Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Louise Erdrich
I lifted this quote from Erdrich's wonderful poem 'Advice to Myself"- but wait!
Before you click on that link and read the entire poem, the department of disclaimers wishes me to issue the following warnings regarding semi-seditious literature:
Reading this poem
-may lead to pronounced squirminess in the type A achiever sort.
-may lead to quiet acts of domestic anarchy.
-may lead to hostilities on the part of family pets who resent disruptions in their feeding schedules.
Exhibit A: My own copy of the poem.
Upon its advice, I had wandered into a book, gotten a little lost, and so was late dishing up breakfast for a cat whose habit is to express her impatience by shredding paper:
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| she has an uncanny knack for destroying the very piece of paper that will best communicate her wrath. |
Take this poem and dismiss it with a shudder, or embrace it with a sigh; I'm taking it to dinner. A nice, authentic, real slow food dinner.
In my travels up and down the internet, I'd come across the phrase "slow food" and until this week assumed it meant meals that involved hours and hours of demanding preparation. You know: an organically fed organic hand-raised chicken named Tabitha stuffed with wild truffle pate in homemade puff pastry with herbs and pomme frite from the backyard garden, sauced with an organic local wine reduction incorporated with organic lightly sea-salted butter.
Not so!
Slow food is simply food that aims to be the things that fast food can't be.
Slow food= the opposite of fast food.
And it can come from a four star restaurant, your favorite taqueria, the lady who sells bread at the farmer's market, the neighborhood deli or even your own kitchen.
It's real and it's authentic but it's not necessarily time consuming. Which is a good thing, isn't it?
Because while serving nourishing,tasty,soul-satisfying food to myself and those I love is important,
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| There are a whole lot of places I'd rather be than in the kitchen |
This week, I'll be playing with recipes from websites that celebrate slow food, but that doesn't mean I'll be spending a lot of money at the grocery shop or a lot of time in the kitchen.
Let's start with fish, a prime protein source that I am STILL trying to make friends with.
Wednesday: Almond Crusted fish and Butternut Squash, Apple and Feta salad
I'll be cutting a little fat from the fish recipe by using fat-free half and half instead of cream. I am, as you know, a butternut squash fiend, but any nice salad or green vegetable will go along with this fish swimmingly.
Do you know what I think I'll do? I think I'll put the broccoli, the cauliflower and the lemon in the bottom of the slow cooker and lay the chicken on top and see what kind of juicy goodness emerges.
I have a little pork tenderloin in the freezer- I'll slice it all up today and use half tonight and the rest in a stirfry tomorrow. Cutting raw meat is one of my least favorite kitchen jobs, so I'd rather do all the raw meat prep at once, but one doesn't want to give thawed pork more than a night to loiter in the fridge, does one? The longer raw pork loiters, the more likely it is to pick up some fowl company.
And would ja look at that?
I just learned how to give you a pic of the recipe.
Go me!
Saturday: Tangelo pork stir fry and rice
I'm calling it tangelo, and I'm going to keep calling it tangelo, because I think that tangelo is one of the most entertaining words I've encountered all week. I'll call it tangelo, but I'll not be worrying about hunting for one in the grocery shop. If they're difficult to find or expensive, I'll be using whatever orange colored citrus fruit happens to be in the fridge. I'll be cooking twice as much rice as we'll eat tonight; I'll be using it tomorrow.
Sunday: Olive Chicken and Rice
If you're lucky enough to live near a grocery shop with an olive bar, splash out an get a few scoops of those beautiful Sicilian olives. And then add another scoop so that you can snack on a few of them as you cook.If you're not olive bar blessed, use a kalamata or marinated green olive. Canned Spanish black olives would work, but I think maybe not as well. And don't worry about the capers.
Don't get me wrong- capers are really interesting- they're tiny little pickled flower buds, and that is very interesting indeed. They're fun to have and fun to eat, it's just that with tomatoes and spinach and nice olives in the mix, there's enough flavor to cover any absent capers if you choose not to buy them.
In the interest of gluten-freedom, I'll be putting this with last night's leftover rice instead of noodles.
Have you read the poem yet?
Did you squirm? Sigh? Laugh aloud at its list of impossible impracticalities?
So did I.
And I know that for all of us, what's real must sometimes surrender to reality.
I know that the authentic must sometimes give way to the expedient.
but maybe-
Maybe there's a line or two of Erdrich's poem that can be applied this week to the cracks and corners of our lives that most need this kind of kind advice.
Maybe this week there's one thing you can do or leave undone that will strengthen your pursuit of the authentic.
One thing that will help you spend a little less energy worrying about who you expect yourself to be and a little more energy on becoming who you wish yourself to be.
That's what I hope.
Because that luminous you that you wish to be
is really, quite authentically, awesome.
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