All posts by GretchenJoanna

Unknown's avatar

About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

I needed some green soup.

food and cooking, poetry,

Some tortures are physical
And some are mental,
But the one that is both
Is dental.

~Ogden Nash

Off and on since October I’ve been the frequent recipient of the benefits of modern dentistry, at which I am amazed and for which I am greatly thankful. Still, more than once while waiting “for things to settle down” I’ve had the proverbial aching tooth that is so distracting and mentally consuming. Just to prevent pain and promote recovery I was on two different occasions instructed to eat “nothing harder than spaghetti” for three days. That means no crunchy vegetables, which are one of my favorite munchies. It’s a good thing I have many soup recipes, and it’s also good that I had made a giant batch of this one before the torture began.

I made it with kale this time, and Mr. Glad thought that version was not half as good as the original spinach, but I could still slurp it by the quart. It’s the anise seed that makes it special. The recipe is pretty straightforward; I usually multiply it x8 so that I can have it in the freezer and at-the-ready. It loses nothing by waiting in the freezer and is a great accompaniment to any Italian main dish. I like it just as well without the cheese and lemon.

P1120284kale soup

FLORENTINE SPINACH SOUP

1 T. olive oil
½ c. each thinly sliced celery and green onion
2 tsp. anise seed
1 10-oz. pkg. frozen chopped spinach (other leafy greens may be substituted)
3 c. regular-strength chicken broth
¼ tsp. freshly ground pepper
lemon wedges
grated Parmesan cheese

Pour oil into a 3-4 qt. Pan over medium-high heat. When oil is hot, add celery, onion, and anise seed to pan; stir occasionally until vegetables just begin to brown, 8-10 minutes. Add spinach, broth, and pepper; bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.

Pour soup, a portion at a time, into a blender or food processor (or use immersion blender?), and whirl until smoothly puréed. Reheat if necessary, pour into bowls, and offer lemon wedges and cheese to add to taste. Makes four servings (unless you are serving someone like me, who would want to eat this whole pot.)

It even comes to the boulder.

poetry

I have read this poem so many times, and still feel that I’m not equal to it, I can’t hope to plumb its depths. In that way the poem is like its subject, which speaks to me of the grace of God, something of Himself He gives us even though we are undeserving, unworthy, dense as rocks. It falls in the form of joy or peace or repentance, and when you’ve recovered from the surprise, you want to bake a cake and give a party.

HAPPINESS

There’s no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ Jane Kenyon

Collis refutes thin air.

nature, quotes, ,

You cannot make things out of thin air, people say. There is no such thing as thin air, if by that is meant something empty. It is really very thick and powerful, and from it all things are made that are made, or without it cannot be made, whether tree, plant, person, or army tank.

What is the atmosphere? It is an air ocean. We walk at the bottom of an air ocean at a depth of from two hundred to five hundred miles. We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, and yet it presses down upon us with a pressure of a ton to every square foot. Each acre of land sustains forty-six thousand tons of air. It is possible to carry this surprising weight on our heads owing to the way it equalizes the pressure all around us.

The atmosphere is composed, as everything is composed, of small items called molecules. They are not all of the same kind. Some contain oxygen, others carbon dioxide, some nitrogen, others argon; some ozone, others nitric acid; some water vapour, others ammonia. In quantity nitrogen heads the list and oxygen seconds it, while in importance the carbon dioxide is second to none. When we grasp that water, carbon, nitrogen, nitric acid, and ammonia contribute ninety per cent of all the materials that are built into the tissues of plants, it is easy to see how necessary it is that they should have roots in the air as well as roots in the soil.

The leaves are these upper roots or mouths — plants are pretty well all mouth.

— John Stewart Collis in The Worm Forgives the Plough

lamium & plum leaves Nov 08

We kiss and name and praise.

poetry, the language, ,

I have a few hours to myself this afternoon and have been perusing a book of poetry that my husband gave me for Christmas, Dana Gioia’s Interrogations at Noon. I think I borrowed this collection from the library once, but long enough ago that even the poems I vaguely remembered are now fresh gifts — like this one on the first page.

WORDS

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

— Dana Gioia

half dome 4 more sun yet
Webcam of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park