Staying Home for Once–2 Recipes

When blues skies are orange and dark

and the prison of life is not the vote but the gravity

this is when i want to stay home

this is when i choose to stay home.

It’s Sonnet Saturday, yet I didn’t get to pen a real poem, much less sonnet.

This has been a home-bound, creative day. I cooked two dishes for dinner while also looking up how to fix the scratches on my wood floor on various DIY sites.

Made a soup of butternut squash and ginger:

• First baked the squash whole then cut it in half and scooped out the seeds
• placed the chunks–some parts weren’t that done– in a soup pot
• decided not to put milk in it–just water (only had chocolate almond milk)
• added red-bean miso paste near the end, smoothing it in using a spoon along the sides of the pot
• had two helpings and felt satisfied
• should have cooked/steeped the ginger separately; couldn’t really taste it in the final soup.

I had bought Brussels sprouts on the stalk and fully intended to grill it on the grill outside–not bake it in the oven. Didn’t do it. Ended up:

• mixing olive oil with tamari sauce, cinnamon bark essential oil, sprinkles of turmeric and red pepper flakes
• rubbing it in, a final shake of sea salt over it all
• wrapped the stalks (I had to cut the big one in two) in aluminum foil
• baked it for the 30 minutes as most recipes suggested
• Tasted them at 30 mins, they were not quite done
• another 20 minutes with the foil OFF
• Forgot to turn them over; did so; left them for another 10 minutes.
• Since it took a full hour I understood why one recipe suggested wrapping the stalk in cling wrap UNDER the foil, then baking.

Enjoyed my bowl of Brussel sprouts. Realized cooking the stalk on the grill might have taken much longer.

For “dessert” I  cracked whole walnuts while watching a Barbara Stanwyk movie.  I used cinnamon bark in my decaf organic coffee.  I also visited Facebook friends from time to time along the way and uploaded info on the HealMobile page and on Twitter.

So my break wasn’t that clean.

–Rev. Niamo Nancy Muid