Lift Up Your Hearts!

The young lady at the grocery store was right:  a chopstick makes a great cherry pitter.

Until I was nine years old, I lived in a small house with a yard that was small by American standards, but large enough to support four beautiful trees:  two spruce, one maple that was the delight of my heart and the joy of my tree-climbing days, and one cherry tree.

The cherry tree produced a gorgeous display of blossoms every year, followed by an abundant harvest of cherries.  These were sour cherries, the kind used most often for pies, though to my child's tastes they couldn't get much better than straight from the tree into my mouth.  The abundance, however, was more than I could consume, even had that been allowed, so I remember hours of sitting around the table with my family, pitting cherries to freeze for future pies.  Despite the work, it was a delightful time because we were all together, working and talking and laughing.  It is nonetheless a pity that we didn't discover the delights of Chinese food until after we had left the house and its trees behind.

The aforementioned young lady was standing at a table in the produce section, offering samples of cherries and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.  I gladly took the cherries, but passed up the ice cream—not, I hasten to add, from any virtue, but because the carton displayed was banana-something-or-other.  But when she suggested Honey Bee Vanilla instead, I acquiesced.  My favorite ice cream remains the Swiss Mövenpick, but the smallest scoop of Honey Bee Vanilla in a tiny cup, graced with a couple of pieces of California Bing cherries...and I was nearly transported to Switzerland.

She did her job well:  I left the store with two pounds of Bing cherries and a pint of Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Vanilla.  How could I refuse?  The cherries were on sale; the reason I was near her table was that I was considering buying them already. Häagen-Dazs ice cream is another story:  I've raised my standards of ice cream from the el cheapo variety I once enjoyed, but only as far as Edy's Double Fudge Chocolate Brownie or similar, and then only if there's a really good sale, preferably two-for-one.  Häagen-Dazs is rarely in my price range.  In this case, however, not only was the Häagen-Dazs on sale, but the delightful young lady handed me a coupon that brought the price of the pint down to 50 cents if I bought the cherries.  Sold!

Honey Bee Vanilla is exquisite by all itself.  A little experimentation at home proved that it also does wonderful things for fresh raspberries.  And as soon as I finish this post I'm going to introduce my darling and hard-working husband—who has already today been on the roof to fix a leaking skylight, and torn the lawn mower apart to determine why it has gone on strike just in time for the opening of mowing season—to Honey Bee Vanilla and Bing Cherry Heaven.

The purpose of the promotion is in part to raise awareness of the threats to the honey bee population.  Learn more at http://www.helpthehoneybees.com.

Oh, yes.  Back to the original point.  In preparing the cherries for our upcoming treat, I used a blunt-ended chopstick to remove the pits.  Piece of cookie.^*

 

Looking back at my Lenten disciplines for 2009, I find it was a surprising exercise.  While I can't say I was perfect in keeping them, two worked so well I intend to continue the practices.

The computer goes off at 9:00 every night.   When I stick to a 10 p.m. bedtime, my life goes much better, but that's not always easy, especially when I'm in the middle of a project and "just one more thing" can lead to midnight or beyond.  Not only are most of my projects computer-oriented, but for some reason computing is one of those areas where I blink and two hours have passed. If I get nothing else from this discipline, at least I'll be better rested.

Discipline 1 was downright pleasant, except on days when my evenings were taken up by other things, like choir practice; then I felt entitled to at least a few minutes of computer time after getting home.  But even then the rule kept that time short.  I enjoyed having the excuse to stop work, and it dovetailed nicely with Discipline 3:

I'll spend between a half hour and an hour reading each day.  Preferably the longer time, though I haven't managed it yet.  I know; that's hardly a sacrifice.  But I've noticed that over the last several years my reading has become even more fractured and fragmented than it was when I had small children at home, if that were possible.  I read blogs, articles, and news stories online; I listen to audio books in the car as I run errands, I skim magazines.  I read books in five-minute gulps as I can throughout the day—on visits to the "reading room," while eating, while falling asleep at night.  What I'm missing is concentrated time on a single, book-length topic, and I have a very large stack of quality books—many recently purchased and one overdue at the library—on which the derivative of my progress is negative.  I'm hoping that a short, but consistent, dedicated time will reverse the trend.

Finding concentrated reading time during the day was more difficult than I had hoped, but turning off the computer an hour before bedtime led naturally to reading afterwards.  It was especially enjoyable because Porter often joined me.  I finished G. K. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils (oops, not reviewed yet) and made good headway on Thomas Dubay's Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer.  I'm almost halfway through that one, and without the Discipline I quite likely would have set it aside, as it is more difficult and less inspiring than I had hoped.

It was Discipline 2 that was most revealing.

I'm giving up reading and/or working puzzles while I eat.  Most of you will find this odd, but it is a real sacrifice for me.  I agree wholeheartedly with C. S. Lewis, who said, "Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably." There's no reason not to combine them; I'm doing this because it's a great pleasure I can dispense with for 40 days as an exercise in self-denial, without troubling anyone else or falling terribly behind in my work.  Exception:  Porter and I sometimes do puzzles together during meals; for obvious reasons I'm not abstaining from them.

This was unbelievably hard, and the strength with which I resisited it tells me I've hit an area in my life that needs work.  Whenever I had food or drink in front of me, I cried out, body and soul, for a book or a puzzle—as an addict must cry out for drugs.  It's amazing how many ways I devised to cheat:  working on the computer I justified if I didn't let myself read articles, blogs, or e-mails; going through my Penzeys catalogue needed to be done so I could place an order, even though it involved reading the spice descriptions; we watched movies during dinner; I would clean the refrigerator while eating, organize the cupboards while eating...anything but sit-down-and-eat-and-nothing-else.  Such a waste of time to do nothing else!  Once I even caught myself adding words to my crossword puzzle between bites, because, after all, I wasn't actually eating when I put pencil to paper.  It was easier when I had someone else to eat with; alone, I was miserable, until I finally discovered I could diminish the craving by taking my meal onto the back porch and enjoying the lovely spring weather.  Even then I couldn't stop Li'l Writer Guy from working—that's going to require an intense course in meditation techniques, I suspect.  I lived for Sundays:  On the Sabbaths I released myself from this Discipline—though I usually continued the others.

I could probably lose 30 pounds by forcing myself to do nothing but eat when I am eating.  I'm thinking of marketing the Full Attention Diet.  ("Fad diets are not the answer to your weight problems—FAD is!")  The rules are simple.

• Eat whatever you want, whenever you want.
• While you are eating, do nothing else.  No reading, no watching TV, no working, no walking around—just eating.  The only exception is for mealtime conversation, with which nothing should be allowed to interfere.  You may eat while listening attentively to what other people have to say.  (It goes without saying that you don't eat when you are the one talking.)
• Don't eat mechanically; take time to enjoy the flavors and textures of your food. This should be easy, since you'll have nothing else to do.
• Give yourself time between meals to enjoy the other pleasures that you normally associate with eating, so you won't be tempted to view mealtime as the only time you have for them...and to keep eating so you can keep reading....
• Brush your teeth after every time you eat.  The reason for this last rule is to minimize the read-between-bites syndrome.  Trust me; if there's a loophole, I'll make use of it.

Lord of the Rings fans may remember Shire Year 1420, when "the fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream...."  That's what life has been like at our house for the past few weeks.  It's strawberry season in Florida, and we've been treating ourselves to strawberries on our cereal, strawberry shortcake, strawberry-yoghurt pie, and—fresh rhubarb is also available now—strawberry-rhubarb crisp.  Life is delicious good.

I spent several of my formative years in the City of Soft-Pretzel-y-Love.  Not the fancy, cheese-filled mall variety, or the bake-at-home frozen blandness, but the soft, chewy, salty Philadelphia Pretzel, preferably from a germ-laden street vendor's cart and drizzled, of course, with mustard.  Nothing ever tastes as good as memory makes it, so for over thirty years I have been making do.

Enter Facebook.  Bear with me here, it's a convoluted story.

It all began, for me, when Janet joined Facebook.  I no longer remember what brought her, reluctantly, to that point, but she had so much fun re-connecting with old friends that she persuaded me to join as well.  The connecting-with-old-friends bit only works if one's friends are also on Facebook, which is much less likely for folks of my age, but nonetheless I've made a few enjoyable connections.  As a whole I find the Facebook package more annoying than not, but can put up with it for the few gems it tosses my way.

Like the inspiration for this post.  This summer I met a friend of my son-in-law-to-be.  Enjoyable as our time together was, we are far apart both generationally and geographically, and in the old days the chances of her sharing a recipe with me would have been nil.  But she is on Facebook, and graciously accepted my "friend request," the result of which is that when she posted a video on pretzel-making, I found it.  There are actually two in the series:

It is a very good thing we do not have cable television.  Put me in front of a food channel and I might not move all day.  Other shows by this guy are proving a major temptation getting in the way of progress this week.  "This guy" is Alton Brown, and his show, Good Eats, is on the Food Network (whatever that is).  Some related links:  One set of shows on YouTube, another set of shows on YouTube, and the fan page.  (I spent a fair amount of time trying to determine the legality or lack thereof of having the shows posted on YouTube, without success, but they've been there for quite awhile without being removed, and one of the posters runs the fan site and knows the chef, so I'm feeling free to enjoy them unless convinced otherwise.)

After all the preliminaries...ta da!  What I Did Yesterday:  I made the pretzels!  It was easy!  Dark brown, shiny, chewy, and exceedingly delicious, with or without mustard.

 

Did I say they were good?  I mean really, really good.  Even without the umibacillus vendorophilus.