Christianity and the Poor

Two very different ways of understanding the Sermon on the Mount:

1. "Blessed are the meek, for they also will possess the land."
2. "Blessed are the meek, for they alone will possess the land."

Birthday Buddies

Evan's birthday is just four days after mine and I always look forward to celebrating with my birthday buddy. I was excited that his birthday dinner fell on our week to cook and I got to make his birthday apple pie. We both love apple pie and it is a yearly tradition that we look forward to. Since we needed more than one pie, I decided to make the second one a blueberry blackberry pie (or black and blue). Joshua barbecued tri tip for the first time and we also had mashed potatoes and asparagus. Everything turned out well and we all had fun celebrating with the birthday boy.

Ice Pack for Your Brain

The Catalyst Cryohelmet is an ice pack for your brain. Research makes it increasingly clear that even when a game of football does not involve direct concussions, it results in accumulated traumatic injury to the brain. Due to the nature of the sport, even practice can do damage to a person's center of consciousness and identity. For $120, you can wrap your child's head in an ice pack after each practice and game to reduce the swelling of the injured brain. While no specific studies have been done to establish the effectiveness of the helmet, the hope is that this will be of some help in limiting the extent of cognitive impairment, mid-life dementia, and other long-term results of football.

...or we could, you know, stop doing this to our young people.

Cambria

Joy and Laura drew our names for Christmas last year and teamed up to give us a gift card to Cambria Pines Lodge. We were able to go this week and spent Thursday and Friday in Cambria. It was beautiful. We arrived around lunch time Thursday and went to Indigo Moon Cafe to eat. The backyard seating was great.

 And the food was delicious! I got salmon tacos and Joshua got a grilled chicken, brie, and apple sandwich with sweet potato fries.

We spent a little time strolling around the shops in the East Village, then heading to the lodge to check in. We arrived a little before check in time, so we relaxed in the butterfly garden.

 After checking into our room, we headed out for a pre-dinner walk along the bluffs. The ocean and cliffs were beautiful.

 Our stay at the lodge included two dinner entrees and a bottle of house wine, plus they brought me a piece of chocolate cake and ice cream for my birthday!

 We took another little stroll through the gardens before returning to our room to enjoy hot chocolate in front of the fire.

 Friday morning we spent awhile watching the waves crashing.

 While trying to take this picture, we were surprised by a wave that was bigger than we thought. Thankfully, I had just enough time to shield my camera before we got splashed. Joshua's left side got wet, but I got most of it on my back. I was glad I had extra clothes to change into in the car.

 We had fish and chips for lunch, then walked along the beach.

There is a farmers' market in the West Village on Friday afternoons, so we headed that way and found a french/english dictionary at a packed used book store. At the farmers' market, we got vegetable juice and bread for dinner on the drive home. Before heading out of town, we went back and sat by the ocean again. It was a beautiful and relaxing trip. Many thanks to Joy and Laura.

Birthday

I turned 31 on Wednesday. We started celebrating the weekend before with a birthday dinner with the Kerrs.

 And a second birthday dinner Sunday night with the Chandlers.

On my Wednesday we had dinner at home and were too full afterwards to eat much for birthday dessert, so we had mint fudge. Joshua made sure to put a candle in mine.

Final Three Months

We have finished our year of recipes! Here is a look back at the last three months of recipes:

Easy Chocolate Fudge

Original Fantasy Fudge

Pizza Dough

Roasted Garlic

Split Pea Soup

D.-K.'s Fudge

Peasant Bread

Roasted Greek Potatoes

Thai Chicken Curry

Balsamic Peach Chicken

Vanilla Pink Grapefruit Marmalade

Lemon Bars

Balsamic Vinegar Chicken Bake

Pita Bread

Baked Tilapia

Lemon Chicken and Rice Soup

Russian Black Bread

Mediterranean Baked Chicken with Lemon

Hummus Mashed Potatoes

Russian Rye Bread

Cinnamon Swirl Raisin Bread

Lemon-Garlic Cream Fettuccine

Teriyaki Chicken

Cajun Shrimp

Barbecued Cabbage

Garlic Croutons

Sweet Potato and Fontina Pizza

Grilled Pork Chops

Asparagus, Tomato, and Feta Salad
Mint Chocolate Fudge

And here are links to the rest of the recipes:
First Three Months
Second Three Months
Third Three Months

We tried a total of 120 new recipes in the past year. It was fun to get to try so many new things and find recipes that we both enjoyed. I'm sure we will continue to be adventurous in our cooking and eating. I think the biggest difficulty I had during this project was trying to find recipes. Of course, sometimes I had things marked or saved, but there were days when I needed a certain number of recipes for that week to stay on track and it took a long time to find things I wanted to try. Overall, we enjoyed the project and were glad we did it.

I have been asked about what some of our favorite recipes were. It is so hard to choose, but here are some thoughts.

The recipe we have repeated the most times is cabbage salsa.

Our favorite drink recipe was blackberry sage spritzers.

The fudge recipe we liked the best was Christmas fudge.

Our favorite bread recipe was Russian black bread.

We made a lot of good main dishes, so I'm not going to choose a favorite of those, but here are some top choices:
Grilled Pork Chops
Orange Chicken
Grilled Shrimp and Apple Skewers
Summer Italian Marinade
Chicken Satay

Our biggest flop was pate de fruits, but the recipe we disliked the most was probably chilled cucumber yogurt soup, although makeover spinach salad dressing was a close second.

So there it is; a year in recipes. It was a great way to celebrate being 30. Now on to 31...

Mint Chocolate Fudge

Our thirtieth and final recipe for the last three months was Mint Chocolate Fudge. What a great recipe to end with, this was delicious. The consistency of the mint layer was strange, it seemed to be separating and was thick and almost pasty. It ended up not looking great once it set up, so I drizzled some chocolate over the top of the squares. That made them look almost as good as they taste. The amount of mint to chocolate is well balanced, the consistency is good; basically, it is rich and delicious. The fudge was melting on our fingers a little when we sampled it the first time, but I think that it will firm up a bit more and that shouldn't be a problem. Overall, I was pleased.

Pork Chops and Asparagus Salad

We had a two recipe dinner last night, Grilled Pork Chops and Asparagus, Tomato, and Feta Salad, which were recipes twenty-eight and twenty-nine. I was not too impressed by the salad. It was strongly acidic and the asparagus and tomatoes seemed overcooked. That was partly my fault because I wasn't sure how long to cook the asparagus. But just having it cooked and drained like the recipe said meant that I tossed everything together while the asparagus was still hot, so it continued to cook and cooked the tomatoes too. I think it would be better if you blanched the asparagus and then stuck it in a water bath to cool it down before mixing everything together. Also, I would probably cut back on the dressing, half a recipe would probably be fine, and maybe add just a little more sugar to cut the acidity a touch. Although, Joshua liked the amount of acidity, so it just depends on your preference. We both really liked the pork chops. I baked them instead of grilling them because it was raining, but they turned out great. Of course, I would like to try them grilled sometime because I'm sure that would be delicious too. They had a great mix of flavors, sweet and tangy with just a little bit of spice.

Men of Straw and Steel

Atheist Sam Harris famously claims to have no patience with philosophically or theologically developed concepts of God; instead, he wants to attack the "real God" in whom most Americans believe. This God is a benevolent grandfather in the sky, so to speak -- the kind of God, for example, who intervenes in football games to make sure that your team wins. So there is a popular concept, held by those who neither reflect upon nor attempt to defend their idea of God, and there is theological concept, at which one arrives when one begins reflecting upon and defending the idea of God. To simply define the terms of the discussion in such a way that "God" means "God-without-any-possible-defense" may score rhetorical points, but gets us nowhere. It is easy to attack embarrassments like the Creation Museum, but it is much harder to articulate a minimally reasonable atheist response to the strong claims of the Christian theological tradition.

The crucial personal move, though, is to ask myself how often I do the same thing. How often do I object to precisely the version of an idea that has no defenders? A straw man may have many adherents, but it is the steel man, defended by those who take a reflective and developed approach to the idea, that is the legitimate target of critique.

Sweet Potato Pizza

We had Sweet Potato and Fontina Pizza today for lunch, recipe number twenty-seven. I found this in my Taste of Home magazine.

Sweet Potato and Fontina Pizza

1 medium sweet potato

2 T water

1/4 t salt

1/8 t pepper

1 tube (13.8 oz) refrigerated pizza crust

1 cup (4 oz) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese

1 cup (4 oz) shredded fontina cheese

2 T olive oil, divided

1 t minced fresh rosemary or 1/4 t dried rosemary, crushed

1 t minced fresh thyme or 1/4 t dried thyme

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Grease a 12-in pizza pan. Peel and cut sweet potato into 1/4 in slices. Cut each slice into 1/2 in wide strips; place in a microwave-safe dish. Add water. Microwave, covered, on high 3-4 minutes or until potato is almost tender. Drain; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Unroll and press dough to fit prepared pan. If desired, pinch edge to form a rim. Sprinkle with mozzarella and fontina cheeses; drizzle with 1 T olive oil. Top with sweet potato; sprinkle with herbs. Drizzle with remaining oil; sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake on lowest oven rack 12-15 minutes or until crust is golden and cheese is melted.

This was a good pizza. It was fun to have something so unique and it looked nice. I liked the herbs and the combination of cheeses.

Croutons

I made Garlic Croutons today with some leftover French bread, our twenty-sixth recipe. I doubled the recipe, but cut back a little on the butter. When I mixed it all together in the pan, the first pieces soaked up most of the butter, so I added a little olive oil. I also sprinkled on some Italian seasoning. They turned out well. I wasn't planning to use a recipe to make my croutons, but when I made sweet potato quesadillas on Friday I forgot to take a picture. Since I didn't want to post without it, I decided that recipe didn't count and so now we have croutons. Anyway, the quesadillas were pretty good too, although a bit strange.

Cabbage and Thesis

We tried Barbecued Cabbage with our dinner tonight, our twenty-fifth recipe. We ran out of propane after putting the pork chops and cabbage on the grill and discovered that we only had empty propane containers, so Joshua had to run next door to Home Depot and get some more. Thankfully, it didn't seem to detract from the quality of the food; everything turned out great. We thought the soy sauce was too strong on the cabbage, but liked its acidic saltiness contrasted with the sweetness of the cabbage. I'm likely to make this again, just cutting the soy sauce in half next time.

We spent the evening trying out our new board game, which we got to celebrate that Joshua submitted his thesis to his committee today! Yes, the thesis is written! Now we have a little bit of a break before beginning the process of revision, editing, and defending. Needless to say, we are quite excited.