Object oriented ontology generously posits an agency, a qualified equal existence of all things. This poem shifts and shares the culpability of an accident across time, space and a multiplicity of things in action. It reminds me of Graham Harman’s example of the emperor choking on a pebble. So many things together make each moment of existence possible. My brain hurts with fascination (and often gratitude). Acorn agency and roadside accidents.
One minute I’m meandering down
a country road on a magnificent fall day,
lost in thought, radio playing,
and the next minute I feel my wheels
on the loose gravel of the shoulder,
there’s a deafening bang and I’m
climbing out of what’s left of my car.
The cop who came to investigate
was pretty sure I’d been speeding
but settled for lecturing me about how lucky
I was to walk away from such a crash,
that I’d be dead if my car had hit the tree
just six inches further to the left.
Anyone could see that what he said was true,
but it also struck me as I stood there
watching his car flash red and blue
that it was equally true the accident
would not have happened at all
if a raging storm some sixty years ago
hadn’t blown an acorn six inches closer
to the road than where it would’ve landed
on a day as sunny and calm as the one
we were in. It was a point I thought deserved
serious exploration—though perhaps
not just then, I decided, with a hundred birds
singing their tiny hearts out overhead
and the sky raining down yellow leaves,
and definitely not with the cop.
The book introduces Pantanjali’s yoga sutras without being pedantic or self-righteous AND offers practical strategies and contexts for application. The author, Jennie Lee, is creative in presenting the philosophy as well as corresponding affirmations and self-inquiring questions to journal.
Finally a book that presents yoga as SO much more than asana!
Here is an excerpt emphasizing the willing and rational devotion to kindness, happiness and peace. As such, yoga becomes the practice of choosing to not to suffer particularly when we acknowledge pain.
To be truly happy is to be successful at life and, like anything worth accomplishing, these practices require dedication. We must choose a peaceful response in times of conflict. We must choose a grateful thought when we feel negative and down. We must choose to tell the truth even when it is not convenient. These are not always easy choices, but if we are ready to claim true happiness and security that can sustain us through all the ups and downs of life, then these choices become a small price for the serenity, power, and wisdom they bring.
Lee, Jennie. True Yoga: Practicing With the Yoga Sutras for Happiness & Spiritual Fulfillment (Kindle Locations 132-136). Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.. Kindle Edition.
This may even make the list of my favorite yoga books for all time.
Comfort food is not always easy on the eyes. Khichuri does not “look” delicious but it is soft, warm, roasty, soupy, buttery and all things comforting. Often served for a big crowd since the rice and lentil stew expands, offers protein and warm stick-to-your-ribs comfort. It can be easily modified to the season and personal taste. It tastes like a South Asian version of Italian Risotto or Asian Congee. This week, this dish was Atiya, my baby’s request. Perfect for the changing of the seasons. You will certainly find this in any Ayurvedic/ Yoga recipe book.
Usually, I make this with a sunny side up egg curry in a light tomato sauce. Today I was out of tomato sauce. So, instead, I made a spicy omelet with fried onions, cilantro, and chili peppers.
Basically, the dish requires rice, lentils, and water, cooked together to make a thick soup. That’s it. Everything else is up to family/ personal preference. Throw in whatever spices and vegetables you like.
Here is how I made mine today (tomorrow and next month might be different)
Wednesday Night Khichuri
1/2 cup of lentils (red and yellow mung dal mixed)
1 cup Jasmine rice (makes it extra mushy, Basmati is the traditional choice)
2 cups of water
2 cups of chicken broth (or vegetable broth, or just more water)
1 Bay leaf
1 Cinnamon Stick
3 Cloves
1/2 teaspoon Ginger Paste
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric
Cook over medium heat in a big pot until the rice and lentils break down and become a super soft mush (about 40 minutes). Fry an onion sliced, 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds, 1 garlic clove sliced in 3 tablespoons of ghee or butter. Add the golden onion mixture to the rice. Stir in. Today I also added a chopped tomato for a bit of brightness. Other days I add carrots or peas or other veggies. You may need to add more liquid to make it as soupy as you like. As it sits the Khichuri tends to absorb all the liquid and set up. You can always add more broth when you heat it back up.
Serve with store-bought fried onions, ghee, and a lime wedge.
You can add a sunny side up fried egg, an omelet or an egg curry. You can also serve with fried eggplant or a spicy beef curry. Really, anything goes well with Khichuri.
If you make this in a pressure cooker, it takes about minutes for the rice to breakdown. After you carefully open the lid, add the fried onions. All done in 15 minutes. Today I had time and had my pot simmering for an hour while I watched Chopped on Food Network (Love that show!).
Today’s Gentle Yoga Practice was based on one of my favorite sutras that reminds us: Yoga is NOT a quick fix.
A yoga practice requires consistency, duration and intention. Like anything in life, small steady steps lead us through any desired change of habit or state. When I find a pose difficult this sutra gives me assurance. When I feel the road ahead long and impossble, it’s a gentle reminder about the greatness of small consistent steps.
Here it is according to Georg Feuerstein’s translation:
Yoga Sutra 1.14:
But this [practice] is firmly grounded [only after it has been] cultivated properly and for a long time uninterruptedly.
For our asana practice, I used circles: arms, hips, legs, toes as a way to give shape to the idea of steady continuity and repetition. For our meditation, we focused on gratitude for something that gives us consistency and steadiness to our days.
……show us a lot about the power of food to bring a community together. Someone had to collect the recipes, each named person wrote down and shared something from their table, someone typed the pages, someone organized the book, someone punched the holes, someone tied the yarn that bound the book….the book has recipes, scripture, has anecdotes about how to preserve love. The gentle and fragile binding of the cookbook holds the congregation and what each of them materially and spiritually consumes. It is a record of loving effort.
Imagine putting together a cookbook with your loved ones, maybe its a collection of places and restaurants you have been with each other or alone. A shared biography of iPhone- Instagram food pictures. It doesnt’ have to be glossy and polished with professional photography. It can be messy, incomplete and loosely tied. It would still hold already shared or hoped for shared joy. Save this for a quick weekend project on a cold winter day when you are at home while a warm pot of stew simmers on the stove.
The poem about “how to preserve love” in the cookbook made me smile,
Give as much as you can away for it dries up immediately when put on a shelf.
Mixed with kindness, it is your best recipe for happiness.
Thank you to Rachel Perrin, my most nurturing and steady mother-in-law, who shared this mid-1970s cookbook from Villa Rica Baptist Church in Georgia and taught me how to make biscuits, coconut pie, pecan pie, chicken and dumplings, meatloaf and so much more.
I want to remember this recipe because it was so light, bright and delicious. The recipe came from a Try the World Box. Remember it with me!
The addition of Sumac made this otherwise plain Tilapia Fish Sandwich, Turkish. Although it was included in the box, you can get Sumac in any Middle Eastern or South Asian grocery store. The spice looks red but instead of heat, it imparts a lemony brightness to dishes.
I am not a big raw onion fan, however, this “salad” was so flavorful and versatile that it’s worth keeping in mind for any grilled meats or sandwiches. Here is my variation of the recipe (I didn’t have the kind of vinegar or herb called for in the original recipe):
Turkish Red Onion Salad
2 red onions thinly sliced
1 medium cubed tomato
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
Juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon good extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon vinegar (whichever kind you prefer)
2 teaspoons Sumac
Mix in a bowl and let sit. Serve with your grilled or fried, fish or chicken.
The lemon and vinegar tempers the onion and adds brightness. The sumac amplifies the brightness with an almost floral note. Combined with the mayonnaise on the toasted baguette and flaky fish it made a worthy and fancy fish sandwich.
Dear vegetarian friends, I bet it would be tasty on a grilled eggplant sandwich too.
Here is a beautiful poem about gratitude for you —
All my life I’ve been lucky. Not that I made money,
or had a beautiful house or cars. But lucky to have
had good friends, a wife who loves me, and a good
son. Lucky that war and famine or disease did not
come to my doorstep. Lucky that all the wrong
turns I made, even if they did turn out well, at least
were not complete disasters. I still have some of my
original teeth. All that could change, I know, in the
wink of an eye. And what an eye it is, bright blue
contrasting with her dark skin and black hair. And
oh, what long eyelashes! She turns and with a slight
smile gives me a long slow wink, a wink that says,
“Come on over here, you lucky boy.”
How do I justify spending a small fortune for one evening? Was the experience worth possibly hundreds of rescued books (my currency)?
Yes. Yes, it was. Thankfully.
Particularly when one takes into account the imaginative time of anticipation and the echoed time of appreciation.
Our June 22nd dinner at l’Arpege began at least nine months ago when I watched the first episode of the third season of the Netflix series, Chef’s Table. As our trip to Paris approached, I watched it again with my sweet, Jim. I was fascinated with how chef Passard talked about the creative “gesture” as much as his status as the “maestro of vegetable cuisine.” I blogged about it in this post.
Actually eating there seemed like a distant fantasy.
Then, surprisingly Jim made a reservation. I was both excited and horrified. What if the fantasy doesn’t match up with reality? What an expensive disappointment? Reading this less than positive review, “The Crushing Disappointment of l’Arpege” didn’t help my anxiety either. But, I am not a food critic. It is not my job to convince, justify or explain. My job is simply to enjoy the best I can. Food blogging is perhaps a more self-centered but less self-righteous mode of sharing gastronomic experiences. Look what I ate, I am so happy and you should be too……..the capitalist-consumer nostalgia is not lost on me.
The limits of food criticism and blogging aside, Thursday, June 22nd arrived. We were in Paris. While Jim was working at the Paris Airshow, I took two cooking classes, Monday and Tuesday. I was immersed in learning French cuisine. Learning, eating, watching, walking, and eating again. I felt like I was training for l’Arpege. I couldn’t have been more emotionally prepared to have a wonderful evening of new tastes and the best of company. I was determined to enjoy it, darn it!
During our short walk to the restaurant I carried my determination with the nervous intensity of carrying a jug full of precious water through the desert. We were seated promptly in the cellar with rugged walls and about 6-8 small white-clothed tables for two. Our server introduced himself. Jim and I talked in reverent hushed tones. We noticed the other tables and our fellow diners. Then the amuse bouche arrived. I gingerly picked up the colorful, beautiful bite, and then I don’t remember anything but fragments of the evening.
Time slowed and sped up, tastes were surprising, often I didn’t recognize what I was eating, names were curious, textures and colors were popping. I remember being suspicious of hay-flavored ice-cream and then loving it, how the sole tasted light and substantive floating on a flavored foam, how the duck felt like an assertive steak, and mostly how the vegetables blossomed, fluttered, foamed and floated. I didn’t take pictures, I wanted to just be in my mouth.
Towards the end of the meal, Chef Passard himself emerged to meet each table. I was starstruck (and I am too cynical for celebrity worship). This never happens. While Jim was talking with him…words…..anniversary….yada yada…happy to be here…take a picture..more words….in my inner monologue, I wondered how can he, a chef, be dressed in all glowing white, panjabi and sandals? In the picture, I look like I’m holding my breathe, horrified and confused.
The evening was worth it. It was small slice of an event that will continue to echo in my memory as long as it functions. This was a memorable meal fed by expectation, digested and converted into inspirational energy. The experience wafts beyond the three hours.
Yes, I still feel guilty that I could feed a small village in Bangladesh or a few hundred at the homeless shelter in Indiana. The guilt is warranted. However, that one evening of experiencing the best efforts of a creative artist, the produce of a beautiful country, the historical, political, social and ecological complex context that made that meal possible continues to make me feel human with the privilege of sense, sensation and guilt.
I, hungryphil, am most drawn to Passard’s philosophy of small things that is best expressed in his recipes. Here is how he introduces his recipe for peaches with lemon and saffron:
Peaches with Lemon and Saffron
“I always like to give a lift to stone fruit simply by adding a tangy touch of lemon juice to it. This recipe takes the lemon further: its chunky segments are stewed alongside segments of peach in a little butter. The lemon adds a vivacious piquancy to the gentle peach, and the heady scent of saffron and some grenadine syrup add to their flavors. The real key to this gastronomic treat, however, is adding olive oil – of the finest quality you can afford- at the end of cooking. Slivered toasted almonds complete the presentation.”
Notice the language of lift, of furthering, of gentility, of quality, and of presentation. This is the perspective I hoped to have absorbed in eating at his restaurant. I didn’t want a meal as a privileged traveler’s trophy. My determination to make the meal great may have made it so. So what? The meal at the least met my expectations half way. It lifted and furthered my taste, like the segments of peaches. Like his recipe, I imagine my fragmented memories and appreciation will “murmur very gently” for years to come, just like chef Alain Passard’s recipe. I will not stir or mix it with bad reviews.
“Partially cover the pan, and adjust the heat to allow the juices to murmur very gently for 20-30 minutes. During this time, do not stir, or mix the ingredients, or the segments of peach may break.”
Thank you Jim for making this experience possible. What a wonderful evening walking with you in Paris after a beautiful meal! You are my celebrity crush. I don’t look horrified and confused here.
So, there is it. The story about how I ate an uncomfortably expensive meal and found comfort in human creativity.
Despite the sin of blogging an event weeks later, here I am. To me, my summer travels are still fresh and worth reliving, even if just to extend the trip a bit longer. Here are five lessons I learned.
1. Pastries, desserts, macarons are experiences of contradiction. Light and airy yet decadent and buttery. Sweets are not only sweet but flavorful. I can taste the butter, the fruit, the flavorings. In Paris, contradiction is sweet!
2. Location, location, location. During a food tour in Paris, we visited a cheese shop. The origin of each cheese variety, the type of milk, and the name was clearly labeled. The region of the cheese is part of the taste and experience. In France, location really matters. Sadly, I don’t know where all my food comes from.
3. Taking cooking classes was a humbling experience that helped me appreciate the simplicity of ingredients and complexity of skill. A baguette is made with flour, salt, water, and yeast. That’s it. No butter. 4 ingredients. A sequence of kneading, rising, kneading and rising, yields the crunchy on the outside, chewy soft on the inside bread that needs to be eaten within three hours. The master sauces class taught me the same lesson. Simple ingredients become unctuous sauces through appropriate sequences of heat, whisking, resting. In France, skill is respected and expected.
4. Markets have a beautiful variety of fresh produce, meats and dairy products. If I were to shop there to make a meal, I don’t know how I would choose. Building a relationship with a favorite vendor would be the best way to decide, I suppose. Somehow, my local grocery store seems very impersonal now. Next summer, if in town, I’ll spend more time getting to know my local produce vendors. I’m reminded that fresh and local produce is imperfect, beautiful and tasty.
5. Long walks between cooking classes, lunch, dinner, snacks, and markets with a curiosity towards small things like the weeds on the banks of the Seine grounds Paris. The idealized glittering image of Paris with its cathedrals, museums, palaces become gritty, real, and more beautiful in my eyes through the experience and perspective of weeds, trash, construction debry and hot summer sweat. The small things remind me that Paris is the home of many and not just an idealized tourist destination. I wonder if the beautiful floral weeds still live there.
What a wonderful trip discovering the grand- the small, the light-the rich, the sweet- the salty, the delicious-beautiful contradictions in Paris. The visit reminded me to notice the contradictions of textures and tastes, the location, the skill, the ingredients and the larger context. I hope to eat like a tourist everywhere, even at home.
Food is a collective coping strategy. Funny. Sad. True.
Maybe cake is the answer. I want to yell into a cake now. Feels cathartic. But, is it okay to be a silent non-violent protester? How do we confront violence, fear, hate? With violence? With indifference? With cake? How do we react and do differently, instead of inverse mirroring? Meeting hate chant with peace songs? We are told to ignore the bully and engage the victim in public hate instances. Do we do the same with a group of torch bearing, blood and soil chants? How do we invoke Popper’s paradox of tolerance of everything except intolerance? How do we address isolation and alienation that fuels such hot hate?
“Arendt’s understanding of the origins of totalitarianism begins with her insight that mass movements are founded upon “atomized, isolated individuals.” The lonely people whom Arendt sees as the adherents of movements are not necessarily the poor or the lower classes. They are the “neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.” They are not unintelligent and are rarely motivated by self-interest. Arendt writes that Heinrich Himmler understood these isolated individuals when he “said they were not interested in ‘everyday problems’ but only ‘in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries, so that the man […] knows he is working for a great task which occurs but once in 2,000 years.’” The adherents of movements are not motivated by material interests; they “are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.”
Tina Fey is a talented comedian who did an excellent job to expose the absurd through the absurd. Her comments make me think, as a philosopher what can I say? I’m still thinking…………….in the meantime pausing and eating “sheet-caking” is something we can do together. Still thinking……………….
Here is a flag cake recipe from my favorite TV chef Ina Garten. The cake was moise and light, the frosting tangy and sweet and much appreciated. The fruit is my favorite part. Strawberry, kiwi, mango, peaches can be other versions of this cake. I’m not a natural baker but Ms. Garten’s recipes make it easy. If I can bake it, you can too. Remember to share. That’s the most important part!
The Hungry Philosopher 