amateur believer: The Puppies Are Here!

words

Every day, it seems, I find myself looking up words and their etymologies, trying to get at the root of what something I've just read means. Sometimes it's a word in the Bible, and I end up wading my way through ancient languages I've never studied, searching for clues. Other times it's just words from daily life that suddenly pertain to some matter I'm struggling with or considering. Often the word has changed over the centuries; I find such words particularly fascinating—particularly when, as is often the case, the word's current meaning is at odds with what it once meant. Some of these word studies find their way into my writing projects. My goal is to post new words weekly, sometimes brand new material and sometimes excerpts from my books.

11 December 2006

The Puppies Are Here!

Seems to me when there's a birth in the offing, that's all the news there is. So, although this is my first real blog entry and my first book and it seems as though what I say here ought to be about the book or at least a topic of interest to visitors to this site, I have to tell you that there were nine fat lab pups born to us last Friday. We've been waiting and waiting, and even when our good Tessi dog went into labor, it seemed they would never come. And they didn't. It took a trip to the vet and a whole nother day of thinking/feeling/praying, "Veni! Veni!"

But now they're here. Five chocolate and four black. Out in the garage. Safe.

Homely Food—the Only Kind I Cook—Recently Served in the Kirk Household

Leftover Beans Chili: Chili, I've learned, in one of my daughter Charlotte's favorite foods. When she's home, I make it night after night for her and her friends: with ground beef and leftover (or canned) beans, as I describe here, or without meat if there are vegetarians (such as Lulu) among them. It's the simplest and fastest meal I know how to make. Fry a pound of ground beef in its own fat till greyish. Add one or two big onions, chopped, and a few smashed cloves of garlic. When the onions are getting done, dump on tons of chili powder—1/3 c or more—and sauté a bit, then add leftover cooked (or canned) beans and whatever tomatoes, fresh or canned or a little paste, you have in the refrigerator. If I'm using cans of beans bought expressly for chili, they typically 1 can of red beans (Charl's favorite) and one can of dark red kidney beans (my favorite). Leftover beans that work especially well are anasazis, pintos, reds, or kidneys of any kind. Cook just a bit more, then serve with soda crackers, grated sharp cheddar, and chopped sweet onion.
Anasazi Beans: They're beautiful, first off: red and white mottled. Only recently available everywhere, they were eaten by the ancients: archaeologists found them in 1500 year old caves and germinated them. And they cook up fast, without soaking, as dried lima beans do. And they taste so good: chewy and rich, almost meatlike. So, I don't really season them with anything but salt and maybe a bay leaf. Maybe a cut up onion. And that's it. Over good rice. With tabasco sauce or salsa. Mm.
Mamaw's Red Soup: My 88-year-old mother-in-law and has Alzheimer's and has forgotten how to make what my daughters and I refer to as her "red soup." Luckily, I watched her make it once long ago and then wrote it all down, and yesterday I cooked her up a gigantic pot of it out of all the things in her refrigerator. Put ground beef in lots of cold water (my written down recipe says 3 hamburger patties worth, but for this massive pot I used a pound of frozen meat I found from Mamaw's freezer) and boil till it appears to be cooked through. Fish it out onto a plate and break it up with a fork, then return it to its broth. Add a big can of diced tomatoes, and whatever canned or frozen vegetables you have. In this case, I used a drained can of corn, an undrained can of green beans and a drained can of peas, and frozen green lima beans (which, according to my girls, are essential). Cook for 15 or so minutes, then add potatoes cut into smallish rectangles and cook till just done before adding chopped onions. Salt liberally and add about a knifetip's worth of cumin. What makes this Mamaw's red soup and not anyone else's is, besides the boiling of hamburger meat (weird, I know) and the addition of cumin, the order of the adding. Onions have to come last because Mamaw likes them to stay slightly crunchy. Anyway, I cooked up a pot of it, and, after Mamaw had eaten a bowl, she told me, "This tastes just like my Mama used to make it."
"All Things New" Rotten Banana Bread: Whenever Lulu returns to her faraway school after a break, I have to do something with all the bananas I had bought in anticipation of her favorite breakfast, "Nut Ban Pans" (banana pancakes spread with Nutella). Sometimes I use them immediately to banana yeast bread for my mother-in-law or students, but often I forget about them until they're completely black and starting to weep. Kris tries to throw them out—"The birds will love them!" he wheedles—but I prefer to make the following crusty, nutty-tasting, amazingly good rotten banana bread with toasted wheatgerm. I don't know if it's the syrupy rottenness of the bananas that makes this bread so good or the toasted wheatgerm or the melted butter or what. Probably, as one of my colleagues says of mental illness, its goodness is "multiply determined." In any case, start by preheating the oven to 400º and toasting 1/2 c wheatgerm in a loaf pan until fragrant and beginning to brown (5 minutes or so, but check often). Let cool while you combine 3 soft black bananas, 1 egg, 1 c sugar, 4 T melted butter, 1 t salt, 1 c flour, 1/2 c whole wheat flour, 1/2 t baking soda, and 3/4 t baking powder. Stir in the toasted wheatgerm. Grease the loaf pan or else line it with parchment. (I use two smaller loaf pans to get more crunchy crust.) Bake until good and brown—about an hour for one regular sized loaf pan and a little more than half that for two small pans.
Bauernomelet: The word, in English, means farmer's omelet. Today's "breakfast" for Lulu and her friend Stephie—it was almost noon when they got up—but also good as dinner. Not significantly different from Spanish tortilla, the food item most readily available on my long-ago trip through the Pyrénées to Sevilla. Slice unpeeled potatoes as thin as you can and fry them in butter or oil (Bauernomelet) or olive oil (tortilla). When they start to look cooked (glassy, brown at edges), push them aside and fry chopped onions and strips of ham or lunchmeat and whatever vegetables you have around, such as green pepper and/or peas and/or tomatoes (tortilla). Eat hot (Bauernomelet) or room temperature (tortilla) with hot sauce or salsa or—my favorite—dijon mustard.

Books I'm Reading

Just finished Fieldwork by Misha Berlinski for the book club I lead at Siloam Springs public library. (All welcome: 2nd Monday every other month beginning in January.) Wow. What a great first novel. What a great novel, period. About anthropology, faith, research. I'm thinking of having my students write about it.
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman: Wow. So good. Novel about a Discalced Carmelite nun who learns her ecstatic experience of God is the result of a brain tumor.
Birdology by Sy Montgomery: About how what weird creatures birds are. Entertaining and largely well written personal essays/nature writing.

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words

11 December 2006

The Puppies Are Here!

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