Month: November 2016

Gratitude, Day 20: Easy Like Sunday Morning

NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?

These are a few of my favorite things.
These are a few of my favorite things.

There is pretty much nothing better than hot, fresh-baked goods on a cold Sunday morning, and today is no exception.

This day I am grateful for easy, always successful, super adaptable scones. This morning I made cherry ginger almond and ate two as soon as I pulled the pan from the oven.

It’s the little things.

Cherry Ginger Almond Scones

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose gluten-free flour (regular works here, too)

1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick of butter, frozen

1/2 cup plain, full-fat yogurt

1 egg

1/2 cup chopped unsweetened dried cherries

1/2 cup unsalted toasted almonds

1/4 cup chopped crystalized ginger

Turbinado sugar for the tops (optional)

Method

This can be done easily in a food processor, but I like to make these by hand.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees (375 on convection).

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients and whisk to combine.

In a smaller bowl. combine egg and yogurt and whisk to thoroughly incorporate egg with yogurt. Set aside.

Grate the full stick of butter into the dry ingredients and use your fingertips to crumble flour into butter. It should resemble cornmeal.

Stir in add-ins, then add wet ingredients to dry and stir until clumps begin to form. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until all of the crumbly bits are incorporated.

Shape into an 8″ disk then use a bench scraper or sharp knife to cut into 8 scones. Sprinkle each scone with turbinado sugar, then place on a baking pan lined with parchment paper.

Bake for 15 to 18 minutes until scones are golden brown. For a traditional scone, let them cool completely before eating, but I bet you don’t make it that long.

You can add pretty much anything you want to these: chocolate chips and walnuts, other dried fruits, coconut, different spices. I think cooked and crumbled bacon would pretty much through these over the top, specifically with the same dried cherries and maybe a little maple glaze.

What are you grateful for today?

Gratitude, Day 19: Horses

NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?

horse

I got my first horse when I was 36. Sadie was a 20-year-old retired racing thoroughbred and dressage school horse.

Although I had read nearly every book about horses growing up and then added to that knowledge volunteering for Save The Horses in Georgia for three years before I adopted her, Sadie really taught me what it meant to own a horse. She was patient while I made every mistake known to horses and never let me down. She taught me how to be a sensitive rider; as a dressage horse her sides were very sensitive, and as a race horse her face was, too, so for the first year I rode her with by legs away from her sides and the reins loose.

Across all of the changes in my life in the past decade, Sadie was a constant.

She died last year at age 31, well-loved until her very last breath.

Today I am grateful for horses. 

Everything about them – their grace, beauty, and acceptance. The way they can teach you about yourself, if you’ll let them, and how willing they are to be your partner.

I have thought about getting back in the saddle, so to speak, but every time I look for opportunities to volunteer or ride it reminds me of the loss of Sadie, from my life when I had to leave her in Georgia first, and then finally from this world just a year later.

What are you grateful for?

Gratitude, Day 18: Conversation

NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?

Neighbors, plus a beautiful sky that everyone can see.

In a week in which the thin veneer of civility has been scraped away like the skin on top of pudding, it has been refreshing to have at least one conversation with someone whose views I do not share that resulted in an amicable agreement to disagree and a promise to keep talking.

This person was a stranger on the internet.

I think this type of interchange is rare, especially these days.

We seem to have lost the ability to truly communicate with each other, seeking first to understand and only then to be understood.

The winner is whomever shouts loudest.

I have been censoring the hell out of myself these past days, crippled by a debilitating sense of doom, accompanied by a side of Who The Hell Is Listening Anyway. I type replies and delete them.

But this one time, I typed my reply and hit send, and what came back was a reasoned and measured conversation about healthcare, specifically the Affordable Care Act.

No one yelled.

No one got personal or insulting.

Everyone felt heard.

So today, as clumsy as we humans can be about it, I am grateful for those moments in conversation when we all feel respected and listened to and understood, not only by people who share our own views (which is easiest) but also by those with whom we disagree.

This is no small challenge – to truly hear others.

But it is work worth doing.

What are you grateful for today?

Gratitude, Day 17: Doe, A Deer

NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?

#Yum
#Yum

’tis the season.

Not for Christmas or good cheer or any of that, although I did make the mistake of going into some fine retail establishments today and was assaulted by a plethora of holiday-themed crap from China that no one really needs and will all end up in a dumpster at the end of the year.

’tis deer hunting season, and although I am not a deer hunter myself, I am a fan of venison in its many forms.

Last weekend, Khristian and I were invited to dinner at a friend’s house. This friend happens to be Graham, the brother of Peter, Khristian’s collaborative partner, and the husband of Brooke, a woman who was in my 200-hour yoga teacher training cohort.

#Smalltimore

A couple hours before we went, Khristian informed me that Graham was serving venison pot pie with a spelt crust for me, a gluten-free person.

Except spelt isn’t gluten-free.

I am not gluten-free because I have celiac. I am gluten-free because I feel better.

Not that it’s really anyone’s business, but it seems necessary to clarify because I had already planned on “eating around the gluten,” which is what I normally do when I go to dinner at a new person’s house.

So imagine my surprise when we got to Graham and Brooke’s and found that not only had Graham switched to a gluten-free flour for the crust because of the gluten/no gluten spelt debate but they had also bought gluten-free crackers for hors d’oeuvres and made a separate gluten-free pear crumble.

Today I am grateful for people who go out of their way to make a person feel welcome.

I have struggled my whole life with a feeling of unworthiness, and people who go out of their way (and I am lucky to have more than a few of them in my life) help that feeling fade away. To be so accommodated at someone’s house in a totally unexpected way was lovely and refreshing and certainly needed these past few weeks.

What are you grateful for?

Gratitude, Day 16: A List

NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?

This is not how I envisioned this month going, blogging-wise.

The last time I did this challenge, it was a straight-up daily blog. There wasn’t the gratitude element to it, which I often complete every November in a journal instead, as a list.

There is no significance to this method – the separation of blog and list – except that it is often less challenging to simply make a list of the myriad ways I am blessed on a daily basis (#ToUseTheVernacular). A November challenge should be challenging, and I am Champion of the Listmakers.

It’s not that I didn’t write today – I did. But it was not this.

And I worked teaching yoga to small creatures who were very trying on this day but still managed to be beautiful.

And I made a pie and then spread that pie all over Baltimore on small white styrofoam plates, covered in foil.

So here I sit now at 9 p.m. in my kitchen, having just returned home from a poetry reading. I have snacked on some pie and some coconut cake and some of the delicious pumpkin pie ice cream that Khristian’s daughter made and am now tasked with following through on the challenge I have set myself.

Today that will come in the form of a list. #ItHappens

Today I am most grateful for:

  1. Editors that get back to you immediately.
  2. Lenar (spelling?) who is just about the nicest person on the planet
  3. FaceTime because it allowed me to have a long, newsy chat with my Gorgeous Girl across the ocean
  4. The Wire. Just because.

Tomorrow is another day.

What are you grateful for today?