2nd Shelf Hummus

I lovingly refer to this as my 2nd shelf hummus because I use almost everything from the 2nd shelf in my fridge.  Again, I don't measure... but here are the ingredients and approximate measurements.

2 cans of garbanzo beans (organic, rinsed)
3 mediumish cloves of garlic
2 palmfuls of cumin
2 tbsp of tahini
juice from one lemon (go with less if you don't like lemon. this is not a problem for me.)
salt (go light on the salt w/ the green olives) and pepper to taste
a handful of green olives
about 6-7 roasted red bell peppers
2 sundried tomatoes
a few handfuls of spinach
2 tbsp of greek yogurt or cottage cheese
Extra virgin olive oil to get it the consistency that you want (I go with about 3-4 tbsp).

Everything gets put in the food processor.  The order I go with is garlic, sundried tomatoes, lemon juice, and seasonings first (to get the garlic and tomatoes finely processed). After that everything else can go in.

I serve this with veggies, tomatoes, feta cheese, and whole wheat pita.  I haven't found anyone yet that doesn't love it. Below, you can see it in a fancy Tupperware container, along with a beer. (The white is feta cheese, the red is roasted peppers. The beer is a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy.)

She hated herself for thinking it.

She lived in the Portland neighborhood. Her aunt had been murdered; her dad, too. Her mom wouldn’t let her play outside, and the kids on the bus called her fat yet she was one of the smaller kids on her block.  For months, she paid the kids at her newest school in stickers, lunch money, and snacks so that they would be her friends. It never really worked though, and one afternoon, alone in her room, her mom found her clutching a handmade card, rocking back and forth, undefinable tears streaming down her face. Her teacher had made everyone in the class decorate and sign the piece of purple construction paper. It was meant to act as an apology. 

“I’m sorry we say your fat.”

“U R nice.”

“You arn’t ugly. That was mean.”

“I hope that we can play Wii soon.”

Her mom furiously called the school. Yelled at the bus driver. Told the teacher that she should be a better role model. None of this made life better. This wasn’t why her daughter was crying.

Aneysha was 8 years old. She ate because she loved food. She loved thinking about food. She loved the comfort and momentary control that planning a meal gave her over her unreasonably confounding life. Her mom weighed 408 lbs. Every one she knew had diabetes. Aneysha took medication because she was a Type 2 diabetic, too, not to mention asthmatic and arthritic. Her knees hurt all the time. Her uncle lost his leg last spring to diabetes so every time she has knee pain she thinks that her leg is going to need to be amputated. It doesn’t help that her mom constantly tells her she is going to end up just like him.

She prays every day. 

Her mom doesn’t know how to just be a mom. She takes on too much, and feels obligated to say yes to everything, to help everyone.  Child protective services were called to her home because her children are “obese.” She is to blame. Her doctors tell her Aneysha is dangerously obese, even though they went to the doctor for Strep throat. She is to blame. Because he thought it made for a funny picture, her brother used to feed Aneysha Big Macs when she was a chubby cheeked 2-year-old. He now tells her she is to blame. Aneysha just wants to play games with her mom, spend time with her mom, laugh, and be loved by her mom. Her mom doesn’t have time for that.

Can’t there just be some pill that takes away hunger? Why won’t the doctors give her that for Aneysha? She knows there has to be a pill like that.

Aneysha didn’t ask to be part of an extended family of 12. She didn’t ask to be moved from complex to complex whenever “Uncle” ____ no longer wants to be part of the family. Did you know that food stamps only buy you $7 worth of fresh fruits and vegetables a week? Aneysha probably wants more than that.

Her older cousin has a job and makes his own money. He brings McDonalds home every night. He’s got a high metabolism.  Metabolism is one of the only five syllable words that Aneysha knows. She wants to be like her older cousin.  He calls her fat and tells her that he hates her, her mom, this house, and everything else since his mom abandoned him and custody was given to his fat aunt.

One day, Aneysha’s mom never came home. She didn’t abandon her family. She was 42 years old and her youngest was only two. Her heart was big; she was Big Momma, after all. She just couldn’t make it anymore.

Aneysha was sent to her grandmother’s. MeeMee, as she was known, was embarrassed by Aneysha. She did not want to be seen in public where people would associate her with this child. This wasn’t the cute chocolate baby that MeeMee remembered. Her skin had darkened, especially around her neck, a side effect of diabetes, and MeeMee always made Aneysha cover her neck. MeeMee was 70, there were no children in her building, and she was too old for an 8 year old child. As exercise and a meal, MeeMee had Aneysha walk to the corner to pick up her dinners every night. She got what she could with $3.

When Aneysha was 9, her late mother’s self-proclaimed worst fear came true. Aneysha was over 5 feet tall at that time, and could be mistaken for a teenager if a stranger didn’t take the time to talk to her. She wasn’t sexually active, but her body had developed prematurely. On her walk to get dinner, she was raped, her plastic wallet was stolen, and she was knocked unconscious. Her grandmother, too ashamed to see her, had to be forced by a doctor to sit by Aneysha’s bed in the pediatric ICU.

“Aneysha is not pregnant,” the doctor said. Aloud, the doctor quietly informed MeeMee that Aneysha would probably never be able to have children. Silently, the doctor prayed that the cycle of pain would end for this poor child. At least the cycle ends here, the doctor thought, but she hated herself for thinking it.

My guacamole

I don't measure things... so bear with me.

This is the best guacamole you'll ever taste. There might be others that you like, but you really won't be able to ever find any guacamole that you'll be able to say... no, I definitely like this one better.  I promise. And if you don't like avocado (I know people like this), you'll still love this guac because it actually tastes like something other than green mush baby food.

2 hass avocados
2-3 green onions
10-12 cherry tomatoes
2 small handfuls of cilantro finely chopped
s & p
the equivalent of a palm full and a half of pickled jalapenos
1/2 a lime's juice or so

aaaand... to make it Salvadoran style: 2 hard boiled eggs (finely chopped)

Mix it up... eat it.

If you want to take it to someone's house as a dip, add a can of black beans (drained and rinsed and warmed up in a saute pan), and a can of corn.  You can also sit down on your couch with a bowl of this and a bag of tortilla chips and feel good about how much of it you can stuff in your face... because it's good for you!

the bear with the broken ear.

I still have about 20 of them, wrapped neatly in a couple of her old handkerchiefs, tucked safely in the back of the second drawer of an old weathered end table.

…When she died, I found a silk envelope that was my grandfather’s from when he was in the war. It was stuffed beyond its capacity, filled with her linen handkerchiefs. There had to have been hundreds, but being a minimalist, as I still am today, I went through them one by one and selected only those that I considered perfect and pristine. Some had stains and others had deep creases from being folded and hidden away for decades. Yet some were perfect with brightly colored threads in greens, pinks, blues, and purples, stitched in intricate patterns and in the shapes of daisies, posies, and lilies. I didn’t need to keep them all. I would cherish those few, keep them in perfect condition, and hide them away so that each time I saw them they would be new to me, and yet they would bring back so many memories of her…

The two that I have wrapped around the old ceramic figurines appear to be all white and yet, up close, they have paisley details painstakingly stitched around the edges in a cream thread. Years after her death I discovered that the ceramic figurines that I cherished were nothing more than an adult Cracker Jack toy.  Not that it made them any less significant, but the figurines came in every box of RedRose tea.  It’s funny that I never saw her drink tea, but she knew I loved to play with her basket full of colorfully and playfully glazed figurines. My grandmother had nearly a hundred of them, most of them duplicates, but all of them played a role.  There was a family of four bears that could all easily fit in the palm of your hand, all four of which I still have today. They were all slightly different shades of brown and tan, and one had a broken ear.  When I would play with them, I was always the broken-eared bear. I wanted it to know that I liked it the most because I was afraid everyone else liked it the least.

There were giraffes (a family of three), a crash of rhinoceros, a pair of happy turtles, parrots, short-legged horses, horribly shaped monkeys, a pride of lions, a couple of sneaky raccoons, a jaguar, and dozens of others that I have forgotten over the years. But when it came time for me to decide what I wanted to keep, there was no doubt in my mind who was coming with me.  

I never traveled with toys so when I came to my grandparents’ house, I played with what they had to offer.  At home I had a pool and a bike, some neighborhood kids, and an older brother and sister that occasionally allowed me to tag along.  In Michigan, thousands of miles from home, I didn’t know what to do outside on those muggy summer days. My brother and sister were much more outgoing and the few kids that lived in the neighborhood were closer to their age, making me a much younger outcast. I was used to finding my own entertainment though. So I spent entire afternoons creating storylines surrounding my animal figurines. They were a traveling zoo one week and an animal-filled neighborhood the next.  They lived in houses made out of playing cards. They didn’t drive around in cars, but they would take the bus together. The bus just happened to be a child’s size eight.  I wasn’t great at making houses out of playing cards, but at that age it was more about quantity rather than quality and I’d use two decks worth making individual houses for each species, easily covering the carpeted floor of the guest room.

After she died, I would take the group out every once in a while, set them all side by side, and look them all over. But I never played with them again. Maybe it was because I had other, exciting, easy toys when I was at home. I definitely didn’t have anything that required so much of my imagination. Maybe it was because it never felt right. I wanted to keep them, and to remember her, but I couldn’t have as much fun with them and without her.  I still have the playing cards, too.

It’s funny the things that you never forget… like when my mom opened up my Grama’s China cabinet to pack it up, she said, “What the hell am I going to do with all of this tea?!”  There were over three drawers filled with boxes of RedRose tea, all of them opened, none of them missing a single teabag.