weekend update, November 24th

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter
 and become a friend instead of an enemy.” 

 Henri Nouwen

If Nouwen is right, then offering a bus seat to a stranger is an act of hospitality. As is making space for a fellow commuter in traffic, or clearing the seat next to you at the lunch table. It's possible, if Nouwen's right, that a hospitable guest can make even her own host feel more at home:

Quick: who's the guest and who's the host?
Can't tell?
Neither can I. Which is why I love this photo.

In fact, if Nouwen is right, then there is in every act of true hospitality, wherever it happens, a certain fearlessness.
Because hospitality requires from one the courage to open a door

even though there may be trouble waiting on the other side.

and the courage to welcome as a friend

 those with whom you might not have much in common.
At least at first.
Actually, these ladies found out that they are all the
black sheep of their families before they'd poured the second cup.

But fatigue, as Vince Lombardi once noted, makes cowards of us all, and under the influence of stress and hunger, hospitality can flip faster than a pancake from an act of loving welcome to an irritating chore. 

That's why, as we prepare for occasions of courageous courtesy, people talk about how important it is to nourish yourself with food and rest. It's not so much that they care about food and rest,

they're only hoping to avoid another Thanksgiving
at a relative crabshack.

 So the year from here will be weeknight after busy weeknight of fast, sustaining food. Food that's more interesting than any activity that has to stop for dinner time, and cheap enough to help put a few more non-food treats under the Christmas tree.
At least that's the goal. 

And if it doesn't happen, it won't be the first missed goal on this particular playing field, now will it?

Let's see how well this week's dinners met the fast,easy,cheap and healthy measure:

First up, the Cheese soup. Easy, fast and tasty, but this is really just a thinned down version of vegetables with cheese sauce.

I'm not saying vegetables in cheese sauce like it's a bad thing.
But I could've chosen more nutritiously.

Slightly better in the health department, the chicken and dumplings:

This recipe's a keeper for two reasons. First, the addition of cream (or in this case some evaporated milk) makes for a more soothingly substantial spoonful and second, the dumpling recipe. Look at these little fluffy wonders:

Next time, I'll add a little poultry seasoning to the soup, up the vegetable count, and try the dumplings with a gluten free baking mix that Costco has kindly put on its shelves.

The best dinner of the week was, without doubt, the dinner that demonstrates the versatile glories of parchment paper. Not only can it rescue entire batches of cookies from burning, not only does it call to mind the wonderful smell of really old books, 

It's the key in the ignition of some very speedy dinners.

 This method, en papillotte,will save a multitude of dinners for us this season. Assemble a versatile array of ingredients and throw the parcels in the oven. There's dinner. With almost zero clean up. Bonus: the assembling can happen hours before the baking. In today's wonder packets, you see Salmon, green beans and slices of leftover baked potatoes (a very good idea, that. Raw potatoes would never have cooked as quickly as the salmon and beans did. Yet another good reason to bake too many potatoes.) A few minutes to preheat the oven and twenty minutes later they looked like this:

Twenty one minutes later, they looked like this:

It deserves to be reiterated:
this is the cooking dish, the serving dish
and the plate (on top of a plate) and it's disposable.
(Except for the plate plate part.)

A good week, dinner wise, with a few quick and easies that will serve us well in the busy days ahead. 

And they will be fiercely busy days.

And though life can cut you deep

and freeze your bones,

there's still room for hope

that this week,

no matter where you are,

the world you embrace

will know that it

is safe here,

safe now,

safe with you, always.

And room for hope that once or twice this week,

This strange world
will offer you that same safe space.