I served a dinner two nights ago that actually induced nirvana.

I am sharing the recipes here, in hopes some other lucky family wants to taste summer at its finest. Do try to use fresh everything: free range turkey, garden beet greens, ripe raspberries. I even clipped fresh herbs from our garden.

The thing is, I improved a meatball recipe from Joy of Cooking, so I know these Hop Klops also fare well in a fantastic winter soup.

The name, Gutentag Hop Klops, is in honor of Will Ferrell's spunky lederhosen dance in The Producers.

1 lb.     ground light turkey
1 ½       English muffins, rubbed together/shredded into light bread crumbs
1 stalk  celery, diced
1/3 c.   parsley, chopped
1 T       lemon zest, approx. 2/3 large lemon
            juice from ½ lemon
1/8 c.   katsup
1/8 c.   yellow mustard
¼ c.      onion, diced
dash     salt and pepper
1          egg

Mix together lightly with hands. Roll into 2” balls. Place on greased baking pans. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.

2 bunches beet greens, stems removed — boil two minutes in a large pot of water.

Saute in a pan:
2 T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed
Sprinkle of chili pepper flakes

Add drained, chopped beet greens to garlic and flakes. Saute one minute.

(Meanwhile, boil the beets for half an hour in just enough water to cover. Cool and then peel them by squeezing off the skins. Serve the following day, sliced thin and chilled.)

1.5 c.     cooked quinoa
1/8 c.    Paul Newman's Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing
15         raspberries, torn to bits
1           Gala apple, chopped
             salt to taste
Combine all and serve chilled.

Not to make anyone jealous, but we finished the meal with . . . no, no, desserts are for another blog.

Happy glorious slow end of summer to us all!

We are seeing the end of patriarchy. It has taken itself to its preposterous cruel end. The insanity you move through that is called contemporary history, these current events that pile on suffering and seem so incontestable, or contestable but unstoppable, are the ruin of a ruinous social system. Does knowing this give any cause for comfort?

Understanding phenomena while you’re in the midst of them does offer strength and detachment. Just enough detachment to know that your values and actions—unlike the global aggressive, destructive, acquisitive swarm—are not prey to the swarm. When the only real freedom is personal, take it. Stand different. Witness your direct line with good. Adore the world still sending its beauty up through you. Reframe the so-called debate of living.

The Navaho call it “The Beauty Way.” Bill Cunningham, eccentric street fashion photographer in New York says: “He who seeks beauty will find it.”

If every one of us fell to the earth in gratitude each day would we be so odd, really?

What if you listened to dirt for one minute, every day? When was the last time you smelled soil? Get on your belly, it’s your inheritance, your support, our own kingdom come.

Society is largely lunatic. Individual wisdom arises continuously. Every one of us can put down the gun.

P.S. The idea of the end of patriarchy was planted in my brain by Paul B. Ferrell, a behavioral economics columnist for Market Watch/Wall Street Journal, who writes:
It is clear that patriarchy — male dominance of world culture, politics and economics throughout history — has failed, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction. Why do male leaders fail? Jeremy Grantham’s firm GMO manages $108 billion. He predicted the 2008 meltdown and now warns: Male leaders are emotional, “impatient ... management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” Leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.” Yet “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers,” which guarantees that “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it . . . ”

In the coming post-capitalism America, Grantham’s research suggests that women leaders will naturally emerge not just because the male brain is a short-term saboteur. The bigger reason is that women’s brains have evolved naturally as superior long-term thinkers. Brain researchers tell us 75% of men are short-term left-brain thinkers, while 75% of women tend to have strong right-brain traits as forward-thinkers, more aware of the future, the big picture, with a sense of future consequences, peacemakers rather than gamer-players.

P.P.S. I know it is "stand differently," but standing alone is awkward, so the grammatical oddness seems right.

Nothing dislocates the apple cart of order, spills humdrum on its ear quite like a fine art museum.

The Denver Art Museum has dedicated much of its real estate this summer to mud.

Their Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World show has something for literally everyone.




Pubic covers made of clay were fashion-forward in the ancient pre-Columbian Marajó culture in northern Brazil.

Bikini bottoms in 600 A.D.!

Clay foxes had a field day at a gleaming red café.

Two Cubans dreamed up a permanent getaway vehicle.

And this stunning mother of four,

made of straw-stuffed erosion control tubes smoothed with Colorado adobe, is still in progress.

You can see Roxanne Swentzell complete the 10’ tall sculpture “Mud Woman Rolls On” in the coming weeks. (Call the museum for days and times.)

This sculpture stopped everyone in their tracks. The artist says of it: "The special thing about this sculpture is it is going to be made of unfired mud. She will have her babies who are all of us. We are of the earth."

Aside from her gracious proportions, Mud Woman's hair is fantastic, you simply have to see it in person. It's like Tina Turner meditating in public, with kids.

Denver’s psychotic art plaza actually holds wonderful art within. Just don’t try to harmonize the cacophony of architectural styles as you approach.

If you’re looking for traditional art, well, just take another glance at the building. And be prepared for wonders unimagined.

My former cat Pete, now living on sixty acres of upland valley paradise, seemed always to get it right: play with abandon, climb any trees willing, keep neurotics at bay (oh, what an arsenal of weapons Pete had for keeping clear boundaries), lose toes, lose fights, win dominance in your own pacific home. For all his crusty bossy masculine ways, Pete was a full-on lover.

When I moved to Boulder and could not take a cat, didn’t the person coming to buy my loveseat scoop him up and say she knew the perfect home, with cows and kids and roadless horizons where he could hunt outdoors all day? Pete adopted me in the country, and to the country he returned.

Now, I live in high-density housing, where you could toss four different neighbors hot dog buns off the back deck if they called for ‘em. We are packed in tight. Rather than stay inside or drive to a park, I looked out all my windows and called up beauty. Wherefore art thou? I asked, from the balcony. I am astonished to report that even in a backyard skinny as two beans laid like an L, beauty came.

First, you trim the lilacs struggling in too much shade. You transplant strawberries and a shade-bound climbing rose against a sunny fence. Cover them with shade-giving cardboard for three weeks until new leaves emerge, and they sparkle. Cut curving bed lines and whack out sod, an hour or two each morning. Hang a bird feeder. Sink a used post to support the new grape vine.

Use the gravel under the deck to start a pathway. Make borders with hand-sized rocks. Move the hummingbird feeder three times, without luck, till you tie on a lucid red ribbon, then watch from the balcony as the lightning birds feed.

When you love your soil, love your views, love your neighbors’ sumac trees’ exotic foliage, dream of eggplants warm with sun, dream of iris, dream of songbirds, you are Pete, who grabs every moment out of doors and shakes it, until all the good falls out.

If you are too young yet to love gardens, grow old.

We’ve been conditioned to believe freedom comes after winning a battle (NOW I’M FREE), even if it’s a battle for a parking spot on a crowded city street. But the amped-up mindset needed to compete stays after the contest is over, and then where are we?

Amped.

You may call it revved or pumped. Your parents called it “acting out.”

The trouble is, acting out leads to the belief that we’re getting somewhere, when what we’re usually getting is more stuck. In anger, force, will, self-defense, desire, stress and more desire.


Reacting is goal-oriented. Reacting to the door-to-door solicitor with a growl and a slammed door means you did rid yourself of the intrusion but you also gained a gut-load of anger, and guess which one lasts longer? I speak from many slammed doors.

I have no silver bullet or five-part course on chillin’. I’m hoping to raise a little flag on a slender pole in the midst of the push-pull American feedlot frenzy to say: don’t ruin your health or our society in the name of winning. You do not have to be a heifer behind anybody’s bars.

Freedom feels nice. (Reactivity does not. It’s sort of itchy and hot and snowballing, and the contradictions are part of the whole seductive deal.)

Freedom is subtle, and not so highfalutin. Try casting no blame while holding your place. Retract the claws you want to sink into anything, issues as well as political systems as well as people. Remember your aunt or uncle or friend who had such a level head and an open mind? How you loved being around them? Be them.

Freedom has to start somewhere. We can all lower our psychic cholesterol.

“Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings,” Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche once said, “we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”

“There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.”  --Rumi


"Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody."

--Marshall McLuhan

What if the key to suffering is being a somebody. What if you planted a hundred trees, little trees or even seedlings or even just tree seeds, in the night while no one was watching? In a hundred years, the leaf canopy would spread and you would be…

Imagine yourself gone and the results of your deeds outlasting you.

The deed is the thing. The deed remains in the stream of things.

It is the same with people. Your impact on them outlasts your own small sacred shot at life. Or scared shot. Or scarred shot. You know how deep an impact difficult, demanding, dramatic people have on you. Their contractions lodge inside you. We suffer in order to realize that that contraction does not adequately describe reality. Does not do her justice. Cannot cover the beautiful, frightening, amazing bases.

And so we must open and perish.

Transparency is all the rage right now. Transparency means see through. Transparency, according to Wikipedia, “implies openness, communication, and accountability.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived transparent lives? Woke up and went through each day openly responding to situations, speaking clearly, and taking the blame? Gave away all the credit. Waited without claiming results. That is traveling light.

We are traveling light. Light bent interestingly backwards to show the world itself. Neitzsche says, “We have art so that we are not destroyed by the truth.” I wonder if art leads us to that destruction with a tender hand? “Let go of the earth, white hand,” the poet Richard Schramm writes. “With nothing below, we are rooted in silence, waiting.”

That is our work. To let go. To wait and see. To travel light, with some singing and head scratching along the way. Light travels. Is it so terrifying, knowing actions outlive forms?

You are going to die. You are made of the dust and moisture and compounds of the earth, just like these iris growing in a garden in Salt Lake City beside a carport and the outrageous reaches of a walnut tree.

Sun pours through them and their fragrance emanates. I rescued them from a garbage can marked “free, purple and yellow.”

You are free, purple and yellow.

It is too much to consider the wealth of soil. No book and certainly no blog could contain that wonder. (Although I admit I am tempted to try…) Hold in your heart the thin radiant petals. Let the vast earth you don’t appreciate absorb all sorrows. Walk among the hundred thousand things as beautifully and unprotected and willingly as flag iris bloom on a hot day in early June. Or late June, when they’re all stalks and leaves. Earwigs dash up. The sprinkler never turns on. Dog poop is rotting.

Glorious, glorious days.

There’s an orange barn in this icicle. What have you locked up that needs thawing?

I tell you, there are stories so harmful we should stomp them senseless rather than repeat them, or let them repeat until they freeze up our gifts. Women are not helpmeets.* A woman need not lie in wait to be chosen. That is a nasty confusing and addictive state of limbo and longing, not the baseline for living.

I’m writing to women, here. Stand in all your fullness, with your highs, lows, torn pieces and stunning bits. Stand exactly where you are as you are. Be a skunk. Skunks do not, with their chokingly effective radiating stink, attract many. But a skunk will find its skunk.

Be so skunkily you that you waste no time luring, alluring, securing or enduring the wrong partner. Choose yourself. Recognize yourself. When a potential partner comes along, be who you are and say what you need. If they don’t choose to stay, they are an ocelot or a bobwhite. Wouldn’t have done you good anyway.

Authentic is sexy. Take it from Pepe LePew: "Zee cabbage does not run away from zee corn-beef." “You are my peanut. I am your brittle.” “Come to me, my melon baby collie.” “Turn out zee lights, darling. I know where everything is.” And lastly—because he usually courts a hapless cat named Penelope--“No matter 'ow I disguise myself, you smell me out.”

Being authentically you will repel many, but to a kindred spirit that genuine stink will be perfume. Love is above all genuine: the world can’t wait any longer for you to thaw your inner worth.

Thanks to You Tube for the Pepe video, Wikipedia for the Pepe quotes and to Dreamstime for the icicle photo.

*helpmeet noun
A person who helps a more skilled person
Synonyms adjunct, adjutant, aid, aide, apprentice, assistant, coadjutor, deputy, helpmate, helpmeet, lieutenant, mate, sidekick

If you’ve ever sat through a juried trial, you know one thing: lawyers are not there to get at truth. Lawyers are there to win their case. Extreme bias for combats extreme bias against, hired specialists paint diametrically opposed scenarios, and if you happen to be a juror your head and stomach get tied in knots in the drawn-out dead-boring struggle for the glittering prize—the verdict.

I walked out of my first jury duty knowing I’d added my own bias to the fierce legal biases; once I’d touched the thick metal pins that held the defendant’s knee together after his motorcycle collided with a truck, my impartiality vanished. Suffering warranted remuneration, and this man had suffered.

Was justice served?

I bring trials up because a couple of weeks ago, my dearheart said—after listening to an operatic description of my woes—that my lawyer was talking, not me. (My father was a lawyer so this struck me as hilarious and likely utterly true.) I laughed so hard tears spilled onto my shirt. I had lawyered-up with my grievances against my man and turned a very open world into one pained with operatic Sturm und Drang.

To make my case at the cost of accuracy, openness, fairness, peace. Well, wasn’t that silly? And of course damaging, because lawyering-up meant I had separated myself from anything and everything but loyalty to my own story. Lawyering-up is a big hard elbow pointed at the world.

If you find yourself trapped in a line of thought that is rigorous, full of thrust and churning out glittering hard-edged conclusions, that is very likely your lawyer speaking. Not you. Good news, eh? You can stop paying your lawyer to spin thoughts into self-serving conclusions. You stop paying the lawyer because it’s a false world, a biased world, an unpleasant world in which to live. And it nearly always harms others, too.

Neuropyschologist Rick Hanson has a fine take on this lawyer-prototype who lives within us. Hanson says, “Watch how a case starts forming in your mind, trying to get its hooks into you. Then see if you can interrupt the process. Literally set down the case, like plopping down a heavy suitcase when you finally get home after a long trip. What a relief!”

Case dismissed. All those cases...

Set 'em down, take in a big long draught of freedom. You are right back home.

Subscribe to Rick Hanson’s weekly e-newsletter, Just One Thing. The week of 4/14/11 (#59) is called “Who are you prosecuting?”

And a charming site on what to do with old suitcases!

Sturm und Drang: storm and stress

Guest blog by my friend Paul McCurdie, who travels for work, and works to eat!

Of all of the places I’ve been, the most memorable experiences tend to be in Milano. Particularly restaurants in Milano with friends who happen to be co-workers. Gabriele, the manager of our office, always takes me to amazing restaurants. My favorite is an unassuming little place near the Basilica de Sant’ Ambrosio:  Pane e Acqua. If you didn’t know the restaurant was there, you’d be hard pressed to find it. There is no sign outside. The owner and chef is Francesco Passalacqua.  Gabriele happens to know him well. He loves to cook and it shows in his food.

Inside there are 5 tables in the front room with the bar and maybe 8 in the back. There is a large table in the basement. You see it when you go to the restroom. The restroom is pretty cool. Yes, singular. It’s a small restaurant, why do you need more than one toilet?

My first visit there was in 2008. Chef Passalacqua came up from downstairs as we were shown our table in the front room. He greeted Gabriele and moved us to the corner table in the back room. I remember this night well because it was the single best meal I’ve had. It also had the single most memorable thing I’ve eaten. More on that later.

He prepares traditional Italian dishes with a modern twist. He also does his own thing. All of the pasta is made there and is amazing.

Now, the first visit: we read the menu. They don’t have an English translation but we manage between my bilingual colleagues and my pidgin Italian. Sidebar: I’ve learned that one needs to understand three things in foreign languages—food, drink and where is the bathroom? Anyway, we figured it out; the wait staff speaks some English as well. Our orders were placed. We were enjoying a nice Italian red Gabriele picked out—I don’t remember what it was other than it was good. Gabriele knows his wines. The waitress comes out of the kitchen and informs us that the chef is cooking for us tonight. We don’t know what we are getting. This is my kind of adventure: one that involves food. It’ll be just like eating in China but the possibility of pig’s asses being served is low.

I don’t remember all of the dishes. There was baby squid, a suckling pig spare rib, fish with spaghetti alla chitara, tortellini and some beef I believe. All of it was wonderful. 

The dish that we all remember the most is the lattume de tonno. We were discussing it last week when I was in Milano. Three little white balls with a little olive oil, black pepper and bright green fresh pesto. That was all that was in the bowl. My colleagues didn’t know what lattume was—it’s a Sicilian dish. They are from Northern Italy. Our waitress understood our confusion, so she helped: “Sperm sack of tuna.” Neither sperm nor sack are words you want to hear applied to your meal. She left us in stunned silence. We sat there looking at each other. I took the approach I use in China: steel myself to try whatever it is they put in front of me—9 times out of 10 it’s good—but have my wine, water and a piece of bread at the ready in case this is the 1 of 10. It was amazingly good. Tender, not a big flavor, but a deep one. The pesto was amazing.

I’ve been back two other times. Last year it was when the white truffles were on. They perfumed the whole place. We had two dishes with the truffles: a simple risotto Milanese and the Italian equivalent of steak tartar. Both were wonderful. There were other dishes—I don’t remember what they were. The truffle dishes stole the show.

I was there just last Thursday. Gabriele called to book a table. Passalacqua answered the phone. Gabriele told him we were coming and the chef said he would make something for us. As usual it was an amazing dinner: marinated rombo—which I think is flounder—with homemade foie gras and mostarda, white bean soup (the beans were from Pigna) with some bit of fish—not sure what—and some crisp prosciutto, ravioli filled with lamb with fava beans and asparagus puree, Italian salted cod (baccala) with fish tripe and white asparagus, roasted pork loin. I am sure I forgot something. The food was amazing. Gabriele picked a nice bottle of Primitivo and a nice Slovenian Merlot. 

I’ve eaten at Pane e Acqua three times and have yet to order.

I am looking forward to my next trip to Milano. Most of my memorable dinners have been in Milano. Gabriele and the others in the office make sure I am well fed. Last weekend I went to a restaurant that specializes in mozzarella, with Stefano and other friends. It was unbelievable. So simple and so good. Next time I will take photos so Barb will be happy!

Thanks, Paul. Irony is, Paul is a fantastic photographer, clearly too happy with his meals to bother to shoot them at Pane e Acqua. So I trolled the internet for help. If you really want a photo-tour, try Gourmantic.com. They must have paid their photographer not to eat.