Celebrating the Ascension

There is nothing about being Protestant that precludes celebrating more than Christmas and Easter during the Church year. And yet, with the exception of Pentecost for the more charismatic among us and Palm Sunday for those of us who like waving palm crosses into our old age, we let pass by a great number of incredibly important days of remembrance and celebration, including the one coming up: Ascension Day.

As far as I currently understand it, Ascension Day is the celebration of Christ's ascension to the Father after his resurrection and the affirmation that he has sat down at the right hand of the Father, not only as Savior but now as enthroned, triumphant, and glorified Lord and King. I can understand a Protestant reticence about celebrating the Dormition of the Virgin, but why pass over a holy day celebrating an event that forms part of the Apostles Creed accepted by all of Western Christendom, and, as it seems to me after a little bit of thought and nosing around, is a key moment and reality to:

Jesus (e.g. looking forward to his glorification in John 18; Revelation 1, 5),
Peter (e.g. 1 Pet. 3.15-22; Acts 2.32-26, 3.12-26, 5.29-32),
Paul (Eph. 1.18-23, 2.4-10, 4.7-16, Phil. 2.5-11, 3.20-21, Col. 2.6-12, 3.1-5ff),
Luke (who tells it twice, Luke 24 and Acts 1),
the author of Hebrews (1-2; 4.14-16; 8.1-2ff; 9.23-28; 10.11-14, 19-25; 12.1-3),
Stephen (who sees to the reality of the Ascension and the glory of Christ in Acts 7.54-6),
etc.

(Let me know if you can add any more or wish to subtract some of these.)

A conversation with a friend after Good Friday services ultimately produced a plan to prepare ourselves for Ascension Day: read 1 chapter a day from Matthew and then from Revelation and get thinking about the Kingdom. So that’s what I’ll be up to until the Thursday about 33 days from now, with Psalm 46 thrown in here and there for good measure. And then what, I’m not sure – any suggestions?

(Aside: in a stroke of brilliance while walking to the University Library the other day, I realized the perfect Ascension Day celebratory dessert, known for its lofty appearance and soft, pillowy clouds of batter - Angel Food Cake!)

When you've bought too much lamb for Easter

Sometimes, whether out of exuberance or in ignorance, you buy too much meat. Sometimes, it might be as much as twice as much. After the initial chagrin, that's when handy leftover transformations are great, and you can't get much more English and much more homey than shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie is of course not to be confused with cottage pie, which is essentially the same thing but with beef instead of lamb. (Although it is tempting to think that perhaps the Shepherd should actually prefer cottage pie, out of loyalty to his charges?) Traditionally, both are made with leftover roast, but rumor has it that making it with fresh, raw ground beef or lamb (dry-fried with the aromatics at the beginning) is actually better. The following is a version of shepherd's pie that I've cobbled together from Nigella's How to Eat, Jimmy Doherty's A Taste of the Country (which by the way is not only a good guide to classic British farm fare, but also one of the most quirky and literally 'down-to-earth' cookbooks I've ever read, and has inspired my obsession with owning chickens one day), and a recipe adapted from a back-issue of Cooks Illustrated for 'smashed potatoes' - the yummy peeling-free version of mash. This is a recipe that calls for a lot of judgement calls, but if you're fearless in such situations and you have any leftover lamb hanging about, give it a go!

Di’s 'Souped Up Easter Leftovers' version of Shepherd’s Pie

Filling:
1 lb. leftover lamb roast, very finely chopped or minced (can dry fry ground lamb with onions first too)
1-2 cans of chopped tomatoes in tomato sauce
1 small can of tomato paste
about 3/4 c. of beef broth
2-4 Tb. Worcestershire sauce (to taste)
salt and pepper (to taste)
3 large carrots, minced
2 medium onions, minced
3-4 stalks of celery, minced
a large handful of parsley and stalks, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

tip: for the last 5 ingredients, using the food processor is quick and easy

1. Cook this mixture in a few Tb. of olive oil over low heat 10-20 minutes or until carrots are cooked
2. add cooked lamb and flour, stir to combine thoroughly
3. add 1 can of tomatoes slowly; add 2 Tb of tomato paste and some broth and Worcestershire sauce. Taste and add more tomatoes/paste/broth as needed to reach the desired consistency, namely moist, but not soupy, like a filling for a meat pie. Simmer until meat is heated through. Dump into 9x13 pan and finish topping.

tip: While you're waiting for the carrots to cook, you can start the smashed potato topping

Smashed Potato Topping:
2 pounds or more of large red potatoes, washed but not peeled and generally all the same size (cut them down if you have to)
3 bay leaves
8 oz. (1 pack) of light cream cheese
4 Tb. butter or margarine, melted
½ c + warm milk or reserved water from boiling the potatoes (which is actually better than milk)
salt and pepper, to taste

1. Bring potatoes to a boil with the bay leaves and then turn down to a low heat and let simmer for about 30-40 minutes, or until a paring knife can pierce the potatoes with no resistance
2. Drain potatoes, reserving some of the potato water; remove bay leaves and let the potatoes dry out back in the pan for about 5 minutes with the lid off
3. While the potatoes dry, whisk together the melted butter, cream cheese, and salt and pepper, adding ½ c. milk or potato water to create a smooth creamy consistency
4. Smash the potatoes with the back of a wooden spoon on the side of the pan. Leave lumps in: lumps taste good. Fold in cream cheese mixture. Add more milk/potato water as necessary to reach the desired consistency (not too wet - you want a chunky topping that can spread, not a gummy topping)
5. Adjust salt and pepper to taste

Assembly:

1. Top the meat filling with potatoes, and grate over a small amount of cheddar cheese if desired
2. Put under the broiler for a few minutes to brown the top

Easter feasting

For Resurrection Sunday, we invited friends over for a proper Easter feast, with all generousity and abundance in light of prudential wisdom. We wanted to celebrate together as a family with them, and so planned for a leisurely, relatively painless meal preparation that wouldn't take away from my enjoyment and their comfort by enslaving me to the kitchen. This pretty much went according to plan, minus the roast being a bit more speedy than anticipated and causing a last-minute sprint for me! But the original plan was something like this:

Come whenever after church
Nibble on cheese and crackers, nuts, delicious french pickles, while sipping Kir for a good while, listening to joyful music
Kick-start the appetite proper with pan-roasted asparagus with a warm orange-sherry viniagrette (easy to make!), quaffing the rest of the white wine therewith
Have a breather and talk
Bring out the roast lamb, peas, artichoke hearts, and green onions with lemon zest and garlic, and 'smashed potatoes' and switch to the red wines
Adjourn to the sitting room and eat carrot cake (made the day before)
Read resurrection poetry (largely dominated by Hopkins) over coffee and chocolates
Go on a walk together by the river

And that's generally what we did, resulting in a great time of leisurely fellowship and celebration of Christ's resurrection and our new life in Him.

Later that day, after the walk, friends spontaneously dropped by and we spent the next hour and a half laughing ourselves silly together. Calls to home ended the day, and we woke up on Monday for another round of enjoying resurrected life with our friends: banana pancakes with John and Di in the morning sunshine and later tacos with more friends in the evening, picked up from Cambridge's one and only tacqueria. All in all, a satisfying set of celebrations and delight, all pointing towards and participating in the great feast in New Jerusalem that awaits us and to which we look forward eagerly in hope!

Thought of Yesterday

I'm putting this here to remind myself that my thoughts are frequently lame - apologies if intentional self-humiliation wasn't what you were looking for today, and don't worry, I'll probably delete this post sooner or later. Here it is, inspired by the 'slavery to convenience' comment from yesterday:

"Pragmatism breeds slaves"

Take that, World...if you dare! Tremble and quail before my manifest brilliance!

Virtuous laundering

A recent blog extolling the virtues of the Fisher & Paykel washing machine reminded me how behind American washers and dryers are in terms of energy efficiency and convenience. They are absolute behemoths compared to my wee under the kitchen sink combination washer/dryer. Moreover, they seem to value power over efficiency, as was confirmed by a chat with a knowledgeable shop assistant at Sears over Christmas. Out of curiousity, we asked him why there were so few side-loading washers, even though side-loading was generally regarded as more efficient in its use of soap and water, as well as amazingly able to spin water out of clothes so that they come out nearly dry. His answer: habit/fashion and apparent size trump operational virtue. He particularly commented on how washer specifications fool consumers by offering them higher numbers where such numbers are generally meaningless. (By the way, the same is true for food processors: the electricity draw of the motor so touted on labels has absolutely no effect on the performance of the appliance according to the good people at Cooks Illustrated.)

The delay start feature is also pretty standard here in the UK, largely because of the way electricity is billed. For those of us stuck with storage heaters (which heat up bricks or oil during the night and then turn off and allow nature and manually operated vents to take over from there), we are billed at much lower rates from 12am-7am when those heaters are drawing electricity like crazy. As a result, the best time to do the wash is...while you sleep! Which is also better for the system as a whole, since night is usually the time of the lowest demand and washers take a lot of power to spin those clothes out.

One final cross-cultural note: a friend from Britain was visiting over Christmas while we were in California and (if I remember correctly?) wondered aloud why in such a sunny climate people didn't just hang their laundry out to dry instead of using dryers. I'd never considered such a thing before on a grand scale, even though we had routinely hung a lot of ours out during the first year of marriage due to a pretty lame dryer. It strikes me as odd that, due to soaring energy costs, I've come to hang up all my clothes as a matter of fact in a wetter climate than my sunny native turf. Now, there is a small sacrifice of convenience, it's true - about a 5 minute sacrifice in my experience when your washer can spin things nearly dry. If California is serious about energy conservation, why don't more green-leaning yuppies (like myself) hang up more of their laundry in their backyards, especially during the summer months when the system gets stretched to its limits by the demands of air conditioning? That doesn't mean never use a dryer, but to suggest that it might be a good idea regard its use as optional, or even exceptional, instead of unquestionable. Or have we truly ceded so much of our God-given agency that we have become slaves to convenience?