Cheap & Easy… Bread

By Rae | Published: March 9, 2010

I grew up making large batches of whole wheat bread. It was dark with molasses and while not dense was certainly not light. By the time I got married I had adapted the recipe to use sugar and white whole wheat flour. My husband loves multigrain loaves so I started experimenting and ended up with high fiber, high protein bread which was surprisingly light.

And then I started looking for ways to spend as little as possible on food. At first this simply meant more bread as the grains were a great way to balance out all the legumes we eat. But then I started to run out of yeast, and I knew there was no way that I was going to buy more for at least another month. So I returned to my friend no-knead bread. I don’t like it as well as regular bread and thus was never won over by the fact that it is indeed less work than regular bread. But Josh loves it and could not care less about the fact that nutrient dense whole wheat bread has been replaced by the cheapest of low effort homemade breads.

You can read Mark Bittman’s gushing or watch Foodwishes make it. You can make a beautiful round loaf in your Dutch oven. Or you can do what I do (hopefully without the healthfoodfreak feeling of shame at buying the cheapest of bleached flours).

Mix together:
4 cups White flour
1 heaping tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. yeast
2 1/4 cups warm water

Think about how it is far too sticky to be bread dough and how it is a good thing that you do not have to knead or shape it.

Cover the bowl and let the dough sit for 10-20 hours.

Remember the dough at some point, hopefully before 20 hours.

Turn the oven to 400°.

Grease and flour a baking pan.

Dump the dough onto the pan (this will probably involve scraping the bowl and smoothing the dough down slightly with the spatula).

Bake for around half an hour.

Or longer.

Worry that the bread is a little too brown.

Wonder how it was that it got eaten in less than a day.

Delight in the fact that a loaf of bread can be made with 1/4 tsp. of yeast rather than an entire tablespoon.

Do you have any cheap food tricks? In general I view food as an investment in long-term health, but these days I am focusing on short-term savings.

Posted in Food | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Philosophical Apology

By Rae | Published: March 9, 2010

Dear Mr. MacIntyre,

You know that I never liked your work. It was not your fault that I first encountered you through pompous “traditional” young men who had only read parts of After Virtue but still liked to cite you as evidence for the evil of modern Catholicism and feminism in particular. Once I actually began to study your work I quickly saw that they were wrong to imagine you as a champion of their conservative, I mean, “traditionalist” mentality. But in the development of your thought I saw a need to develop further. It seemed as if you did share something in common with the young men of my acquaintance: you loved to hate modernity and preached the superiority of that which was past, and thus could be understood differently (arguably more fully) than that which is still being lived.

I thought that you failed to see how judging liberalism as a philosophy today is much like judging Thomism while it was still being developed. If Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Paul II could all work with the philosophies of their day, why could you only insist that the main philosophy of your time was incoherent and useless?

When I read your argument against voting I saw only the thoughts of a man so privileged to live above reality that he feels no need to  stoop to choose the lesser of evils. I did not understand how not voting could be voting against the system. After all, not voting is typically only a vote for apathy.

I did not have much patience for your talk about not talking about the culture of death. Here you were, once again pontificating on how John Paul II used a dangerous rhetorical style and ignoring the substance of the issue! Even though I was supposed to be studying your thought I was much more drawn to the talk on Catholic feminism.

I could not help but like some of your thought, after all, I accused you of inconsistency. But I had already decided that you were no infallible tower of philosophical perfection, and there was nothing more to it. Nothing, of course, other than the nagging fear that you would get me eventually. After all, there are only so many noncommunitarian communitarians out there.

And then one day I read a great post on the contraceptive mentality. It was as good of a description as any that I have seen on the topic, but instead of “bravo” my fingers were inclined to type questions. What culture has not considered children in terms of economics? How is imagining that one has a right to children a “contraceptive” thought? Are we to imagine that Popes Paul VI and John Paul II were guilty of a contraceptive mentality when they allowed that one should consider the serious problem of population growth? Or that Pope Benedict XVI suffers from an inverted contraceptive mentality since he believes that population decline is a serious problem? How exactly can abstaining from sex in order to avoid pregnancy be a sign of a “contraceptive mentality” when the complaint is that this mentality separates sex from procreation? Why should considering sex as a base instinct be “contraceptive” when it does not in any way necessitate the separation of sexual intercourse and reproduction?

And then it clicked: I was rejecting the philosophy behind this post because I was accepting yours. You were right that  ”moments of great rhetorical power are dangerous.” If one seeks understanding, then one must be very careful about how one characterizes a culture or mindset. And rhetoric is, by its very nature, more useful for drawing together an army than for gaining understanding of those around us.

Blast it.

I tried to think of other areas where I could still disagree with you, but all that I could come up with was that Dependent Rational Animals was not particularly well constructed. And I wished that I could have been a grad student working for you to help you improve a few parts of the manuscript.

I have known for a while that you were right about voting. Maybe not totally right since even if the third-party candidates are not good enough one can always find some potential philosopher president to write-in, right? But in terms of practical ramifications, you were right.

And, no matter how much I make myself believe that your book on Edith Stein is merely philosophical hagiography which shows more of your story than Stein’s, I still want to read it. Because I want to know your story, and I cannot think of a better way of learning it than to read it cloaked with the life of one of my favorite Saint Philosophers.

You win, Mr. MacIntyre. Thank you for making this one-sided fight possible. It did my mind good.

Sincerely,

Rae

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged | 2 Comments

Beauty of a Challenging Sort

By Rae | Published: March 8, 2010

I love to read Kathleen Basi’s blog for her portrayal of the difficult beauty of life. Kathleen approaches a raw honesty which is itself a challenge for blogging mothers who must present themselves as perfectly pulled-together; you know, women you can admire and follow. But I confess that one of the things I love most about Kathleen’s blog is when she writes about her elf child. The posts are not simply beautiful, they are full of a beauty which is profoundly challenging.

Sometimes I run to my husband to make him read and ask: “could we do that?” He says that of course we could. Yet I hesitate. I know that we could fulfill the basic duties of a parent, but could we love that well and live powerfully with a beauty so challenging?

Before Josh and I married we talked about various challenges with adoption. I said that I did not think that I was prepared to parent a child with severe developmental disabilities. But I knew that if it were a question of birth rather than adoption I would consider it my duty to become “prepared.” So how could I count myself permanently unable to parent simply because another women had given birth to the child? Why could I not learn the way that every other mother does?

And then I started thinking about why it is that no one really values these children. I know many people who dream of having a large family. They know that it will be a challenge, but it will be oh-so-worth it. Yet I have never once heard someone say that she hoped to someday raise at least one child with down syndrome. Pro-lifers will say that it is a great shame that the majority1 of those who receive a prenatal diagnosis of down syndrome will choose abortion, but we show so little sign of wanting these children. We do not want their mothers to end their lives before they are even born, but we also do not want to spend our own time advocating for basic services to make their lives just a little easier.

I do not have any firm conclusions. For now I just keep reading Kathleen’s stories and looking for little opportunities to make life a little easier for those who actually live with this challenging beauty. So far that has meant absolutely nothing in terms of actually accomplishing something. I do not feel guilty for doing so little, so much as I am bewildered by why no one else seems to care.

What do you do when you see a beauty that requires a significant amount of work and is dramatically undervalued by our culture?

1.Some estimate that it is around 80% in the United States and 90% in the United Kingdom.

Posted in Life | Tagged , | 8 Comments

I am thankful 3/7/10

By Rae | Published: March 7, 2010

For flowers and spring in general.

Posted in Gratitude | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Neighborly Noise

By Rae | Published: March 4, 2010

I use our kitchen table for my computer desk. It is against the wall dividing our apartment from our extra-noisy neighbors. You know, the divorced mother with five children? The one who seems to think that her children still have such a limited vocabulary that using “the F word” multiple times in every sentence will make things clearer? The ones who watch loud movies well into the night on school nights1 and make me remember how grateful I am for the gift of hearing… and earplugs?

Anyway, my location typically means that not only can I hear our neighbors, I can often hear them quite clearly. Their love for ’90s music and pop classics in general has helped me to understand some things more clearly than ever before. For instance:

Tragic in a beautiful way: Hearing an eight-year-old sing along with Elton John to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

Disturbing: Hearing the same child sing along to Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You.”

1. The mother apologized the one time when we were home when she called the police in order to get her children to school. I suppose that I should just be happy that, whatever else her mistakes, she finds some way to get the children to school most of the time.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Frosting or Icing?

By Rae | Published: March 2, 2010

In my mind frosting is made with powdered sugar, may or may not be heated, and is spread over a cake or cupcakes.

Icing is made with granulated sugar, boiled, and then drizzled over a cake.

But my husband says that he has never heard anyone else in real life use the term “frosting.” It is always icing, even when it is that nasty stuff in the little tub from the store.

What do you think? Frosting or icing or it depends?

Posted in Food | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Quiverfull?

By Rae | Published: March 1, 2010

The Quiverfull movement is based on a fundamentalist Christian theology which teaches that one should have as many children as possible in order to transform the world for God. Some in the movement are providentalists, meaning that they believe that married couples should have sex as desired and simply accept what does or does not happen in terms of pregnancy. Others reject any method of avoiding conception but accept fertility treatment or early weaning in order to achieve pregnancy. They believe that they are following the Genesis command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” and specifically cite Psalm 137:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

It can be very difficult for scholarly outsiders to understand why anyone who based their views on “the Bible alone” would end up as a Quiverfull family. After all, the Bible is far from full of large families. Even the most exceptional case of Jacob’s 12 sons and 1 daughter is a rather questionable model tainted with four mothers and dramatic parenting failure.

But understanding the reasoning of fundamentalist Protestants adherents to the Quiverfull lifestyle is easy for me compared to its appeal for Catholics. I can understand how traditionalist Catholics can reject NFP, but the more traditional Catholic ideal is not a Quiverfull approach, it is complete sexual abstinence and sacrifice of one’s sexual desires for the sake of a godly home. Saint Augustine was about as far as one could be from advocating very large families.

The providentalist approach is highly problematic because it fails to account for human responsibility, and the duties of parents in particular. Parents are not entitled to enjoy full nights of sleep while their infants wail from hunger. Parents are not entitled to enjoy their hobbies while their children demolish the house. And parents are not entitled to enjoy sexual intercourse while their children are neglected.

The idea that more children is always better is incorrect because married couples are called to procreation in the fullest sense. This means that mere reproduction is not enough, parents must also raise their children well. Or, in the words of Vatican II: “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children…Parents should regard as their proper mission the task of transmitting human life and educating those to whom it has been transmitted.” The idea that Christian married couples must “give outstanding witness to faithfulness and harmony in their love, and to their concern for educating their children also” is simply a new way of understanding the longstanding tradition that Christian couples are obligated to not only have children, but to raise them to be healthy members of society.

In recognition of the importance of quality over quantity of children, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus contains strong warnings against the idea of mass breeding one’s legacy:

Do not long for a brood of worthless children, and do not take pleasure in godless sons. However many you have, take no pleasure in them, unless the fear of the Lord lives among them. Do not count on their having long life, do not put too much faith in their number; for better have one than a thousand, better die childless than have children who are godless. One person of sense can populate a city, but a race of lawless people will be destroyed.

Few people have experience with either very large families or the reality of uninhibited fertility for healthy women in wealthy countries. Perhaps this is why so many seem open to the idea of “being Quiverfull” without recognizing the implications of such a belief system.

It is quite reasonable to expect a healthy Quiverfull woman to start bearing children in her late teens and not stop until her mid-forties.  My sisters and I used to calculate what this would mean for us if we were to give birth every 18 months. We were not scared of the numbers because of the physical ramifications of constant pregnancy and breastfeeding. We were scared because we knew what it meant for the family. We knew that there was no way that anyone could actually parent that many children.

EDIT: While this post is about the Quiverfull ideology, I feel the need to at least acknowledge the Quiverfull reality. For one of the most powerful posts that I have seen on the subject please stop by Quivering Daughters. And please say a prayer for all the children who are caught in this movement. They have no choice to fight over theology and whether it is better to birth 15 children than to parent 5. They simply live this.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , | 27 Comments

I am thankful 2/28/2010

By Rae | Published: February 28, 2010

For the gift of hearing. My most frequent complaint (which I force my husband to hear) is about the noise from the apartment next door. They have five children and two dogs (one of whom is an oft-chided puppy) and apparently like to stay up very late watching television (on school nights). And I complain. But until this week I never stopped to be grateful for the chance to be bothered by noise. And a slight annoyance is a pretty minor cost for the ability to hear the birds outside each morning, and my husband’s voice, and phone conversations, and yes, even music.

For cloves. Not only can they make a room smell like Christmas, they turn oatmeal into a sophisticated treat. And yes, my version of sophistication is oatmeal with cloves. Yum.

For clean water. And clean water always available at the turn of a handle? Pretty wonderful.

For iTunes U. I think that my brain may be starting to work again. I miss college and it is simply delightful to be able to hear great professors, not to mention new lectures by some of my favorite professors.

Posted in Gratitude | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Endometriosis and Me – Part 3

By Rae | Published: February 26, 2010

Lessons Learned from Endometriosis

I am usually pretty negative when I think about endometriosis, but I realize that it has given me some valuable lessons.

Money matters for health. I took a class on health economics in college, so I should have learned the basics of the correlation between financial resources and health. But I learned far more from living with endometriosis. At first pain impacted my ability to work, not to mention study. Then I dealt with the fact that I could not receive medical assistance while working full time since I was only insured while in school. Later people suggested I fly to a specialist for a follow up surgery after my first one did not work and some could not understand that cost really was an issue.

These days I am reminded of how much money it took for the “cheap” solutions that did work for me. A few months ago I stopped buying extras and things such as fresh vegetables and vitamin powder did not survive the cut.  As the pain gradually worsens I wonder what it is like for women with endometriosis who never have the option of adequate nutrition, let alone medical assistance. Is endometriosis stereotypically the “rich white career woman’s disease” because they/we are the only ones who can actually get help for it?

Pain is a spiritual hazard as much as it is a blessing. Pain can reshape one’s world. Pain can foster mystical experiences. Pain can transform one into more perfect union with God. The greatest heroes of religion tend to have lived through tremendous pain.

Pain can also cut one off from God. Pain can make it extremely difficult to focus on anything beyond oneself. Pain can stop one from caring about anything other than stopping the pain. And, in my case, pain could stop me from going to Mass. Suddenly walking to daily Mass was far too difficult. There were more times than I could count that I ended up vomiting after forcing myself through the physical motions of Mass (which, for some reason does not involve a whole lot of lying down. Maybe I should have sought out Eastern liturgies?). And at such times I was most certainly not focusing on God, I was focusing on getting through the Mass.

It actually is bad to treat women as if the only thing that matters about their gynecological health is their reproductive ability. I knew that it was wrong to reduce women’s health issues to things like birth control and childbirth. But it was not until I dealt with medical professionals who focused on my fertility when I questioned pain that I knew what it is like to live with the fact that no culture will ever progress past seeing women as child-bearers before they are seen as persons. Everyone cares about endometriosis in terms of its impact on fertility. Yet when it comes to pain, Catholics are quick to say that women can simply live with it and “offer it up”, and medical professionals tend see pain medication as the solution rather than caring about curing a reproductive disease for any other purpose than directly achieving pregnancy.

Charting fertility is not always helpful. Those who practice natural family planning or fertility awareness typically know that charting is not merely a means of enabling one to choose timing of conception. It is also a great way of picking up on a woman’s reproductive problems. Charting can show an amazing amount of issues related to abnormal hormone levels including LPD, low progesterone, anovulation etc. which can then be treated and everything is all happy and good thanks to the wonders of charting fertility. Yay! Except that sometimes when charting shows problems  there is nothing a woman can do and seeing the charts is more frustrating than helpful.

The first month I charted I had a textbook cycle and a perfect chart. I was amused because I had read so much about how real women do not actually have 28 day cycles or ovulate on day 14. Not many months later I was writing on the side of the chart because it did not have enough spaces for the days in that cycle. If I had not been charting I could have imagined that it was simply an issue of stress and that I misremembered the signs of ovulation. But there it was on the chart. And since I had not had any recent visits from an angel I was quite confident that I was not pregnant. I scheduled my first gynecological appointment where I learned that “sometimes our bodies just do these things.”

After a while I got tired of stressing over charts that would be read by any instructor as frequent pregnancies ending in miscarriage and simply stopped charting. It did me no good to have a clear record of the fact that my body was messed up when there was nothing that I could do about it. If I had not had this experience I would have been entirely positive about women charting their fertility in order to always know as much as possible about their health. But now I know that there really are times when “knowing” is not a clear benefit.

I am not entitled to bear children. We all know that if you sleep around a lot you may get STIs which impair fertility, and that if you wait until you are over 35 to try to conceive you can expect difficulty. But it is natural to imagine that so long as one only has a few sexual partners and tries to conceive in one’s 20s, one is going to get pregnant immediately. When things do not work out so easily there is not merely sadness about the sub-fertility, it is as if her entire world is turned upside down because she never previously considered that she is not entitled to bear children.

Having endometriosis taught me that simply having a woman’s body did not mean that I would be given the opportunity to experience pregnancy and childbirth. Knowing that I had a disease taught me that I could not simply expect everything to be well with my body. While I sincerely wish that no one suffered from infertility, I do wish that more women could experience something sooner in life which would teach them that no one is entitled to experience pregnancy or childbirth. Infertility is hard enough as it is, there is no need for its pain to be magnified by the fact that one never previously imagined anything other than complete control over family planning.

———————-

I asked my husband what he had learned from my endometriosis, and he said that it made him learn how to take care of me much faster than he would have otherwise. I suppose that life just is not fair: I get all the deep philosophical lessons and my husband just gets to learn to bring me a heating pad and apply pressure to my lower back.

Posted in Endometriosis | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Endometriosis and Me – Part 2

By Rae | Published: February 24, 2010

Improvement

About a year ago I began to try various diet modifications and supplements to cope with the pain of endometriosis. I was quite skeptical since I had previously tried taking flaxseed oil capsules and eliminating all the “foods to avoid” but needed something to do to make myself feel as though I had some control over my health. I still do not believe in an endometriosis diet, but somehow something worked and I began to get better. In early December my husband gave me a  heating pad which had been intended for Christmas because he did not want to make me wait through my pain. By March I had “lost” the heating pad through disuse.

Unfortunately I do not know what food or supplement actually reduced my symptoms because I tried several things at the same time.

Flaxseeds. First I took three or four tablespoons of flaxseed oil daily, and then I switched to about a half cup of freshly ground flaxseeds daily. Eventually this was reduced to anywhere from two tablespoons to a third of a cup. I have no idea whether those who are paranoid about flaxseeds interfering with estrogen are on to something, or whether it was just the omega 3s helping me overall, but I am convinced that flax was and is a key to my improved health.

Soy products including tofu, sprouted soybeans, and protein powder. Soy was one of the foods which I had previously eliminated entirely from my diet with no results. It appears on many lists as a problem food for those suffering from reproductive disorders, but I had heard stories of others with endometriosis who had found it to be quite helpful in reducing pain. These days I try to consume a moderate amount of soy several days a week.

Vitamin powder. This had the added benefit of providing soy, but my main purpose in addition to insuring basic nutrients was the high amounts of B vitamins. Some people focus on supplementing just one or two of the B vitamins, but since they complement each other I thought it important to avoid focusing on just one.

Cruciferous vegetables. I had read that consuming large amounts of cruciferous vegetables can alter the activity of estrogen. So I not only ate lots of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, I started drinking kale and collard greens.

Tart cherries. I could never convince myself that these actually helped… but it felt as though they might have eased the pain a bit and my husband was convinced of the correlation enough that whenever I started to complain about pain he would get me cherries. Perhaps they just made me happy, especially since I think that most of what I actually consumed were sweet cherries.

Otherwise I continued to eat my vegetarian diet which included not only large amounts of fruits and vegetables, but also white flour, sugar, caffeine, and dairy products in the form of chocolate chip cookies. Maybe they were the real cure and just took a while to kick in?

There was sort-of science behind everything I tried, but no conclusive studies. Unfortunately it seems that endometriosis has been a bit neglected in terms of research for both treatment and pain management techniques. All I know is that something made a world of difference for me. I wish that I had studies, but I can be content with simply feeling better; especially since secondary symptoms such as exhaustion and extremely heavy bleeding also went away.

Next up: what I have learned from endometriosis.

Posted in Endometriosis | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments