Light and Momentary

More Fast Food

Have you been wishing for a speedy tasty weeknight chicken idea? I have just the recipe for you. It's Arroz con Pollo, from Coco Morante's Essential Instant Pot Cookbook. (That's an affiliate link, meaning Amazon will pay me a few cents if you click through and wind up buying something.)

First, pile the following items into your food processor and turn them into green and pungent puree: a quartered onion, a seeded red bell pepper cut in strips, 8 cloves of garlic, a bunch of cilantro including the stems, 1/4 c. pimiento-stuffed green olives, 1 T. capers, 2 t. kosher salt, 1 t. black pepper, 1 t. dried oregano, and 1/2 c. olive oil. This is your sofrito.

Fire up your Instant Pot in sauté mode and add a tablespoonful of olive oil. When it shimmers, measure out a half-cup of your sofrito. (Or maybe more. It's such a yummy mix of flavors.) Stir it around in the hot fat for about 5 minutes to tone down the ferocity of the raw onion. Next you'll chuck in more green olives (1/4 c., sliced), more capers (1 T.), and 1.5 lb. boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch pieces. Toss them around in the sofrito. Flatten the chicken into an even-ish layer and pour 1.5 c. white rice on top, spreading it out more or less evenly.

Now you'll stir together 1 c. chicken broth and another cup of tomato sauce. Add them to the pot, and make sure all of your grains of rice are bathed in liquid. Check for wayward grains, perhaps straggling along up the sides of the pot, because surprise mouthfuls of crunchy rice will make this delightful dish much sadder. 

You're almost there: seal 'er up, and switch the cooking mode to Poultry. Give it 10 minutes at high pressure and 10 minutes of natural release. Serve it forth with more cilantro on top, and save some for me.

The nicest thing about this recipe is that it makes a bunch of sofrito, so you can freeze it in recipe-sized portions. Then you have hardly any work to do: slice your chicken roughly along with your olives and you're practically done. It's less than 15 minutes of hands-on time.

Elwood made this recipe last month and I practically burst into song at the dinner table when I tasted it. When I made it again a week later, I thought I'd put the rice on the bottom and the chicken on top -- that way (it seemed to me) the rice would have to be coated in liquid. It was a disaster, though -- a woeful mix of mushy and crunchy. Even the thought of that dish is causing me to make sad disgusted faces as I type. But! Fear not! Follow the recipe and all should be well. Tell me if you try it!

Archaic Blades, or Maybe It's Time for a New Translation

The Gideons were on campus today. They always come near the start of the fall semester. There were a half-dozen white-haired white men posted along my route to campus, and I'm sure they were just part of the detachment. They hand out little Bibles, KJV New Testaments with Psalms and Proverbs. Most students don't make eye contact with them. Some take a Bible and then drop it on the ground a little bit later. A Buildings & Grounds truck pulled up to one of the Gideons as I was walking past, and handed him a stack of 8 or 10 that he had picked up on his rounds.

I always say something friendly -- it seems like a pretty thankless task. This morning a woman was at the spot closest to my building. I said, "I don't think I've ever seen a lady Gideon!" She explained that she's part of their sister organization, the Gideons Auxiliary, and it had been decided that the ladies could join the men today. "They think some people would rather talk to a woman," she said.

The Gideons always make me a little thoughtful. They are handing out KJV New Testaments to students who don't read a lot of stuff written in English in the last century, let alone texts from the Jacobean era. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to transform hearts, but I don't know what an average 21st-century college student is going to do with a passage like this: 

For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.

Maybe they drop the book on the ground, maybe.

This morning I was thinking that giving people Bibles and nothing more is the equivalent of handing out swords with no swordsmanship lessons. How can you know unless you're taught? (It's just like teleporting St. Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.) Maybe, I thought to myself, the idea of handing out weapons on a college campus is not a great metaphor. Maybe I should turn that sword image into a plowshare image. 

I don't think many people know what to do with a plowshare these days either.

Unlonelifying

"Your blog is lonely," a friend texted me.

In the two weeks since I last posted we went to New York City to visit Alex and took Joe back to boarding school (he's a senior! the boy who had just turned 2 when I started blogging!). The two youngest kids go back tomorrow; the 19yo returns to college next weekend. And I just changed my work email signature to say Jamie Most Gladly, Associate Professor.

The thing about not blogging is that it always leaves a person wanting to say everything and nothing all in the same post. So I will tell you about something fairly random, and see if the posting gears mesh more smoothly tomorrow.

We were looking for a vigil Mass in Alex's neighborhood, and we wound up at a Ukrainian Catholic church. Their Facebook page left us with the impression that the liturgy would be in English, but that was a faulty impression. All Ukrainian, every word. It was a gorgeous space, with mosaics and gold leaf and memorable acoustics. Much of the liturgy was chanted, with congregants singing multi-part harmonies. We were pretty much at sea for the whole first half, and then Elwood figured out where we were in the Ukrainian-English book. The post-communion prayers were especially beautiful.

I did not know that they would use leavened bread, and I had only a vague memory that the priest combines the consecrated elements and serves them to communicants from a golden spoon. The texture was a little startling to receive, and it left me wondering what happens to the leftover Jesus Porridge afterward. Anybody out there part of a related rite?

Tomorrow morning is the faculty retreat. (This year "retreat" = 3-hour faculty meeting, which is a big improvement over the usual "retreat," a 6-hour faculty meeting. Normally I would be cautious about work complaints, even mild ones like "a 6-hour faculty meeting is pretty different from an actual retreat," but hey! I am tenured now. What are they going to do if they uncover a blog post asserting that 6 hours is about 5 hours too long for a faculty meeting to last? Fire me? I may even knit a sock during the boring parts.) I am slipping out to meet Elwood for an end-of-summer drink. More soon.

The Would-Be Shusher

This summer I've seen more theater than usual, and it seems to me that people are talking more in theater productions than they used to. I've paid for tickets to four productions, and in each one of them people around me were talking -- not a quick whisper, like, "Do you have a tissue?" but ongoing observations in out-loud voices. Tonight I went to the kids' performance that marks the end of theater camp, and I was genuinely taken aback by the chattiness of the people around me.

My parents must have been very firm about talking in theaters when I was a small girl, because I arrived at adulthood with a deep inner certainty that talking in theaters was for barbarians only. It took me years (and some blog posts on the topic) to realize that chatting in a movie theater is part of the enjoyment for some people. But honestly, it still bugs me. And talking in a live production seems like next-level rude to me. In a small space, the actors can hear audience comments. For audience members with any degree of hearing loss, nearby chitchat makes it harder to follow the dialogue. It seems to me like common sense: if people nearby have come to see a show, especially if they have paid money to do so, I should be quiet so they can enjoy the show. 

Tell me what you think here. How do you feel about chitchat in movie theaters? What about in community theater productions? Does it make a difference if people are buying tickets or just showing up to see something for free? Does it make a difference if the comments are on-topic observations (e.g., "I don't think she understands") versus off-topic complaints ("This is really long")?

As always, I am 100% sympathetic to adults trying to help small children understand confusing parts or enjoy a new experience. I'm a lot less patient with bigger kids who want to talk about the Instagram post that just appeared in their feeds. Phones are part of the problem: people get interesting alerts and they want to talk about them right away. One teenaged couple at the show tonight spent the entire show commenting on the stuff that kept blipping across their respective phone screens.

It doesn't seem to be a kids-only issue, though, as evidenced by the 60ish guy who took an actual phone call in the middle of tonight's performance. He didn't just say, "I'll call you back later"; he had the conversation right there.

Sometimes I wonder whether I am cut out for life in the modern world. Moments like that make me wish for a fainting couch, and a phial of hartshorn.