Domesticity Log, no. 4 | Chickpeas in Spicy Tomato Gravy

Ingredients:

• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 jalapeno, chopped
• One 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 bunch green onions, chopped + sprinkling of dehydrated onion (eyeball it).  Or, 3 onions, chopped.
• 2 tablespoons ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon ground coriander
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 1/2 cups canned diced tomatoes
• 2 cups dried chickpeas (soaked overnight)
• 2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons cilantro leaves

Instructions:

1. In a food processor, combine garlic, jalapeno, & ginger.  Process to a paste.
2. When chopping green onions, separate the green from white.
3. In a large skillet, heat the oil.  Add the white stems of the chopped onions & dehydrated onions and cook over moderately high heat until sizzling, about 3 minutes.  Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are browned, about 7 minutes.
4. Add the garlic paste and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 2 minutes.
5. Add the cumin, coriander, and cayenne and cook, stirring for 1 minute.  Add the tomatoes and simmer over moderate heat until thickened, about 6 minutes.
6. Add the chickpeas and water and simmer until the chickpeas are flavored with the gravy, about 8 minutes.
7. Season the chickpeas with salt, garnish with cilantro and green onion.
8. Serve with Greek yogurt & naan.

Recipe adapted via Food & Wine's Chef Recipes Made Easy.  Every year my grandpa orders me a Food & Wine recipe book for Christmas.  I have about five now, this one being the most recent (2011).  Below, you can see how I changed up the recipe.  My effort was to make this not so incredibly spicy, though even with my alterations (I used 1 jalapeno instead of 2, for instance), this still about burnt my tongue and lips off.  But, still a very tasty dish.  And cooking it is a delight--all those spices hitting the skillet make the entire kitchen bloom with that exotic scent.  It's lovely. 

Also, a note on onions: I don't like them.  I hate getting a mouthful of onion, which is always somehow crunchy and slimy at the same time.  So, I use scallions and dehydrated onions exclusively to get around the weird texture thing.

Scintilla, no. 8 | Sitting on Porches on Rainy Days

I asked Wolfman this morning what he thought my most simple pleasures are, and he answered, "honey, shade," and then a specific carnal act which I probably should not repeat here.  He was right on all counts, of course.  He knows me so well, knows how I thrill to see honey glistening over the foam of the red tea lattes he always mixes for me at the coffee shop, knows that if I can't find any shade, I will make my own whether it be with a parasol or large hat, or, in moments of desperation, book or paper.  And, then, of course, he knows me, as Shakespeare would say. 

The fact is, most of my pleasures are what I would consider simple.  I am made happiest by the same things that make most of us happiest, man, woman, child, or dog.  Tasty things, a loving touch, something cool on a hot day.  I find pleasure in burying seeds in black dirt.  I am pleased beyond measure when Wolfman nods and groans a positive affirmation over some meal I've cooked.  I love the feel of a skirt that twirls, swishing about my legs, and I love finding a good linoleum upon which to twirl (the floor of the break room in our building where I wait while heating water for tea is perfect). 

And while I am not, as Shirley Manson sings, only happy when it rains, I am extremely happy when it rains.  Two days this week we've woken to the sound of rain and thunder outside our open bedroom windows, and I can not ever describe the feeling that illicits in me; I am just not that good.  But, God, how happy I am.  And oh, God; is that you?  In Albuquerque, where horizons reign rather than trees, my mother would take me outside in the dusk to watch storms so far away, lightening miles and miles and miles from us, and we would both share a quiet furor.  And if I move to the other side of the country again, away from North Carolina, I will always remember its summer storms, and sitting on my grandmother's back porch, pressing my feet to the cold concrete and watching the rain fall in a curtain, being misted when the wind blows, listening to the cacophony of her many windchimes, the porch ceiling just covered in them.  I love sitting on porches on rainy days, more even than honey. 

And what are Wolfman's simple pleasures?  Ginger, fixing broken things, and a specific carnal act which I probably should not repeat here.

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Ephemera Friday, no. 11 | Sartorial Lust, Spring & Summer

The weather here in good ol' NC has skipped Spring and headed straight to Summer.  There has been sweat.  So, I find myself perusing my style pinterest board for some reminders on how to dress when I feel like I very well may melt into a puddle on the sidewalk.  Here are some things I'll be searching for in thrift stores as the days get hotter and longer:

1. Loose dresses, slacks, and blouse + skirt combos in bold colors.  There is nothing more pleasant on a summer day than catching a breeze in the folds of some slouchy, floating material on your body:

The Sartorialist + Bobo Woodlake + Stockholm Streetstyle + Dirty Richmond

 2. Overalls!  I have longed for a good pair of overalls since middle school, no joke.  Perfect for puttering around in the garden and kitchen (particularly if there are large pockets involved), which so much more sunlight hours allows me to do:

Pinterest + FaceHunter

 3. Hats.  There is very little that bums me out more than a sun-induced headache.  And, my skin sure does appreciate the shade, and will show me its appreciate tenfold when I am 40 and virtually wrinkle-free:

Planet Blue + Chic Too Chic + Sparkling Glitter

 4. Simple mini-dresses in vivid colors.  Such a cinch, so utterly doable, and effortlessly chic.

The Blonde Salad + Tuula Vintage

 5. Linen dresses for work on the homestead.  No, technically my tiny garden and four cats do not count as a homestead, but I'm already visually shopping for the possibility one day. 

L' Atelier des Ours + Acoustics + LarimeLoom (Etsy)

 6. Bold patterned dresses with chunky accessories.  Who am I kidding?  I look for this sort of thing every season, in every kind of weather:

Natural Hair Teens + Black Fashion + Vogue Australia

7. Bloomers!  Bloomers are brilliant, end of story.

Catherine Reeves + Crea Time





Scintilla, no. 7 | My People

Nevada Moonrise

I am Mouse, and I hail from Trailerwood, USA.  When I see a photo of a man with stringy colorless hair, and scraggly beard brushing his solar plexus, in a bare room, clutching a beer, I am transported.  That is My People.  Those girls, hardly teenagers, in the tiniest shorts, drinking slurpies outside a convenience store.  My People.  An upside down American flag, an abandoned strip mall, a bikini-clad girl on a hotel balcony, a low mist settled across the floor of a wood, blue/black tattoos, rusted trucks, snow, and braids, Willie Nelson and the Meat Puppets, dogs with missing limbs, cats with missing eyes, small children with dirt smudged across their noses and packed under their fingernails, tall grass fields full of grasshoppers popping like corn.  Mutts of every kind.  My People.  Men in heeled boots and Stetsons, beer and packages of bologna kept icy in creek beds, panning for gold, bottle cap collections, nudity amongst ferns and in hot springs, wildfires, torn jeans, freckles and birth marks, roads which wind about mountains and shoot straight through desserts.  My people are always saving up for a horse.  The West, and cowboy stories, and knowing Doc Holliday’s final words by heart.  Axes and shotguns propped up in corners.  Pond baptisms in godless God’s country.  Lost polaroids in the sand, and dolls half-buried in mud.  Men selling watermelon at the side of the road, and traveling families crowded in U-Hauls buying two for the trip.  Corn whiskey.  Broad, high cheek bones.  Passing by the Redwoods when I am 10, and stopping the car to reach around a tree, my fingertips brushing my step-dad’s and my little brother’s, and still the three of us not nearly reaching all the way around the trunk.  Kittens hiding in a pile of fire wood, and being yelled at for eating the grapes off an old man’s vineyard.  And eating blackberries, too, which grow wild, so we don’t get yelled at.  Moccasins staining my feet sienna, and freezing at that sound, that rattle, feeling my heart seize, more scared than I had or would ever be, and leaping away like a gazelle, with luck on my side, just that once.  Rock hunting.  UFO spotting.  I’ve seen ant hills in the dessert taller than a person, taller than me.  Men who hoot and holler while children roast hot dogs on sticks in an open fire.  Women who daydream too much, or drink too much.  Growing up to not be one of those women, to not be old before my time, but still scanning my eye along the trailer parks beside Tryon Rd., still perking up at the name Oakridge, still telling people that once I lived on Route 66, and I found a homeless man in a dumpster.  Still riding so many buses.  Still hypnotized in the passenger seat by the high way moving under the car like water.

The Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 6 | To Whom It May Concern

I tend to address my prayers, To Whom it may concern.

I used to not pray at all—for years and years, my entire life, essentially.  I remember on the U-Haul trip from New Mexico to North Carolina, my mother told me in some dusty parking lot that when things got really bad, she prayed, and then life, without fail, would start looking up.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, though I must’ve said something supportive, because I spent so much of my childhood trying to reassure my Mom that she was understood and loved, but I filed that away for review at some later date.  This is that later date, of course—this new year, 2012, in which I resolved to pray, though I never did define what it was I’d be praying to. 

The way I think prayer works is by way of mental concentration and effort--not necessarily the grace of some higher being, but the grace of the very human mind, that 90% we are not using at any given time, perhaps.

Wolfman is a shaman.  He’s the man on the mountain.  He is a reader of runes, and a sage.  When I first met him, I found this aspect of his life, his spirituality, to be somewhat annoying, but definitely fascinating, and incredibly perplexing.  I was flummoxed.  I was intrigued.

And all his magical thinking has worn off on me, perhaps.  Or maybe, I was more of an atheist-for-argument's-sake all those years.  After all, didn’t I only actually announce myself as an Atheist while in a Biblical Lit class full of freshmen Southern Baptists? 

But, as I wrote to Kath once, I found myself, a couple years into my marriage, praying over a dead tree, or what could be described as praying though I did not immediately recognize it as such, and had an epiphany—my part-time Agnosticism had taken such a weird turn. 

Weekly now, though not daily as I originally intended, I throw out praise and questions and wants to the universe, the void, or the lack-of-void.  I sometimes say, “Mother,” as in Mother Earth or some combination of Maiden, Mother, & Crone.  I sometimes say, “Spirits,” because I like the image of ancestral beings and ghosties floating about the atmosphere and listening in, though I don’t believe it as an actuality.  Mostly, I find myself simply paying greater attention to what is before me.  If I can memorize the exact placement of a freckle on my husband’s ear, I can pay that same amount of respect to trees, to plants of every kind, to which flowers bees and butterflies prefer.  In fact, I did not have such an interest in gardening and self-sustainability until I found myself interested in that wishy washy term, Spiritualism.  Or maybe vice versa.  I’m still figuring it out, of course.  But never have I been so aware of the passing of seasons and days and moons.  And, no, I don’t believe in an afterlife as such.  But, I do believe in breathing on growing things, saying kind words to my seedlings—it’s scientific, really, that exchange of gases.  But it’s more than that, isn’t it, I ask myself, still unsure.

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Scintilla, no. 5 | Big Me, Meet Little Me



Photo by Trish Reda



In a letter recently, Grandma told me that once, at a mall in Florida, an old Cuban man sitting on the tile floor giving fortunes, upon seeing child-me run past him in a whirlwind of oomph and pizazz, as was my wont back then, asked the crowd delightedly, “What was that?!,” and upon being formally introduced to me and my tiny palm, or however this worked, announced that I had an old soul, that I would be good with words, and that I would go far in my life, in this life

It made sense to my grandma.  I was born on a Thursday, after all, and “Thursday’s child has far to go.”

She has a lot of mall stories about little me.  I used to dance to the music filtering out of overhead speakers, drawing actual crowds, and I would stop teenage girls to discuss fashion, to show them my painted nails and tell them about my favorite dresses.  I was a Leo, true and blue.  I liked being the center of attention.  I was bright and merry, vivid and loud, spoiled, sassy, and, on occasion, in need of a good spanking.  Once, Grandma was in her kitchen and suddenly realized that the chatter in the dining room she was listening to was four year old me and my mother bickering back and forth.  She stepped into the doorway to ask, “Val, why are you letting that child argue with you?”  Perhaps, because there was something adult about me even then, or perhaps because my personality was so big that sometimes people got caught up in it and forgot, forgot that I was an infant, that I was totally new on this planet.

I’m speaking mightily romantically of myself as a child, I know.  But please don’t mistake this for vanity.  The fact of the matter is that that little girl with the ribbons braided into her knee-length hair might as well have been somebody else entirely.  She, her attitudes and desires, are totally and utterly foreign to me.  Even the fact that she used to have a designated time each day to slow dance with her grandpa, my grandpa, is somewhat mindboggling to me.  I love my grandpa, but I don’t have nearly the same command of our relationship as I did at 5.  I very much doubt I could get him to slow dance with me these days.

My grandma blames a stifling, strict step-father for the way I am now.  Not that I am in any way undesirable now.  But, I know at times, in her heart of hearts, as she watched me struggle through middle and high school to fit in, to hide (though my innate weirdness, passed along in the blood stream from our matriarch Wilhelmina Bentz, of course made it impossible to completely fit in), she must’ve mourned that fearless little firecracker of a girl, in her tutu and her saddle oxfords. 

When I am most punishing of myself, I call myself timid.  On a daily basis, I don’t feel timid at all, but occasionally, some hang-up will rear its ugly head and make my daily life a little less… just less.  I’m getting over it, but when I first began working as an administrative assistant, I had to pump myself up before calling caterers, before going upstairs to get signatures on budget documents from the bigwigs.  I’m reluctant to try new things, to sign up for the classes and projects I think I would enjoy.  Before I met my Wolfman, I had never pursued anybody, for friendship or otherwise, and every day I am thankful for that glitch in my personality sub-routines which made me pick up a phone and call him. 

When I daydream, it’s about a me who’s a little more of that small child, a me who is sanguine and intrepid, who grasps life and makes it bow to her.  A me who eats whims for breakfast and tap dances on the status quo.  And, every year, I think I come a little closer to reuniting with that child me, every year I am reintroduced to myself.  I will, perhaps, never again be a true Leo, but a little humility never hurt anyone.

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 4 | A Boho Bedroom for Little Warriors

When we were left alone in the house, those rare times our grandparents both were away from the home, things got downright post-apocalyptic.  Now, years later, after we’ve all left home, if I say to my sister, “Hey, remember that time I accidentally threw a rake at Dusty?  Remember how mad he got?,” we both dissolve into a fit of giggles.  But living those days was not fun, not funny.  Our survival without parental supervision was a very serious matter.  You see, in those first years of living with our grandparents, after Mom left us, our brother, the middle child, still in elementary school, suffered a very real and powerful form of rage, a sort of rage that we two sisters seemed very good, naturals in fact, at bringing to a boil.  It’s not fair to blame these Lord of the Flies scenes from my childhood entirely on Dusty, though.  After all, I “accidentally” threw the rake at him while purposely swinging it at him.  (The metal rake flew off the handle, hitting him in the back as he ran, and he splayed forward to the ground in a way that, to this day, as I’m typing this in fact, makes me laugh.  The afternoon it happened, however, I had not time to laugh; I had to book it inside the house and lock him out before he got me and did—what?  What was I so afraid of, exactly?  I was bigger than him, and I knew from experience that I could throw a mean punch.)

Generally, we weren’t allowed to spend too much time in our rooms.  My grandma called it “sulking”, regardless of our attitude at any given time.  If we had free time on our hands, we were expected to spend it in the kitchen with the rest of the family, playing card games, or doodling, or helping with dinner, or just jabbering nonsensically at each other, which we did a lot of.  But, when Grandma and Grandpa weren’t home, Sierra Dawn and I spent most of our time locked in our bedroom, with Dusty occasionally beating at the door and shouting threats.  Our snoody Great-Aunt Tricia called the room a “toy store”; clearly, she thought it was decadent beyond belief.  As years went by, we collected—toys, yes (mostly dolls and doll accessories), but also strange things, like Christmas tree garlands which we wrapped around the posts of our beds, and silk scarves which we hung from the ceiling.  We somehow accumulated a collection of poster board dioramas of cityscapes and pastoral landscapes—Brazil at Carnival, a Japanese villa, the Amazon river rolling through jungle—which we tacked on our ceiling.  Fairy lights abounded, as well as several bead curtains, and some feathered masquerade masks on the wall.  We even had a wooden cat with wings dangling from one corner and crystals refracting rainbows throughout the room.  When we were still small enough, we shared a queen size bed, covered in stuffed animals and lace throw pillows.  It was our gypsy paradise, really, and a shame we were hardly ever there except when frantically considering how to reinforce the door against our manic brother.  Much like my three favorite movies when I was six are my three favorite movies to this day, minus the creepy doll collection, my decorating style has not changed much.  The more color, the more beads and crystals and scarves, the better.

Out to dinner with some girlfriends not too long ago, I told the rake story.  And while two of my gal pals stared blankly at me in disbelief, my friend Siobhan answered, “That ain’t nothing!” and told, much to my relief, the story about her sister chasing her through her house with a softball bat while their parents were gone.  I remember Siobhan’s bedroom, vaguely, but I’m sure she, to this day, has every detail of those Dragon Ball Z banners that hung on her bedroom wall memorized, and the every habit of her terrarium frogs, long dried up and dead.

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