Glory of God

"The glory of God is the human person fully alive"
-St. Irenaeus

Pictures from The Priory

Last week I took a two-night private retreat at the Saint Placid Priory Spirtuality Center in Lacey. I embarked on several picture-taking prayer walks over the grounds at the times when the sun peeked through the clouds, and have chosen five of my favorite images to share with you:

Indian American Food

Some of you know I have been dating a man from the Panjab region of India since December. One of our favorite things to do is cook dinner together. Both of us eat better when we do this; I do because he is vegetarian and both of us do because we're not just throwing a frozen burrito in the microwave or a frozen pizza in the oven. It is a lot easier to get motivated to actually cook with raw ingredients when you have someone to share the job with, talking about your day and laughing about the process. And there is a lot of laughter about the process, because we're both trying to combine our unique cultural expectations about food into a meal, and the results can sometimes certainly be classified as humorous.

On Saturday night, he had a bunch of vegetables that he wanted to use so I suggested that we make something for dinner with them. I had something like a stir fry in mind, and he had something like an Indian curry. We started with our usual base; sauteeing onions and tomatoes in olive oil. Then, my contribution was adding tofu, and my insistence that we add the carrots and cucumber he wanted to leave out. His contribution was to add fresh ginger and garlic, as well as powdered garlic, red pepper, black pepper, and turmeric; and to fry some Indian Roti (a round, flat whole wheat bread resembling something like a flour tortilla, from which you rip a piece to eat the curry). The end result was delicious but completely impossible to categorize. It was not American; not much like the stir fry I originally had in mind. It was not Indian; not much like the curry he had in mind. In fact, no one in the world has probably had that exact meal! But oh, we enjoyed it.