lemon lavender shortbread

a simple summer shortbread,

1 c (2 sticks) butter, (vegan or otherwise) softened to room temperature 
3 c flour--  (I like to blend a couple different kinds of flour, last time I made this I used a gluten free flour blend and graham flour along with all purpose)
1 c confectionary sugar
2-3 lemons worth of lemon zest
1 lemon’s worth of juice
1/4 c(ish) fresh lavender, plucked off the stems
 
blend all of the above (hard butter cut into chunks, using a pastry cutter or a food processor) until well mixed and forms a ball, (add more flour if needed) knead in another 1/4 c of whole lavender flowers for added texture.

roll out the dough into a long log or press into a corner of a bread pan, any thickness you like.  Wrap in plastic, wax or foil and freeze.  When you’re ready to bake them, pull it out of the freezer while the oven preheats up to 350f.  slice into little rounds and place on a cookie sheet.  If the dough breaks rather than slices, let it warm up a little more and try again.   bake 10-15 min until the edges just start to turn brown and the kitchen smells buttery. 

if you like, sprinkle granulated sugar on the hot cookies when they first come out of the oven.  let cool and enjoy!

rosemary shortbread

rosemary is a bit of an unsung hero in the herb family, perhaps because it is really only worth using fresh.. between a good loaf of rosemary bread warm out of the oven and this subtly-sweet shortbread, I am a believer. so much so that this has become one of my signature baked goods and the subject of my background photo…

here’s how the magic happens..
blend in a bowl:
1 c (2 sticks) butter, (vegan or otherwise) softened to room temperature
2 c flour
1/2 c confectionary sugar
1/4 c fresh rosemary, chopped

blend until well mixed and forms a ball.. here’s where you have two choices..
1. press the dough into the bottom of a bread pan or roll into a log and chill.   then slice the chilled roll into 1/8 inch thick slices (easier) or..
2. roll out the dough on several cookie sheets, chill on the cookie sheet, then cut out shapes, reform ball and repeat until all the dough is used.

either way you then place the cut or rolled dough onto ungreased cookie sheets. sprinkle or grind a little salt onto the raw cookies then cook in an oven at 350° for 15 min or until the edges of the shortbread turn golden brown..

I enjoy them plain or drizzled with a little chocolate ganache*
**melt some good quality semi-sweet choc chips with a splash of (soy)milk or crème in a double boiler, put it in a plastic bag and cut the corner out, let the magic drizzle out while you pass over a tray of cookies.

ethics tested, and I passed!

I have been in the process of transferring my teaching license to Utah so I can more sustainably teach and pay off student loans (incurred to get said license…)  It has been longer than I had hoped and with plenty of the hoop jumping and the bureaucracy I can look forward to when working in the public school system.  The most enjoyable part so far was taking a 30 question ethics test..  It is indeed a funny thing to take a multiple choice test on!  included below is one of my favorite questions..

9. A counselor is teaching a health class. The counselor explains to the students that no form of contraception is 100% effective. The counselor also explains that in her estimation, the Great Creator never intended for humans to have sexual relationships for any purpose other than procreation and will give AIDS to any person who has sex outside of marriage or for any purpose other than the creation of a baby. Which of the following statements most accurately describes the counselor's actions?

• A The counselor has violated the Utah Educator Standards requiring that teachers communicate with civility with students.
• B The counselor has violated the Utah Educator Standards prohibiting educators from promoting personal opinions as part of the instructional process in a manner inconsistent with law.
• C The counselor has not violated the Utah Educator Standards because she has academic freedom to encourage discussion in the manner she thinks will best elicit a response from students.
• D The counselor has not violated the Utah Educator Standards because the Standards only apply to teachers

ancient and powerful women

we are them and they are us

some times I am more inclined to send information—write, reflect, share—and others I am more inclined to receive—read, listen, observe.   Lately it has been more of the later.  I am reading the richly interwoven “The Temple of my Familiar” by Alice Walker.  Amazing.  It ensnares so many stray thoughts into an intricate, heartfelt mosaic of the human experience.  I feel the need to share this gem, and although I have shortened the excerpt as much as seems fair to both reader and author, really, the whole book has been breathtaking…

Unfortunately, even my poor village women were considered inferior and kept out of the secrets the men felt necessarily to have.  But we knew!  Everything! We always had secrets of our own… Our mother's taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandfathers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added—only women had been priests  Yes!  This is what they said…

Woman was entirely used to herself, while man was still infatuated with his relative newness.  Woman was already into adornment. In truth, she was already into high fashion! Yes! You can laugh, and I know this is a funny was not to put it. But!  Women did not know she was even interested in high fashion.  She was more, you know, like playing with herself.  Making interesting to herself and other women what she already had.  So she had tits, sticking out there!  She had a soft brown belly and strong brown legs.  So what, that she had hair to her ass that glistened like the wings of a bird.  Woman was bored with it,  and so she began to play with how she looked.  She used feathers, shells, stones, flowers.  She used leaves, bark, colored sand.  She used mud.  The toenails of birds!  For days she and her sisters hung over the edge of the reflecting pools in the jungle, trying this and that.  The rest of the time they spent gathering food…

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships of fears.  I am speaking here of man's mind.  The men both worshiped and feared the women.  They kept their distance from them, but spied on them when they could.  the finery the woman wore seemed to prove their supernaturalness. T he men, lacking centuries of clothing and adornment experience of the women, were able to make only the clumsiest imitations.  The women laughed at them!  Perhaps the most fatal error in the whole realm of human responses to sincere effort!  So, at first, to show their worshipful intent, the men, who were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat, gathered those things they knew the women liked or might be encouraged to like-- feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws-- and brought them, on their knees, to the women, who picked over them like housewives at a sale.  
…

♥

the power of play

Unfortunately, I no longer spend my days building forts in bushes and making “potions” with dandelions and pine sap.  I witness daily how central play is for development.  A child can imagine and begin to explore any role from cop to cowgirl, from superhero to an exhausted mother pushing a heavy stroller waiting for the bus.  As children we all play-out ideas and learn our world through empathy and imagination. 

What an immense capacity: the ability and willingness to temporarily take on a role outside ourselves.. and come away with a greater understanding…

A mother of some of the children I work with, looked at me down on a kids’ level being goofy and straight-faced asked me “how do you play?”   Working with young children, I facilitate play daily, yet generally reject the idea that I participate.  I tend to conjure images of a preschool teacher who worships disney movies and wears whinnie-the-pooh sweatshirts, you know the type.  Even as a I write this I fear that perception.  Yet here was an adult woman with two kids and she was really asking: “how do I connect with my kids the way you do?”  Play offers us an opportunity to be outside ourselves and our comfort zone, to lower our fears about how we are being perceived, and really connect to people and experiences.  I feel more open to others when I can imagine their daily life and find a place of identification.  That old saying, don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes, mental role play creates the medium for that practice.  

I am noticing there are many elements of play in my adult world.  I believe we all find moments of play.  I regularly play dress up.  I feel more yogic when I don yoga pants and a zen tank, more hippe and carefree in a skirt, more nurturing in an apron, and more “cool” when I dress to go out as if I were an exceedingly fashionable woman I have never been in daylight.  I imagine myself into situations before I commit to them.  After an interview for a job, I foresee myself in that role, and evaluate if it’s a good fit for me. Looking for apartments, I forecast what it might feel like to live there, experience it each day.  Especially when making life-changing decisions, like the one to move to Utah, I play with the idea of it first and foremost.

Manifestation and visualization seem not-so-distant from play.  Descartes said “I think therefore I am” yet the closer truth for me seems to be: fake it ‘till you make it.  I am becoming and play is a useful tool along the way.  Not unlike the children I work with, I can present a less-authentic self to share with the world while protecting my fragile, dearer, inner self.  Other times play helps me be expansive.  I might be a in role playfully one day, allowing a side of me to come out, and in time, that side becomes a more integral and present part of me.  Play is the bridge between a fantasy and reality.  A safety net.  An opportunity to  be the person we might be with the easy out of: “just playin’.”   I am the thoughtful, confident, beautiful, talented, woman I portray or am I just playin’?  

                                                               What I am to be, I am now becoming. -B Franklin

home is wherever I’m with you

  Sometimes, I fall hard for a song.  It’s the kind of crush that is almost unbearable.  I can listen to the song seven times in a row three times a day and still can’t seem to get enough.  Still, some songs hit me harder than others. 
 
   “Home” by Edwarde Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.  It’s just so simple, sappy and sing-able---like song candy—but for me there is something a bit deeper.
This song found me, more than I it.  I am hardly a person who is ever ahead of any trend, musical or otherwise, but with this song (and Gaga’s first album, oddly enough) it does seem like I heard it before most people I know.  I was finishing a two and half month long cross-the-country-and-back road trip with two of my closest people.  Man, oh man, you’re my best friend, I scream it to the nothingness. There ain’t nothin’ that I need... I’ll follow you into the park, through the jungle, through the dark

   We had already experienced more than our share of car trouble when we landed in a middle-of-nowhere ditch during a fluke December flood in Kentucky.  We survived, but our car was not so lucky.  We found ourselves stranded, trying to have the car repaired locally, and growing restless for “home”.  As grateful as we were for the people and places that had taken us in during our travels, we all craved an end to the couch, car and/or house surfing and to once again be on solid ground.  Anxious to be home, now, we opted to rent a U-haul, (and a flatbed trailer for the car) and drive those last 15 hours up into snowy New England.  Tired, overwhelmed and still taking-in all of our many and varied adventures with friends, family, and strangers around US, we spoke very little in those last hours.  The three of us taking shifts driving, shot-gunning and sitting cramped on the floor between to two seats.  Still, it was a welcome improvement from our water–logged, heatless, and much loved Frida Forester. Moats & boats & waterfalls, alley ways & (cell) phone calls, I’ve been everywhere with you

I drove the last leg, in the early morning.  Once back in the Pioneer Valley, I already began to feel relief, I turned on a familiar local radio station.  As I rounded the final hill and made the final curve on my way to my parents house (the impetus for the trip had been our apartment being foreclosed upon, so the home I was returning to was the one I grew up in), this magical song came on.  I felt like crying and laughing.  La la la la, take me Home.  Baby, I’m coming Home.

Last night Edward came to Twilight, and no, I’m not talking vampires.  (Although when I overheard some young thing saying “I mean, when is Edward going to be on” all sassy and rolling her eyes, I did draw a parallel.) Twilight is Salt Lake’s free concert series.  This year I have a craft booth there and my friend and I have been discussing how having a booth at this event is so grounding.  You walk out into the park at the peak of the concert and it is a sea of people with few landmarks.  Meeting up with friends once there is a challenge at best.  Thousands swarm and cell phones stop working due to sheer concentration.  Yet our cozy booth, complete with a mustard yellow lounge area, is like home. We laugh until we think we’ll die, barefoot on a summer night
Nothin’ new is sweeter than with you

Hearing this song again, and live, I could not help reflecting on the past couple years.  I love the song because it portrays a nomadic lifestyle so beautifully and yet also validates the struggle and the power in enduring.  Literally the song speaks to romantic love, but for me, the “you” in the song is me.  Home is wherever I’m with you.  From foreclosure to flood.  From forlorn and isolated in Guate to the rush and uncertainty of moving to Utah with nothing but a backpack and the hope of something new.  In the midst of shifts and uncertainty in my relationships, friends and family,  Through it all, I had me.  At times I had little else to rely on.  Home is when I’m alone with you.  Here I am, creating home daily (and apparently weekly at a craft booth in the park), in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The desert and the mountains are beginning to feel familiar to this east coast native.  I never would have expected to be here, much less a year and half later, calling Salt Lake home.  Yet the disbelief doesn't make it less true.  Home is where you make it.

Ahh, Home
Yes, I am Home

Vegan Matzoh Ball Soup

     It’s that time of year.  When the Jews and Jewesses* of the world cast away some of the luxuries of food yet somehow still make even more amazing, symbolic and delicious meals.  Passover.  Out here in SLC I have yet to meet a single Jew or Jewess, and I have been missing the company, traditions and of course the foods of their rich culture.  So I created a little taste of the tradition for myself.  
     I’ve been making this soup for several years.  Traditionally the soup is made with chicken broth and a dumpling like balls made from matzoh meal and eggs.  Somewhere in my vegan interpretation I mixed up matzoh meal (the flour used to make matzoh) with matzoh farfle (broken pieces of matzoh) .  So in my version of this classic dish I use crushed whole wheat matzoh, which makes for a slightly more texturized and dense ball that I really enjoy..

the balls:
dry ingredients: (mix in a large bowl)
1 package whole wheat matzoh, crumbled
salt and peppa to taste

wet ingredients: (blend together in food processor)
12oz Package silken tofu
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 c vegetable stock

Mix together wet and dry ingredients and let dough chill for about an hour. 
(In the mean time prepare the broth)  when dough is chilled form into hand sized balls. 

broth ingredients:
4 c vegetable stock, water as needed
1 carrot finely shredded
2 celery spears finely shredded
1 1/2 onion thinly sliced
fresh dill
salt, peeper, brags to taste

Add thinly shredded carrots and celery and thinly sliced onion and chopped fresh dill to vegetable broth on medium heat.  (again this differs from tradition but I like veggies.  by prepping the vegies so thin and delicate they blend with the broth.)  When broth is bubbly and tasty add balls and cook until they are thoroughly warmed.  Serve hot to friends and family.