The Joy of Cooking

Mmm, just look at these scrumptious Coffee Cake Muffins. I made these tonight in a recent kick to do more cooking from scratch-- thus far its been quite successful and satisfying. I also cooked a delicious Eggplant Parmesan for lunch today, which was going remarkably well until I smelled burnt paper and realized the corner of my cookbook was stuck and burning under a molten-hot frying pan. I guess all novice cooks are required to have some major kitchen disasters on the path to culinary mastery!

Another great joy of my week involved cooking.....cooking an amazing dinner with a dear girl friend who I haven't spent time with in over a year and a half. The best sort of friends are those which can jump back in right where they left off after months or even years apart, despite all the changes and growth and experience the two of you might have been through since you last met. I am so thankful that God is so gracious and good to grow those roots of friendship deep- across time, distance, huge life changes....and that He is constantly making all things new.
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p.s. my roommate just alerted me to my new favorite food blog: http://smittenkitchen.com/
Beautiful and mouthwatering, check it out.


sew it begins...


I am proud at announce a new skill: I have been taking sewing lessons the past few weeks, and they have been so much fun! I can now operate a sewing machine (quite a feat, let me tell ya) and make all kinds of crazy stitches. This little heart pillow (seen here with my roommate's cat Babar, who was more than happy to model) was my first project. I hope to go on to making bigger things someday, but it's a start :)

Football and Funny Face


A quick note on the Superbowl: anyone who knows me knows that I don't know the first thing about sports, nor do I really care to most of the time (sorry, sports lovers, I have tried). Yet for some reason I almost always can't resist watching the Superbowl. Regardless of who you were pulling for (sorry, Peyton fans), you have to admit that watching the Saints win was amazing. I felt so inspired and overjoyed for the battered city of New Orleans. I don't know what it is about sports, but they just rally people together like few things can --take for example the recent movie Invictus, about how Nelson Mandela unified the South African people after apartheid through the sport of rugby. And watching Saints QB Drew Brees cry as he held and kissed his little son after winning was enough to make me want to cry myself.

It was also pretty neat to see via Facebook that some Scottish pals were watching the game as well (which is a lot of dedication to American football, since it ended about 3:30 AM their time). One comment concerning my church family in Scotland that made me particularly happy: "Rest assured there were brothers watching in St V's tonight...feeling the American love, stunning show tonight! " You gotta love transatlantic sports comraderie.

On an entirely different note, I'm watching the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face right now, and a great deal of the movie is set in Paris. I love spotting all these places I've actually been, then pinching myself to remember it was real. The Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Seine, the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Sacre Couer.....it all seems like a dream now, but the movie brings all of the thrill right back to me. Plus, Audrey Hepburn is probably the most lovely, charming woman to ever grace the screen--watching her is always a delight :)

A great musical number just for you: Audrey and Fred Astaire singing (and dancing) "Bonjour, Paris!"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuhl8gO7Igo

letting the thrill go

One of my biggest problems is a constant excess of nostalgia (you might notice it if you have read this blog for any length of time). I tend to constantly look backward and grasp for past joys rather than savoring the present moment, and I've been doing that a lot the past couple of weeks. A few days ago, I was talking about this feeling of loss to an old friend, who reminded me of this wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (which begins as he is talking about marriage).....oh, actually, I just realized that I already posted this one this blog about a year ago, but it still incredibly relevant and I love it, so here you go:

"People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change — not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening.

This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy."

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