Cabbage Peace

Cabbage is one of those things that goes in and out of favor. In this country I suspect there were periods when we didn’t want to eat cabbage because it is “poor” food. Exactly. That’s one of the things that makes it extraordinary. Wherever you come from, whatever variety you grow, it can fill you up. If more of us ate it and ate more of it, there might be more food for others.

And it’s good for us. Another sturdy vegetable that can deliver health-giving properties all year long. It’s back in vogue at the moment, fermented foods are surging in popularity. What ferments better than cabbage. Although cabbage is one of those places that I surprise myself with my limitations. I don’t think i want kraut with jalepeno nor do i particularly want it with eggs for breakfast.

It grows well in cold climates, and it stores well, so, people eat it in soups and stews all year long. Certainly borscht, that wonderful adventure in beets, owes almost as much to cabbage as to beets. Apparently there are some versions that grow well in tropical climates as well… It’s got a long growing season wherever it lives and will keep delivering bounty and vitamins and minerals to your door. Hooray for cabbage!

Around here, you eat cabbage with onions and noodles and call it tasty. My mother used to sauté it with onion and apples when we were having pork or sausage. I like it in stir fries, I’ve eaten, and am not sure I’m in love with kim chee. But it’s a great vegetable.

And I love the silly references to finding babies under cabbage leaves (those that aren’t left under the gooseberry bushes or brought by storks.). It didn’t teach great physiology, but it’s sweet. There’s a painting from 1820 of a “maiden” discovering a baby under a cabbage leaf you can see here. This was early in Queen Victoria’s reign (like year 2). Good to know she didn’t invent prudishness, she merely popularized it. That Mother Nature doesn’t merely feed you, she brings you babies!

But here’s today’s paean to good and responsible eating: the cabbage! Cabbages for Peace, across cultures and socio-economic divides.

Melon Peace

I realized as I was sending out this message, that here it was hot and humid, and there is no melon in my fridge! That’s an oversight that needs to be connected with a trip to the farm stand today. Mother Nature really concocts some wonderful things, doesn’t she?

I have a picture I treasure of my friend Lorraine and me eating melon on a beach in Corfu. Back in the days before we knew how dangerous sun worshipping was, we were young and tanned and beautiful and thrilling to the taste of watermelon. It was so hot that day and the sun was so bright. We’d hauled that melon on the ferry with us for our day-trip to another side of the island. Oh, it was heaven.

Actually, when I start reminiscing about melon, I can think of many wonderful meals with melon as a focus point… and all of the memories are of slow, relaxed meals. What joy. And it’s not as if eating an abundance of melon is bad for you. Slurp! And how many foods can you say that about?

I don’t know if melon is really a key to World Peace, but I do know that the cultures that don’t grow melons crave them, and the cultures that do relish them. So perhaps, they could be a reminder of the importance of World Peace. Certainly we need reminders. And we need slow meals with friends from cultures all over the world. If we start weaving peace, there is no way they could bring us to war with one another. So, maybe, yes, melon could be a key to World Peace. Let us make it so.

It’s certainly delicious enough to be!

Putting Up Peace

I don’t know what it’s called where you come from, but around here, thanks to German roots, you put up vegetables (up where, one wonders.)

So yesterday faced with far more zucchini than I (even after waxing eloquently about it) could manage, I through it in the crockpot with a whole bunch of other wonderful things, set it on simmer and came back 24 hours later. yum. A whole pot ful… some summer for now, a bit for later in the year.

I’m currently savoring Nature’s bounty over polenta, with just a bit of cheese! yep! Yum!

I don’t know how we’d manage it… whether taking a photo and putting it on our mirror would do it… but imagine if we could take out a little Peace success and fill up/fuel up when we’re not having much luck moving forward… It’s one reason we really need to catalog successes, no matter how small. It hits the reset button, helps us to remember that small successes work and that we have made progress. and hooray for us.

Computer glitches have me running behind… so it’s time for me to finish today’s bounty (sufficient unto the day is the bounty thereto!)

Eat now, put up some abundance for later!

Eggplant Peace

Oh, I know I’m shallow. I know the only reason to make Peace here, there, and everywhere isn’t just so you get to taste the food of other cultures… But it’s not the worst reason, really, it’s not! Food can be an interesting place to enter… and entering to explore beyond the food boundaries…

Those beautiful, comma-shaped Japanese eggplants were an invitation beyond my world. it seems so simple, change the shape, change the spices (but keep the garlic constant) and everything was different. And now I feel differently about the aubergine… and all the other delightful shapes and colors with which the eggplant graces the world.

“Same, same, but different,” isn’t that what they say in Thailand? That’s what the eggplants are and that’s who people are… and that’s one thing that makes life delightful.

Nature offers metaphors everywhere. It’s up to us to explore them and to live beyond them! That way lies Peace.

Lingering Peace

I forget, until it happens again, how absolutely wonderful it is to dine outside in a quiet courtyard as dusk moves in on a summer evening. It can be the most indulgent, sybaritic experience.

I had that experience the other night, and I wonder, why don’t I do more of it. The food doesn’t cost any more, but it always seems to taste better. We all had our little islands of light and conversation in the dusk, but were pulled together by the music… It was a marvelous experience.

And here it is the beginning of August, and I’ve still not set up my porch. Too busy, too hot, too… and yet, some of the best porch sitting is ahead of us… so I’m off to accomplish at least some little part of that today!

It’s good to have lovely indulgences in our lives that take advantage of the beauty of nature, the gifts of the seasons (and of our senses), and the sweetness of good companionship. And it’s important, now and again, to give ourselves the gift of simply being present.

There on Friday night, in a little courtyard off a busy street in Williamsport, over plates of good food, in the company of friends, to the accompaniment of wonderful music, I did that. I hope you find the time to do the same… You are all the reason you need to indulge yourself in Peace.

Zucchini Peace?

It’s come to this. I’ve just created an analogy between zucchinis and Peacemaking… A bridge too far?

When I said I would write about summer vegetables, I knew I’d have to write about the zucchini… I mean, it’s a constant of the garden box… So I thought, tackle it early in the month and get it done.

People write differently. I’m never exactly sure where I’m going to go with a piece, whether it’s a sermon or a poem. I’m one of those writers who hears from her subjects rather than one who starts with a plan. I write to find out what I think/feel/believe, and then I formulate and format. So there was the lowly zucchini, the butt of so many garden jokes, imparting its wisdom about the importance of versatility and willingness to get along and, oh, by the way, the gift of abundance.

If you live in central PA, people are as likely to be making chocolate cake with this squash as they are ratatouille! Oh, they exclaim it makes the cake so moist. I’m sure it does, but if I wasn’t eating that 15 inch coconut cake at our local diner yesterday, I’m not wasting the calories on zucchini cake! I’ll take mine with sauce, thanks anyway!

I dawns on me as I write this, that versatility and willingness to get along or go along are not always good… it’s up to us… isn’t it always? Nature provides what she does, in this case in great abundance, the question is what do we do with it? So, my dears, wishing you the Peace of the big zucchini!

Peach Peace

Every time we come to a new fruit or vegetable, I think, “there simply isn’t anything better than this…” whatever this may be… and so I’m stuck, obsessing about some particular piece of loveliness until Nature and agriculture’s next gift comes along.

Right now, it’s peaches. Oh, so good. Not those cue balls they sell in grocery stores, but the juicy, run-down-your face things you buy at your local farm stand. Sweet. and weirdly fuzzy. Why did that evolve, do you suppose? Certainly not just to entrance those of us who devour them! And of course the camp is divided between the entranced and those who just can’t stand the feel of the fuzz on their lips.

They are, for me, the quintessential August fruit. You can’t eat them elegantly, they’re juicy when ripe. You delight in them and their stickiness. And what more is asked of us than that we delight in creation. Give thanks, say grace and eat a peach. And then consider how your being in the world might offer people delight… even Peace. Be a peach for Peace, how about it?

Lemon Peace

Yummmm. Sounds like pie, doesn’t it. Lemon Chiffon? Lemon Meringue? I’m beginning to wonder if August isn’t going to be the month of foods in celebration of the harvest. I could probably do a week on tomatoes! Nature and the seasons keep delivering bounty, what can I do but wonder and write odes!

My friend Susan Willm taught me to make the best lemonade (using the lowly Joy of Cooking Cookbook), although her lemonade was made from, drum roll, Meyers Lemons. Oh, yeah. That raises the bar more than a notch!

I don’t drink lemonade often, but when I do, I’m transported to childhood and delight. It’s one of the few sugary drink treats that Mom ever had in the house. (she must have liked it a lot!) And let’s not forget limeade — swoon.

But lemons… those tart beauties are the beginnings of many favorite things in my life and the transformers of other favorite things. Pour a glass for a friend! Pour a glass for yourself! Drink deeply! Savor the sweet taste of Peace. Consider how sharing increases the delight. Ah, August! Summer!

Peace Away, Peace at Home

I’m not an outdoor kinda girl, except in theory… and of course, unless it’s a beach or a lake or a pond in the summer. I’m probably the only concrete Pagan Priestess you’ve ever met! But I know how important it is to our well-being to be in nature. This cruise was great this way, it was sorta like living in a travelogue! Look, Nature! Over there, Beauty! (My friend and I loved the list of things that made your brain work longer, brushing teeth, lowering your cholesterol, drinking green tea and watching nature shows. pretty doable, eh?)

But we all need a break from our lives to be able to see our lives. And we all need to make a pilgrimage now and again to a place that reminds us of our insignificance in the face of such grandeur and abundance. We need to practice awe.

This trip offered me that opportunity. Where do you go to be amazed back to silence and Peace? Where are your prayers for a better world startled out of you? Alaska did this for me.

A Peace of Convenience

When I want to decouple from my busy and intense life, I tend to read fluff. Nothing shuts your brain off at the end of the day like a romance, mystery or fantasy novel. Some people like TV; it doesn’t work for me. So, in all of the regency romances (man, I’m REALLY baring my soul here!), there’s conversation about marriages of convenience.

So how is a trip to Alaska like a marriage of convenience you might ask? And what does that have to do with Peace exactly? Well, as I said, it’s not so much a marriage of convenience as it is a village of convenience. 50 people getting to know one another in 10 hour stretches. You find out a surprising amount about people… maybe not so much what they do back in the real world, but how they treat one another, how much they laugh… those things.

Well, Alaska is like Love, it seems, and conquers all. There we all were, hanging out the window oohing and ahhing at every little moose and caribou. We were joined together in wonder… and that made for a very pleasant, Peaceful village. Alaska triumphed and we all lived together Peacefully and happily, with generous offers to trade seats for great photos. It was a short-lived village, but it prospered.

Wonder. Beauty. Nature. It changes us. It helps us make Peace. Why, we wonder, don’t we let that happen more often? Why won’t we do it in the villages where we live and love everyday?

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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