All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

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

The Feast of Angels

church, feasts, quotes, , , , , ,

Being raised in Protestant churches, I learned little about angels. Since coming to Orthodoxy, I’ve been introduced to a large body of teaching, and some practices that help me learn experientially, too. Some lessons come through the feasts such as on November 8th (beginning with Vespers tonight, actually), when we celebrate the Feast of The Synaxis of the Chief of the Heavenly Hosts, Archangel Michael and the Other Heavenly Bodiless Powers.

I read that the commemoration was established at the beginning of the fourth century at the Council of Laodicea. It was set to be celebrated in what was at that time the ninth month of the year, because there are nine ranks of angels.

This very rich article also tells a lot about angels according to our tradition. One teaching that gets me thinking about the mysteries of God’s Kingdom is about the angels’ bodies. But aren’t they body-less, as the name of the feast calls them? On that topic and others, here are some excerpts from the blog post, passing on to us the teachings of several church fathers:

St. John of Damascus says they are creatures limited in space and time; they have their own specific external appearance. Compared to humans, they are bodiless due to the human’s “heavy body,” but compared to God they have a body. “We speak about the angels as bodiless and immaterial compared to us, but in fact everything is heavy and material compared to God, to Whom nobody can be compared, because only the Divine is non-material and bodiless.”

St. John Chrysostom says that “… every one of us has his angel;” and St. Basil the Great adds, “Beside every believer in God sits his angel, so repent.” Finally, the angel of prayer is the angel who helps us to pray. St. Clement of Alexandria says, “Even when a person prays alone, he is accompanied by angels.” Tertullian commands the Christian not to sit when he prays in respect for the angel of prayer standing beside him.

That last sentence is the kind of nugget of truth that I can hope to remember, and let it influence my everyday life. Some will say, Why not just remember that God Himself sits with you, so repent? etc. What I have concluded after debating about these things many years ago is that if God has chosen to use angels in His salvation work, why should we ignore or reject them? Why don’t we just say, Thank you, Lord! and show our appreciation by our acts?

In our parish we have many who are named for the Archangel Michael; we’ll have Divine Liturgy tomorrow morning and give thanks for the work of angels in our lives. I’d like to muse longer over more quotes from this article but I better return to my housework if I want to make it to church in the morning.

Perfect Cheesecake Bars

church, food and cooking,

It wasn’t my idea to make cheesecake bars, but once I accepted the assignment I took ownership with my usual under-deadline obsessiveness. Lucky it was that I only had a week to fill up with the project, as it turned out to be one of those tasks that swell up to take as much time as you give them.

If you want to see how and why a recipe might evolve, devolve, and eventually get tuned up into its final and praiseworthy rendition, keep reading. This is where I play the professional baker (I know, that’s tooo funny.) If you just want the recipe, please skip over all of the tedious and painful story and go straight to the bottom of the page.

At church the Sisterhood was giving a dinner to celebrate the 60th anniversary of our priest’s ordination, and the 85th birthdays of him and his wife. We threw in a celebration of their 61 years of marriage. We love them so much, we wanted it to be a Very Special dinner, and many people put in many hours and days of planning. I came late to that part, when the final plans for the end of the meal settled on a dessert sampler, and I was asked to make cheesecake bars.

The other four choices on the dessert table were to be Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars, Greek kourabiedes, baklava, and orange chiffon pie. The pie and the cheesecake bars would be baked in bun pans, which are 18x26x1″, so that we could cut them into approximately 2″ pieces and end up with close to 100. I was offered a recipe that called for a commercial cookie mix, but I decided immediately to find a recipe that I could be proud to serve to honored guests. For this kind of occasion I didn’t want to include anything like that.

The things I wanted or needed in a recipe were cottage cheese as well as cream cheese (because I remembered liking what the cottage cheese did to the texture), a streusel topping, and a balanced relation between crust, filling, and topping. It couldn’t be much taller than one inch, if I were going to bake it in a bun pan. I wanted a bar that would present well on a tray, and that could be moved from the pan to a serving platter to a dessert plate without its layers mushing together or becoming a crumbly mess.

for the streusel

Pinterest and other sites are replete with pictures and recipes for cheesecake bars, but very few of them met my requirements. Some looked tall and ready to topple. Many were too gooey, or had base layers that seemed too thin to support the cheesecake. And few had cottage cheese as an ingredient. Eventually I went to my old recipe binders and discovered that I myself had made two different versions of this dessert many years ago, and I’d written notes about them. One of them contained cottage cheese.

So I started with that one, and built on it. After several hours (I kid you not) of this creative culinary plagarism, I had a plan, and I put together a 9×13 test pan of the goodies. A bun pan’s horizontal space is four times that of a 9×13 pan, so if I kept the height to 1″ I could easily adjust the recipe for the larger pan.

The kitchen table was covered with old recipes from my files, and new printouts from the computer, from which I’d cobbled together my own possible versions that I scribbled on a legal pad. First lesson I learned from the test: I should carefully write out, or better yet, print the recipe off the computer in a large font, and double-check that I haven’t left out an ingredient or transcribed something wrong.


Test batch #1 was a failure, mostly because I goofed up the streusel and it was way too crumbly. I made a couple of other boo-boos also. After that I studied up on streusels with the goal of producing a topping that would decorate the smooth cheesecake layer and hide any little imperfections or bumps. It would not spill crumbs too readily and mess up the sides of the bars when they were cut. And it wouldn’t be too thick, because I wanted to be sure that the cheesecake layer was prominent. I planned for mine to feature walnuts and not cinnamon.

test batch #2 after setting up overnight

Those messy bars were not a complete failure, and the boys next door enjoyed them very much. But I wanted to make a second small batch that was good for my purposes in every way, so the next day I produced Test Batch #2. I remembered to put in the parchment paper before I pressed in the crumbly crust, and the next morning it was very easy to remove the whole cake by lifting up on the sides of the paper.

I set it on the cutting board and began to trim away the unattractive edges. The streusel was just the way I wanted it, but the crust was too crumbly and uneven. There was more crust and less filling than desirable. And maybe the whole thing had been in the oven too long, because the edges of the filling were dry and cracked.

Test batch #2 had several problems.
Layers of the unacceptable Test #2

There wasn’t time enough for me to make a third test batch, or even to shop for more ingredients to make it, so I just took care to adjust the amounts and change a couple of things in preparation for making the final huge panful — though I’d decided by that time to make them in two half-size bun pans.

The next morning was the real thing. I tried not to be my usual loosey-goosey self. I moved slowly and methodically and stopped to clean up several times during the assembly, so that I wouldn’t get stressed and confused by all the mess. If I ever play professional baker again, I’ll have to bring in a sous chef and/or a dishwasher. But I hope my experience has taught me not to do this kind of thing a second time.

I mixed the base in the food processor this time, after grinding the walnuts finer. I cut down on the amounts, and then I had a really hard time making the dough cover the bottom. Oh well, it’s too late to change now, I thought. After it rose in the oven, though, I was surprised to see that the base layer had puffed up a bit. Maybe it wouldn’t be too thin after all.

I also increased the amount of the filling, which I had reduced in the second test batch in an effort to achieve that elusive 1″ height. I hoped that the shorter crust layer would make room for more filling, which was, after all, my favorite part.

The most fun was spreading all that creamy cheesy lemony filling on to the crust…

…though sprinkling buttery streusel on top was a close second.

I baked the two big pans in my oven, being careful not to overbake, and when they had cooled I took them to church to store overnight, because we have an extra-large refrigerator there. In the morning all of us dessert-bakers got together in the church kitchen and prepared our sweets for serving.

I didn’t try to remove the huge cheesecake from the pan in one piece, but I cut the bars right in the pan. They were just as I wanted them to be. The scraps from the edges — not dry, but a little raggedy — were passed around to all the people setting up tables and decorating, and they were declared scrumptious.

Some other things I want to remember about this consuming experiment: In the end we served all of the dessert samples in paper muffin cups, so there wasn’t as much opportunity for squishing. I decided that it would have been much easier to make four 9×13 batches than to go to all the trouble to adjust for big shallow pans. And after all the cheesecake bars had been cut and made ready in the cups, I heard how a local expert in a sister church makes cheesecakes for a crowd. She bakes individual servings right in the muffin cup!

For a smaller batch to be served at home, I might try this recipe without the streusel and top the bars with something that is less like the base. But for a while, these will be my standard, gorgeous, addictively creamy — ta da! Cheesecake Bars!!

Perfect Cheesecake Bar
Lemony Walnut Cheesecake Bars

Base/Crust:

Line a 13×9 pan with parchment paper, overlapping sides a little.

¼ cup already chopped walnuts

½ cup cold salted butter, in chunks

3 tablespoons brown sugar

¾ cup white flour

Using the steel blade, chop the walnuts further in food processor until fine. Add the other ingredients and mix until they clump together.

Press evenly into bottom of lined pan, and bake at 350° for 15 minutes. Remove from oven.

Filling:

1 ½ cups full-fat cottage cheese

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon lemon zest

2 tablespoon lemon juice

½ cup sugar

Blend cottage cheese in food processor until smooth; add all other ingredients and mix until blended. Spread on baked crust.

Topping:

½ cup flour

4 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons powdered sugar

½ cup walnuts chopped

¼ cup butter, melted

Mix all with pastry blender until the crumbs are the size you like.

Sprinkle topping evenly over filling. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until a table knife inserted in the middle comes clean. Cool in the pan on a rack. Refrigerate overnight, then use the parchment paper to lift out carefully onto a cutting board. While the loaf is still on the parchment paper, use a sharp knife to cut the bars, dipping into hot water and/or wiping on a wet towel as needed. Trim edges as necessary and cut into 24 bars. Keep refrigerated.

 

Everyone lies naked on a bed of nettles.

education, play, quotes, ,

I ran across this article, part of a series on education by Anthony Esolen. In the course of describing how the modern world wars against our children’s souls in ways our ancestors didn’t experience, he touches on the topics of play, and why we don’t want to be stimulated, and silence.

I think of the Lord speaking to us, in His silence that communicates so much: “Be still, and know that I am God.” And that is how I know that these issues are crucial. Some excerpts:

It is noise, rather, that is the absence, both of the significant word and of the fullness of being that silence allows us to hear.

…how petty and dreary a thing it is to be stimulated. The stimulus is the prick or spur you dig into the side of an animal. Imagine the horse, slow moving creature when he is content, with his large sad eyes. If we are to make use of him, we must apply the spur.

It is essentially a pornographic world, where everyone lies naked on a bed of nettles, and every new thing is dead before it is born.

Silence is so great a blessing to us because we cannot use it. All things truly creative, which partake of the spirit of play, send their roots deep down into silence.

Read the whole article, Life Under Compulsion: Noise.

How long will the rocks of Berkeley last?

family, history, nature, time, , , , ,
Berkeley Camellia in October

My sisters came to visit, and for the first time in about 50 years we returned together to places in Berkeley where we used to play. None of us has ever lived there, but as children we visited our maternal grandparents every summer.

Both of our parents had grown up in Berkeley, and last week we walked and drove the mostly hilly streets to find several of the houses in which our grandparents and our father and his sisters had lived. Of course we also stopped and stared at our other grandma’s house, savoring the memories that had been born in us there.

Not far away is Indian Rock Park, of which you can see pictures in my post about the neighborhood where Grandma and Grandpa lived for half a century. Indian Rock is huge — but not as big as we remembered it. And the park includes massive slabs and lava stones directly across the street, which I don’t know if I’ve ever played on. We didn’t go there this time, either, but climbed to the top of Indian Rock itself and sat a while, looking out over the tops of a thousand houses to San Francisco Bay.

Down Indian Rock Path

Not for very long, though, because we wanted to skip on down the steps of Indian Rock Path to Solano Avenue shops. Well, maybe not skip. But skipping is probably what we used to do!

Jade plant in bloom on the path

In our memories the excursion to the ice cream parlor took much longer than what we found this time, even though we have passed the age when one can be unconscious of one’s legs and feet whether walking uphill or down. That shop has a new name, but the wares are similar, and you can look at old scoops while you wait.

After lunch, because we wanted to return to the higher neighborhood, it was necessary to hike up, and this time we took the steep route of Marin Avenue. Again my experience seemed altogether different from that of years ago, when most evenings after dinner Grandma, at an age greater than any of us have reached yet, would lead us on brisk neighborhood walks. It was slower than then. And the crucial person was missing.

Marin Avenue is a hike.

Mortar Rock steps

We circled back to Mortar Rock, just around the corner from Indian Rock, and wandered there longer, just as we used to play there longer in our childhoods. More of those stone surfaces are easily climbable, and Grandma always felt better about us going by ourselves, because we didn’t have to cross a busy street to get there.

The houses next to these parks and paths don’t have much privacy. In this picture you can see how close they are, and how there are not fences blocking them from park goers and their glances.

When I first put my feet on the dry paths of Mortar Rock Park, suddenly a familar herby smell registered in my senses, making me look down to see long pointy dead leaves underfoot, just as my mind was linking to “bay tree.” I lifted my head and saw that the dappled shade was cast by at least two tall old California Bay Laurels (along with oaks and buckeye) whose several large trunks were curving high over the rocks.

And yes, there were the grinding mortars in the rock, empty of anything but leaves at this time of year. Do children still pretend to be Indians grinding acorns in them?

One of the houses we were searching for was only a few blocks from here, so we walked up the street, admiring the many flowers still in bloom in this mild climate. Banks of fuchsias always remind us of the long row of them that grew along the brick path in Grandma and Grandpa’s back yard.

More rocks! This house, though modern in design, has a very traditional and unchanging boulder to distinguish its front yard.


This one’s even more of a monolith. Having such a thing in your front yard would certainly lend drama to the landscaping. I wonder if the owners of the house are helped to keep a humble perspective on their lives, with the antiquity of their mineral friend constantly looming. So solid, and not going anywhere.

Lots of giant volcanic rocks dot the neighborhood. I saw these I didn’t remember on Santa Barbara Avenue, taking up a lot or two.

Rocks on Santa Barbara Ave., Berkeley CA

The weather was summery, and we seemed to walk always up, and up. It felt good to stop frequently to snap pictures of fall color or late summer flowers. Eventually we arrived at the first house of our father’s on our list, on Santa Barbara Avenue.

Another childhood home of my father, on Euclid, has had a facelift recently — we compared it with photos from 15 years ago when a patriarchal tree must have blocked the view and the warming sunlight, and the color was white. Paint and trees and even whole houses are easier to change or remove than those giant rocks.

Euclid house

And though it seems ages ago that we walked these streets together, and slept in the Berkeley bedroom wondering at the city lights spread out before us, most of these houses are not more than a hundred years old. Young things, really.

We went back to our car and drove to a few more houses, none so photogenic now. We bought gas at the station where our grandma used to buy hers, and we shopped at the market where she used to shop. We ate dinner at Spenger’s Fish Grotto where we’d eaten many times with our grandparents. And then my dear sisters and I finished our day with shopping at our grandma’s favorite Park & Shop market, now Andronico’s.

But a little earlier in the evening we’d added to our tour a visit to the cemetery where both Grandma and Grandpa are buried. None of us had visited since the last graveside service almost 20 years ago, and it took some exploring to find the marker. I felt closer to Grandma and Grandpa there at their grave than I had on the street in front of their house.

Cemeteries are where one finds another sort of stone, markers of lives that grew up like grass, and withered and died, most with life spans briefer even than flimsy wooden houses and certainly shorter than those huge stones people built neighborhoods around fairly recently. At the end of time, we read in 2 Peter, “… the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

Indian Rock and all the granite in the Sierras, though it’s been around longer than we can imagine, will be gone, along with houses and gravestones. Then what is most enduring, the souls into whom God breathed life, will be raised. We are what on this earth is eternal.