Never did I think my first foray back into food blogging (as opposed to walking blogging-- is that a thing?) would be a chili recipe.  I wouldn't have thought it would be a recipe at all, given that a lot of dinners here lately have taken the form of hummus-pita-carrot sticks or bread-cheese-bing cherries or here-is-a-plastic-tray-of-sushi.  On the other hand, life without recipes has meant the occasional creative masterpiece, which I have proceeded to never, ever tell you about.  The other day I had some stuff I wanted to use up-- actually, not much stuff, just more of the endless supply of green chili peppers I've got in my freezer and half a bag of carrots-- and so I bought a lot of cans of beans and tomatoes and some bulk cashews and made some vegetarian chili, which turned out to be the most delicious vegetarian chili I have ever made, even though most of it came from cans.  This is how it went:

Saute in about 2 T. oil:

• One big onion, chopped
• several fresh (or frozen!) chilis, minced

When onions are softening, add:

• a few carrots, diced

Saute for a few minutes, then add:

• a big 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
• small (15 oz.) cans of chickpeas, red chili beans, and black beans, or some other combination of beans (but the chickpeas are essential)
• salt
• really quite a lot of chili powder
• much more modest shakes of powdered ancho chili, white pepper, and red pepper flakes (or whatever similar items you have around to complicate the spice profile) 
• a tomato-can-full of water

Bring everything to a boil and cook for 15 minutes. Now add:

• about 10 oz. of firm tofu, diced small
• about 1 c. of whole raw cashews

Stir and adjust the salt and spices to taste.  Add:

• 1/4 c. molasses (yess)
• juice of half a lime

Simmer 10 minutes or so more, adjust any flavors to taste (especially salt), and serve with the most awesome easy cornbread (below).

This chili has a delightful sweetness due to the cooked carrots and onions, naturally sweet cashews, and molasses.  The molasses, as it turns out, also gives it an amazing, complex depth of flavor.  I also like the filling sturdiness of the multiple proteins: several kinds of bean, tofu and nuts all in one place.  And it was very easy and quick.

Now for delicious and quick matching cornbread:

​Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  In a medium-sized bowl, mix:

• 1 c. all-purpose flour, or whatever
• 1 c. cornmeal
• 1 t. baking soda
• 1 t. baking powder
• generous 1/2 t. salt
• brown sugar to taste (I probably used about 1/4 c.)

Since you are using brown sugar, I recommend mixing the dry ingredients with your fingers to break up any lumps.  Then add:

• 1 1/2 c. milk

Mix.  It will seem too runny, don't worry about it.  Pour into buttered 8x8 dish and bake about 25 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean.  Let it cool some and then eat it with butter (and chili).

Brown sugar instead of white took this cornbread to a whole new level.  Both the bread and the chili were addictive.  I kept going back to the kitchen to take little bites.  So will you.  The whole thing took approximately 45 minutes.
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​Life has changed and I go to a lot of meetings now, as my mother did when I was a child.  This is probably the reason why I remember childhood as a pleasant round of Beefaroni, frozen waffles, and Weaver's Chicken Rondelets.

A similar phenomenon is happening to us.  Prepared foods have improved in quality, but we still find ourselves eating refrigerated sushi, frozen tikka masala wraps, pizza, mac-and-cheese, dumplings, or sandwiches much more often than I'd like.  While I still buy food and supplies every couple of days, evenings are so busy that the time to cook something elaborate just isn't there.  It is also hard to find the solid two-and-a-half hours or so that it seems to take me to choose recipes for a week, make a shopping list, go to a major store like the Whole Foods or Safeway, park, shop, check out, drive home, and put everything away.  Maybe three hours.

I want to make Deb Perelman's Ultimate Chicken Noodle Soup.  It looks like it will take about 4 hours to cook.  Also, my child no longer eats chicken.  These are both limiting factors.

Still, I try.  I went to Whole Foods this afternoon, and bought the ingredients for the soup, as well as for Lavender Marcona Almonds, three Madhur Jaffrey recipes (Moroccan Potato Stew with Turmeric, Crispy Potato Cake with Herbs, and Moroccan Tomato Salad), and Rogan Josh.  I'm hoping to find time to cook most or all of them this weekend.

Meanwhile, it's hard to find time to write, too... or even to think, much.  I shouldn't say there isn't time.  There is time; there is always time.  It's hard to concentrate, though.  So much is happening, and so much matters.  My attention is divided in a million directions.  Some of it still goes towards food, but even that is entangled with so much else.  How will I lose the seven pounds I gained in November and December alone, by constant comfort-eating after the election?  Can I get my house presentable and something simple cooked in time to have five other progressives over for supper for the purpose of "community-building?"  On Tuesday I bought a carrot cake at a nice bakery at 8:30 in the morning in western Massachusetts, stuck it in the back of my car, and drove all day to Washington DC.  I arrived around 5:15, took a brief rest, and then brought myself and my carrot cake to an activist potluck.  Rarely, rarely do I ever fail to bring something homemade to a potluck.

This was going to be a post about attending City Council meetings with my teenager.  City Council happens pretty much every Wednesday at 7:30 pm.  While there is enough space for hundreds to attend, generally there are between 10 and 30 people present.  My teen and I scarf down some dinner quickly, leave a portion for my husband, and walk down the hill to the community center, slipping inside the double doors just on the dot of 7:30 and taking the seats that my teen has decided are our "regular ones," towards the back in the middle.  Our city councilmembers sit in an arc in front of us, with the mayor at the center.  The city council is not as diverse as our town is.  All six councilmembers are men, and four of them are white men.  The mayor, thank god, is a (white) woman.  Three other white members of the city staff (two of these, at least, are women) sit with the council on the dais.

​Like that, we watch them deliberate.  And boy, do they deliberate.  The best part of the meeting is the public comments, which are limited to (I think) three minutes each and range from highly specific (a bush is blocking visibility at the intersection of X and Y streets) to sweepingly general (love trumps hate!  Peace to all!).  The worst part of the meeting is the councilmember comments, which are unlimited in length, open as to topic, and tolerant of some of the most extensive and wandering pontification I have ever heard, including in college lectures.  Some offenders are worse than others (I'm looking at you, old white guy who needs a haircut).  Notably, the mayor, the only woman, does not offend in this regard at all.  She is always efficient, considerate, somewhat self-effacing, and sensible, though she is not incapable of giving the occasional impassioned remarks.  My kid and I have become real fans.  Of the mayor; but also of the whole process.  Even the pompous haircut-needing guy, who talked so long about speed bumps last week, enumerating all the kinds of vehicles that might drive over them, that I got the giggles severely and had to pack up and go home.

That is the thing with city council.  Sometimes they talk about speed bumps for an hour and half.  But somebody has to.  And many topics turn out to be surprisingly fascinating.  An argument about how exactly to develop a particular empty residential lot.  A proposal by citizens (amazingly, accepted by the council) for the city to stop doing business with a large national bank which carries holdings in the nuclear industry, and switch to a small local bank which does not.  A threat by a small business to move down the street into the District of Columbia in order to avoid a particular local tax.  We love it all.  And we love the handful of other town characters who show up to almost every meeting.  I guess we are town characters now too: that mom and that teenager of indeterminate gender who always come and sit in the back and never say anything, don't seem to be there to monitor any particular issue, and slip out around 9:30, most likely during one of long-winded guy's long explanations of a vote.

Ironically, I bought frozen waffles for dinner tonight.

I am sitting in the little-used tiny room in our apartment we call "the spongy room," because of its loose old dark-brown carpeting and the way it feels underfoot.  There is nothing interesting in the spongy room, just some spillover kitchen gear and cookbooks, bottles of liquor, an old armchair, and a bicycle.  It's also cold.  Would it help if I noted that my browser is closed?-- the spongy room today is a critical retreat of sensory and information deprivation, desperately needed if I'm ever going to have any hope of writing or thinking something coherent this morning.

It's true that I still have "I can't keep quiet" running relentlessly through my head, as well as a succession of paranoid thoughts about exactly what dastardly plan has been concocted and is being implemented by (some subset of) Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon, Rex Tillerson, Carter Page, Richard Spencer, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Alexander Nix and (maybe) Donald Trump.  On the other side of the scales there is an obsessive desire to keep looking for data and photos about a protest and impromptu march in which I personally participated yesterday.  Why?--I was there, I know what it was like.  Also-- and I know I'm not alone in this-- I'm thinking about some comments I made on Facebook-- whether they were wise, what people thought about them, whether they contributed to the conversation or were just a bunch of self-important BS.

The browser is closed, I won't look at my phone until this is finished, no one else is home, I don't have anyplace else to be.  But I still can't turn my brain off.

If conversations I've had with others over the past couple of weeks are any indication, we are all in this boat.  So much is happening that consuming news has become (in an immediately overused analogy) "like drinking from  a firehose."   Then, once you consume it, the pressure and obligation to act in response is immense-- but what should you respond to first, and how?  And, while you are beginning to consider action, the firehose blast of new material continues.  Meanwhile, there is also life to be lived, a life that increasingly seems like a trivial aside: going to a job, perhaps, keeping up with the kids' schedule, making dinner, doing the laundry, calling your mother and talking about something other than Donald Trump.  Reading a book published before 2016, in the Days of Irrelevant Yore.  These are all things that have to be fit into the interstices between fits of panic, outrage, and righteous action.

So, for a long time now I've been intending to write and think about how to create an activism schedule, or life balance, or however you want to put it-- some way to gain control back over my time and decision-making-- but ironically I have not been able to find the time to do so.  This, despite the fact that I have only a part-time job and my child is 15 and needs very little direct care and feeding.  There have always been urgent news to read, urgent calls to make to my senators about cabinet appointments, meetings to attend, protests planned and spontaneous... or, on the flip side of all this, a day here or there of total meltdown in which I check out entirely, eat potato chips, and block out the world.

I was going to write this post yesterday, but a major protest and then impromptu march arose downtown, near the White House, in response to Trump's new travel/immigration bans, and I couldn't bear not to be there, so I went.

The situation is dire.  It's great that, all of a sudden, we have an engaged and responsive citizenry, an army of people willing to act at a moment's notice.  But, on a collective level, we need to have enough opportunities to catch our breath that we can coordinate well-considered actions, not just reactions.  We also need to not burn out after a couple of weeks or months.  On an individual level, there's laundry to do, and your teenager wants to tell you about a test score they're really proud of. 

And this liquor isn't going to drink itself.

So-- and I am really asking this question, like, seeking answers-- how do you decide what to do, at any given moment?  I always have trouble with this issue, being a scheduler and a list-maker-- spontaneity does not come naturally to me.  But I'm thinking that maybe, right now, my natural lack of spontaneity could be an asset, something that could keep me from being entirely reactive 100% of the time.  I had some luck-- for, like, one week, right after the new year and admittedly before Donald Trump actually took office and started firing off presidential memoranda-- with a schedule that looked like this (on the days I do not work at the restaurant):

7:00am--12:30 pm  Ingest news and commentary (usually takes until 9:30-10 am).  Shower.  Spend a couple of hours calling congressmen, writing letters, and/or writing my own material.

12:30 pm--1:30 pm  Lunch break.  Read something that isn't news.  Like a book.

1:30 pm--dinnertime  Do Life things.  Try really hard to stay away from Facebook.  Go grocery shopping, do the laundry, errands, bills, cooking.  Don't check Facebook.  Don't.  Even email is shaky now that I receive 80 million action alerts and news digests in it.  Just life things.  And, oh yeah, exercise.

Eat dinner with my family, do dishes, go for a walk around the block with my husband, possibly watch a TV show that is not black comedy about news (possibly).  Now I can check Facebook, but not for too long, because I need to go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Attend scheduled meetings, protests, volunteering, etc. as needed (probably a couple of evenings a week, plus occasional daytime commitments, usually known in advance).

Sounds like a pretty decent plan, right?  But, oh my God, it requires so much self-discipline.  I've had three big problems right off the bat.  1) It is hard to stick to ingesting news only once per day, when the constant barrage of outrageous activity from this administration (plus fascinating tidbits that seem out of a spy novel) mean that there is something shocking happening pretty much every second.  2) The pretty natural and universal addiction to checking social media to see if anyone has responded to me has now been invested with a whole extra veneer of urgency and importance, so that it is now possible to pretend to oneself that it matters how many people liked one's comment about Putin or the Women's March.  Hint to self: it still doesn't matter that much.  3) (perhaps an extension of #1)  In my 7-12:30 time slot, the news-gathering portion of the time has tended to slowly expand and eat up the action portion until it is all gone.  This kind of defeats the purpose.

All this has led to a fourth problem: quite uncharacteristically, I am finding myself committing to taking actions that I then don't get around to or forget about.  The list of things to do is just getting too long and unwieldy and living in too many different places (emails, calendar, Facebook, written lists, inside my head).  I really need to go back through everything and figure out a) what I said I would do that I still need to do, b) what I said I would do that it is too late to do, and c) what else is most important to do next.  In a block of time like this, where all other inputs are turned off and I don't stop mid-sentence to read the Daily Kos Elections email or the action steps in My Civic Workout.  People who keep recommending new activist tools to me, please stop.  You don't understand: I already have a problem.  I will love your new activist tool, and subscribe to it, and it will slowly crush me along with all the others.

So.  I want to hear your strategies, your problems and solutions, in as much detail as you are willing to give.  It is trivial and yet it is absolutely not trivial, because our lives and futures depend now on our being able to get it together and keep it together, to at least a certain degree.  How do you decide what to do and when to do it?  How do you know which ball to keep your eye on?  Do you spend time thinking about where you direct your energies?  If not, should you?

Please advise.
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And now I'm going to take a shower.

It is January 3, 2017.  We have now passed almost two months (can it be that?) in grief over the November election, and the time has come for the new music to start playing, and for us to face it.  Our new Congress begins today, and the House Republican conference got a jump on things last night when they voted amongst themselves to eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics as part of the new House rules package.  It is expected to pass.  (Please note, this is the Office of Congressional Ethics, NOT the Office of Government Ethics-- I have seen this mistake several times this morning in headlines, captions, etc., and it is an easy one to make.)  We will have Donald Trump as our president in 17 days.  This thing is happening.

We rang in the New Year with quality family time (board games and TV), and a really epic cheese board.  I feel like, in the midst of dread and fear and sadness, remembering to have cheese boards is going to be the kind of thing we need to keep us sane.  It was kind of expensive, but then again we had a lot of leftovers.  If I were to do it again, I would not accidentally pay $15.99 for a wild boar salami.  Regular salami would be fine.

I'm still struggling with the question of how to respond to our current political situation: not, "how should we respond?" but ME, personally-- what should I do?  

For the past twenty years or so, I have owned a deck of Tarot cards, and-- I know it sounds ridiculous-- but I know how to use them.  Sometimes, at the beginning of a new chapter, or in times of bewilderment (and this is both), I will ask for some guidance.  Sometimes it helps, sometimes not.  Sometimes, I've asked a stupid question, or my whole heart is muddled, and the cards also are muddled, trivial, and forgettable.  ("Forgettable" also often means I didn't care for the information I got.)  Occasionally-- very occasionally-- a Tarot reading hits like a ton of bricks.  This is especially the case when a lot of major arcana are present, signalling: "This is important."

​I almost stopped here to assure you that I don't believe in magic, that my interest in Tarot is purely a matter of accessing one's own subconscious knowledge.  But I was finding it hard to write that sentence properly, and eventually it occurred to me that this was because it was a big-ass lie.  I don't believe in magic, per se.  But I do believe in fate, in a kind of complicated way, and possibly I believe in God, and I don't see why a pack of cards should be any less subject to what I perceive as the laws and vagaries of the moral universe than everything else, so why should they not ever arrange themselves into useful messages, just like the flocks of birds do when they carry to me a sign of hope even while simultaneously going about their own God-given business?

Anyway, this morning I stopped to ask the Tarot about my path in 2017: wtf is it, basically.  But a classic Celtic cross Tarot reading actually tells you more about what is happening than what will happen.  This particular reading was one of those ton-of-bricks ones.  Please only read this next bit if you have an interest in/knowledge of Tarot; otherwise it will bore you to death.  You can rejoin us here* (scroll down)

1/2.  The two crossed cards in the middle, representing the crux of the present moment, are the 3 and 4 of Swords (the 4 is "reversed," that is, upside-down, which suggests a kind of complication, restriction, inhibition, or even--in rare cases-- overturning of its influence).  These are not happy cards; the 3 is often pictured as a heart stuck through with three swords, and indicates heartbreak and betrayal.  The 4, typically depicting a sleeper, portrays the kind of retreat and holing-up that follows heartbreak and is necessary for healing.  It seemed appropriate that my 4 was reversed-- while my instincts may all cry out for rest and retreat after the pain of this national and personal shock, I am definitely unwilling to indulge this impulse very far.  Those two Swords cards, referring to personal pain, are surrounded by a ring of major arcana, far more of them than an "average" pull of ten cards from the deck would produce.  This is important.  This is bigger than my mourning or my recovery.

3. Tarot readers know that The Fool-- who lies here in a kind of founding, underlying, deep-consciousness position-- is the most important card in the deck.  He is the undefined well of all possibility, because he is unburdened by knowledge or expectation, and operates outside the bounds of logic and preconception.  He is the zero card, literally.  And he also represents the questioner in her primal form, each one of us born unformed, an open and curious blank page.  Each time we take the risk of open-mindedness or open-heartedness in life, or embrace the unknown, we are The Fool (and are often called one).  My Fool, here, is reversed, because I am not approaching this massive unknown in a spirit of complete openness (though there is a little exhilaration to it), but also of fear (see #5).

5.  (I always read 3 and 5 together, then 4 and 6.  It just makes more sense.)  Above the cross, in the position representing my conscious understanding, we see The Devil (also reversed).  Everyone always goes on about how the Devil is not literal in Tarot.  Well, I guess not, because most of us don't believe in literal big red demons appearing to take a hand in things.  However, if your understanding of the devil is that he represents everything that foments evil within us-- fear, jealousy, addiction, petty dulling of the mind and senses-- did I mention fear?-- then I think it is accurate to say my consciousness is full of him now.  He is both the thing that I fear, and a representation of my own fear, which is always a dangerous emotion to court.

3/5 form a pair, a tension, between a fundamental innocence and freedom, and an imposed consciousness of evil. They are both reversed, neither fully-expressed.  Conscious thought is not necessarily wrong, but it often is.

4/6 form a different kind of pair, a temporal one, with 4 describing the (recent) past and 6 describing the (near) future.  Card 4 is the major arcana Judgement, which is a complex card of multiple meanings, but what I would here read simply, as representing Election Day itself.  The "day of reckoning."  Again, it is reversed, perhaps to indicate the rather tortured and ambiguous nature of this reckoning, as well as the fact that I think it sucked.

And card 6?  The future I am heading directly towards?  Here comes the ton of bricks.  Justice.  

Just look at her.  Is there any image that better represents who we might want to be in this moment, with her scales in one hand and her sword in the other?  "I have come, not to bring peace, but a sword."

7/8.  Another pair.  Card 7 can be seen as "who we are" in relation to the reading, Card 8 I typically read as the influence of an important other or others.  Card 7, with the last of this reading's major arcana, brings another blast by naming me, outrageously, The Magician.  This is card number 1, right after The Fool, which is about raw, elemental power, the channeling of the unformed emptiness of the Fool's world into formed creation.  Logos, or a guy with a magic wand, or action!, making something new.  Of course, the Magician, like nearly everybody here except for (thank God) Justice, is reversed, because how can any of that be easy or simple, especially for a crabbed old tangled useless person like me?  But, how amazing, to imagine that after farting around for probably more than half my damned life, I might be finally chosen to DO something (also see, even more amazingly, the corroboration of Card 10).

Card 8, the 10 of Pentacles, shows a material fullness, comfort and abundance.  Since this is the card position representing others' roles, I can expect cheese boards with family and friends to nourish me when times are tough and there's not too much power in my wand.  This card, too, is reversed-- nothing is going to be easy, not that easy.  But there is sustenance there, and community.

9.  This position is always difficult for me to put my finger on.  I call it the "hopes and fears card," but maybe more accurately I think of it as the "illusions card," a second place (like card 5) where one's own mental constructs are represented.  Not "what is real," but "what are you worried about?," or "what pipe dream are you indulging?"  In this case, the 5 of Cups (reversed again!) shows loss and regret, some very serious spilt milk.  Is this just fear of the losses inherent in the world going all to hell?  Perhaps, or perhaps it is more personal, a fear that any attempts toward justice or action on my part are bound to suck.

10.  The final position is the long-term future or "ultimate result," though of course no story ever ends and no future is certain.  For a budding activist, though, the two of wands is a good card to have in this position.   Wands is the action suit, and the two of wands "taps the same energy as the Magician, but with one important difference. The Magician represents the archetype of power - the impersonal energy of creativity and strength. The Two of Wands stands for that power brought down to Earth and made personal."  Also, unlike most of the other cards, the two of wands was not reversed, suggesting that in the long-term I may be able to throw off some of the inhibitions that restrict my movement now.  Put together, then, with the Magician and Justice, the reading is very favorable for activism! 

Rejoin us here!*  In summary, my 2017 Tarot reading suggested that my path forward might be to become a butt-kicking activist.  This pleased me.

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[Jan 8 update]:  In the way of these past couple of months, so much has happened since I failed to finish this blog post on January 3.  As everyone knows by now, House Republicans failed miserably in their grand plan to undercut ethics oversight in their chamber.  For that, we have ourselves, the national press, and (strangely) Donald Trump to thank.  New challenges abound, though: 

Two different bills have passed the Republican House this week that would serve to hugely undermine the executive branch's ability to implement any regulations-- both the Obama administration's past 6 months of work, and the Trump administration's future work, as well as that of the Democrat (I trust) who will succeed this administration. It is vitally important that they do not pass the Senate.

The Midnight Rule Relief Act would allow all rules finalized by the Obama administration since June (60 legislative days) to be dismissed as a batch without further debate, purely on the basis of their being too last-minute.
​
The REINS ("Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny") Act creates a system under which every new federal regulation (that would have more than a $100 million projected impact) would have to be explicitly approved by Congress within 70 days, or be considered rejected by default. Therefore, the executive branch could spend years developing new regulations, and then have them consistently die in Congress by simple lack of action. Imagine if these were, say, the kinds of long-hashed-out rules we got out West over land/wildlife management issues, with years of public comments and much negotiation among stakeholders? And then, after all this work, they go to Congress... and quietly expire. Some find this bill appealing in the short term, because it might make it easier to block Donald Trump's activities. I believe we should remember that there are a lot of hard-working, nonpartisan people laboring in many federal agencies for the benefit of the nation, and their work should not be consistently relegated to the trash bin over political ideology. What a recipe for despair in government!
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Both of these pieces of legislation have already been introduced in the Senate. PLEASE call your senators if you oppose these bills (or one of these bills) and let them know your opinion. What many of us are newly discovering, with a kind of wondering delight, is that they REALLY DO TALLY THESE CALLS! It matters. These may seem like arcane rules, but in fact they have the potential to affect hundreds or thousands of issues that are important to us.
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Your senator's contact info is here.
https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

We also have an absurd numbers of cabinet nomination hearings coming up in the Senate, even though many of these nominees have not been thoroughly vetted yet by the Office of Government Ethics (you know, the one that the House Republicans never had on the chopping block).  Six major cabinet nominees will have their hearings this Wednesday.  [Correction: Jeff Sessions is Tuesday.] They are:

• Mike Pompeo for CIA Director
• Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education
• Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State
• Jeff Sessions for Attorney General
• John Kelly (who?) for Secretary of Homeland Security
• Elaine Chao for Secretary of Transportation (note she is also married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell)

Make sure you also call your senators to oppose any or all of these nominations, before Wednesday.  And I will sign off here, so as to finally get this piece posted.  More ASAP.