joan Aiken.

This one is a YA book, but Joan Aiken always uses her whole butt and doesn’t talk down to younger readers. Really never read a dud by her. The Shadow Guests is a weird, compelling story about Cosmo, a teenage boy who’s sent to live in the countryside with his great aunt after his mother and older brother apparently killed themselves to avoid succumbing to a family curse. But the past isn’t done with his family, and Cosmo becomes entangled with previous generations. It sounds dark and awful, but it’s very entertaining and funny in parts, and the dialogue and characters are so skillfully and realistically done even as the plot itself is outrageous. We recently read Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase out loud, and it was just as good as I remember. Aiken’s male teenage characters are the most appealing people you’ll ever meet. 

3. What do you plan to read next?

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I started it several years ago and didn’t get very far, but I hope to keep going this time. Damien’s been recommending it for years.

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

ANY BOOK. I have almost completely ruined my brain with social media, so if I could finish anything at all, I’ll be pleased. 

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

With God In Russia by Walter Ciszek

I’m a bad Catholic reader and I should feel bad. I have now officially lost this book under the bed twice, once under the old bed and now once under the new bed. With God under the bed, I guess. 

6. What is your current reading trend? 

See (4.) 

That’s about it! Check out Darwin Catholic for the source of this meme, and let me know if you have any recommendations or dire warnings!

Does it matter if a priest makes up his own sermon?

Would it bother you if your priest delivered ready-made sermons, written by someone else? A lot of Catholics say they wouldn’t mind in the slightest — especially if the alternative is sermons that are bland and uninspired, or rambling and incoherent, or heretical, or just plain weird.

I always felt sorry for parish priests who must, in addition to their insanely busy schedule, set aside time to come up with a sermon that is coherent, likely to speak to the congregation as he knows them, and is also tied into the readings we just heard or the day on the liturgical calendar. And some priests have great ideas to impart, but they’re just not good writers or speakers; and some aren’t fluent in the language their congregation speaks.

There are services and publications designed to solve this very problem, either offering full-blown homilies or helpful prompts; and there are public priests whose sermons are available online, making it easy for less-famous priests to borrow liberally or simply repeat the whole thing. It seems like a no-brainer: If you’re a priest who’s already pulled in a thousand directions and running dry creatively, it just makes sense to take this one thing off your plate.

That’s why I was a little surprised to learn how many priests have a visceral aversion to delivering a sermon written by someone else (even with attribution). When I asked on Twitter whether priests ever do this, only a few said they did… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Image source

 

I threw out half my books and I’m okay

It’s trendy to talk about your hopelessly neurotic relationship with books. People love to share memes about how they just can’t stop buying more books even though they haven’t read the last books they have. It’s not my favorite schtick, but at least it’s better than the people who, to prove their love of books, share photos of the intricate diorama they made by cutting an actual book into little bits. They just love books soooooo much, that’s what they did to a book!

If that’s how you show love, remind me not to let you babysit.

Anyway, I could tell you a thing or two about what it looks like when book collecting gets truly neurotic. I grew up in that kind of house. My parents weren’t hoarders, but they accumulated books in a way that can’t be completely explained by their love of reading and their thirst for knowledge (which were considerable). My father once bought an entire dumpster full of books, which the seller delivered to our house at an excellent price. The only catch with these particular books was that they had been on fire, and most of them were blackened and crumbling, and wet and moldy. But books! For such a good price, that would otherwise get dumped! And it was such a deal . . . . and it would be such a waste to let books get thrown out.

That’s the thing that catches me up now: It would be such a waste to let them go. You can’t just let books go. Collecting books isn’t like collecting anything else, because they’re not just things. Books are especially important. They hold a special place in our minds and command a certain category of respect. You can’t just let them go!

Maybe you see where this is headed… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

Some ethical questions about The Pillar’s Grindr exposé

Yesterday, The Pillar reported that Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill was using Grindr to meet gay sex partners while he was general secretary for the USCCB.

The Pillar reports:

“According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar, a mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.”

The smartest response I saw to the article was a priest reminding Twitter that it’s okay to not be sure what to think about it all. That’s where I still land: I’m not quite sure. But I have a lot of questions.

People are alarmed and disgusted that someone’s phone data would be tracked and used against them. I don’t like it either, but I’m not prepared to say it’s unethical to use it, if you have a good reason, and if you’re sure you understand what the data signifies. At very least, it’s a great reminder that the best way to defend yourself against this kind of thing is, you know, don’t be gross.

Here are the questions I do have (and Damien doesn’t agree with me on all counts):

Was it necessary to make this public?

Something people ask me every single time I write about ugly stuff. There are a few reasons to make wrongdoing public: One is if the person is prominent enough and the wrongdoing is significant enough; and two is if it’s the only way to protect vulnerable people.

It was right for Burrill to lose his job. Any priest who’s soliciting sex with strangers, whether he’s a sinner struggling with a compulsion or a hypocrite unrepentantly pursing gratification, has grievously betrayed his vows. He is supposed to be a spiritual guide, and he is unfit for his office. Yes, we do hold priests to higher standards, and he held a fairly high office. (The Pillar says he “was charged with helping to coordinate the U.S. bishops’ response to the Church’s 2018 sexual abuse and coercion scandals,” but it’s not clear what that entails.)

I also believe that the fact that he was using Grindr is a problem in itself because of what Grindr is. As I understand it, the app wouldn’t be profitable if it excluded predatory relationships. This isn’t like drinking a can of Pepsi even though Pepsi is Frito and Frito in Kansas has bad labor practices; it’s more like subscribing to Playboy, but just for the articles. There are some things you just can’t separate.

At the same time, I am uncomfortable with the way the Pillar heavily implied that there was a good chance he’s a pedophile, because it’s likely that pedophiles use the app. So this is an “everyone sucks here” situation: Burrill was sleazy for using a site that facilitates predation, and The Pillar is sleazy for helping people assume, without evidence, that he’s probably a predator. 

So those are reasons that it makes sense for Burrill to lose his job. But was he prominent enough for it to be important to expose his sins? I mean … I’ve never heard of the guy before, have you? This part is iffy. 

As for protecting the vulnerable, this is not a clear cut “stop the bad man to protect the vulnerable” situation, as it would be if he had been meeting people in confession, or using the power of his office to prey on people (quite the opposite: He apparently though he could remain anonymous). So I don’t think it was necessary to make this story public to protect anyone Burrill was directly in contact with. 

What about the power of the press to exert pressure on institutions to do the right thing? 

I know very well that the Church will often not act unless it’s forced into it, and public exposure is an effective tool. Apparently, The Pillar approached the USCCB and let them know the story was in the works. The USCCB agreed to meet, got rid of the guy, and then told the Pillar, “You know what, we’ll talk some other time.” The Pillar then published the story. So in effect, this is a story about someone making a report of wrongdoing, and the USCCB responding appropriately. If the goal was to remove an unfit cleric from office (either for the sake of justice, or to protect themselves from blackmail), I’m hard pressed to say why it was necessary to go ahead with publishing, since they already accomplished what was presumably their goal. 

Or, if that wasn’t their goal, what was it? Are they going to publish stories every time someone who works for the church is caught in sin? Where is the line? I am not sure myself, and I am very curious about what the Pillar’s line is. 

And this leads us to the second main question I have: 

Did the USCCB know? The sex abuse scandal in the Church has two main components: The abuse itself, and the institutional cover-up of abuse. If it weren’t for the cover-up, the abuse wouldn’t be able to flourish. That’s why the McCarrick exposé was so especially crushing: Not only did he prey on so many people, but so many people knew he was doing it, and didn’t do anything. 

Experience tells us that someone, maybe lots of people, probably knew what Burrill was up to. If so, that was wrong, and possibly-to-probably worth writing about. But The Pillar presents no evidence that anyone at the USCCB was aware that this was happening. As they reported it, there was a sinful man doing sinful things while he was at work. The story, as reported, does not actually reveal or demonstrate any malfeasance on the part of the Church. That’s significant. It changes what kind of story it is, and it vastly changes how newsworthy it is.  

My third question is about journalistic ethics more generally, and doesn’t have to do with the nature of the sin or even the content of the story:

Who paid for it, and why does that matter?

The Pillar says “According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar, a mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.” It says “The data was obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar.”

Our first impression upon reading the article was that someone bought the incriminating data and offered it to The Pillar. This assessment was shored up by an article we read later, which says that CNA, former employer of The Pillar’s JD Flynn, had been approached starting in 2018 by someone who had been shopping around incriminating data about clerics. CNA cited ethical concerns in the story, and didn’t accept the data. It clearly knew by some means that The Pillar intended to publish its exposé, and published its own story a few days before. 

It is possible that The Pillar wasn’t working with this same individual (and it’s possible CNA was trying to erroneously create the impression that they were), and it’s possible The Pillar independently purchased and analyzed the data. But if that were the case, why it would say it “obtained” the “commercially available” data, rather than clarifying that it bought it itself? 

Why does it matter? Reporters get tips all the time, right? Well, if The Pillar got a tip that Msgr. Burrill was up to no good, and decided to narrow in on him and buy some data to verify it, that would be slightly sketchy but possibly legitimate, depending on the significance of what they found (see my questions, above, about their goal and their mission).

But if, as seems likely, someone came to them with an already-purchased bundle of red hot data about how Burrill spent his weekend, and The Pillar simply verified it and wrote it up, that’s not actual investigative journalism. That’s performing a service for the person who spent the money to make the story happen. This is a huge ethical problem, and I’m alarmed that more people don’t realize it.

The Pillar has been presenting itself as a watchdog journalism site. But if someone else is buying information and feeding it to them, they cannot be considered objective journalists, but instead something more like partners with their source. 

Is this what happened? We don’t know, because they don’t say! Which is a problem in itself! They do not name their source, and that’s reasonable. But they don’t make it clear whether they actually even have a source, and if so, what kind of relationship the source has with the story. This is very shaky ethical ground. 

We recall that, when he was editor at CNA, JD Flynn defended running a story that devoted an astonishing eight paragraphs to the funding allegedly behind a story in The National Catholic Reporter, creating out of whole cloth the impression that journalist Jenn Morson was attacking Franciscan University at the behest of George Soros. It was complete garbage journalism, but at the time, Flynn thought it was important. So you tell me. Does funding matter? Does it affect which stories are covered and how? Perhaps Flynn’s perspective has evolved now that his work is subscriber-based. 

None of this is black and white. Despite all the hot takes on social media, it’s not a clear case of either “hooray for The Pillar for uncovering this important story” or “shame on The Pillar for engaging in this obvious sleaze.” Nothing I’ve mentioned above is a clear reason why they should or shouldn’t have written it.

But I will say this: When Damien and I are working on a story and we keep bumping up against more and more and more questions about the ethical way to approach it, we look at each other, sigh, and just walk away. A high number of questions around a story is a red flag in itself, and this story has an awful lot of questions.

hello, I must be going

just a quick note to say that someone stepped on my computer. The six-year-old, whose knee is the exact size and shape of the new indentation on my screen, reports that it was “probably the cat.” I’m borrowing a kid’s computer, but I’ll be more scarce than usual until my own machine gets fixed! I know there have been some lively conversations in the combox, and I haven’t been moderating them — or in some cases, some innocent comments have been auto-flagged and not published. Sorry about that! I’ll weed through it now, but I will probably fall behind again, as it’s difficult to do on my phone. Thanks for your patience. 

Image by Zaneology via Flicker (Creative Commons)

What’s for supper? Vol. 259: Totus Foodus

It’s Totus Tuus week! We haven’t been for a few years, so we were delighted to sign up again for this Catholic day camp. Well, I was delighted. The kids were jerky about it in that very specific way that signals to parents that it’s actually a good thing, but they don’t want you to feel like you’ve done something right. 

The only catch is that the church is 35 minutes away, and we have kids in the day and evening programs, so that makes . . . a lot of driving. That means it’s week for easy peasy meals. Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Steak sandwiches, fries, watermelon

Well, this was before camp week started, so Damien grilled some steaks and sliced them up, and we had the meat on toasted rolls with mayo, provolone, and roasted red peppers. Mighty tasty. 

I love sandwiches that look like they’ve been tucked into bed with a blanket of cheese, and also I don’t really understand why all my pants are tight. In this essay I will explain

SUNDAY
Vermonter sandwiches

A favorite cold sandwich, great for prepping ahead of time. I usually use ciabatta rolls, but had sourdough bread this time. Cold chicken, bacon, thick slices of cheddar and green apple, and honey mustard. I took a picture of the fixins

But not the sandwich. Here is a Vermonter of ages past:

Shoutout to everyone who’s recently accused me of journalistic sloppiness, when in fact I’m the kind of person who feels the need to disclose that the sandwich pictured above is a previous sandwich and varies slightly from the current one. 

Anyway. Such a pleasant combination of sweet and savory, and all kinds of textures. 

MONDAY
Chicken caesar wraps

I forget who suggested this on Facebook, but thank you, genius! Really trying to use up leftovers, rather than throw them away. We had chicken left over from the Vermonter sandwiches and from whatever chicken dish we had last week, as well as some freshly-grated parmesan cheese from the pasta on Friday, so I just bought a bunch of pita bread, romaine lettuce, bottled dressing, and cherry tomatoes, and it went very nicely together, very pretty. 

I know tomatoes don’t go on caesar salad, but it was a very good addition to this wrap, which just about everyone liked. It turns out almost no one in the family likes the kind of flatbread they sell around here, but they do like pita. You hear that, pita?

It’s funny, I’ve been making all these salads that are modified versions of full, carbier meals, and now lately I’ve been reverting them back into sandwiches. It’s the circle of salad (ingonyama nengw’ enamabala).

TUESDAY
Burgers, veg and dip

Nothing to report. Lots of vegetable action happening around here lately.

This is the proper amount of ketchup and mustard, by the way. I am a professional and I should know.  

WEDNESDAY
Domino’s pizza

I know it’s not exquisite, but I like Domino’s pizza. I like how pillowy soft it is, and I like the salty, somewhat gritty crust. There is far better pizzas in the world, and I like them too, but Domino’s pleases me. 

Also, Damien discovered that, if you order it online, it’s $12 a pizza, but if you call up the local store, it’s $7. We did the math and it turns out we’re not quite willing to pay $20 for the privilege of not talking to anybody. But there was a struggle. 

THURSDAY
Whatever you want from the fancy part of the supermarket.

Listen, Biden just paid us to be lazy, and I’m not made of stone. On the way home home from camp session one, I turned them loose in the supermarket and we came home with an assortment sushi, pizza rolls, chicken tenders, pizza, and misc.

Then Damien and I both dropped off the older kids at session two and got Chinese food while we sat back and waited for a couple of seminarians to secure our children’s spiritual future. 

This particular restaurant mayyyy be a grandparent restaurant. They don’t give you chopsticks, and everything is sweet, sweet, sweet, and we’re pretty sure the music they were playing was a jazzy synth version of “How can I keep from singing?” for some reason; but the food was hot and delicious and nobody yelled at me. That has been my standard for an excellent experience lately: Did anybody yell at me? No? Then A+. I had some kind of prawn and vegetable thing that was very tasty, and it did not yell at me.

Then we killed some time at a sort of rural Walmart store called Runnings, which featured some unsettling taxidermy and the biggest frying pan I’ve ever seen. You’ll have to imagine it, because I do have a photo, but while we were out yesterday, someone, reportedly “maybe the cat” knelt on my computer and now it doesn’t work. It’s under warranty, and Lena’s graciously letting me use her computer for now. I don’t know any of my own passwords and I don’t know how to do anything and am suffering greatly. Anyway the upshot is that if I have to process one more photo on an unfamiliar laptop, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti? I don’t know.  Maybe I will just put out all the extra snacks and lunch treats I bought while suffering from inappropriate guilt over making them go to fun camp for five days! How about that! How about that!