Weekend update, August 1, 2013

“Choose a job you love, and you will 

never have to work a day in your life.” 

 Confucius

Confucius, who earned his living as a politician, diplomat, teacher and philosopher, gave the world this wonderful little gem of career advice about 2500 years before United States President Grover Cleveland created a National holiday designed to celebrate all those who might or might not love their jobs, but do them anyway.

 Labor Day.

 It's not an exclusively American Holiday, although one could argue that it started here. One could argue that it started in 1892, after a public and particularly violent argument in Chicago about whether or not the work day ought to end after 8 hours. Until that protest and others that followed, it wasn't just the aristocratically unemployed who wondered

"What's a 'weekend'?"

 It was everyone.

 


Fortunately for modern civilization, those Chicago protests for the rights of workers lit the spark that now fuels summer holiday barbecues worldwide. It's true. Even countries infamous for forced labor policies set aside a day on which to honor the hard workers who make everything work.  While the rest of the world tends to celebrate its laborers around the first of May, and the day is called May Day or Worker's Day, I prefer the time and name of American Labor Day because it provides a special sort of fun.  Labor day is, after all, the day on which we fold away the summer and brace ourselves for the school year by kicking back

and making a point of not, well, laboring.

Imagine if the ironical wit of Grover Cleveland and his cronies had given us a few other holidays:

We could have had National Food day

on which we all skipped food.

Or they could have calendared a National Children's Day, on which all the grown ups leave their kids behind and enjoy a child-free day of restaurants and movies and shopping and just let the children

 entertain themselves.

In another bit of belabored irony, work is by definition the thing that makes things happen. So, if a Labor Day day-off barbecue happens to happen where you are, it means that someone is working hard.

 Though not all work feels like work, does it?

  Take, for example, a few of the things that worked their way out of our kitchen this week:

Let's hit the lows and near-lows first:

1. the sausage clafouti. Don't invest your time or your labor or your appetite here. It's a weird sort of crustless quiche, and not at all the puffy pancake thing I was hoping for. If you want quiche, make quiche. If you want a sausage studded puff pancake, this one looks beautiful.

2.This week's try at a Kale Salad was okay, especially when I topped the leftovers with caesar salad dressing. The surprise here was that soaking for an hour or so in a lemon dressing didn't tenderize the kale nearly as much as giving it a thorough rub down. This Huffington post article explains why.

3. The sauce of the Hatch chili chicken was fantastic- if you like chicken in a sort of Thai peanut sauce. Nothing like a Mexican mole sauce, but my fave peanut sauce recipe so far.

 and now for the kitchen work that really worked:

 1. The coconut sauce in the Thai coconut ribs. It was great as both a marinade and sauce for grilled chicken, and would work wonderfully as a sauce for stirfry rice, veggies or noodles too. Hmmm... Little ziploc bags of this versatile stuff in the freezer could come in quite handy....

2 and 3. The Hatch Chili Cheeseburgers and the avocado and potato salad with Hatch chili vinaigrette. Double wow!! The Cheeseburgers were awesome, and the potato salad was a tremendous surprise. I made it exactly by the recipe, except white balsamic vinegar was too pricey, so I went with a nearly as sweet substitute, apple cider vinegar. Look at those proportions! So much vinegar! I really hesitated, then thought, "oh well, let's go with the recipe and vary next time if we need to". We don't need to. This is a great potato salad, and it's mayo free. 

Here's my gluten-free version of the burger.  Really yummy.

 4.As a Hatch chili fest bonus, I give you this unplanned but enthusiastically received weekend dessert:

Hatch chili brownies

I made the brownies exactly by the recipe, even though the amount of cinnamon gave me pause. These are fantastic. Just enough spice and cinnamon to make them a very grown-up brownie. If you have one of these,

you can annihilate the chilies, and get all the flavor and moistness they provide without having to worry about any visible green chili bits. We topped them with ice cream instead of the grand marnier whipped cream in the recipe, and enjoyed every rich and fudgy bite.

The amusingly misleading name of today's holiday aside, I like having a day that makes me think about why some work feels like toil, and some work feels like play.

I appreciate a day that makes me appreciate the difficult things achieved by the hard-working people around me. 

And I don't mean only those difficult things that are done for pay.

Because all the best philosophers (and most tombstones) agree,

It's not only the work you do for money that matters,

Its the work you do for love.

I hope this week, whether or not your work produces a paycheck,

that it comes from and produces love.

And I hope that this week (at least once or twice)

you know what we all want to know:

That your earnest efforts are seen

That your well done work is respected

And that your labors

are not in vain.