lenten journal: in the soup

Today I worked on a project that was off the menu, if you will, along with the other prep I had to do to get ready for dinner. One of the organizations in Durham that works hard to figure out how to feed and house folks who, for whatever reason, are hungry and homeless is Urban Ministries. One of their big fundraising events is called Empty Bowls. (The concept is a national one you can learn about here.) The way it works is potters here in town make clay soup bowls, restaurants make and donate soup, and people come and pay for a bowl and soup ($30) or just soup ($15) to help support UMD.

The Durham restaurant is one of the restaurants involved and I am the one who gets to make the soup. This will be my second year doing that; the new part for me is I get to go to the event and serve the soup this year. And yes, there is a friendly competition among the soup providers. (Durham folks: come eat and vote.) Here’s their promotional video.



Now, I’m not just making soup; I’m making twenty-five gallons of soup, which means I have no recipe that large. Let me back up. I don’t actually have a recipe, period, other than this is a soup I have made before and love: Sweet Potato, Apple, and Poblano Bisque. The largest batch I’ve made to this point was about three gallons. In many ways, soup is a forgiving thing to make because it is not an exact science in the way baking is, for instance, but in both cases, expanding the recipe means working to figure out the ratios: the ingredients have to be seen in relationship to one another. A salad dressing, for example, hangs on the ratio between the vinegar or acid and the oil. For my soup, the relationship between the sweet potatoes, apples, and poblanos has to be in ratios that let you taste the ingredients in that order and in that priority: you need to know it is a sweet potato soup, with a touch of apple in the middle, and a nice peppery finish at the end. The garlic and ginger are there to fill in the background, if you will. My recipe ended up something like this:

60 quarts of peeled and sliced sweet potatoes and the water they are soaking in
16 quarts of onions
16 quarts of Granny Smith apples
8 quarts of poblano peppers
4 cups of garlic
4 cups of fresh ginger
enough vegetable stock to get the soup to the consistency needed
salt and pepper

We don’t have pots big enough to do all of that in one, so I divided it into fours (because I had two big pots) and made half of it today and will do the other half tomorrow. Then I’m going to mix the batches in the containers (five 5 gallon containers) so the soup will be consistent from batch to batch because I want the soup to taste the same to the first people who come to eat on Friday night as it does to the last people. And it will.

My brother called me this afternoon in the middle of my souping and I tried to explain what I was doing, much as I have tried to do here. He is the pastor of a church with several thousand members; our church has about a hundred and fifty active folks. I listen to what he has to do and feel about his job the same way he felt about how I was spending my day. I love being in a small church where I know the three year olds and the eighty three year olds, where worship has both focus and informality, and where there is a certain hand made quality to the whole experience. I have no idea how to think about going to church with eight or ten thousand other people. I imagine understanding the commonalties means learning to understand the ratios and how you expand the recipe for what it means to be a community of faith. I’m sure making more soup is easier to do.

The word ratio has relate in its roots, which is to say figuring out ratios has to do with figuring out relationships and priorities. In the same way I want the taste of the sweet potato to come first, and then the apple, and then the pepper, so I have to keep tweaking the recipe of my life so that my relationship with Ginger is the strongest note and let the other aspects of my life begin to find their place in relation to what matters most to me. As one who is capable of becoming quite task-focused in any given situation, I have to keep reminding myself that the ratio between people and stuff that needs to get done, people should always be on the heavy end of the equation. The analogy works on an individual level, as I struggle trying to figure out how to exercise and lose some weight in a personal world that has all but written both out of the equation.

On a couple of the recipe sites I have found, they have a function that allows you to change the number of servings and they will recalculate the amount of the ingredients. When the new recipe comes up, so does a disclaimer saying expanding a recipe is not as easy as proportionally increasing the ingredients. Sometimes you have to add more of something, or less of something else, to get it to taste and feel and look the way you know it’s supposed to look. Life may be about ratios, but it’s more than just doing the math. If I were someone who understood the nuances of mathematics, I would probably say life is more complex than just following the recipe.

I do wish, sometimes, life was as easy as soup.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: missing pucks and pound cake

The restaurant where I work at Duke serves dinner Monday through Thursday, which means we do our best to run out of everything on Thursday night and we have to recreate most everything on Monday. I go in on Monday mornings (I get there about eleven) and start working my way down the list. Abel, my partner on the line, comes in around one and Arnaldo, our dishwasher and helper in most any way we can teach him, gets there about three-thirty. Billy and Chris are the lunch cooks who, along with Jorge, the daytime dishwasher, take care of the lunch buffet and help me out with dinner prep when they can. They know Mondays are crazy, so they usually get a couple of things started, but today when I walked in they only had news that a major accident on I-40 had kept the produce truck from making its appointed rounds and we didn’t have what we needed to work down our list. Instead of getting started at eleven, it was closer to one-thirty or two before we got into full swing. Monday, Monday: can’t trust that day.

“How do you eat an elephant?” the old joke asks. “One bite at a time.”

And so it is with prep work. I must have been standing and staring into nowhere when Abel said, “So, Milty (I wish I knew how to write that with a Guatemalan accent), what you gonna do next?” He timed his repetition of the question perfectly throughout the afternoon and, by the time service started at five, we were putting the finishing touches on our final projects. No one who came to dinner knew of the accident in Raleigh or the purposefulness of our preparation. They sat down, they ordered, and we cooked for them, as if it were any other night, which, of course, we our intention.

We had a good afternoon and evening because we worked hard and stayed focused and because we let some things not get made. I had time to make the chocolate chip pan cookies, the brownies, the apple crisp, and the blueberry bread pudding, but I had to let the sweet potato pound cake wait until tomorrow, along with a couple of other entrée things I wanted to do. Perhaps I could have gotten it all done, but Abel and I decided we were going to work hard, make sure we were well prepared, and enjoy our day at work. Letting the pound cake go was part of completing the third objective. The folks in the dining room could live without pound cake easier than I could live without my sanity.

I didn’t get it all done is not the same as I failed to get it all done.

Yesterday afternoon, I watched the USA-Canada Olympic Hockey Final, with most of North America, I understand. After the game, Ryan Miller, who was both the losing goaltender and the MVP of the entire tournament, was rather ruthlessly interviewed by someone from NBC who kept asking him what the game meant. Miller kept saying something along the lines of, “It was just another hockey game,” which flew all over one of my colleagues at work who is a huge hockey fan.

“It wasn’t just another game. It was the Olympics. But he had to say something like that because the real problem is you win to get the gold and the bronze medals, but you lose to get the silver.”

I’d never thought of it that way. When you have to win a tournament to get a medal, first and third places are won; you get second by losing. However well the entire tournament went, second place comes out of a final defeat. Maybe Miller’s words were a way of choosing to get up off the ice and see the medal around his neck as an accomplishment rather than a defeat. Maybe not. As someone who is an amazing average athlete and who has never been in contention for a gold medal of any sort on any level, I don’t know what it feels like to turn in the kind of effort worthy of being named MVP only to miss first place by a fraction of an inch or a second.

I do, however, know what it’s like to be one of two people up for a job that I really wanted and end up being the one not hired. There was no silver medal involved, nor was I given any credit for how I participated. They just sent me an email note to let me know I didn’t get the job. As I look back on it, I responded a little like the goalie, acting as though it was one job among many and I would have other opportunities, which I knew to be true but didn’t feel very much in that moment.

We read Job’s words Saturday, as he came to terms with all the bad news from his various servants. “The Lord gives,” he said, “and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Though, theologically, I’m not one to ascribe every aspect of our existence as being caused by God, I love the sentiment in the statement. Job was a rich and prosperous and comfortable and powerful man and yet he saw something deeper than his net worth, or even his grief at losing it all.

As we were cleaning up the line after dinner tonight, Abel said, “This was a good day, Milty.” He said it at the end of a day that began at 4 a. m. for him, taking one of his brothers to the airport to return to Guatemala for good. Arnaldo kept his spirit and his sense of humor even though his son is in ICU at Duke Medical Center. Getting worked up over pound cake didn’t make much sense.

It never does.

Peace,
Milton

it's my job

In the middle of the afternoon, as I was cooking for a friend and Ginger was sermonizing, as she calls it, she started reading MLK quotes to me, ending with this one, which she introduced by saying, “Here’s one I didn’t know.”

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Beyond its newness to us, the quote stood out because it made us both think of her father, Reuben. If there is anyone on the planet who took pride in the job he did, day in and day out, it was Reuben. He is the incarnation of the words from Jesus’ parable, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Reuben was first a milkman and then later a deliveryman for Golden Flake potato chips. Both the angels and the checkers smiled when he walked into a store.

I thought about King’s words later in the evening at the celebration of Rev. J. C. Cheek, who has pastored Mt. Calvary United Church of Christ here in Durham for forty years. The ballroom at the local Hilton was filled with friends and parishioners, full of laughter and stories about this man who has poured his life into his city and his church. One of his childhood friends turned to him and said, “Thanks for letting me say these things now, rather than at your funeral.” What a gift, indeed, for both men.

Last Sunday night, I caught the end of the Golden Globes when I got home from work. The festivities kick off what some in the entertainment industry call “Awards Season” (summer, autumn, winter, awards, spring), as the weeks ahead are filled with a bunch of different congratulatory celebrations, including the Grammys and ending with the Oscars. I like watching for the moments when someone is caught genuinely by surprise by the recognition, and a year doesn’t pass that I think about how fortunate they are to have chosen a career where awards are part of the package. Most people on the planet go unsung, regardless of how well they do their jobs.

One of the things I learned when Ginger read the quote was Mac McAnally must have read King, because the quote is an obvious inspiration for Mac’s song, “It’s My Job,” which Jimmy Buffet made famous. The first verse says,

in the middle of late last night
I was sitting on a curb
I didn’t know what about
but I was feeling quite disturbed
a street sweeper came whistling by
he was bouncing every step
it was strange how good he felt
so I asked him why he swept and he said
it’s my job to be cleaning up this mess
and that’s enough reason to go for me
it’s my jog to be better than the rest
and that makes the day for me

If you walk into the Dunkin’ Donuts in Charlestown, Massachusetts on any work day morning, the express line forms to the right. These are regular customers only getting coffee. Behind the counter, there is a Lebanese man who has been at the shop since it opened. Next to him is a woman at the cash register. The man knows his customers so well that the only words spoken are ones of greeting and gratitude. He simply looks about two people back in the line, smiles, makes their coffee they way he knows they like it, and then hands it to his coworker at the register. It’s his job.

At the Durham Ritz Car Wash on 15-501, you might think the small army of guys armed with towels would just give your car a quick once over before waving for you to drive away. Instead, you should plan on standing there a good ten minutes after your car has ridden through the automated wash as they hand dry the vehicle, clean all the windows, and even spray the tires clean. It’s their job.

On any given night he is working, my coworker Abel is out to make cooking history. He watches every detail, preps his station beyond expectations, and watches out for those around him and what they might need. If the night is slow, you will find him in the walk-in, cleaning and straightening things for the folks who will come in the following morning. When he gets ready to plate an order, he moves efficiently and intentionally, making sure his food is the best it can be. Every shift. It’s his job.

I wish the Golden Globes had categories for all of them. I hope those around them are extravagant with affirmation of their excellence. I pray for a spirit that doesn’t depend on affirmation to motivate me to offer my best work. I offer this poem by Marge Piercy, who does excellent work of her own and also knew of what King spoke.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Amen. I think I will ask Jimmy Buffett to sing our closing hymn.



Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe.

taking time

Remember when Alanis Morissette told us irony was “like rain on your wedding day” – which is mostly sad and not ironic at all? Well, it’s not raining here in Durham, but I have my own offering of irony: I’ve been all set for a post on Sabbath for several days and haven’t made time to write.

Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

This weekend my church hosted a conference on “Faith and the Environment.” My contribution was to help prepare the meals on Friday night and Saturday morning. One of the conference organizers took me on a shopping spree at our State Farmers Market in Raleigh and almost everything we ate came from there. I met some great people doing some wonderful things on both small and large scales. And I heard Norman Wirzba talk about Sabbath and what the concept means for our care of and compassion for the creation of which we are a part.

Using the Genesis 1 account as a map of sorts, he took us on a journey through the days in which God spoke all that is us and around us into existence and then looked at the Seventh Day when God rested to reflect on the purpose behind everything that had been brought into being. The climax of creation, Wirzba said, was this act of menuha, tranquility and repose. Sabbath is not doing nothing, but resting, reflecting, reinvigorating. Rest, in this sense, is the opposite of restlessness.

I came away with a couple of quotes that have stayed with me through what has already been a more restless week than I would like. I will quote them and then tell you they pull me beyond the speech in our Fellowship Hall.

Creation is the place where the love of God is made concrete.

Creation is an act of ultimate hospitality: God made room for what was not God to be.

Though I have not been posting, I have managed to get back in the routine of my Morning Pages (thanks, in part, to Wirzba’s words), which I see as a moment of morning Sabbath, if you will. And as I have turned these two ideas over in my mind and heart, what keeps coming to mind pulls me to see them in the light of knowing that I am created in the image of God. As God spent the “week” breathing, speaking, imagining a universe with everything from light years to ladybugs into existence and then followed that brilliance with time to think about what it all meant, I have weeks of my own to consider. What am I breathing, speaking, and imagining into the world in which I live? How is my love made concrete in what I do? Or is it? And then the big one, for me: how am I making room for what is not me to be?

Twice this week I’ve answered my phone to hear the voice of an old friend. Two different friends, actually. Each one was calling from the road, on their way from one place to another, and began with the same sentence, “I was driving and thinking about you and thought I would call.” The conversations took different turns after their openings, but both had the same result: I hung up the phone feeling loved and connected to something beyond me: to memories and dusty dreams, to laughter and longing, to hope , and to love (as E. E. Cummings said) that is “more thicker than forget.”

Their love made concrete has made me wonder who needs to hear from me.

Working in a restaurant kitchen carries with it a certain sense of urgency: we work with perishable products, we are almost always facing a deadline, and, once service starts, we cook until they quit coming. All those things are true, as is the fact that our sense of urgency is as much self-imposed as it is false. I get more calls on my day off than a heart surgeon it seems sometimes, and most of them were, well, not urgent. But waiting is not one of our strong suits. I’m working to understand this urgent illusion because buying into it is one of the ways I end up not making room for what is not me to be. I can’t make room. I don’t have time. I have things to do.

But living into the wholeness of being created in God’s image is about time, not things. Abraham Joshua Heschel said:

The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept the premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.

If time is at the core of what life means, even as God took the seventh day to relish and reflect on what he had brought to be, how then does time feel like such a tyrant? Why do I feel I have to wrestle my schedule to find time for Ginger, for writing, for life?

I am not living creatively, I think. God did not imagine me living this way. I want to take time to imagine living differently as well.

And then write a new creation story of my own.

Peace,
Milton

he's got danny glover eyes

We have a new dishwasher at the restaurant at Duke. His name is Arnaldo and he is from Cuba. He is about my height and, I’m guessing not much over half my weight. His skin is dark – ebony – and yet luminous enough to let you see the lines worn into his skin by wherever life took him before he ended up in our kitchen. The way those lines shape and mark his face allow him to exude the same kind of calming presence as Danny Glover did when he turned to Kevin Kline and said, “Man, get yourself to the Grand Canyon.”

That's it: he has Danny Glover eyes.

(And I hope the obscure reference makes you go watch the movie.)

He comes into the kitchen promptly at five, shakes my hand, and says, “How are you, Sir?”

Sir. So, you see, he has me smiling from the start. And then he goes to work. First, he washes whatever dishes and pots and utensils and bowls we have managed to stack into strange sculpture by the dish machine in the midst of our prep. He then cleans up his area to get it ready for dinner service and then asks me for something to do. Everyday. And with that question he moves from washing to being a part of the prep team, which is good because he actually is a cook; the job, however, was for a dishwasher and a job was what he needed. He doesn’t complain. He works and he smiles and he is kind. Kind in a way I rarely experiece. Kind in a way that changes the way the room feels when he walks in. Kind in a way that makes me glad we work together, even though tomorrow will mark four days that we have known each other. Kind in a way that makes me wonder about me and what it feels like when I walk in the room, whatever room that might be.

Our week has been, as they say in the restaurant business, a “soft opening”: we had eighteen customers the first night, thirty-six last night, and fifty tonight. I’m not much at geometric progressions, but if things continue we should hit a thousand soon after Labor Day. We are happy because it was well into September last year before we hit fifty. We are off to a good start. And we are all tired because we have been going full strength all week, trying to make things the best they can be. I’ve had three ten or eleven hour days in a row and there are a few more to come without much down time in between over the next couple of weeks. Yet, I find myself looking forward to work and one of the reasons is that I get to be around Arnaldo and share in his kindness.

As we move toward the end of the dinner shift and things slow down on the line, the cook’s job turns from creating to clean up and the dishwasher moves into full motion: the last hour is his heavy time, getting everything washed and put away. As Abel and I were wrapping and labeling things to go back in the walk-in, I could hear Arnaldo singing from the dish area. He was singing in Spanish, so I didn’t understand him, but what I did comprehend was he was not singing as though he needed something to get him through the stacks of pots and plates; he was singing like he had the afternoon off and the top down on the Wrangler, full of joy and life.

I am fortunate in these days to say part of what happens when I go to work is I get to watch and listen to Arnaldo sing and be kind. Tomorrow will be a good day.

I’m sure.

Peace,
Milton

waking up

I’m about a week and a half into the resurrection of the ritual of writing my Morning Pages and I’m already feeling a shift. I’m getting used to getting up and, other than making the coffee, letting those three handwritten pages be the first thing I do. Those scribbles are starting to shake up my soul.

Something about waking up with a pen in my hand seems to set the prevailing themes of thought for the day. I woke up today realizing I had not spoken to my parents or my brother in several days and I found time to call them this afternoon. On a more profound level, I’ve felt a growing sense of restlessness in my job of late and this morning I woke with Paul’s words leaking out through my fingers:

“[F]or I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

The seed was planted last night when Ginger asked me if I was happy. When I said, “Yes,” she told me I didn’t always seem that way of late. And she’s right, yet the past few days have brought a shift. As a therapist told me long ago (and I have repeated here more than once, I’m sure), the only two things I can change in any given situation are what I do and say and how I feel. My control of the circumstances ends there. I was in a more observant place when I answered her question last night and followed her response by saying when I took time to remember who I get to spend my life with, my home, my friends, and the fact that I get to do something I love for a job, I think life is pretty good.

Two nights ago left me almost sleepless because I had brought home my frustration with me from work. The events of the day had left me feeling taken advantage of and I chose to pack my bitterness in a take out box rather than shake it off in the parking lot. The bleary-eyed morning pages that followed woke me to the realization that, rather than allow myself to feel victimized and bitter (as Cherry’s friend says, “Bitter is a flavor, not an emotion”), I need to speak up for myself (I’m working on that one) and I can chose how I want to feel at work. You see, part of the changes are I’ve been moved from cooking on the line to expediting the shift, which means I call the tickets and check the plates before they go out to the dining room. It also means I get to set the tone in the kitchen, for the most part.

I love the job.

After my morning musings, I came across Marcus Goodyear’s post at HighCallingBlogs.com and began to see the theme of my day, which was my day off. Part of what he had to say was:

We can talk about glorifying God through our work all we want, but if we’re not also serving our neighbor we are completely missing the point. We can’t love God without loving our neighbors. And loving our neighbors means showing mercy to them.

He also quoted a line from a Marge Piercy poem that is one of my favorites and worth including here.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

The real work of my life is in giving mercy: “a disposition to be kind and forgiving.” In the common tasks of the kitchen, I am called to contentment and compassion. I can’t do either one in my sleep. I have to be awake.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” Jesus said. Though my week has not necessarily borne that out, the real work of my life also entails leaning into those words as though they will come true, just as I must trust I am a vessel shaped to share love with those around me.

Sleeper, awake.

If I am going to be of use, I must remember every move matters: every cut of the knife, every spoon on a plate, every word from my mouth, every beat of my heart. If I am to be merciful, as I am called to be, I must be intentional. Compassion is not an accident. Neither, I suppose are bitterness or complacency.

The choice is mine.

Peace,
Milton

P.S. – How could I not end with this piece? And I love that the guy is sitting in his kitchen.

mixing metaphors

Walk into any professional kitchen and you will most likely find two things at a premium: knives and cutting boards. In fact, in many restaurants, it is customary for the chefs to provide their own knives. Practically, it means when you get a hold of a cutting board, you make the most of it – and you use it more than once. Of course, it has to be washed well if you are using it to prepare raw meat of some sort, but as far as veggies and bread and most other things, the way of the restaurant world is you wipe it clean between each action (or flip it over) and keep working on your next project. Whatever the task, it works best when you clean your work area of whatever you were working on before and then move on to the next thing.

How nice it would be if life were so easily segmented.

A chance to submit a piece of writing this week brought with it the residue of relationships and the trace elements of insecurity that somehow seem connected to much of life (at least for me) and have set me to thinking how I might clean my board, so to speak, so I can make a clean offering to the project. Perhaps it begins with finding a new metaphor.

Soup making is a regular activity in our kitchen. I love making soups mostly, I think, because it means seeing what new thing can come from things that already exist. Our soups, for the most part, are made from what we have on hand; other than some dried beans, we don’t order anything exclusively to make soup. After brunch on Sunday, for example, I set aside the last of the pinto beans (along with some extra we made), the salsa fresca, some caramelized onions, and some sautéed poblano peppers to become our soup for tonight. All I have to do is add some vegetable stock (our beans are vegetarian – I’ll keep them that way for the soup), adjust the seasonings, and puree the mixture and we will have something wonderful to offer our customers made from the things we carry, if you will.

Granted, the leftovers of life don’t always offer such a flavorful recipe, but the creative tension that lies between cleaning the board and making the best of what is left appears to be the path I’m pulled to walk in these days, if I wish to do more than let my insecurities get the best of me. And I wish. I want to clear out those things capable of turning toxic and hang on to all the tasty tidbits that add flavor to what I have to say. Sometimes those are easier to distinguish in the kitchen than they are in the rest of my life.

One of the lessons I learned from one of my chef mentors is you make soup ahead of time. You don’t, for instance, make tonight’s soup this morning. The bean soup I’ll finish today will be for tomorrow night or Thursday. We have a chilled carrot soup with orange and mint I made on Sunday that has been waiting to debut today. A little time lets the flavors marry to become what they want to be together, rather than merely a collection of ingredients. A good soup takes time, and patience. When we heat it up to serve, I will check the seasoning balance again to see how they have matured together, what they have become given some time.

Sometimes our insecurities get the best of us (and by us, I mean me) in situations seasoned too heavily with history. I struggle when I feel pulled back into who I was, rather than who I am in these days. Growing into wholeness as a human being requires some of the same sense of timing and patience as soup making, it seems; rechecking the seasoning and the ingredients added to my life along the way will help me remember who I am and who I have become, even as I step back into a context that connects to who I was. Growing into that same wholeness requires I clean the board, if I am to make an honest offering, and wipe away what is not healthy or useful and get to going on the work at hand in the context of the relationships as they are in these days, not as what they once were.

The best cooking is simple. By simple, I don’t mean quick or expedient, but well-chosen ingredients prepared in a simple, patient, and straightforward way that allows them to, well, be themselves. When we were in Turkey a few years back, my favorite dish was made of eggplant, tomatoes, onions, parsley, and olive oil. That was it – and it was amazing. Life, perhaps, is the same way. I have an invitation to write, which I love to do. I have a chance to lean back into an old friendship to find something new. The call, then, is for me to work in the same simplicity, patience, and straightforwardness and trust that it, too, will be a flavorful offering.

Thanks for listening while I worked this out.

Peace,
Milton

of skunks and storms

It was a dark and stormy afternoon and I was trapped in the Barnes and Noble by a thunderstorm. Ginger was on the other end of the Streets of Southpoint looking for shoes. Since I had the time, I migrated upstairs to the poetry section to see what I could see. There I found a teenage Latina girl who was planted in front of the poetry books and so deeply engrossed in what she was reading that she didn’t even see me when I took my place in front of the bookshelf next to her and opened a book of invitations of my own. Neither of us spoke or acknowledged one another; we simply shared the space the poems made for us there on the second floor.

We were both deep into our poems when three other girls descended on the young poet like pigeons on breadcrumbs, barraging her with Spanish I didn’t understand. I assumed they had come to tell her it was time to go, or that the rain had stopped. Then one of them asked, “What are you reading?”

“Poems,” she said. And for the first time she looked at me, perhaps to know someone understood.

More Spanish, and then the older of the three intruders grabbed the book out of her hand and said, “You don’t need to read poems,” finishing her thought in Spanish.

The girl grabbed the book back and answered, “Yes, I do. They talk about love and yearning.” The others shrugged her off and turned to walk away. She put the book back on the shelf and began to follow, but not without asking, rhetorically, “What do you want me to do – just get a job and make money everyday?”

My chance encounter fell in the middle of an eleven-day-thirteen-shift stretch for me at work in a frame of my mind that has me examining what meaning I am making of my life these days. Reading and writing far too easily gives way to prepping and cooking; I spend much more of my life with pots and pans rather than poetry. I love cooking, I like my job, and I would like to spend my time differently, proportionally, than life affords me the opportunity to do in these days.

The last paragraph has less to do with existential crisis than with the desire, to borrow words from a biblical poet, Paul, to “make the most of the time.” As long as I’m borrowing words, I’ll turn to a poet and recent acquaintance, Justin McRoberts and one of the songs he sang at the Writer’s Conference in Jackson a couple of weeks ago:

you see the question isn’t are you going to suffer any more
but what will it have meant when you are through
the question isn’t are you going to die, you’re going to die
but will you be done living when you do

What the poets know is life adds up to more than the sum of the parts. A poet who has befriended me with her words over the years is Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote a poem in response to a student coming up to her at a workshop, handing her a piece of paper with his address on it, and asking her to write a poem and send it to him.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

You can't order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter and say, "I'll take two"
and expect it to handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like you spirit.
Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn't understand why she was crying.
"I thought they had such beautiful eyes."
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Who knows what the days ahead hold for any of us. Here’s what I do know: I want my life to be about poetry more than paychecks. I want to live in the middle of the skunks and the storms and still have the wherewithal to notice who is standing beside me at the next bookshelf, who I come home to, and, whether I spend the rest of my days cooking or writing, do more than get a job and make money, even though I need both.



Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: dishwashing service

I’ve never really gotten foot washing.

When I was a youth minister in Texas, we had a foot washing service one Maundy Thursday and it was solemn and thoughtful and meaningful and, well, what I can say is I got more out of washing than being washed. Then again, I’m not one for having my feet handled. But the experience has stuck with me beyond my bewilderment because of the way our pastor introduced the ritual, quoting John 3: 3-5 –

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

The trajectory of Jesus’ resolve and compassion is what grabs me: knowing that he had come from God and was going to God, he washed the feet of his disciples, who lived in a world with dirt roads and open-toed sandals: a world of filthy feet. Jesus’ action was not quaint or ceremonial; he wasn’t going for brownie points here. He was doing something few people would do as a way to show his love because he knew from whom he had come and to whom he was going, which gave him all the time and presence he needed to incarnate his love to his loved ones in the most practical way possible, even on the night before his death.

And the practicality of his incarnation of love is what grabs me. It’s not the foot washing for foot washing’s sake; it’s remembering where we’ve been (with God) and where we’re going (to God) with such tenacity as to make us aware and able to love so viscerally, so practically, that what we do to show our love meets that kind of basic-barefoot-in-the-dirt kind of need.

I mostly stumble into those moments.

Tony, our dishwasher, is very new to the US and speaks very limited English. He works hard and he wants to learn because, if we’re talking trajectories, the way out of the dish room is to learn to cook. Abel, who is Guatemalan and can speak well to both Tony and me, has been teaching Tony on the nights they work together and Tony can now cook all the sauté dishes, and cook them well. Last week on a busy night when Abel was not working and Tony was left on the line with two English speakers, he had four or five pans of rosemary pasta going and we were running out of pasta bowls because he was up on the line cooking (where we desperately needed him to be) and not washing the dishes. I didn’t have tickets on my station at that point, so, rather than take over for Tony so he could wash dishes, I went and washed them myself – about three loads, which was enough pasta bowls to keep us going. I was busy washing and didn’t realize they had caught up on the line and Tony was back with me. When I looked up, he was grinning from ear to ear and he said, “Tank you, Miton. Tank you.”

Only then did I realize what I had done. For Tony, it was washing dishes rather than feet that let him know I was with him, that I cared, that I understood how hard he was working, that I knew he, too, had come from God and was going to God. But I can learn. I am intentionally going back to wash when I can. He smiles and “tanks” me every time. Maybe you can teach an old dog new grace.

If we come from God and are going to God, then we began this journey with the very same boundless love and grace that we well find at the end, and that walked with us the whole way. There’s no race to run, nothing to earn or prove. As I’ve said before (mostly so I will hear it again):

we are loved, we are loved, we are really loved

If we are going to end up with the One who begat us all, then this life is not about progress, but about passion and compassion, about loving one another at street level where the roads are dirt and we’re all sockless. And it’s about opening our eyes and hearts that we might do more than stumble into sacredness, but we might, as Jesus did, do what we do on purpose.

I’m grateful I have a dish machine to remind me of the lesson I need to learn and relearn. And a smiling dishwasher who could use a hand.

Oh – and this song from Victoria Williams, passed on to me long ago from a friend with whom I’ve been traveling this circle for a long time.



Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: edible art

Some years ago, Ginger and I were in Paris and we attached ourselves to edge of a tour group walking through Notre Dame Cathedral, mostly because I wanted to pick up a few more pieces of useless facts and information to store in my brain. The guide was talking about the stained glass windows when we walked up, pointing first to the North Rose window that dated back to the original construction in the thirteenth century. She then pointed to the South Rose window and said. “This, however, is the new window,” she said, “which were installed in the fifteen hundreds.”

The new window was older than most anything of historical significance -- even in Boston, where we lived at the time. Good art has staying power.

For Christmas, my chef gave me an absolutely gorgeous cookbook – a work of art on its own terms – called Pork and Sons. Besides offering some amazing recipes, the book is beautiful because it is the story of a family’s relationship to food – pork, in particular – and because of the incredible images of the dishes described.

In my business, we think about how the food looks almost as much as how it tastes. Presentation is a big part of the picture, which is why (I have to keep telling Ginger) that we sprinkle “all that green stuff” on top of the dish before we serve it. I want the plate to offer a visual invitation even before you bite into it. Even in the heat of the dinner rush, we work hard to make sure the plates look good, to create edible art, which is intended not to last. The whole point of our preparation is for the customer to deconstruct and devour the dish. If we do our work well, when the evening ends the room is empty, as are our pans, and we have nothing to show for our work except the knowledge that we sent folks home full.

Of course, they will wake up hungry again tomorrow.

As much as I like making beautiful food, the memories of meals that hang like portraits in the gallery of my mind don’t revolve around what was on the plate as much as who was around the table. As Vanier says, “Food and love are linked closely” (35).

The hardest thing about restaurant work for me is I don’t get to talk to most of the people who eat my food. I do make a point of getting out in the dining room several times during the course of service, but I don’t get to meet most folks. One student comes in a couple of times a week with her boyfriend and orders the same thing. She gets the Roasted Chicken Marsala, but asks for only the sides of mashed potatoes and vegetables, and butternut squash on top. I have the squash on hand to sauté and serve, so I make the dish. After about the third time, I took the plate to the table myself and said, “I need to put a face with this food.” We had a nice chat and got acquainted a bit. Now when she comes in, the server simply comes into the kitchen and says, “Megna’s here,” and I know what to cook.

For now, the incidental contact will have to do; I pray it will not always be so.

I think I have spent a lot of my life praying it will not always be so – related to any number of things; I feel as though I’ve lived on the cusp of things, mostly moving and rarely feeling settled. That’s why, I suppose, these words of Henri Nouwen tucked away in my readings found me tonight:

When you pray, you profess that you are not God and that you wouldn’t want to be, that you haven’t reached your goal yet, and that you never will reach it in this life, that you constantly stretch our your hands and wait for the gift which gives new life. This attitude is difficult because it makes you vulnerable. (118)

When the artisans set the glass in the windows at Notre Dame, they knew they were building a house of worship. The building took so long to complete that the ones who started the construction were not the ones who completed the cathedral; it took almost two centuries. Whether working on the intricacies of the Rose windows, or stacking the stones for the walls, I can’t imagine any of them found it easy to grasp an image of what they were building together other than some abstract idea of a church. Once finished, it has continued to be a work in progress, requiring restoration and rebuilding due to the damage done by the wear and tear of the following centuries. Though the edifice stands as one of the most recognizable building in Paris, its art is not so much different than my nightly offerings: neither is ever completed.

We share one other thing in common (at least I hope we do): for all our effort to create something beautiful, the art itself is not the point. A restaurant is not a bad metaphor for church because the idea is to incarnate two of Jesus’ invitations: “Come and see,” and “Take and eat.” We spend a lot of energy in church making sure things are “right,” which is not all wrong, yet we have to check ourselves to make sure we have not lost sight of our calling to make a place for everyone – particularly for those who live at the margins of life.

In every kitchen where I have worked, the only person who has a meal prepared for them everyday is the dishwasher, the one at the bottom of the ladder. Regardless of how busy we are or whatever else is going on, we take time to feed the guy stuck at the dish machine. It doesn’t make his job any easier, I suppose, but it lets him know he is regarded and cared for. He’s one of us.

And it’s my favorite meal to make everyday.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: mise en place

I don't come by organization easily.

I've never been one to know exactly where a particular piece of paper is, nor one who naturally finds a way to categorize life and collect things in an ordered fashion. I suppose I could compliment myself somehow by saying I'm a more organic organizer, but the truth is it takes me a long time to figure it out. We have lived in our house here in Durham for almost a year and the kitchen is just now beginning to make sense to me; I am just now beginning to figure out where things go. And I've chosen a profession that thrives on organization.

Go figure.

I've been working at the restaurant at Duke about a month and a half longer than we've owned our house, so I suppose it's no surprise that I'm finally figuring out a system there as well. You see, when you go into a restaurant and order a dish, whatever time it takes them to prepare and serve it is dwarfed by the amount of time it took to prepare to be able to cook the dish to order. If we want to serve our Brown Sugar-Dijon glazed salmon to you in a reasonable time frame (and we do), long before you begin to make your way to our dining room, we have cleaned and portioned the salmon, prepared the glaze, cut and roasted the seasonal vegetables (tonight’s were roasted zucchini, carrots, yellow squash, and radishes), and made the sweet potato polenta far enough in advance for it to set and then cut it into sticks to fry. All of those things are in containers and cold drawers, waiting for the ticket to come through that will call them into service and us into action.

And we have a term for it all: mise en place, which translated means, “to put in place.”

My work day at the restaurant right now runs from eleven in the morning to nine at night. Of those ten hours, six of them are spent getting ready. Sometimes six and a half, when there is a lot to prepare. The prep list is driven by the menu, each dish requiring six or seven tasks to get them in place for cooking. If we prepare well, the evening generally goes well, regardless of how many customers come in. Our well stocked mise en place means we are ready for the unexpected. Then there are the nights when we let ourselves believe we are well stocked when we know better, leaving one or two things a little short and, of course, by some strange intuition the first ten customers come in and order the thing we have nine of, sending us into a spin, trying to do that which we are no longer prepared to do.

And we know what the menu is.

Mise en place struck me as an appropriate Lenten metaphor a week or two ago because Lent is a season of preparation. When I sat down to write tonight, I began to ask, “Preparing for what?”

Yes, I know we are walking to the Cross with Jesus. Yes, I know we are getting ready for those dark days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Yet, as moving as Maundy Thursday services are for me and as palpable as the grief can be, we live on the business side of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. If I’m getting ready for something is it not something more than acting out the obvious? Perhaps, then, Lent is mise en place without a menu: getting ready for what we do not know.

If I have done my prep work well at the restaurant, I don’t have to worry about the small stuff and can concentrate on the bigger picture, if you will: on making sure the plates are excellent, my communication with the staff is clear, and that I have time to go out into the dining room to meet some of our customers. I’m preparing to free myself to see more than slicing and dicing, to see the whole instead of the parts.

When I am at my most distracted or disorganized is when life descends into details. Though it alliterates nicely, it sucks to live out. During January and February of this year, I wrote fewer blog posts than I have any months in the three years I’ve been writing, other than a couple of months when my depression had the best of me. For the first winter in almost a decade, I have not been depressed; in fact, I have felt more hopeful. My struggle, I think, is related to organization: I’m trying to figure out how to put things in place to be who I want to be. Many of the nights I have chosen not to write because I wanted time with Ginger (which is at a premium on our current schedule), or I chose to sleep (which is a health issue). I have worked hard to see a bigger picture and not be legalistic. My goal when I started writing was to write two-hundred and fifty posts a year, mostly because I wanted to develop the discipline of a writer. I am still committed to that discipline and I want to see a larger grace that allows for time to lay fallow, to do something other than keep up production.

And I knew Lent was coming when I would keep my yearly promise to write a thousand words everyday. I knew I was getting ready to, well, get ready: to put things in place. The menu I’m working with includes doing a job I love that has grown to be larger and more demanding of my time, investing in my marriage in a way that offers Ginger more than the dregs of my existence, writing this blog and some other things I want to be on paper, cultivating friendships both old and new, and growing to be more faithful in my life. This is the season for me to make my prep lists and do what I need to do to get ready for life beyond the Resurrection, for living out those days we call Ordinary Time with flavor and intention.

I’m grateful for the time to prepare.

Peace,
Milton

goutez, goutez, goutez

I have a growing shelf of books about the experience of being a chef, thanks to my friend Mia who is kind to send one at every birthday and Christmas, and sometimes in between. This Christmas’ offering was The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. The book has both interested and encouraged me.

I had to run an errand on the way to work one day last week and ended up with a few minutes in the parking lot before I had to be in the kitchen, so I pulled the book out to read for a bit. In the middle of the chapter I was reading, Flinn described the Chef making a consommé:

Chef carefully removes the clarifying ingredients and pours the consommé through a passoire. He tastes again with his spoon. Satisfied, he adds perfectly diced vegetables.

“Goutez, goutez, goutez,” Chef begins. “C’est tres important . . .”

Anne translates. “Always taste, taste, taste, as you cook. Chef Guillard believes this is very important. If you wait until a dish is done, then it is too late to fix the seasonings. You must taste everything as you go along, every ingredient.”

Thursday night it was Chef #2 and me in the kitchen again. Tuesday night I had made a concerted effort to approach things differently. I had a much shorter prep list for him and worked hard to frame things so I didn’t play into an adversarial relationship. He seemed more accommodating as well, and the evening went OK. Part of the change I made was to take the lead in calling the tickets as they came in and give him a more limited responsibility, and he responded well, leading me to rethink my assumption that the problem was his lack of passion; perhaps he was just struggling to keep up. Thursday night, we saw our first customer a little before six (we open at five) and our last just after eight – in between there were sixty-seven others who came, unannounced, for dinner. In that time frame, also, the printer in the kitchen became temperamental after we changed the paper and a couple of tickets got lost. One of our servers, in particular, became discombobulated.

Duke Dining Services sends anonymous students in from time to time to evaluate all the eating establishments on campus. (You can see this coming, can’t you?)

The server came back first to ask if a customer could get an appetizer portion of the Butternut Squash Ravioli. My answer was yes. Several minutes later, she came back with a ticket for said ravioli to be served with a medium steak. A crucial detail is I make the ravioli myself, but I can’t make them to order, so I freeze them. They have to be in the pasta water for a good four minutes to thaw and cook; when I pull them out of the water, I always press them to see if they are cooked before I drop them in the sauce to finish the dish. About the time we started the ravioli, six dessert orders came in, so I asked Chef #2 to finish the dish. He timed it with the steak, which had already been cooking, and sent them out together.

The ravioli came back. It was still frozen.

When the server returned, she said she had forgotten to write a Roasted Chicken Marsala on the ticket and needed one, as we say, on the fly. Once again, I needed Chef #2 to get it done. I was finishing the desserts as the dish went out. A few minutes later, one of our other servers came to tell me one of his friends was eating dinner with us and was doing an evaluation. I went out to see how their dinner had been and, yes, they were on the receiving end of all that I have just described.

Needless to say, we got a poor evaluation, which listed, among other things, that the ravioli was still cold and the Marsala was bland. I could hear the French Chef saying, “Goutez, goutez, goutez.”

My mind was full of woulda-coulda-shouldas. I should have gone out when the ravioli was sent back. I should have double-checked his dish before it went out. Then I moved on to the reality of our needing to send an order out every two minutes for two hours. Those things crossed my mind before I even got back to the kitchen. As I opened the kitchen door, I made a decision not to say anything to him about what had happened. Part of my choice was driven by my need to finish the inventory before I went home; part of it was I wasn’t up for a confrontation; part of it was I’d been in his shoes. I picked up my clipboard and finished my tasks.

We had had a good night. One table – a table with an evaluator – had gone bad. Next Tuesday, I thought, as we are getting ready for service, I will go over the evaluation and remind him to taste, taste, taste.

About that time, one of the other servers came in to tell me there was someone else in the dining room who wanted to speak with me. I went over to a customer seated close enough to the evaluator for him to have heard what had happened.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “I had the ravioli and it was amazing. The cinnamon pasta. The filling. I’ve never had anything like it.”

His order went out after the frozen one. While I was still doing desserts. And Chef #2 cooked it. I was grateful I had chosen not to speak to soon.

On Friday, I stopped by the used bookstore in our neighborhood because of a comment on my “Redemption Center” post that mentioned Flannery O’Connor. I got two of her books for about five bucks and came home to read the story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which tells the story of Julian and his mother, whom he despises for her unwillingness to change with the times. The story is set in the South, in the thick of the Civil Rights struggle. Julian and his mother are white, and they are riding on public transportation, which means blacks are on the bus as well. When she embarrasses him by her actions, he comes down both angrily and condescendingly. When the story ends, he is on the precipice of what O’Connor describes as “his entry into the world of guilt and shame.”

Perhaps the parallel is a bit overstated for what happened Thursday night, still it strikes me that the entry into the world of hurt presents itself, sometimes, as a clear gateway and other times as a trap door. I had decided Chef #2 was low on passion and high on attitude; I watched and listened a bit longer and found he’s trying to adjust to an environment that may not match his skill set. He does have some of the attitude, but not for the reasons I assumed.

We are often offered opportunity to enter the world of grace, and take those around us along. As I learned again Thursday night, most of the time I find that door by stumbling in.Like the chef tasting and tasting along the way as he prepared the soup, I had managed to find some redemption in the evening by moving slowly and not over-seasoning my responses.

At least I can see that looking back.

Peace,
Milton

lots to learn

I love watching Top Chef.

I’m particularly intrigued by the scenarios the contestants are forced to face, which often call forth skills beyond cooking that they may or may not have. A couple of weeks ago, the episode was called “Restaurant Wars” and the eight remaining contestants were divided into two teams and given the challenge to open their own restaurant for one evening. The two chefs who won the opening “Quick fire Challenge” became the leaders, though neither of them were actually leaders. Both restaurants suffered as a result. Ultimately, the reason one chef who was asked “to pack her knives and go” was not because of her cooking but because she didn’t lead her crew.

“If you’re the chef, you have to act as though no one else is going to do their job,” one of the judges said to her.

I understood exactly what he meant. In a job that depends on everyone doing their part, you have to be prepared in case someone doesn’t come through. At the same time, however, you have to trust each other – even depend on each other as though everyone is going to do excellent work. When both things are held in creative tension, good food happens.

One of the reasons I’ve never made a good Calvinist is I believe people will rise to the level of trust you put in them. When I took kids to youth camp as a youth minister, our “rules” consisted of, “Live, act, and speak like the children of God that you are.” And they did. I took the same basic approach as a high school teacher and now as a chef it’s the way I choose to relate to the folks on the line with me.

I have two guys who alternate nights working with me at the Duke restaurant. One, Abel, I have written about before. The best way I can communicate his approach to his job is to recount what happened the other night. We had some fresh trout to sell that evening, which we were going to dip in an almond crust and fry. As he was getting ready for the dinner service, he said, “I’m going to cook the best trout they have ever tasted.”

And he did.

The other cook who works with me is capable, diligent, yet he lacks the passion Abel articulated. I don’t know his story. I don’t know what has hardened him. I do know it feels to me like he comes to work on an assembly line. I don’t think he gets much joy out of his work. He is filling orders more than he is feeding people. I don’t know how to help him. You can teach technique but you can’t teach passion.

That last realization calls me to live in yet another creative tension, between the poles of my own passion for excellence in what we are doing and my responsibility as both his supervisor and a human being to find a way to look at him that is something more constructive than judgmental. I may not be able to teach passion, but I can learn not to write him off.

Right?

I’m reminded of something my first therapist said to me: “The two things you can change in a situation are what you do and what you say.” I can’t make Cook #2 be different than he is; I can choose to be more creative in the way I deal with him, which means acting my way feeling something other than frustrated. Perhaps I can act and speak in a way that offers him the opportunity to feel something other than frustrated, as well.

The contrast from night to night for me is palpable. Abel comes to work and he is full of energy and intentionality. He and I like each other and we work well together. We have done so long enough now that we know how to help one another, even anticipate one another, when we are on the line together. Abel has risen to the trust I put in him from the beginning. On the alternate nights, I’m working with someone I don’t know as well, with whom I have not worked as much, and who doesn’t exude the same energy and intentionality. He is more dutiful than creative. He doesn’t appear to be interested in more of a relationship than is required to get through the evening.

I’m the chef. It’s my job is to work with both of them to create consistency both in our kitchen and in the food that comes out of it, which means, as much as anything, I have to go to work everyday looking to learn and seeking to rise to the level of trust that has been put in me.

And I still have a lot to learn.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe (finally).

dinner conversations

I’m not sure what it is – the pie, the lazy day, my thankful state of mind and heart, the fact that other blogs are posting poems – but I have landed on a couple of great poems this week. Today’s offering comes from another one of my favorites, Mary Oliver. I have posted her poetry previously here, here, and here. I found this one as the Thanksgiving Day post at The Writer’s Almanac.

Winter and the Nuthatch
Mary Oliver

Once or twice and maybe again, who knows,
the timid nuthatch will come to me
if I stand still, with something good to eat in my hand.
The first time he did it
he landed smack on his belly, as though
the legs wouldn't cooperate. The next time
he was bolder. Then he became absolutely
wild about those walnuts.

But there was a morning I came late and, guess what,
the nuthatch was flying into a stranger's hand.
To speak plainly, I felt betrayed.
I wanted to say: Mister,
that nuthatch and I have a relationship.
It took hours of standing in the snow
before he would drop from the tree and trust my fingers.
But I didn't say anything.
Nobody owns the sky or the trees.
Nobody owns the hearts of birds.
Still, being human and partial therefore to my own
successes—
though not resentful of others fashioning theirs—

I'll come tomorrow, I believe, quite early.

This semester we have worked hard to get the restaurant at Duke off the ground. Part of that work for me, besides cooking, has been to get out into the dining room and make some sort of connections with the students who come to eat. I’m pretty good with names, so, over the course of the last couple of months, I’ve managed to remember the names of thirty students or so who are regulars and they know my name (since I’m wearing a name tag.) Reading this poem reminded me that acquaintance and allegiance are not the same things. The connection between us looks different from each side. They are customers to me – people I want to like the food and the place and come back; I am a cook at their college.

I am planting roots here and they are passing through.

When I was born, the population of the world was about 2.8 billion people. The world population clock says four billion people have joined our ranks while I’ve been on the planet and it won’t be long before we top 7 billion folks finding their way around the world. Even Kevin Bacon can’t be connected to all of them. The sheer immensity of our population feeds the sense of wonder that grows in me as I read Oliver’s words and imagine the little bird coming down to land on her finger for food, creating a moment in which the enormity of the universe is distilled in the preciseness of the moment. In like manner, the incidental contact that happens over dinner between the students and me carries the same sense of wonder that we could find each other in a world of seven billion people, even for a moment. Still, being human, I think many of those moments are lost on us. We don’t realize our brush with eternity in passing conversation over dinner.

And, thank God, some days we do.

Peace,
Milton

lessons from the kitchen

Lesson One: Remember What It Feels Like.

Sunday nights I work at the Durham restaurant. The guy who is my second at Duke works there also, after doing the brunch shift on campus. When he got to work, he told me our Duke dishwasher had not shown up, which meant the cook got to wash all the pots and pans and plates and glasses and, well, everything. Neither of us had phone information for the dishwasher, but my cook knew where he lived and was going to stop by and make sure he was coming to work on Monday.

We need all hands on deck the first day of the week because it is the big preparation day: everything has to be made. I go in about eleven to get started and to do my part for the lunch shift. My second is due in at two. About one the phone rang and he told me, first, that the dishwasher was coming in. Then he told me he was in Greensboro and wouldn’t be in until three-thirty or four. At two,, he called back to say he wasn’t going to be in at all.

Thanks to the dishwasher, a Duke student who wants to learn more about cooking, and anyone else who happened into the kitchen, we got the prep work done and the meals cooked and served. I got out of the kitchen at nine-thirty, rather than eight o’clock. I drove home wondering how the guy who got stuck with the dishes on Sunday could turn around and do the same thing to someone else on Monday. I don’t know what kept him in Greensboro; he didn’t tell me. I do know, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” feels particularly poignant this morning.

Lesson Two: Ask for Help.

The dishwasher and the student are a study in contrasts. The dishwasher has been in this country for a dozen years, has worked as a landscaper since his teens, and is always looking to learn more. The student was born in this country, has not really had to work for his station in life, and wants to learn, but begins from a position of what he thinks he already knows, rather than what there is to learn.

When the dishwasher started working for us, he came to me one day and said, “I want to learn how to cook. Will you teach me?” Each shift, my second and I have brought him up on the line and taught him one of the dishes. He both listens and remembers well, down to the details. He has become our go to guy on the pasta dishes when things get busy.

The student loves food and cooking and does know a good bit about it, but more from books and meals he has eaten rather than those he has cooked. He has no restaurant cooking experience. Yet, when I ask him to do something, I have yet to hear him say, “I don’t know how to do that. Will you show me?” Last night I asked him to julienne some red peppers, which means to cut them into long thin strips. I think I could have grown peppers faster than he cut them. When he was done, he asked if they were all right, and then said, “I’ve never done that before.”

I wish he had started there.

Lesson Three: Be Willing to Learn.

The glue that holds our operation together is a guy who makes deliveries between the two restaurants and the catering kitchen. We all have his mobile phone number and you know you can call and say, “I need (whatever it is),” and he will bring it expeditiously. When I called to tell my Chef I was playing shorthanded, she called back to say she was sending him over to help, which was great news to me because he’s a pleasure to have around, even beyond his willingness to work and do whatever needs to be done. He showed up around four-thirty and stayed for about an hour and a half.

I should back up and add one thing: he started to work about seven yesterday morning and was due to get off around four.

One of the tasks I had for him was to pound out the boneless chicken breasts so they would cook evenly for our dishes. “No problem,” he said. “Just show me how to do it.” (He obviously has already mastered Lesson Two.) I showed him how to put the chicken between two pieces of plastic wrap and how to use the side of the mallet, rather than the end with the points, so the meat stayed intact. He made short work of the rest of the chicken and moved on to other things. As he was getting ready to leave, I thanked him for his help and he said, “No problem. And thanks for showing me how to do the chicken. I learned something new. If I can learn something, it’s a good day, no matter what else happened.”

By the time I got to the end of my day, I had three lessons worth learning and re-learning (and probably re-learning again). The day was long and I was tired on the drive home, but he was right: it was a good day.

Peace,
Milton

food, for a change

This coming weekend is Fall Break at Duke, something universities have added since I was in school. The students get an extra two days off next week, which means I do, too. The short break is a natural segue to a new menu for the restaurant, and a chance to try some new things.

The prospect of a new menu also raises the question of why we need one. We’ve had a slow start this year. I’ve gotten to know a good number of regular customers who come in to eat quite often, yet we are not doing the kind of business we need to do. My reasons for making up a new menu go farther than just hoping for more customers, however. We work hard to use seasonal vegetables and fruit, so it’s time to say goodbye to tomatoes and hello to root vegetables. I’m also ready to cook some different things, though that, on it’s own, is not reason enough for change.

I think there’s a second question that rises up: what kind of change do we need?

Last night I was talking with two of our regulars who, when told about the coming change, said, “Don’t change the salmon.” She was happy for a new menu as long as we didn’t take away her favorite fish. As I thought about her comment later, I wondered how different the view of change is from the dining room as opposed to the kitchen. I’m thinking produce and process and she’s thinking food on the plate.

Oh – I’m now to a third question: what passes for change?

Is it really change if I simply trade in the vegetables for one season for those that naturally come next? If I still serve salmon, but this time with potatoes rather than risotto, have I done a new thing, or simply repackaged what was already there? When I move from the light dishes of summer to the comfort foods of winter, Is that change or just the natural progression of things? Is “We should do something different” automatically synonymous with substantive change?

I know. I’m moving out of the kitchen and into a larger room.

Some years back I became acquainted with a magazine called DoubleTake, which was founded by Robert Coles, among others. It was a wonderful mix of art and thought and culture and conversation. Unfortunately, it went out of publication a couple of years back. Before it did, it ran an interview of Bruce Springsteen by Will Percy, Walker Percy’s grandson. The connection was that Springsteen had corresponded with the elder Percy when the singer (and the author, I suppose) had been much younger. The interview brought things full circle. One of the exchanges stays with me and came back to mind as I began writing:

WP: Do you think pop culture can still have a positive effect?

BS: Well, it's a funny thing. When punk rock music hit in the late 1970s, it wasn't played on the radio, and nobody thought, Oh yeah, that'll be popular in 1992 for two generations of kids. But the music dug in, and now it has a tremendous impact on the music and culture of the nineties. It was powerful, profound, music and it was going to find a way to make itself heard eventually. So I think there's a lot of different ways of achieving the kind of impact that most writers and filmmakers, photographers, musicians want their work to have. It's not always something that happens right away-the "Big Bang"!

With the exception of certain moments in the history of popular culture, it's difficult to tell what has an impact anymore, and particularly now when there's so many alternatives. Now, we have the fifth Batman movie! I think about the part in the essay "The Man on the Train" where your uncle talks about alienation. He says the truly alienated man isn't the guy who's despairing and trying to find his place in the world. It's the guy who just finished his twentieth Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novel. That is the lonely man! That is the alienated man! So you could say, similarly, the guy who just saw the fifth Batman picture, he's the alienated man. But as much as anyone, I still like to go out on a Saturday night and buy the popcorn and watch things explode, but when that becomes such a major part of the choices that you have, when you have sixteen cinemas and fourteen of them are playing almost exactly the same picture, you feel that something's going wrong here. And if you live outside a major metropolitan area, maybe you're lucky if there's a theater in town that's playing films that fall slightly outside of those choices.

There's an illusion of choice that's out there, but it's an illusion, it's not real choice. I think that's true in the political arena and in pop culture, and I guess there's a certain condescension and cynicism that goes along with it -- the assumption that people aren't ready for something new and different.

We, as Americans, don’t do much to dispel the cynicism Springsteen articulated. We appear to be poster children for the path of least resistance, or at least the path of convenience, or the path of I’m-going-to-do-what’s-good-for-me-period. I wonder if that’s who we really are, or who we play on TV. Conventional wisdom says ife is usually easier when we know what to expect.

Now we’re back to defining terms and asking questions: What do we mean by easier? Is easier really the point?

The menu of faith offers us the vocabulary we need to change in ways that are nourishing and substantive: repentance, conversion, new creation. The sad irony is, in many cases, those are not the words we choose. We, as people of faith, have bought into the convenience and cynicism of the culture and are starving and stagnating. We need more and we need to offer more to our world than the same redundant and ridiculous rhetoric that passes for cultural conversation. We are called to more profound words and actions than the level of discourse promoted by most of our media.

Now I’m stating the obvious.

Let me try it another way. We belong to a God who is the source of creation and creativity, of nourishment and nuance, of community and connectedness. We are called to love the world – to feed the world – with all the resources available in the divine pantry, and with all the imagination that can grow out of our conversations.

As I work on my menu for the restaurant, I’m working to remember the girl that wants the salmon to stay, asking questions of the other chefs, and scouring for menu ideas anywhere I can. The point of the change is to better meet my mission, if you will, to stand (to paraphrase Frederich Buechner) in the intersection of what I most want to cook and what the folks most want to eat.

It’s a moving target, calling me to live in a state of change.

Life, on a larger scale, feels much the same way.

Peace,
Milton

happito

Jorge is one of the people I work with who inspires me.

He is a dishwasher who does a great job, but that’s not what gets me. Jorge works at both the restaurant at Duke and the Durham restaurant where I work. From Monday to Friday, he works from 7 am to 3 pm at Duke. On Tuesday through Saturday, he works at the Durham restaurant from 4 pm to close. On Sunday he works there from 8 to 4. He is not a person who has the luxury of deciding whether or not to be a workaholic. He works because he needs the money and he has family to support in Mexico. He works every chance he gets. And he works hard. His work ethic is exemplary. But even that is not what gets me.

I am moved by his attitude toward his life and his work. He always has a smile and a good word. I’ve never seen him lose his temper. Yesterday, I saw him at shift change and one of the other chefs said, “Jorge, are you happy today?”

“Not today,” he answered, which surprised us. “Not very happy.”

“What’s wrong?” the chef asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only poquito happy.”

“Happito?” I said.

Jorge laughed. “Si,” he said, “happito.” And he went back to washing dishes.

When I got to Duke this morning, he was already settled in by the dishwasher. working through the pile of pots and pans that surrounded him.

“Buenos dias, Jorge,” I said. “Happito today?”

“No,” he answered. “Today very happy.” And he smiled.

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content,” Paul wrote to the Philippians. I think of that verse as I see Jorge, the Mexican incarnation of those words, live out his life in front of me. I’m sure there are things about his life he wishes were different. I don’t know much more about him than what I see day to day. Yet, what I see calls me to remember that I, too, am called to be content, to be happito in all things.

I’m grateful for his reminder.

Peace,
Milton

the whole plate

Some parts of my job come easily for me – the cooking part, for instance. Some parts have a steeper learning curve – figuring out food costs, for one. In order to be profitable, what it costs to buy all the food needs to cost less than a third of what we sell it for, which is hard to do. There are different kinds of formulas to help chefs do the math. I don’t really come to work to do math, but I’m learning.

One of the most helpful conversations on the topic for me recently was with James, one of the other chefs who has culinary school training and thinks creatively about most everything that happens in the kitchen. I was telling him about trying to cost out the menu at Duke and he said he thought the best way to lower food costs was to begin to figure out how much food – by weight – was going on each plate. Besides controlling costs, he said, you also give people a responsibly portioned meal.

I had never thought of it that way. I tended to look item to item: if salmon costs $6.50 a pound and I cut eight ounce servings, then I’m putting $3.25 on each plate. James challenged me to think more holistically. I’ll stick with the salmon for my example. On my menu at Duke we serve a pan seared salmon filet with a roasted corn risotto cake, grilled asparagus, and a lemon thyme beurre blanc. I began to do some figuring. If I serve

a 6 ounce portion of salmon
a 4 ounce risotto cake
4-5 ounces of asparagus and
2 ounces of beurre blanc

I’m putting a pound of food in front of my customer, which is plenty of food and not bad for $14. I have to admit I still struggle a bit when I cut the salmon or weigh out the risotto, so the cakes are consistent; they both look small. When they come together on the plate, however, they look like a good meal. So far, no one has complained about going away hungry. Yet, even as I’ve seen the truth in James’ logic play out in my kitchen, I struggle with coming to terms with the big picture. It’s far too easy to get caught up in a more fragmented view of both my menu and my life.

Another James, who goes by Jimmy and writes a blog and raises bees, stopped by this morning to bring me some of his Front Porch Blend honey. He has kept me supplied since we moved to Durham, so I was glad to see him. He also kept me distracted for the last hungry and horrible hour before I went for my colonoscopy (everything’s good). I’m grateful for both things. I’m also grateful to be developing a friendship with someone who doesn’t share the same political perspective. I like knowing that developing friendships run deeper than political views (there’s that big picture again), and I just like Jimmy. He is a kind and thoughtful person.

Our conversation did turn to the presidential campaign and one of his comments has stuck with me through the day. In the context of talking about the two choices for vice president he said, “Well the goal is to win the White House.” I can hear the reality in Jimmy’s statement and it makes me sad. If the goal of either side is simply to win, then neither one is looking at the whole plate. If the goal of either side could be reached the first Tuesday in November, then we need leaders with bigger goals and broader vision.

When I hear another new friend here, Terry, talk about what he does, he says he’s working to prevent and end homelessness in Durham. I love his choice of words. He’s not working with the homeless, or waging war on homelessness, he’s working to bring an end to the things in our society that keep people on the street. And he’s doing it, along with a growing group of people – many of them formerly homeless – who can see the whole plate Terry seeks to serve. Their big picture is a masterpiece.

I had another couple of paragraphs that turned into more of a sermon than I wanted from this post, so I cut them out. My point here is not to preach as much as to say I’m beginning to understand, whether I’m in the kitchen or not, I have to remind myself to look at the whole plate almost everyday. The big picture is not my default view. I need help to see more than my little piece of the meal. We all do. I also need to be reminded to look again and again at how I think about my life – my time, my relationships, my vocation – so that I have a sense of calling that is more than mere accomplishment.

Another blogging buddy, Towanda, offered this quote today, which spoke to me:

The only dream worth having ... is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead ... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or to complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

- Arundhati Roy
From her book, The Algebra of Infinite Justice

Now that’s a plate full.

Peace,
Milton

recipe for living

The beginning of the school year has meant a move for me. I’m back at Duke, as the chef for a restaurant my boss contracts to run on the Duke campus. We are open Monday to Thursday nights, and then I still work Sunday nights at the restaurant where I worked this summer. I like being able to be a part of both places. The Duke restaurant was a new venture last year and I came on board in January. By the end of the school year, we began to get a pretty good idea of what we needed to do to really make it work. The restaurant is the nicest place on campus for students (or anyone else) to eat dinner. As Ginger says, “We never had a place on campus with salmon and sirloin and linen tablecloths and beer and wine.” And they can use their meal plan points to boot.

Last year, I worked from two until about ten, Sunday through Thursday. This year, my Sunday nights run until eleven because the other restaurant is open later, and, because my chef wants me to be a part of what happens at lunch in the same room at Duke (primarily a faculty restaurant), my days begin at eleven, rather than two, but still aren’t over until after nine o’clock. When I factor in the time I spend at home dealing with work email or refining recipes or doing other administrative tasks, I’m up to close to sixty hours a week.

I love to cook. I love what I’m getting to do at Duke. I get to come up with the menu, design how the dishes should taste and look, go out into the dining room and get to know some of the students who eat with us regularly, and hone my skills as a chef. When I’m at work, I’m not conscious of time. I get lost in the making and serving of the meals. I’m doing what I most love to do.

And I know doing it sixty hours a week is no way to live. Something’s got to give.

On our trip to Texas, I had time to read. One of the books I picked up was Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal by Margaret Visser. Though the book was published in 1986, it was new to me. Visser begins with the idea of a simple meal – corn on the cob with butter and salt, roast chicken with rice, salad dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, and ice cream – and then, as a self-described “anthropologist of everyday life,” tells more than you could ever imagine about each of the ingredients in the meal. She spends fifty-five pages on corn alone. Here’s part of what she has to say:

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. . . And always they added ash: burnt hickory or the ash of some other wood, ot the roasted and crushed shells of mussels they had eaten, or (as in modern Ecuador) they burnt shells of land snails. All this was sheer tradition: corn, beans, and squash with a pinch of ash in every pot. Only very recently have scientists fully grasped the wisdom of the Indians’ behavior. Corn, we now know, is about 10 percent protein, but is deficient in the amino acids lycene and tryptophan, which people must get from food. In addition, although corn contains the vitamin niacin, almost all of it occurs in a “bound” form called niacytin, which makes it biologically unavailable to human beings. Corn, in other words, cannot feed people adequately if it is not supplemented by other foods, and beans and squash are excellent complements to corn. The holy threesome, in fact, enabled corn to be consumed as a staple. Wherever the rule has been broken, and corn eaten without the correct supplements, the consequences have been disastrous: outbreaks of pellagra and kwashiorkor, the agonizing diseases of nutrition deficiency. (32) (emphasis added)

Let me pull out the highlighted part, so you can see it as clearly, I hope, as it jumped out at me.

Corn, in other words, cannot feed people adequately if it is not supplemented by other foods, and beans and squash are excellent complements to corn. The holy threesome, in fact, enabled corn to be consumed as a staple. Wherever the rule has been broken, and corn eaten without the correct supplements, the consequences have been disastrous.

One of the central quotes we used at the retreat on vocation was Buechner’s definition of vocation: the place where your greatest joy and the world’s deepest need intersect. As best I can read my spiritual GPS, I’m pretty close to that intersection. I would like to be feeding folks who needed the food more than I am, (I’m working on that) and I have a strong sense of calling and peace about doing what I’m doing where I’m doing it. Coming from a family of fairly intentional workaholics and having spent a lot of time and energy trying to learn a different way to look at life and work other than burning out for Jesus, I struggle to heed the traffic signal in my vocational intersection that tells me to stop and rest, or to go do something else that feeds me, such as spend time with Ginger or write or read or head for the gym.

Visser’s brief history of corn caught me because, even though corn was the crop that spread around the world once the Europeans learned of it from the Native Americans, it isn’t enough all on its own. In her history I found metaphor: work, even work I see as my spiritual vocation, doesn’t have the spiritual nutrition to sustain me all by itself. My life has to have its share of beans and squash if I am to be the human being I was created to be.

Human being, as someone else noted long ago, not human doing.

The days ahead, for me, are ones of discernment, working to figure out how to balance the recipe of my life so I am nurtured and sustained and I nurture and sustain those who matter most to me. Part of the task for me will be drawing some boundaries around my job and sticking to them, which doesn’t come easily for me (see earlier comment about workaholics). Part of it will be making sure how I actually spend my time matches with what I say matters most to me. Ginger deserves more than the dregs of my day; so do I. I’m not in a crisis, but I am aware that the recipe of my life isn’t quite right. And a good cook knows if something doesn’t taste right you change the recipe.

Peace,
Milton