Fun with Gud Fud

Cooking and baking are perhaps my favorite distractions/adventures. Sometimes it is a catastrophe, but it is mainly successful, and sometimes astonishingly so. Like almond butter cookies. Using my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe, I substituted almond butter for peanut butter and absolutely love it. I wonder how substituting the melted butter with olive oil would work out . . . Hmmm.

I've been on a bit of sauté kick . . . okay, so it's just about the only way I cook anything, stove top. Maybe it has to do with Spain: stove-top with olive oil. A la plancha. Even artichokes. I find it to be so much more flavorful than steaming. But Spaniards also boil veggies . . . ick  : P And of course, I love love love the colors. 

Zucchini-Shroom-Black Bean Quesadilla à la Dublin

Corn Tortilla, Dubliner Cheese, Black Beans, Sautéed Mushrooms and Zucchini . . . mmmm

Lemon-Ginger Stash Tea

Although I wasn't quite able to capture the colors, the orange radiated like the sun from the middle into the bright yellow.

Sautéed Vegetables

Aren't they so pretty?! I threw in the broccoli, then the onion, then grey squash and shrooms, and for the last bit the spinach (to keep it from wilting too much). Cut up a tomato for the top and grated a bit o' parmesan, and ate with a heated whole wheat pita spread with baba ganouj.

¡Buen provecho!

Stillness

Stillness is one of those funny deals that we through around with great respect to the idea but little adherence to the practice. Be still and know. Be still and listen. Be still and . . . oh look!

It is hard to be still and more so when it seems so unrewarding. But that is the problem We expect something out of stillness, and we are so busy waiting, looking, waiting patiently for that something, breath baited and eyes pealed, that we miss it. We miss everything.

My stillness today was a little atypical. I was attempting to send a text message. This is quite difficult for me. Really, quite difficult. I like to write somewhat correctly. Blatant misspellings are not acceptable (blatant meaning that I notice it). Besides, I wasn't too focused. I would stop and space into the distance. I was out walking for walking, for air, for it is my last day in Grand Rapids until it is time to come back.

Believe it or not, I was being still. Texting does not seem very still, not to those who watch those crack fingers punching keys at 200 words per minute and not to myself or others who labor over each letter, but this was stillness in some strange way. My mind was not whirling. It wasn't focused on much of anything. I was just breathing. Being. A funny concept, I know.

Anyway, amidst that, amidst that still moment after running from office to office tracking down professors and trying to hold myself together, two people popped into the moment, one right after another, two gals from the Spring Semester in Spain. They were both on the phone but they both took a moment to say hi, give a hug, and offer their prayers as I head home for the fall.

Had I not set myself down to breathe, attempted to send a text without much focus, had I not mistakenly slipped into stillness, I would not have seen either of these women who have a gift of sending out sunshine to whomsoever they encounter.

That is the point of stillness--when one is still, one is not expecting, one is vulnerable to the unknown . . . and the gems of stillness, of that unknown, are best seen in reflection.