Let’s Be Warriors

“What are you doing here?” He asked.

“I was waiting for you,” she replied.

He noticed that despite the passing years the woman looked the same; the veil hiding her hair had not faded with time.

She handed him a blue notebook full of blank pages.

“Write: A Warrior of the Light values a child’s eyes because they are able to look at the world without bitterness. When he wants to find out if the person beside him is worthy of his trust, he tries to see him as a child would.”

“What is a Warrior of the Light?”

“You already know that,” she replied with a smile. “He is someone capable of understanding the miracle of life, of fighting to the last for something he believes in – and of hearing the bells that the waves set ringing on the seabed.”

He had never thought of himself as a Warrior of the Light.

The woman seemed to read his thoughts. “Everyone is capable of these things. And, though no one thinks himself as a Warrior of the Light, we all are.”

He looked at the blank pages in the notebook. The woman smiled again.

“Write about the Warrior,” she said.

Paulo Coelho Warrior of the Light, A Manual

Shaved Brussels Sprouts, Lentils, Bacon, and Pear Salad 

Inspired by the Brussels Sprouts Chapter in Nigel Slater’s Tender

• 2 lbs. brussels sprouts
• 2 Comice Pears
• 1/2 cup hazelnuts
• 1/2 cup cooked bacon
• 1 cup De Puy Lentils
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 heaping tbsp  dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp honey
• 2 tbsp of red wine vinegar
• salt/pepper to taste

Bring two pots of water to a boil. One for the lentils, one for blanching the brussel sprouts. Cook lentils for 20-30 minutes or until tender. Meanwhile, shred brussel sprouts by hand or in a food processer. Set aside. Cook bacon to a crisp and lay to rest on a paper towel until cooled. Chop and set aside.

Roughly chop hazelnuts and toast in a dry pan for 5 minutes until browned but not burned. Set aside. In a small bowl, combine olive oil, dijon, honey, red wine vinegar, and salt/pepper. Set aside. When all accessory ingredients have been prepped, toss shaved brussels sprouts into the boiling water and blanch for no more than 1 minute. Pour into a colander and rinse with cold water immediately. Dry with a salad spinner-dude or with towels. In a large bowl combine sprouts, cooked lentils, chopped bacon, and toasted hazelnuts. Cut in the slightest slivers of pear over the salad. Toss lightly with your hands before mixing in the dressing. Taste test for extra salt or dijon.

Hey, did you notice we got a facelift!? Thanks to the wonderful Megan Gilger and Aaron Wade for their savvy, kindness, and patience. Pardon the dust as I tidy up new bits and pieces of the site. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Holding Fast

There is a freight train of words and unfinished sentences inside me, pressing against my chest. It’s past midnight. I sit in the dark at Shaun’s desk wearing his black coat with the hole on the right arm. My feet are cold and I have to be at work in four hours but I feel like if I don’t write, right now, I will continue to feel paralyzed by the quicksand that has become of my brain. I stopped trying to be perfect a few months ago and in the absence of it’s restraint there is now this hole, a vacuum for new ideas, new people, and new experiences to flood its place. Everyone (myself included) talks about how liberating it is to follow your bliss, let go, be free, and to abandon expectations, but what nobody talks about is how fucking insane it can make you feel in the process. There are moments, like earlier tonight, when I am brushing my teeth or folding laundry when and I have to look down at my hands or touch my sacrum to remind myself that I’m still here. I’m still Kelsey. It’s borderline-terrifying when you look in the mirror and can’t recognize the person looking back at you. I’ve done so much thinking over the past few months that I swear to God it’s like I thought myself away from and out of my body.

There is a bench outside of my workplace that I spend most of my breaks. You’ll find me there these days watching people pass on their bikes, listening to the howls of the pool table at the bar across the street. It is my designated non-thinking bench. Really, it’s come to this. A place for fifteen minutes of peace from my own existence. Don’t think. Just sit. Just be. Just breathe here. Of course this non-thinking rule lasts for a whole minute until my phone blinks and reminds me that I have avoided more than a half-dozen phone calls from family and friends whose love and patience I probably don’t deserve right now. I remember the pile of bills and payment warnings from mid-summer blood tests sitting on my desk, a half-emptied suitcase from my last trip home, and the $13.00 library fine that restricts the release of my college diploma. These are all just things. Little things. Little things that mirror my high-speed chase away from all the calm, away from what could actually help me reach a finish line, a resolution, or at least a reset button. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. Is it possible that I’m cultivating a mess in my temporal, phsyical world just to match or trump the spiritual warfare that’s going on within? Yes. Probably. Crazy. Who does that? Crazy people. Break out the DSM-IV, Mom.

I met a woman the other day at a party. I was immediately drawn to her energy because she held herself with the kind of ease and confidence that I have so often craved to make constant in my own state of being. You know these kind of women, or, at least, the idea of these kind of women. The kind who wear old jeans and whispy bohemian blouses with their perfectly messy hair. They practice yoga, are genuinely kind to everyone, unflustered by common commotion of human existence, and ready at a moments notice to jump into the ocean completely naked. You know exactly who I’m talking about, right? There are these that come in and out of our lives that we see and know and think, God, you make it look so easy. Anyway. This woman. At the party. I listened to her talk and watched her move and realized that I WAS her. All those things I saw that felt so far away in that moment lived inside of me, too. The utter madness and dislocation I feel when I look in the mirror is part of the same woman who laughs until she nearly pees her pants, cries when lady bugs land on her arms, travels fearlessly through foreign lands, gives amazing hugs, believes love will change the world, eats cake for dinner, and sings Julie Andrews ballads at the top of mountains so even the goats can hear just how happy she is to be alive. Anyway, I’m realizing that I don’t crave being her, the woman at the party, I crave being more of myself.

I’ve been cooking. A lot, actually, through all of “this.” I’ve made chocolate chip cookies four times from the same recipe and tried, at each go, to melt with that same buttery pot of comfort back into my own skin. I got closer every time, you see. Really. I should probably keep making them.

All of this. These words. These midnight ramblings might be (probably are?) best kept locked in a folder on my desktop for a later date. Something I can look back on when I’m wise and gray and think, whoa girl, that was a dark place. But I’m going to release them here. Be free, words. Be free, mess. This is what a mess looks like, if you weren’t sure yet. I imagine you have had, seen, or felt, or dug through your own and had a panic moment somewhere in the process that you were straight up bat-shit crazy. You’re not. Well maybe you are, but we all are. You’re human. We’ve got this brain, a million sets of choices and paths to take and a thousand different ways to imagine what it will, can, or should all look like. I’ve gotta believe we all go through this, these WHO AM I, WHAT AM I DOING HERE, WHY AM I ALWAYS GETTING IN MY OWN WAY cycles of questioning. I’m standing at the brink of 23 and part of me thinks it would be crazier if I wasn’t experiencing some sort of existential reckoning. Right? Right.

I’m in it. Here. Now. Perfectly okay and perfectly not. I will come back to me. I will. I imagine I’ll be grabbing the mail one day and look up to the sky, feel the sun on my face, and see it all so clearly. Until then, I’ll be here, holding fast like an anchor in the storm and facing forward to all that this place has to teach me.

Butternut Squash and Farro with Honey Harissa Dressing 

Adapted from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (and hey, guess what, I’m giving away a copy on facebook!)

• 1 medium-sized butternut squash, peeled and cut into small cubes
• 1 1/12 cup uncooked farro
• 6 cups vegetable or chicken stock
• 1 honeycrisp apple, unpeeled and diced
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• Lug of olive oil

• 1 small shallot, minced
• 1/4 cup Italian parsley, finely chopped
• 2 tbsp mint, julienned
• 1 Lemon, juiced
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 tsp honey
• 1 tsp cumin
• 2 tsp harissa powder

Preheat the oven to 400.’ Start with the squash. Peel and prep and cube the dude and lay out flat onto a well loved baking sheet with a douse of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. Roast in the oven for 20 minutes or more until the edges are just browned. Meanwhile, bring the veggie or chicken stock to a boil in a medium-sized pot. Add the farro, cover, and let simmer for 30 minutes or until most of the liquid has evaporated. Strain and set aside for later.

For the dressing, combine liquids first: olive oil, citrus juices, and honey. Stir in cumin and harissa vigorously before adding the shallot and herbs. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine cooked farro, roasted squash, pine nuts, and the freshly diced apple. Cover with dressing and gently toss before serving.

Chard Pesto Linguine

“I took you by the hand and we stood tall,

Remembered our own land, what we lived for.

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.

And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.

Get over your hill and see what you find there,

With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”

Mumford / Sons

Linguine with Chard Pesto

• 1 large bunch (or more) rainbow chard (lightly de-ribbed)
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 cup pine nuts
• Juice of 3 lemons
• 2 cloves garlic
• dash of salt
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/4 cup Pecorino Romano
• 1/4 cup Parmasean Reggiano
• One package dried pasta of choice

In a large food processor, combine all the ingredients, except for the cheese, until completely pureed. Add cheeses last, and blitz together or an additional 1-2 minutes. Toss pesto with cooked pasta.

Answer It

I stood there, in the cold of the morning, hunched over the kitchen sink with my hands gripping the counters ledge watching the leaves fall and collect on the deck. Trying to count my breaths, I silently beg each one to play it’s reverse card and go back to the tree, the life-force, that created it earlier in the spring. They do not stop. With each yellow sliver that drops, I feel myself being pulled down to the ground with them. Pieces of my heart and understanding lay there, wilting, disentigrating back to the earth. I wished for Autumn all summer long — for it’s first snow, cold sheets, fires in the living room. Now that it’s here, I’m not sure I’m ready to dig through the “basement” for all that needs supporting it. Things have settled, and suddenly the stillness I asked for has arrived with a pretty bow and a painful but necessary awareness to all that has really taken place from January to October.

I’ve highlighted and bookmarked Tiny Beautiful Things to shreds during this phase. Is it a phase? Can we call it that when it hasn’t yet passed? Anyway, Cheryl Strayed’s words are both comfort and a total slap in the face right now. In one particular letter, a young woman writes to Cheryl asking “WTF, WTF, WTF?” She responds in sharing the bone chilling history of sexual abuse from her father’s father and how she came to realize that pressing against the wound, tackling it straight on, was the only way to get a grip on her life. She ends her response to the young woman, “Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.”

I share this passage not because I stood there staring at the leaves thinking, like the young woman who wrote Cheryl, “WTF, WTF, WTF.” But I realize that the leaves falling is my life. I need to answer it. Simple as that. I need to ask better questions about the why. Ask questions that shed light on what needs adjusting. So you’re feeling like “x” you’re acting like “y” and it’s causing a sour, hollow feeling in your gut. It’s not WTF. It’s your life. Dig deeper. Lean in. Throw yourself down the basement stairs and scavenge for as much as you can. You’re going to need all of it, everything you got, to make it to winter. 

Thai Carrot Soup

• 3 sweet onions
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp grated ginger
• 2 tsp red chili flakes
• 3 spoonfuls coconut oil
• 2 tbsp cumin
• dash of nutmeg
• 2 stalks lemongrass, finely chopped
• 1.5 lbs carrots, peeled and chopped
• 1 can full fat coconut milk
• 5-6 cups chicken broth
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 3 tsp salt
• 4-5 thai chiles, de-seeded

• handful fresh basil
• 3 limes, juiced

In a large pot or dutch oven, saute roughly chopped onions with grated garlic, ginger, red chili flakes, and coconut oil until softened but not terribly browned. Add apple cider vinegar to deglaze the pot. Add cumin, nutmeg, lemongrass, and carrots. Stir to coat. Add coconut milk and the broth. Combine. Simmer on low with a lid for 30-40 minutes or until the carrots are completely softened.

Pour contents of pot into a high-powered blender in small batches with the fresh thai chiles. Blend until completely pureed. Add water or stock to adjust the thickness. Pour into individual bowls and top with juice of fresh lime and chopped basil.

Miscellany

No recipe today. I have a few on deck that I think you’re really going to dig, but our work hours and travel schedule have left us light-less for any actual photo taking lately. The Happyolks posts of days past were thought up, and literally shot, on a whim. Nothing was planned, most times I’d show up at the farmers market, grab what looked pretty, and develop an idea from there.  Pulling it all together now takes more finesse which is fine, I like a good challenge. New posts end up feeling like an accomplishment. A gift to ourselves, and a gift to you.

In the meantime, I’m dropping in to share a few good things that I think are worth a look or listen. Some new, many old. A random assortment of ideas and art that keep me light on my feet during the “in-between” moments of these jammin’ days. Take it easy, friends.

Katie Makkai, “Pretty.” For every woman, and her best friend, sister, or daughter.

This song and this song. All. Day. Long.

Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability.

Denali, one day?

Cozied up in My Berlin Kitchen and Tiny Beautiful Things.

Chaos on Bullshit Mountain.

Yes. Yum. Creamy Polenta, Cherry Tomatoes, and Shell Beans.

Favorite online reads of late: Rose and Crown, Big Bang Studio, Delightful Crumb.

Martha Beck, rule No. 5.

Kiele of the Sea.

A story for tomorrow.

Paperback weddings / 3:00 minute marker, sobbing. Don’t even know these two.

Direct Orders, Anis Mogjani.