“While God gives me meat in due season and the sensibilities with which to relish the gift, I refuse to sit down to eat and rise up only to have picked and fussed my way through the goodness of the earth . . . It is bread that strengthens man’s heart; it is the valleys …
Glory in Butter
“One last secret. There is almost no sauce that will not be improved by having a lump of butter whisked into it the moment before it is served. In addition to what it does for the flavor, it provides the sauce itself with a patina, a sheen which delights the eye even before the palate …
Small Immensities
“The processes involved in sauce making are hardly as dramatic as the driving of great engines, but they testify no less to the brooding of the Spirit upon the face of creation, to the endless speaking of the Word Who mightily and sweetly orders all things. Unfortunately, we live in an age which is too …
What Would Melzar Think?
After services yesterday, I was asked a good question about my series on food. Do I believe that there was a miracle when Daniel and his three friends refused the king’s meat and wine, and came out of a ten day test healthier than the stable-fed Babylonians? The first response was the one I offered …
Eating Healthy and the Feminine Ideal
Just a few quick observations about food, the created order and body image. We will have to deal with this in more detail later, but it should be mentioned in this series of posts early on — because it really is such a huge player. When a girl who is hovering on the edge of …
Reverent Minds and Irreverent Conclusions
“One might have hoped that, with so gracious a creature as wine, even the most ardent religionists and secularists would have made an exception to their universal custom of missing the point of things . . . Consider first the teetotalers . . . Something underhanded has to be done to grape juice to keep …
Not to Mention the Pantry
“Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them …
Lotsa Water
Driving out the coast, I had the privilege of driving for the better part of a day alongside the Columbia River. Driving back, the river was just as wide and just as long. What an enormous amount of water, flowing steadily to the sea. And, making this even more fun, we were doing pretty much …
So Don’t Be a Food Fusser
“The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag . . . If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks us why we are …
Stuffed Manskins
“There is no way around the killing here that is not less than human in the end; man is what he is: hunter, butcher, carnivore; save him without that and you save nothing — manskins stuffed with sacred sawdust reach no New Jerusalem” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 49).