Tag Archives: house-blessing

Blessings with gingerbread and Flour.

food and cooking, the language, Theophany, , , , , , , , ,
Grandson who is now married.

By the time the book was ready to pick up at the library, I’d forgotten that I’d ever put it on hold; there must have been a good reason for me to look beyond the hugely generic title of Flour. Probably it was back before Christmas when I was still looking ahead, to Christmas baking, whereas now I’ve moved on.

Normally I am more drawn to provocative titles like Samarkand or Bravetart, two other cookbooks on my shelf at present, though I also have had plainer in my possession, such as The Onion Book, and Salt and Pepper — or was it Pepper and Salt? I gave that one away. The Moosewood Cookbook from my youth comes to mind, named after a restaurant, and Mollie Katzen followed it up with The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I guess she had a knack for evocative names!

Before I leave the subject of Katzen, I have to tell you that one of her own three favorite cookbooks has an ambitious title: Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia, by Patience Gray. I definitely need to check my library to see if I can borrow that one; it has several words that arouse my imagination. Katzen’s latest published work has the lovely title, The Heart of the Plate ❤️

I did bring  Flour home, and leafed through its pages a bit. It turns out that the word is in this case a reference to a very specific thing, and place, the Flour Bakery that the author Joanne Chang owns in Boston. Chang graduated from Harvard with honors, and degrees in math and economics, and also studied astrophysics. But even while she was in college she was selling cookies to her classmates.

today’s flour

All these facts make me start wondering about different personalities and how they use language; I’m fairly certain no one whose mind works like mine would ever come up with such a name for a bakery or anything. Her more recent book is titled Flour, Too, which is even more puzzling. In spite of all this distracting analysis, a recipe for Deep Dark Spicy Gingerbread caught my eye, and I decided to make it to serve after my house blessing that was today.

It’s not as though I needed another gingerbread recipe. If you are fond this kind of cake you might explore the other versions I’ve written about here over the years, like the vegan Gingerbread Pear Bundt Cake and Wheatless Gingerbread; I’ve made chocolate chip gingerbread many times but evidently never shared it here.

For the house blessing, we began our prayer downstairs, not far from where I had displayed the air clay owl that my granddaughter Ivy made for me last year. This year someone made a clay sloth for me. Not long ago I was also given a sloth tree ornament. Is there something about me that makes the family think of sloths? Now the sloth has joined the owl, and what they mean together, I am still pondering.

Knowing while sleeping last night that I would bake a cake in the morning, attend my friend Gwen’s house blessing, and drive back here for my own — all that made me wake up earlier than ever, and I had the cake in the oven before 8 o’clock! I was not channeling my sloth friend today.

The cake was not that special. I think it had too much butter — a full cup for a 9×13 cake — which bogged it down; the gluten-free flour probably contributed to its heaviness, and it included a whole 12 oz jar of molasses. It was not as spicy as I expected considering the fresh ginger and lots of black pepper that went into it. If I make it again I will use half the butter, and more egg. And maybe try another sort of flour.

But it was easy to eat
with a dollop of whipped cream on top,
and I sent a big chunk home with my priest,
because it was his birthday.

Moving toward civilization.

home, homemaking, quotes, , , , , ,

Today was my house blessing of Theophany. I was glad it had been delayed a few weeks after the feast on January 6th, because I wanted to put the house in order beforehand, especially the construction/storage areas that were still in process until a few weeks ago.

So as I was getting things spiffed up for today’s event, I thought, this is the time to share a few carefully chosen images, for those — maybe only a very few? — of my readers who are interested in the indoor physical landscape of my days.

My total remodeling project is not done, but nothing stops me now from living fully in my three new rooms — that is, once I unpack and figure out how to arrange things. I’ve bought a few pieces of furniture and have taken a carload of stuff to the thrift stores, but there is still a lot of processing and figuring out to do. I ordered a cozy armchair that won’t be here until about Pascha (May), and I can’t finalize the arrangement of the morning/sewing room until I get that.

Above is a photo of the morning room from a year ago, and there are lots of Before and In-Process pictures in a post aptly named: Hodgepodge. I don’t intend to show any of the remaining hodgepodge or mess. Instead, I picked out a few tidier scenes or items to focus on.

Above, you can see through the doorway at left into my bedroom. My goddaughter Mary’s father A. made the cabinet doors for me and trimmed out everything. It was so heartening to have someone who was enthusiastic about doing the work and even communicated with me about it! Not to mention the beauty of the result. He had no part in the work that I complain about farther down.

I’m sure I’ll be rearranging sewing things again and again, but for now, I have all my fabric and projects in the cabinets in the proper room. I did remove five boxes full of fabric from my stash, which I will give away, but I kept all of my Waldorf doll supplies. And all of the luscious fabric I brought home from India.

The cluttered environment has disturbed me inwardly, I always knew that, but when I managed to open up floor space and dresser tops, and whittle down the mass of unpacked boxes to take up less and less space in corners… why, I felt like a new person, becoming civilized! It was very calming.

At right is an unfinished area of my bedroom, which had to get repaired after pulling out an old built-in cabinet. There was a nail still sticking out so I put up this hanging I found in a box, that I made eons ago. I still have a lot of painting to do (I should say, for someone to do) in my room, and a few other rooms of the house.

The new bathroom is pleasantly boring in beiges and white, tile and granite. I wanted it that way so I could have colorful towels and shower curtain. That storage cabinet at left I found at Home Depot and bought another one for the master bath.

I have so many interesting little tables that I am fond of for various reasons. This one is a hundred years old at least, and used to live at my husband’s family’s summer cabin. I have never known it as the patio table it was obviously designed to be; it always sits along a wall as a shelf, and is known to be wobbly on its own. But I will probably keep on keeping it, at least while I am in a big house.

My closet got refurbished, and I added a little dressing table to replace what got lost when the two rooms were linked by a door in that spot. It was so long between the time I made decisions and the completion of those shelves, I don’t remember how I ended up with melamine, which is really cheap. So I bought a piece of plastic to put on the dressing table top, to protect it from getting wrecked. The next picture shows the view from the bathroom.

On the dressing table right now I have a Valentine’s Day card I gave to my husband a really long time ago; and an icon of St. Porphyrios.

This is the one bank of drawers I have in the closet. Because it has nice drawer pulls it looks upscale and makes the closet feel fancy — until I want to open the bottom drawer, which as you can see sits right on the floor. So that doesn’t work very well. The shelving units didn’t fit nicely in the crooked old closet space and there are shims and gaps everywhere. Like a 1-2″ space at the ceiling, big enough to collect dust and spiders, but too small to store anything — except for our entire vinyl collection! Maybe I will find some other belongings that are conveniently short and flat, that need storing.

I have oh so many paintings, pictures and other beloved items that eventually I will find new places for, on the walls of several rooms, after the painting and furniture arranging are complete. I’ll leave you with one that I had forgotten about, a little Peruvian farm scene made in Peru, a style of tapestry that was sold in a local shop in a past era. One more thing I am looking forward to incorporating in my newly civilized, homey decor.

“It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”

-G.K. Chesterton

The glory of wetness and a black mark.

nature, Theophany, , , , , , , ,

“It is a bleak sort of day, but I’m glad to be out walking.” Something like that was my thought as I set out on my creek path this morning. A white shape caught my eye, silently winging down the creek, and within two seconds it passed by me close enough to see that it was egret. Then, gone behind the trees.

I had read a poem by Wendell Berry about mud in January, and I looked at the muddy creek, stirred up and deep from recent rains. It wasn’t photogenic, but it was briefly captivating. Flowing streams are good to look at for a few minutes, but there is too much busyness there, and I get restless.

When I pulled my eyes away and to other things, I found an unusual depth to even the neutral colors, from all the leaves and bark and needles being entirely wetted. I have walked by these trees for almost 30 years now ! but this is the first time I noticed their massiveness. As I studied the chunky patterns on their trunks of pines, it took me a long time to notice another design style in the spider’s web.

I ran across a wide road to get nearer the fields, and on the faraway other side of those hayfields and pastures whiter clouds hung in drifts on the hillsides, below the gray sky. This is a day between rainy days; those clouds may be forming into bringers of rain by now, but then they were waiting and still…

Wherever redwood trees towered above me on the path, thousands of their little cones littered my path. How many are lying on the ground just in this neighborhood? And each one a wonder. I stuffed my pockets with them.

After my camera battery was spent, I watched fat robins bathing in the creek’s muddy overflow, their wings fluttering and splashing. Today some Orthodox are celebrating the Nativity of Christ, and yesterday was our (new calendar) feast of the Baptism of Christ. Water is the joyous theme, as it is a fundamental substance of our life, and a fitting symbol for all of creation. Christ baptizes the earth with His baptism, sanctifying it, filling it with Himself. The days on this earth can only be bleak inasmuch as I am not noticing the glory. Why do I forget this reality? I can’t remember ever finding a bleak day out of doors; even when my mood is low, the glory lifts it and comforts me.

This evening, water was sprinkled all over my house, as we walked around singing about our Lord’s baptism, by which he revealed Himself and the entire Holy Trinity. At the end, my priest surprised me when he reached up with the snuffed-out candle and painted a waxy cross on the ceiling near the front door. I had never seen this done before! It feels like a resurrectional form of the Israelites marking their lintels with blood. I am in awe.

The day has been a complete blessing.