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Archive for June, 2011

International Feasts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2011|

On the Tuesday after Memorial Day I ran into a woman I know who works in another department. She grew up in New York City, where her father worked at the United Nations. Her family is from Pakistan. After inquiring about her weekend, I learned that she had cooked for 80 by herself, serving everyone in her backyard! The meal sounded amazing, so I asked her to e-mail the menu to me.

hi, here was my menu, enjoy!

mixed vegetable pilaf, BBQ chicken with various spices, beef kabobs, fenugreek and potatoes, samosas filled with ground chicken, corn, cow’s feet, naan, yogurt, Pakistani bread pudding

Cow’s feet/trotters are considered a delicacy in Pakistan.  Mine took 7 hours to make of which 6 hours were cooked on the regular stove and one hour was in the pressure cooker.  Ideally, you should be able to cook them for about 75 minutes in the pressure cooker.  However, since I was making such a large quantity I decided to cook them on the stove.  After six hours, I gave up and cooked a few batches separately in the pressure cooker 🙂

So I got to thinking, I wonder how many different kinds of banquets prepared by people from different countries of origin are being cooked for backyard parties on Memorial Day. Or July 4. What a recipe book that would make!

Do you publish cookbooks? You may take the idea and run with it. This book will surely be too heavy to carry, given all the different groups that make up America. You may have to make it an online e-book.

 

Reader Asakiyune writes, “The woman who cooked for 80 TOTALLY INTIMIDATES ME. Cooking for 10 is about all I want to ever try managing! … maybe 15 or 20. 80? 80?? Yowza. And I liked your earlier entry, on the group doing mild ecumenicism for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I hope you can interest your religious ed director in hosting a lecture by the organizing woman.

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Three Related Religions

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2011|

When my daughter-in-law was about to be a mom and present me with my first grandchild,

her sisters gave her a lovely baby shower.

A couple of the women I spoke to there told me about a book group they enjoyed called Daughters of Abraham, located in a number of towns. As the organization’s website says, they are “a group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women who want to deepen our knowledge of our own and one another’s faiths. By reading books that teach us about each other’s faith traditions and learning about the practice of our respective faiths, we hope to increase our respect for all the Abrahamic religions. We are committed to building relationships among us.” They find that reading books and sharing the perspectives and insights from their different backgrounds is rewarding and fun.

One of the women had gone on to found a nonprofit that does something similar for the children of the three traditions. “Kids 4 Peace Boston is an interfaith, nonpolitical organization of Jews, Christians, and Muslims that fosters friendship, understanding, and respect among children and families in the Boston area, and hosts children [of our three faiths from Jerusalem] in a summer program. … Kids4Peace Boston practices hospitality — a shared value of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  We strive to create a place where faith and friendship thrive.”

I have been trying to interest the religious education director at my church to bring in the woman I met at the baby shower to talk about the Kids 4 Peace program.

Please send comments to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com. Suzanne is the founder of the birthstone jewelry company Luna & Stella. She asked me to do a blog and write about anything I felt like writing about, which is exactly what I have been doing. Thanks for visiting.

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Rhyming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 3, 2011|

Every once in a while the urge to write doggerel just overwhelms a person, and you have to give in. It seemed to happen more often when I had young children in the house.

Basil, Basil, you’re a cat
Never try denying that
Stand up for your kitty mother
Turn your back on no cat brother
When the cat god calls your name,
Let there be no cause for blame.
Future generations all
Will praise the cat that heard the call.

Or how about this ditty, which I associate with Suzanne’s friend Joanna, who must have been visiting when the urge overcame me:

Think how lovely it would be
Living always by the sea
Eating muffins with our tea
And jam.

Finally, when Asakiyume and I were working at a famous management journal and hearing lots of jargon, I used one such hackneyed phrase in a haiku I wrote about a dream Asakiyume described:

Watercolor moon
Grows larger nightly and yet
Is trending downward

My father was his class poet at Princeton, and I think he must be turning over in his grave right now.

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Using the Blog Like My Fridge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 3, 2011|

I think I have always cut articles out of the paper to give people or to post on my fridge. (At the office, I post work-related clippings on the wall of my cubicle.) Suzanne and her brother, John, often teased me about how often the stories were dire warnings in the news. Around this time every year, they would be deluged with clippings about sun screen and melanoma or deer ticks and Lyme disease.

Now that they have grown up and have their own homes, the fridge is rather empty of news articles. But since they are reading this blog, I’ll post a typical dire warning from today’s Boston Globe, something I’ve been harping on since the mid-1990s. (Oh, well. They laughed at Columbus.)

Hiawatha Bray’s column for June 2 is about protecting oneself from possible cancer-causing effects of mobile phones. He has several pieces of advice any mother would love: “make like a teenager, and text instead of talking. Sending SMS or e-mail messages keeps the phone well away from your skull. The farther your brain is from the phone, the lower the risk of brain tumors. If you must talk, most handsets have a speakerphone feature to let you converse at a distance. I often use it because I’m too lazy to hold the phone. Now I’ve got a better reason.”

And a study done in Sweden a few years ago suggests that it isn’t just brains we need to worry about. Cellphones left on in a pocket can affect reproductive function.

Bray says, “I carry the phone on my hip, in a holster which keeps it the required distance from my body. I’ve mocked my wife for losing her Android smartphone in her purse, but carrying it well away from the body is the safest way to go.”

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The Joy of Children’s Books

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2011|

Among children’s books, I especially like books that are fifth-grade level. Although I enjoyed all the “color” fairy books when I was in third grade or so — Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, the Orange Fairy Book, the Rose Fairy Book, and so on — it wasn’t until about fifth grade that I really got hooked. Flashlights under the cover and all. I had a relative who worked for Dan Wickenden (The Amazing Vacation), and she sent me Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and the Narnia books. My cousin Patsy got me into George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. I reread that one a couple years ago, and it’s as great as ever.

After college, I  taught fifth and sixth grade for a few years and read to the kids as time allowed. I remember how one class only gradually realized they were really starting to like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince. Reading can sneak up that way.

Today I am one of the volunteers who go out from our workplace to an inner-city school where there has long been a tutoring relationship. It started with a team who read picture books chosen by teachers to first graders. Then other teams were added (such as fourth grade math tutoring), and now there are teams reading with fifth graders. The books are chosen by the librarian. Each fifth-grade volunteer has a group of three children, and grownups and children all take turns reading and discussing. Even though the kids see teams once a week, most individual volunteers only go monthly. It’s not hard to fit into one’s schedule. I have learned about a lot of books by volunteering at the school. I already knew about From the Crazy Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, but not about Holes, Maniac Magee, Hatchet, or Hidden Talents, to name a few.

One colleague, having found out that I liked this age level, introduced me to the Golden Compass series. Heaven! I also like her suggestion of The Island of the Aunts and recommend it.

Better sign off. The last time we had a storm like the one outside my window, my computer was hit.

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