I haven’t been collecting ornaments for too many years, but here are some I have/like:

glass cupcake, part of a set of four (also in white)

Little owls made of straw and wood.

A goomba, of course.

A peace dove picked up at my free sale.

A gourd owl from Nate last year.

A mushroom that clips to the branch.

Cheeky bumble tree topper.

Nate’s beer, a glass ornament found at a thrift store.

Owlie.

The most recent addition, from Nataleigh.

I wanted to get my tree up in time for the first dinner co-op of December. Every first and third Thursday I get together with a group of pals to have dinner at someone’s house. December 1 was my night. I made salad dressing (creamy Sea Czar from Professional Vegetarian (actually vegan) Cooking), chick’n noodle soup, roasted vegetables, crispy battered deep-fried tofu smothered in shiitake & portabella gravy, and baked apples with a poured-over homemade caramel sauce.

It’s just a soup and salad.

I love this soup! So easy! So warming! Onions, shallots, celery; carrots; broth; marjoram, thyme, sage, rosemary, a little shaved nutmeg; Soy Curls reconstituted, drained, and sauteed in a cast iron skillet with aromatics, shoyu, nutritional yeast. Combine. Simmer. Add noodles. Eat four bowls without blinking.

Roasted vegetables and smothered tofu.

Easy apple dessert: cored, stuffed with a brown sugar/flour/oil/spices/oats/nuts combo, baked in a pan of water infused with vanilla and cinnamon for 45 min; covered with a homemade caramel sauce. Recipe in the Modern Vegetarian (mostly vegan) Kitchen by Peter Berley.

Sarah & Nate

Elizabeth, Jacquie, and Aden

I love having friends over.

Today I met my new farmer-friend from Serenbe to pick up the beautiful order of vegetables they donated to this week’s meal delivery in return, basically, for mentioning that they have a CSA. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and refers to the system wherein subscribers pay farmers in advance for a share of the next year’s harvest, which is then delivered to a central pick-up point on a weekly basis. Serenbe in particular is worried that folks in our parts (AKA L5P, Candler Park, Inman Park, Reynoldstown, etc) don’t know that they offer a CSA. Well, folks – be aware! Serenbe offers a gorgeous CSA!

Subscribers have three options: the full season share, the Spring/Summer share, and the fall share. The full season share runs 30 weeks from late April to late November. It’s $770, or almost $26 per week. A week looks basically like what’s above. The Spring/Summer share is twenty weeks from late April til September. It’s $600. Finally, the fall share runs 10 weeks from mid-September til late November at a cost of $300.

You might feel a sense of sticker shock if you’ve never seen CSA prices before. It seems like a lot up front, but consider how much you put in the mega-corp pockets of Wal-Mart/Kroger/Publix/etc getting produce shipped from Mexico, California, or god-knows-where? $26 per week for gorgeous, locally-grown, responsible vegetables is a bargain. Further, Serenbe’s prices are competitive. Vegetable Husband, another CSA I like, is $35 per week for approximately the same amount of food. They’re the high-end luxury CSA in my opinion because they include delivery To Your Residence. In contrast, Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture offers another similar program for about $17 per week. So Serenbe is a mid-range choice. I am looking forward to trying everything – look for another update with recipes next week!

The fun continued today with a visit to Criminal Records to help my lovely friend Lillian cozy up the store with Christmas decor. Apparently I can’t take a fuzz-free picture to save my life these days, but here’s what we finished:

Unpacking, assembling, fluffing, and decorating two artificial Christmas trees; wrapping a lot of boxes; making it look festive. We focussed on the back stage area since that’s where A**hole Santa will be on Sunday.

While decorating, an Ars Gratis secret agent came in to drop off a piece for Free Art for Free Art Friday Atlanta. From the official site: “Free Art Friday is an art scavenger hunt that happens on the first Friday of every month. Participants make art and place it around town for others to find and take home.” Plus, it’s totally ‘organized’ (to the extent that it is organized) by an awesome vegan artist, Kenn Twofour.

A handmade George bill with an ancient White Christmas album.

I helped him nestle it in the tree. Within minutes of texting the clues to Twitter with the appropriate Free Art Friday hashtag etc, someone had come to claim it.

I guess I was maybe a teensy bit disappointed that I was in Criminal to decorate and not to get free art, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I totally would have snagged the Ars Gratis piece. But I got over myself… and wouldn’t you know, just an hour or so later I was walking into my favorite vegan barbeque joint, Burnt Fork… and as I approached, I noticed and casually grabbed an Evereman zombie sitting in the window!

It was like the most natural thing in the world to do. Ambling up to my favorite restaurant – oh, there’s an Evereman. Free Art Friday. Yoink.

Such is the beauty of Free Art Friday. Anyone inclined to make something and share it with the world is welcome to do so. If you’re famous (ahem, Catlanta), people will refresh your Twitter feed and hunt ravenously. But even if you’re less so, whoever comes across your art is totally delighted to take it home. Evereman is definitely one of the more famous street artists, and while I’m not too into zombies, I’m really thrilled to have a piece.

If you’d like to keep up with Free Art Friday, you should totally follow them on Twitter and like them on facebook. Here’s the full run-down if you’re still not totally sure what FAFATL is all about.

Now, if you’ll excuse me… I need to go rescue my baby girl Unix.

Meanwhile, Nate and I spend the evening doing crafty things: making video game/8-bit Perler art, or “sprites“. We wanted to DO something – not just sit around and worry. Create, not imbibe. And time really flies when you’re making sprites, all the better for those of us keeping an eye on returns.

First, I cooked a mostly from-scratch meal for the first time in possibly two weeks? Intense emergency dentalwork + the worst cold in years put me out of commission… but I’ll be back in time for Crack the Plates deliveries on Tuesday, hooray! Tonight, just a simple homemade tomato sauce with sauteed seasoned soy curls over tortiglioni – easy, but still with a sense of accomplishment. Mostly, though, we made things:

Nate finishing a project.

My Mario garden. Interested in perler crafts? Learn more here.

Perl lookin’ pretty.

Taking note of her father perilously balancing a netbook, Unix decided she just had to join him. He was not so pleased.

“What, papa? Dis are problem?” “Ok, I are guess not Unix.”

And that’s how we spent election night 2011.

In my last post I mentioned that I would be cooking a lot of fourth food in hopes of raising money for our trip. That hope became a reality! Not only did tons of friends and friends-of-friends order lunches, but I got a great big catering order! Thanks to your generosity, we’re no longer freaking out about having to put any portion of our trip on the credit card. I feel great.

Thursday night I made eight dozen chocolate espresso cupcakes for Nate’s officemates. Three dozen had already been “reserved” – the others were up for grabs. Nate came home with an empty tray!

I started the fourth orders after the cupcake drop. Friday morning & me: 8 blocks of tofu, cubed, fried, drenched in gravy:

Deep dish.

Meanwhile, I soaked a bunch of organic navy beans from the co-op. Like, four pounds.

In time, such things became these things:

I took a break to make & donate cupcakes to neighbor holding a fundraiser:

The catering order was so pretty!

Look at these baked beans!

Crispy tempeh bacon is so delicious.

Mmmm, tempeh bacon. Okay, I’ll stop.

Packing it up for the final individual orders.

Out for delivery!

Signed, sealed, delivered – it’s yum.

To celebrate, I extracted March’s Chocolate of the Month from the freezer (and layers and layers of wrapping, lest freezerburn provoke!). Perfect.

Oh, and shared a lunchbox with Nate. Serendipitously, after filling all the orders, there was ONE LEFT!

Rarry was feeling celebratory, too, so I gave her a few branches of catnip. Yeah, branches. That’s how we roll around here.

She lost her mind.

The comedown.

I made more cupcakes, this time for grieving. Since cupcakes = instant joy, I figured they were appropriate for our gathering.

A new concoction, blackberry cobbler – rich (soy)buttermilky cake with a fat organic blackberry in the middle; raspberry frosting on top.

And today, I roasted vegetables for the road tomorrow. Does anyone else cook everything in their fridge before travelling?

My battery’s almost dead – love you all!

PS: atliens, bradford cox likes the Ponce whole foods. just sayin’.

January

• Started my final semester of graduate school and thesis-writing!
• Considering how I might embody the counter-cultural, anti-materialistic message of Jesus in one of the most insanely commercial times of the year, I hosted a free sale at my house… and provided suggestions for yours!
• More community-building: hosted the Super Happy Dev Night with Nate!
• Moderated a discussion of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders on the topic “Sacred Sexuality: What do religious texts really say about sex & sexuality?” as part of the Religious Emphasis Week at Earlham College
• Did a lot of organizing, awareness- and fund-raising for Haiti relief, with an emphasis on groups that would be around for community-building after the dust settled (Life & Hope Haiti particularly)

February

• Hosted a free sale at Amigos, advocating giving directly for building community
• Fell in love with RuPaul’s Drag Race – hosted weekly viewing parties
• Began the Lenten journey with Global Women’s Project’s Calendar and Amy Ritchie’s “Thirsting for God”
• Celebrated one year with cat Unix
• Attended IFYC’s Stranger to Neighbor training at Earlham College
• Was inspired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s talk on astrophysics and poetry

March

• My birthday! Had a great dinner with Anna Lisa & Seth on the 10^th and a Wonka-themed party the weekend after
• Was super proud of my little brother for organizing protests around GA budget cuts targetting education
• Happy memory: One day, while working at the church, I noticed three young boys (mid-elementary) circling the Peace Pole outside of the entryway. I went out, explained the meaning, and pointed out how people of every language wish for peace. The best part was when I quizzed them on the languages (after explaining what they are & where they’re spoken, of course!) and one boy referred to Arabic as “Iraqic!” We straightened it out and he seemed very happy with his new knowledge of that gorgeous lettering. When the elderly crossing guard came over, she said “I’d always wondered about that thing! Tell me about it, too!” And, of course, I did. She patted the boy on the back and said “We learned something, didn’t we?!”
• Supported my mom as she started her new gig as accompanist at Aragon United Methodist Church!
• Attended my first Passover Seder at Earlham College, hosted by friend & Rabbinic intern Aaron! I didn’t find the afikomen but I did throw open the door for Elijah!

April

• I hosted two interfaith dinners to test instructions offered in my Master’s thesis. Building upon an understanding that interfaith dialogue is about relationship-building, I provided theoretical and practical reasons, as well as clear directions, for bringing young adults of differing faiths together around food. The dinners – on April 13 and 23 – offered an opportunity to test my guidelines! They were extraordinarily well-received by the Earlham community: the second event, a middle-eastern themed picnic, had over 75 attendees!
• Presented my thesis to the seminary community at Earlham School of Religion’s Common Meal
• Took a break from thesis-writing to go see xiu xiu at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit
• Made seitan (that vegan staple) for the first time with Seth
• Defended my thesis on the 26^th – small crowd, but it was a great success!

May

• Submitted my thesis for approval! By the numbers: 150 pages; 43,495 words; 36,414 words in the body text; 20 words in the title; 2 inches – thickness in 100% cotton paper; 265 footnotes; 70 entries in the works cited section; 67 respondents to interfaith dinner questionnaire, results displayed in the appendix…
• Graduated from Earlham School of Religion on an unseasonably cold day!
• Happily moved from NW I Street to the sunny, if dilapidated, College Ave apartment
• Dumpstered at Earlham post-graduation and student move-out: recovered two car-loads worth of stuff for Goodwill and local charity. Discovered that students put actual trash, recyclables, and perfectly good items in the same trash bags. Opened dozens, sorting out the recyclables, removing what could be donated, and re-tying the actual trash. Full bottles of cleaning products, shampoos and conditioner, unused notebooks, a $22 SIGG water bottle, skullcandy headphones, multiple rugs, lamps, a pair of unopened contacts, several comforters, shelf-stable canned goods, unworn pairs of $100+ shoes … just a few of the treasures found.
• Helped worship-lead an incredible service at Richmond Church of the Brethren with Bob Hunter and Matt McKimmy – “Celebrating the Music of the African-American church” – ALL God’s children got shoes!
• Said goodbye to lots of friends as they left for new adventures – Seth & Jenny in Chicago, Jenna & Peter in Scotland, Benji, back to California, and all the other grads…

June

• Travelled to California for the first time – 2010 vacation!
• Ran into my interfaith hero Eboo Patel at Stanford!
• Served as a panelist at Richmond Church of the Brethren’s Faith and Food Panel Discussion

July

• Sustained my first accident as a bike commuter – a transfer truck ran me off the side of the road while on my way to work at the church! If I recall correctly, July was a month of bad/weird Thursday mornings…
• Went to see Jujubee in Columbus, Ohio with Nate and Michael!
• Visited Jina in Ann Arbor; went to see Lightning Bolt with Wolf Eyes at the MOCAD
• Served as a delegate to the South/Central Indiana District yearly meeting of the Church of the Brethren

August

• Moved into the most beautiful house in Richmond, 447 College (no offence, other Richmond houses :))
• Hosted a Perseid meteor shower party
• Briefly got really into making Perler crafts – hope to pick this up again soon!
• Focused on raising awareness and money for Pakistan flooding (at final count, a little over $200 one Sunday with a home-made bulletin board and short presentation before worship at RCoB) – the larger Church of the Brethren did well, too!
• Cooked a lot of yummy vegan food for Nate’s sister & brother-in-law, when they visited from New York
• Started volunteering at Earlham’s Office of Religious Life – first task, building Lady Gaga eyewear for the Director of Religious Life (a skit!)

September

• Successfully trained to drive a 12-passenger van at Earlham College!
• Inspired by my friend Tim Brauhn and his blog practicalraw.com, I bought a fancy-schmancy blender and an Ani Phyo cookbook and started doing more raw foods! (A little late in the season for Indiana, I know…)
• Participated in a moving interfaith vigil (in response to the Qu’ran burning controversy) – “Holding Our Holy Texts in the Light”
• Presented at Peace Forum, “From the Full Plate to the Wide World”
• Went to hear my dear friend Aaron give the Rosh Hashanah sermon at Temple Israel – Dayton !
• Attended Rosh Hashanah, Kol Nidre, and Yom Kippur services for the first time; drove Earlham students to these services
• Attended Eid services for the first time at the Islamic Society of North America in Plainfield, Indiana – drove students to this service, too!
• Helped build a sukkah for sukkot, the happy Jewish harvest festival!
• Volunteered and attended services for the International Day of Prayer for Peace in Richmond
• Because I went to a school that officially issued credit/no credit instead of letter grades, I had to petition my professors to convert their narrative evaluations of my work into letter grades. This takes some time. I was thrilled to finally learn that I made a 3.92 GPA in graduate school overall, and a 4.00 in my concentration! The A’s in Greek surprised me more than anything else…
• My cat Unix escaped and returned hours later covered in poison ivy, which she bestowed upon me – thus commencing my second-worst poison ivy attack

October

• Went to hear xiu xiu and deerhoof in Bloomington
• Went to hear xiu xiu and deerhoof in Columbus
• Helped friends Aaron and Mel move to Ithaca! :-(
• Started the second season of “Spiritual Snapshots”, a story-telling class I started with the help of Matt McKimmy at Richmond Church of the Brethren! Inspired by an Sunday class gathering at Atlanta Friends Meeting, I proposed we gather as a community before worship to hear stories – “snapshots” – from our journeys of faith. From October – Dec 2009 AND 2010, it provided a way to get to know folks in the congregation better and make new friends.
• Gave a great big Mario-themed birthday blow-out for my sweetie Nate
• Travelled to Chicago for Nate’s MongoDB conference, hung out with Jenny and got thrift plague
• Attended the American Academy of Religion annual conference in Atlanta
• Visited the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan mandir outside of Atlanta!
• Supported Nate as he started the application process with Amazon (which would culminate with an offer in early December)
• Helped spread awareness of the pernicious “vampire power” – when plugged in electronics continue to leach power, even when not in use – with a silly presentation at Richmond Church of the Brethren

November

• Celebrated two years with my darling Nate
• Celebrated a year with baby cat Perl
• Made enough home-made barbeque sauce to feed well over 100 people for Peace Forum’s Thanksgiving meal!
• Went to hear dear friend Aaron’s senior sermon at Hebrew Union in Cincinnati!
• Did all of the cooking for and helped host (with Charlotte-Anne M.) my third interfaith dinner, a benefit for Genesis of the YWCA and the kick-off to Earlham’s IFYC Better Together campaign. We fed over seventy people and raised $401 (not including material donations of food and household items) for Richmond’s only domestic violence outreach resource! Official video here.
• Flew back to Georgia for my brother’s beautiful wedding to Sarah
• Enjoyed a ridiculously delicious vegan Thanksgiving meal with Donnie and other Earlham vegan friends at Teetor House
• Travelled to Chicago to see Jenny and celebrate vegan ThanksLIVING at Chicago Diner

December

• Celebrated Hanukkah with my first kugel, latkes, applesauce, and home-made vegan dill sour crème!
• Trained my replacement at the church
• Enjoyed a great going-away at Richmond Church of the Brethren – so many sweet messages!
• Stayed with Elizabeth and Dustin Hartman and all their animals (cats and raccoons) while we searched for a new home in Atlanta. Super-awesome Elizabeth runs Tails from the Hart, a wildlife rescue outside of Atlanta.
• Squeezed in a trip to New York for Christmas between packing up in Richmond and moving to Atlanta with the gracious help of Nate’s parents!
• Applied for the Faiths Act Fellowship, an extraordinary opportunity funded by Interfaith Youth Core and the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that brings young adult bridge-builders together from all over the world to work on furthering the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

Year-long

• Served as a study buddy mentor in Richmond Community Schools
• Involvement with Earlham Animal Advocates United, from hosting and cooking lots of dinners, co-op meals, Nathan Runkle presentation, helping prepare the debaters, promoting VegPledge, and much more!
• Served as Office Manager at Richmond Church of the Brethren, which included making weekly bulletins, monthly newsletters, the yearly directory, as well as serving as a central point of contact in the church and between the church and Richmond-area aid/outreach organizations.
• Continued to be involved in the campaign to save Richmond’s Human Rights Commission and, once it was cruelly defunded by the Common Council, supported the burgeoning Equality Richmond Group

What a wonderful year! Here’s to 2011!

Some of her other quirks include: snorting, snoring/wheezing, scratching everything (til one of us bellows “Hugs Time!” and she stops, fearing an embrace), getting in a box and planting, being a B, attacking her small bean friends Mr. Dog and Cow-Cow, hiding out in the shower, sticking her weird cat-arms through the holes in a particular laundry basket, and mauling mobile phones, especially while in speakerphone mode.

According to Unix, though, the best part of her birthday was the catnip binge. (Big thanks to Auntie Catherine for making it possible.) Photographic evidence as to why a run for public office is no longer an option:

Birthday kisses, Ra-ra.

I had hoped to give you an update before the 6th of this month, but I’ve been dutifully working on my thesis before tomorrow’s first meeting with my advisor in the new year. Blessed with a quiet home, good tea and coffee, and bountiful blankets for snuggling, I’ve been able to get a lot done. Today I hope to read many more articles, finish a book (or two) and, of course, write write write! But first, a cheery update re: what I’ve been up to lately.

As this post’s title suggests, my chief kitchen (my chef chef?) concern in 2010 (at least the early part) is finding a way to provide fast, delicious, healthy, vegan meals for myself and Nate …on a budget. Last year my strategy toward eating well & saving money was to to cook exclusively from fresh, raw ingredients–from scratch–all of the time. I was so committed to saving money on the grocery bill that I regarded even a can of beans a luxury and insisted on preparing my own from dry in the crock pot.

While using raw ingredients (including dry beans) definitely saved me money at market, I, like many women, was missing something huge: I wasn’t counting the cost of my time in the kitchen. A good 2-3 hours start to finish every night has a cost–a time expenditure, yes, but also a cost on one’s mental, physical, & spiritual energy. I was so caught up in a routine & way of thinking such that even if I had been at work, school, and volunteering all day, I would still come home, running on empty, and prepare a big lush meal that I barely had the energy to enjoy once I’d finished. While I might have been saving money in the grocery store, I probably expended way more in crucial non-cash resources.

So I’m doing something different this year. I’ll still try to delight you with my elaborate creations on a regular basis, but they’ll be more likely to feature a canned or frozen or prepared ingredient. I’ll still focus on organic, fair-trade ingredients, but will now have to navigate my desire for something prepared/more easily accessible with my desire to avoid a lot of excess packaging.  Of course, if you have any ideas towards these ends–especially recipes–please send them my way!

Here’s one of my early examples in 2010: spicy chick’n pizza. Ingredients: one store-brand organic pizza crust, one jar of non-GMO pizza sauce, chopped shallots, chopped onions, chopped garlic, frozen organic spinach, chopped organic mushrooms, and two Boca brand vegan spicy chick’n patties, chopped. Assemble (15 min), bake for 10 minutes (while reading an article), let sit for 5, voilà!

Cost: $5.59. About the same price as an Amy’s Kitchen organic frozen pizza, only double the size. About half the cost of a commercial delivered pizza, but way more nutritious and delicious (and organic), taking no more time than you would if you drove to pick up your pizza or waited for them to come to you. Win!

Further win, in the Italian theme: our cat Unix as stromboli (paradoxically, wrapped in an American flag throw)! She’s been doing a lot of burrowing lately.

I has a foot.

How to keep a Ra-Ra type from escaping through the bedroom window. Here, she is particularly incensed with Weasel-friend, her dearest enemy.

Sleepy sweetserole.

Doubled recipe of the Asparagus and sun-dried tomato “Frittata” from Vegan With a Vengeance, made with tofu, nutritional yeast, mustard, and many other disparate ingredients that don’t sound like they’ll taste all that good together but actually makes one swoon. One of the best recipes in the book.

Looking to do something with the Dandies Candies marshmallows I brought back from Chicago (aside from gobble them straight from the bag), I googled and discovered a recipe from a fellow VeganMoFoer p.h.d.elicious called Chocolate Confetti. Simple concept: chocolate + peanut butter + fat (eBal!) + vegan marshmallows makes a veg very, very happy. :-) I threw in peanuts and added a little salt.

Befitting an anniversary, I scooped out half a container of Turtle Mountain’s Purely Decadent Cookie Dough soy ice cream, drove a sharp piece of bark into it and covered it with organic chocolate sauce and peanuts. Yowzah. (To my credit, I didn’t eat it.)

And for those who care, a picture of our darling Ra-Ra type Unix, a veteran open-source user. Yay Ubuntu 9.10! Hoorah Karmic Koala!

On the flip-side, it makes me feel guilty about not having blogged in a couple days. (Not that you’re out there chewing off your fingers waiting for something new to read, but it does add a measure of responsibility, knowing you’re there.) The disappointing truth is that there wasn’t much extraordinary coming out of our kitchen this weekend. Saturday and Sunday were rather glum because of work we did towards recovering the stolen bike. (It seems very unlikely that we will recover it, but we did the flyer/walking around the neighborhood/talking to the neighborrhood-alliance President thing anyway.) We ate a lot of pre-packaged food: a Kashi pizza, heat-and-eat dumplings, and more veggie patties of various stripes than I care to mention. Sunday I made raspberry muffins for a Process Theology conversation group–muffins, my culinary summit for Sunday. :-/

Tonight, though, was book club! Each month a group a small group of friends gathers for a pot-luck and conversation (with tons of unrelated gossip) around a featured piece of lit. Because October is my favorite month, I claimed it months ago. We read in common Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Since I’m too tired to write my own description, here’s a link to the associated wikipedia page. Basically, Ray interweves a story of South Georgia land, its plants (long-leaf pine & wiregrass) and its creatures (assorted) that is centuries older than she and her people are (the ecological narrative) with her own memoir of growing up in on this radically-altered landscape; specifically, in a junkyard with fundamentalist parents. It is a beautiful story that can be difficult to bear at moments, especially if you have bipolar disorder in your family; nonetheless, as I noted at book club tonight, it was not the tragic moments that coaxed tears from my eyes, but the soaring ones that stole my heart and infused it with rapture.

Appropriately, the theme of the food was “that which evokes your childhood/homeland.” I made my momma’s sweet tea–

• 8 tea bags steeped briefly,
• squeezed and poured over nearly two cups of sugar that waits in the bottom of the gallon jug
• then topped off with water

Sinfully sweet. I also served some good ol’ deep-southern buttermilk cornbread, cooked in the skillet with drippings from my vegan gravy; cabbage a la mamma–

• slice off a half of a big cabbage; core it; cut into bite-sized pieces
• put a little water in your pan
• add some eBal (Earth Balance), salt and white pepper
• add cabbage, stir well; steam til the cabbage is delectable mush!

and finally, a pot of Grit collards. The collards were the only thing that weren’t really like my mom’s at all, because when she makes collards she doesn’t have much “pot likker” (pot liquor; the juice from the cooked collards that lots of folks like to sop up with savoury cornbread). I use a recipe from Athens Georgia’s famous vegetarian restaurant, the Grit, which always renders a ton of tasty pot likker. It went especially well with tonight’s cornbread.

I was grateful that B brought mashed potatoes, H, a gorgeous blueberry cobbler, J, a lentil bake, E, a mashed carrot-and-potato dish that seemed to be infused with dill and chives, and K, a perfectly-pureed pumpkin soup. We ate like queens and gossipped like songbirds. Looking forward to next month!

This just in: the katzerole Unix in a box: