a satisfactory pot - Black-eyed Peas and Greens

Yesterday ended up being a tad strenuous at times. I was making a meal for a family in my former homeschooling group (the mom had been the hospital with pneumonia and was just recently back home recovering), and suddenly I found my schedule ramped up by a couple hours so that I could hand off the meal while the father was up our direction. My unhurried plan for making dinner and driving it down went right out the window! So in the midst of scurrying around trying to get veggies chopped and cornbread baked I had a tiny blissful little interlude while fixing a pot of black-eyed peas and collard greens.

I theorize that in cooking, as in the rest of life, there are certain sweet spots. Perhaps in your life there's an ideal amount of yard work or a perfect running pace or a peaceful time of day to fold laundry. Whatever you're doing suddenly seems a little more satisfactory. The pace seems a little less frantic. Chopping the onions and searing the roast and stirring up pudding - those things all felt more of less like work. I had a schedule to keep, and gracious knows the one time you send your chocolate pudding off to someone else's house you don't want it to scorch. The peas and greens though. Those were different. I was still bustling around trying to get everything done, but there was something so satisfying in putting some fat back in a pan with a few seasonings and then stirring in the peas and greens with some chicken stock and letting it all simmer until the pot liquid becomes this rich broth just begging to be soaked up with some fresh cornbread. It's simple, instinctual fool. Soul food really. There's just enough slicing and stirring involved to enjoy cooking without it becoming tiring, and especially for those of us in the South it just tastes like home. My father-in-law is pretty darn southern, and he couldn't say enough nice things about this dish.

Black-eyed Peas and Collard Greens:

1/4 cup fat back/side meat/or uncooked bacon sliced into thick matchsticks
1/4 cup thinly sliced shallots (or sub onion)
2-4 cloves minced garlic (around 2tsp)
2-4 bay leaves (depending on size)
2 cups chicken stock
3 cups frozen black eyed peas (I used 1 1/2  packages since that's all I had on hand)
2 cups frozen collard greens (or a similar amount fresh - I'll use either depending on what's available. You can also use kale or turnip greens)
Salt, pepper, red pepper (if desired)
Tamari Sauce/Braggs Amino Acids/Worcestershire Sauce

Put a heavy bottomed sauce pan (or cast iron pan) on medium heat and add your pork. While the fat is rendering mince your garlic and slice your shallots and then add to the pan along with the bay leaves and salt and pepper. Stir frequently for a couple minutes until the shallots and garlic start to turn brown and smell amazing. Pour in your chicken stock along with the collards and black eyed peas and a dash of Tamari Sauce. Simmer for 10-15 minutes and taste to correct seasoning. I like plenty of pepper on mine. You can also play around with a little cumin or freshly chopped marjoram. Simmer for another 15 minutes (up to an hour with low heat and enough liquid) and serve with fresh cornbread or biscuits.


Caveat: This is more cultural memory than recipe so all amounts are estimates. Just use your common sense (and your nose and your tongue), and everything will turn out great!

A little bit of community

People talk about all sorts of communities. Gaming communities. Trade unions. Congregations. Here's one for you. Looking down the sign up list to bring a meal to a family I noticed my aunt by marriage had snagged the slot right before mine. Even when I feel like I'm not getting anything done, that my personal sanctification moves at a glacial pace, I'm reminded that I'm part of that vast army of women who look at these small moments of service and ask themselves "Pot pie or beef stew?"
 

Homemaking without kidmaking

Something I've mentioned in previous posts but never actually discussed at length is what it means to be domestically minded when you don't have kids. This is particularly relevant because in the preceding post I pretty explicitly said stated that married women should seriously reconsider participating in the job market. This naturally begs the question - then what? The short answer is that I'm not sure. It's easy to babble about community service and "endless opportunities" without saying anything particularly helpful or encouraging. Considering that housework is less physically arduous than in previous years and that not every woman wants to sit around knitting afghans for other people's children, wives can find themselves with a decent amount of time on their hands. I say this with the guilty knowledge that for me such time all too often gets converted into old novels and cooking shows on Hulu. Not exactly the picture of industrious housewifery - except that right this moment I actually am because of my paint spattered clothes which indicate a freshly painted pantry. But, I digress. The point is that with so many women looking outside the home (shall we say domestic sphere?) for meaningful work it can be hard to figure out what we're supposed to do after we've folded the laundry and swept under the kitchen table.

With that in mind, here's my "Good Heavens what if we don't have kids and I end up stuck in this house alone with Allen forever!?" list (so far):

1. Cook more slow food. 30 minute meals are great when you've got an hour between piano practice and Wednesday night Bible study, but in my experience good food often takes a while. While it might not take a whole lot of time all at once (pot roast for instance), it often takes a few hours of being to kneed or stir or baste once every x minutes.

2. Invite people over to eat said food. Most moms would probably like a break and plenty of bachelors (of both sexes) would almost certainly enjoy a home cooked meal eaten at a family table. And of course there's always the time honored tradition of inviting the pastor over for dinner.

3. Read something intelligent and discuss it with my husband (or friend if he's really not interested). Allen and I already have the best discussions, and I look forward to us having many more.

4. Learn a new skill - piano or photography. While this could devolve into mere personal fulfillment I think a skilled woman, by her very nature, has more to offer those around her. That could mean something as simple as being able to lead a round of Christmas carols or being the unofficial family photographer at reunions, but it could also lead to wider opportunities. For myself, I rarely get deeply enough into any particular subject to master it, but I do enjoy dabbling with new skills and hobbies.

5. Get involved with Christian education. Even if I decide that pursuing full time employment is definitely out I expect there are ways to get involved. There's volunteering obviously, but I could also look at part time work in a classical or home school coop setting. Those are situations which would give me a substantial amount of time for purely domestic pursuits while reducing my job competition with men.

6. Cultivate friendships. If you're not holding down a job and/or trying to raise three kids you really don't have many excuses for not getting out there and working on your relationships with other people. The world keeps bemoaning the lack of community, and women with time on their hands to listen, to talk, and to encourage sounds like just the ticket to fix it. (Did I mention I don't make new friends easily? Yeah, this one I really need to work on.)

7. Love other people's kids. I know that having other adults in my life I could trust or least enjoy being around made a big difference in my life. These were people who encouraged skills my parents may have overlooked or gave me confidence that their confidence in my intelligence wasn't mere parental wishful thinking. There are already three kids in my life that I love to visit, but in church with so many young ones I could afford a few more little friends. (Funny aside, I had picked up the youngest after church while talking to someone I hadn't seen in years. After a couple minutes talking with this lady the little girl's mom and I just sort of blinked at each other and had to straighten out just who Mama was. First time that's ever happened.)

8. Travel. I don't know where this fits in under good Christian housewife, but I plan to keep traveling as long as possible. Lets just say that if the Heavens and Earth are God's art gallery I like to go poking around in the different exhibits.

9. Be readier to volunteer at church. I don't just mean teaching Sunday school. There are plenty of times that the deacons will have a request, but in the past I've just been too tired/busy to do anything.

10. Get more involved in my city/state/neighborhood. I must say I have no idea how this will work. It's not something I saw my parents model pretty much at all except for their interactions with our elderly neighbors over the hill. It might mean volunteering at a community garden, getting involved with local political campaigns, or helping maintain the local trail systems. I mainly just figure you can't whine too much about everything running downhill if you aren't occasionally willing to patch a leak or two yourself.

Well I reckon that's my list. There's probably a whole lot I'm leaving off of there, so if anyone wants to make any suggestions I'm all ears. I realize that a determined mom could probably finish off my list at some point in her child raising career, but the idea I'm contemplating is that since moms are really a subset of housewives our lives (in broad strokes mind you) shouldn't really look all that different. We keep house, cook meals, serve our friends and family. Those without children just have more disposable time with which to cultivate their talents and serve those outside their immediate family. I admit there are plenty of times when I wonder whether I'm really wasting time better spent on some "larger" vision, but for every doubt I get a little throb of conviction telling me that the largest thing I ever accomplish might be to do some of those small things well.

Teaching: a short recap and some thoughts

Over the past 5-10 years I've been interested in teaching. It hasn't been a ruling passion of mine or anything like that, but it has been an interest of mine right up there with literature, camping, and discussing odd subjects with my husband. Given my interest it would have seemed sensible for me to do something like major in English education instead of the taking the English/philosophy path I did take. However at the time I had grandiose dreams of graduate degrees and professorships and the like because I figured that was where the fun happened. A professor takes open minds and pours into them all the distilled knowledge and passion from her own and searches for that one answering spark in the minds of her students. In between teaching there are researches into the compelling book of the moment and long hours of crafting prose that simply sings with new discoveries and insights. Perhaps that is true for some professors, but I rapidly begin to suspect that it's not. During graduate school I continually saw students and professors driven not by what is, not by the true and beautiful, but by voters and interest groups and this heaven turned hell that secularists long to create on earth. If it's true that men (in general) at all times and in numeral ways oppress women (in general) and that this is one of the great truths of literary history then that says something very specific and odd about how you read. Books cease to be windows into the human condition (at least in the way commonly thought of as such) but instead function at frames for the persistent arguments of feminists against men. Jane Austen becomes a feminist. Shakespeare becomes a misogynist. These become moral categories, and they start to privilege books to support their own faulty understanding of the world and denigrate books that would question these values. "So," they might say, "you do much the same in saying that Shakespeare or Bunyan or Burke is better than Hemingway, Joyce, or Rousseau." The difference, which hardly bears mentioning since they willfully can't see it, is that we have a firm set of standards for evaluating all literature in all ages. True the tides of opinion might ebb to and fro and legalism or license takes the upper hand in Christian culture. The point is that we have fixed principles that guide our taste and evaluation. They don't and are therefore at the mercy of every new student demographic and every new socio-political stance that appeals to their secular hearts. And so I left. I walked away from graduate school and every dreams of peacefully scribbling away in my ivory tower. I suppose I could have gone to a Christian school, but on the whole I don't think they're so very much better. I was also looking at doctoral studies, and the school where I went had a program to do so.

By the time I left I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be. I'd always had an aversion to government run education programs, and so many of the Christian schools just toddle along with the same methods as the government schools. I wanted something different. Then I found this classical school that let me volunteer and learn on the job. I got to work with students and see the process happening on a lot of different levels. I learned later that some of the processes where dictated by the board and that not all the teachers thought them effective, but at least I got to see real Christian education happening. Just recently I was hired temporarily to fill in for a couple teachers who left abruptly. It's been challenging, and yet I find it so addicting. I didn't realize how much my students would test my compassion, justice, intelligence, and judgement. It's incredibly intense, and I love it. I really feel like I've found something I can pursue. Unfortunately, since this particular school is closing I don't have the option of carrying on there next year. At this point though I'm just glad to have found something that makes me come alive and want to get to work. Right now the hard part is mainly trusting God that I'll be able to continue working in Christian education. Despite the doors slamming shut I feel confident that somewhere the road will shake itself out, and I'll find myself in front of the right door at last.