One of my dad’s favorite possessions was his slide rule.  It is, apparently, quite the deluxe model, as slide rules go.  Furthermore, he obtained this luxury at a great discount from the college bookstore because personal calculators had just become affordable and no one wanted slide rules anymore.  Daddy was a math geek who tried very hard to make me into a math geek.  Unfortunately for him, while I had no trouble understanding math, in the words of one of my teachers I “just didn’t like it.”  Nonetheless, we found math geek points of contact.  I am reader and occasionally writer of fantasy and have been since middle school, when a favorite father-daughter activity was applying geometry to design the MOST DEFENSIBLE CASTLE EVER.  But at the end of the day, I was more interested in the people in the castle than in its construction or defense.  Sorry, Dad.

I remember getting a fast food meal with Daddy.  I believe it was at a Wendy’s, and it was probably on a Wednesday, either before or after Wednesday evening church.  The total for the order came to a dollar amount (let’s say eleven), plus change (we’ll go with thirty one cents).  Daddy gave the cashier a twenty and pulled a nickel and a penny from his pocket.  The cashier must have hit the twenty dollar button on her register while Dad was retrieving the coins, because she looked at the change he put in her hand with abject horror.  Dad explained that by adding the six cents to the amount tendered, she only needed to give him back eight dollars and seventy-five cents (that is, all bills and quarters) rather than eight dollars and sixty nine cents (which is an obnoxious amount of change to count out, much less carry in one’s pocket).  I think the cashier’s response of “Say what?”  With a sigh, Dad sketched out the math for her on the back of a receipt and – I think – still without being totally convinced, she gave him the eight seventy-five.

Back in the car, square cheeseburgers in hand, Daddy fell into an extended rant on how sad it was that cashiers didn’t know how to count change.  I offered something about how the register does figure it for them.  (Remember that I’m probably thirteen or so in this story and, therefore, at the peak of teenage insufferable-ness.)  This is rejected as a bad excuse because the computer could break, or a customer could hand or coins, or the martians arrive with heat rays, or some other scenario wherein the brain needs to understand how to count.   Daddy followed this up with a detailed explanation of the correct method of counting change backward from the total charge to the amount tendered.

This past week, my bossfolks were out of the country, and I was left to run the store with the other employees with all the de facto authority accorded the senior staff person.  By hitting a button wrong, the bossman managed to lock me out of the entire POS system.  I couldn’t even clock in much less assign myself a cash drawer.  The other morning cashier could clock in, but the computer was programmed to only allow her to run credit cards.  She couldn’t accept cash.  The third cashier could not be clocked in or assigned a drawer until his scheduled arrival time.  By the time I figured out how badly my hands were tied, I was ready for the Martians to show up with their heat rays.

After three days of counting change back manually and keeping hand records of cash transactions all I can say, “Daddy, you were right.”

Chard and Chantrelles

I did a very Berkeley thing today. I let a passage from Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma put the idea for dinner in my head. Or rather it was a combination of Pollan and the funhouse of fungi at Monterey Market.



The chard is lightly sautéed in oil with salt, black pepper, and mustard seeds. The mushrooms (a mixture of chantrelle and oyster) are seared per Francis Lam's instructions with thinly sliced shallots. Next time I think I'll add a bit of garlic to the mushroom to round out their flavors a bit. In general though, exciting times with fungi.

Quinoa and Economics...

...protein as privilege. From the NYT.

Self-care and the Fast

Self-care is one of those funny words that suddenly enters your vocabulary when you move to Berkeley and start living at a seminary and hanging out with seminarians. People don't talk like this in Memphis!

I have a lot of trouble with self-care, something that has become painfully clear in the recent past. I sincerely say that many of my greatest sins are against myself -- denial of my own value, cruelty, and neglect. (Which is not to deny my sins against others.) Even as I'm writing this, I'm fighting off the notion that I'm giving into selfishness -- that I should be focusing on helping other people and not just on me. But the idea of self-care is prominent among seminarians because it really isn't possible to care for others unless you're first taking care of yourself.

Natalia Antonovna has a beautiful reflection on caring for one's self by means of a pomegranate. Mindfulness, time, and sensual pleasure as aspect of simply appreciating existence. One of my Lenten goals is to start forming good habits of self-care. Food is part of that. Beyond the health benefits of eating well, I do associate food with caring. I love to cook, but I really love to cook for people I care about. So putting effort into the food I fix for myself is a deeply embodied symbol of self-care.

Lenten Practice

Great and Holy Lent, as I've been reminded multiple times in the past couple of weeks, is a time for repentance and transformation. Casually and sadly though, Lent seems largely to be thought of as a time of fasting and giving up -- a purely negative connotation.

In my mind, neither fasting nor repentance should have a solely negative connotation. Repentance involves knowledge and confession of former sins. But biblically, the act of repentance tends to be the command, "Go, and sin no more." One is to move past one's sin and reconstruct one's self. There is transformation and rebuilding in the light of past failings. Likewise, fasting shouldn't be understood simply as giving up certain foods or habits. Fasting is a positive reordering of habits; one that takes place at the very primal level of eating.

I have several goals for the Lenten Fast this year. Most basically to keep it to the best of my ability. Beyond that I hope to practice mindfulness and deliberation in what I eat. Both out of concern for self-care and to better understand the interconnection and impact of my habits of consumption on the environment and the global economy.

Yia-yia Approved

We can debate whether yia-yias or babushki are more awesome all day. All I have to say is that I have the coolest Grandmother and the awesome-est Nouna ever! And these commercials are just darned entertaining.

French Pressed Almond Milk

Temporary veganism (Great and Holy Lent) begins today/tomorrow, and I decided to kick it off by making my first batch of nut milk in Kate, my shiny new food processor.

After reviewing my notes from last week's foodie date and reading various guides to making nut milks I settled on the following ratios and procedure:

1 cup of whole blanched almonds
4 cups of water
1 TBSP honey

I soaked the almonds in cold water for several hours then pulverized them in the food processor. Then I added water that had just come off boil in batches (to accommodate the size of Kate), blended the mixture for 2-3 minutes, and strained the resulting liquid in my french press. In between batches I returned the almond meal to the food processor. I sweetened the milk at the end by adding a TBSP of honey and shaking the lidded jar vigorously. The remaining pulp has been saved in the fridge and will probably end up mixed in with steel cut oats for breakfast.

The french press use had a couple of rationals behind it. One, I don't yet have any cheesecloth in my arsenal and didn't feel like dropping the money on it at the grocery while waiting for my Amazon order to arrive. Second, after reading the descriptions of making almond milk, it seemed to function on a very similar principle to coffee preparation. You want to extract oils and some fine solids from a pulverized seed type thing. A french press is a great tool for coffee -- why not almond milk.

I found that the french press did very nicely; although, a quick google search turned up one story of a shattered press. I used very slow and even pressure on the plunger and didn't try to force it down too quickly. The press seems no worse for the wear, and I have a happy little quart jar of homemade almond milk.

ETA: Made another batch the other night using cheesecloth to strain the milk from the almond pulp. I managed to extract about 3/4 cup more of milk from the mixture.