It’s hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what’s moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it’s easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal.
~ Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
A puppy-themed birthday celebration for a very special little boy.
Birthdays! What music in the world! In these unresting times, when nothing intellectual, economic, social, political, seems stable; when customs and traditions hoary with age are mixed with explosive elements, this oldest of institutions is not in danger of yielding to destructive forces.
Whatever I’m doing, I’m in that moment and I’m doing it. The rest of the world’s lost. If I’m cooking some food or making soup, I want it to be lovely. If not, what’s the point of doing it?
~ Sade Adu
I have to warn you before you continue that if you don’t care for salty language, you will not want to read the recipe for this soup. It’s been adjusted (censored) somewhat, but there’s no doubt about the words being used.
Now that I’ve got the disclaimer out of the way… For this week’s soup, I used a recipe from The Thug Kitchen cookbook. It’s one of my favorite vegan cookbooks because, frankly, the salty language peppered throughout makes me laugh. I’m childish that way. The recipes are fantastic, too. Everything I’ve made from Thug Kitchen has been delicious.
Today I made their Warm The F*ck Up Minestrone. Normally I would not follow a recipe for minestrone soup. It is a clean-out-the-fridge type of soup that I intuitively make based on what is available and what needs to be cooked. However, one of the purposes of this exercise in Sunday soup making is to use the recipes I have on hand. The Thug Kitchen minestrone is seasoned differently than mine and I have to tell ya, it’s wonderful. I used fresh rosemary from my garden, and frozen basil from last year’s vegetable garden. The recipe calls for cabbage or kale. I had both and they needed to be cooked so in the pot they went. I also added a sweet potato which is not on the list of ingredients. It’s minestrone. There are no rules.
If you’d like to try your hand and soup pot at this recipe, you can find it here. If you do try it, let me know what you think.
Love is a force that connects us to every strand of the universe, an unconditional state that characterizes human nature, a form of knowledge that is always there for us if only we can open ourselves to it.
The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage.
Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of the Union Theological Seminary and Time magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird?
And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted?
The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together.
