Happy and Thankful

IT’S NOT HAPPY PEOPLE WHO ARE THANKFUL

IT’S THANKFUL PEOPLE WHO ARE HAPPY

Sweet Darkness

This is the strangest cloud I've ever seen

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

(House of Belonging)

To be at peace with yourself

Me and my shadow

“…I want first of all – in fact, as an end to these other desires – to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact – to borrow from the language of the saints -to live ‘in grace’ as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony…”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

More Cooking: A Dutch Winter Dish

When Winter approaches in the Netherlands (Holland) we start eating richer dishes (to keep warm!) that we call stamppot. To stamp means mashing and so we mash together usually potatoes, some kind of meat (or keep that on the side) and a vegetable. The dish I am making used to be a stamppot, but my mother turned it into an oven dish called Andijvie schotel.

In Holland we make this dish with endive, something I have not found yet here in the US, but as I found out via this website called The Cook’s Thesaurus there is a French version called Escarole and as I found out it has very similar texture and taste.

Escarole

For my Escarole dish you cut up the endive/escarole/chicory into 1 cm (1/4 inch) strips and wash well. Cook in boiling water (a little water on the bottom of the pan) for just a few minutes to wilt! Drain all water and put the endive in an oven dish and sprinkle a little nutmeg on top.

Before you start, peel some potatoes (enough to cover your oven dish) and start boiling them, by the time your endive and/or meat are ready, they’ll be ready to get mashed.

Then bake some minced beef with beef spices of your liking, make sure it ends as very small cooked pieces. Place the meat on top of the endives in your oven dish, and then cover it with your home-made mashed potatoes topped with bread crumbs and little pieces of butter.

Bake in a 350 (180C) oven for about 30 minutes (to get the top golden brown I turn off the oven after 30 minutes and turn on the broiler for just a few minutes).

I love it when I can make a whole meal in one dish! This time I used a small (just for two) oven dish, but when you make a huge batch, you’ll enjoy it several days!

Enjoy! Eet smakelijk!

The Fear of Facing Ourselves

We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can’t do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.

Chogyam Trungpa

When Fall Meets Winter

Snow in Virginia on October 29th

Today we had our first dusting, this is rather early, yet a pretty sight to see the bright-colored Fall leaves being covered with snow flakes. It was not enough snow to play with, so Sarah and I made it a Mother/Daughter indoors, foodie day. We started with making “poffertjes” for breakfast, this is a Dutch dish usually eaten as lunch or snack. They are tiny pancakes that you cover with powdered sugar. I made huge batch and froze them for another yummy breakfast or lunch.

Poffertjes

Still in our pajamas we started the next baking project: a Pumpkin Pie. I remember when I tasted this pie the first time (they do not make pumpkin pies in the Netherlands) I didn’t like it, thought it was weird to use a vegetable to make a sweet pie! Then I found out about the carrot cake and zucchini bread, two other awkward treats I now like a lot! It is a great way to enjoy a treat and eat your veggies at the same time

Sarah could not wait to taste it, but I think that pumpkin pie really needs to cool off before digging in, although I love warm apple pie…we walked to the store, singing about he snowflakes hitting our faces, to pick up whipped cream. You see, you can’t eat pumpkin pie without whipped cream on it!

I was kind of lazy and used my phone camera to take all the cooking and baking images today, instead of using my big Nikon D300. It’s so convenient that I can upload the images to facebook instantly, I wish I could do that with my Nikon! I do not have a lot of natural light in the kitchen en with this dark weather we had the lights on all day, a challenge for food photography. After we had lunch (pumpkin pie) we started our next baking project: Oatmeal Cookies.

They came out very nice, no wonder with all that butter in it! I replaced the raisins with dried sweet cherries and added some chopped pecans and walnuts. First Sarah was mad at me for adding the cherries, but later (after 2 more cookies) she admitted they were rather delicious. While the cookies were baking we played with her doll house, this new doll house has several rooms that you can stack any way you like and a lot of furniture, our little friends had a lunch and watched TV.

Finally it stopped snowing, sadly it didn’t stick, Sarah had her snow clothes ready for a snow ball fight or snow man building, I just hope we can first finish Fall! Our last cooking project for the day was roasting a whole chicken. They were on sale and the one I got was a little over $6, a great deal for a natural (hormone free, free range) chick! We usually eat about 3 to 4 times from it, as I use the small parts for chicken noodle soup and pasta sauces.

I first wash it, then butter it, followed by garlic and onion powder, salt & pepper, and a good dusting of Herbes de Provence, finally topped with a drizzle of honey. I bake it at 350 degrees for 20 minutes per pound and according to Sarah it came out scrumptious! We really enjoyed this foodie day, and when I talked to my mom via Skype she said she baked a bread and made a few other things as well, I bet my brother was busy cooking as well, it’s a family thing we all enjoy…Resting now, because tomorrow it is soup making day!

Moving Water

     Moving Water

By Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

When  you do things from your soul, you feel a river

moving in you, a joy.

When actions come from another section, the feeling

disappears.  Don’t let

others lead you.  They may be blind or, worse, vultures.

Reach for the rope

of God.  And what is that?  Putting aside self-will.

Because of willfulness

people sit in jail, the trapped bird’s wings are tied,

fish sizzle in the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness.  You’ve seen a magistrate

inflict visible punishment.  Now

see the invisible.  If you could leave your selfishness, you

would see how you’ve

been torturing your soul.  We are born and live inside black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don’t

insist on going where

you think you want to go.  Ask the way to the spring.  Your

living pieces will form

a harmony.  There is a moving palace that floats in the air

with balconies and clear

water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained

under a single tent.

The Journey

The Journey

By Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice–

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do–

determined to save

the only life you could save. 

Window Shopping

I love window displays, or etalages as we call them in Holland (actually a French word).

Especially when they’re “designed” by the shop owner themselves. This is an Arabic grocery store in Paris.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)