A great quote:

But schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-textbook bandwagon. This morning, at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, a team of researchers from the University of Washington, led by doctoral student Alex Thayer, is presenting the results of a year-long study of student reading, and the findings suggest that e-readers may be deeply flawed as replacements for traditional textbooks. Students find the devices cumbersome to use, ill-suited to their study routines, and generally underwhelming. Paper textbooks, it seems, may not be quite as obsolete as they appear.

Essentially, we have so many modes of reading while studying that ebooks just can’t handle it. We lose our ability to process from multiple books simultaneously, our ability to make deep cognitive maps of the book as a physical object, and so on.

Down with ebooks. Up with paper!

I have a new perspective on Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha after serving for the first time this Lent as a psaltis (chanter) for the duration… so much more joyful and less somber when you go to all of the Orthros (morning prayer) services before the liturgies during this time; such beautiful hymns, odes, and prayers that I’d never heard all of before! (ok, I did miss a couple — but made most of them!)

It is amazing how the services are so full of both challenge and sustenance for our souls during this time to help us get through the great fast… I’m constantly amazed by the depth and wisdom the fathers of the church have given us over all the centuries!

I hope for all to have had such a blessed Lent and Feast of Feasts!

(also, comments are now enabled)

The old site was hacked and was acting as a spam-farm; sorry about that. I’ll try not to let that happen again.

As I do port some of the old content from the previous incarnations of scriptus, they will end up with the original post dates and will all be ‘older’ than this post. I will not be posting every post; just ones that I liked for whatever reason. Also, we had stopped posting from mid 2007 on… so that gap is because there was no content at all.

Laura asked for our Red Chile Enchilada recipe, so here goes!

Red Chile Sauce

First you have to start with the right sauce. Where I grew up (in Northern New Mexico), you won’t find things like tomatoes or onions in the best enchilada sauces — mostly you will find red chile.

You should start by getting out a blender and adding:

• 3 tbsp of Red Chile powder (preferably Chimayo Red Chile powder)
  This red Chile powder is pure red chiles ground up, no other additives. Chimayo red chile, from the small town of Chimayo in Northern New Mexico, has an incredible earthiness under the pungency of the chile. Aficionados regard it as the best red chile to be had, ever, anywhere. If the chile is very mild, 4 tbsp may be used.
• 4 tbsp flour
• half blender (2 cups) of water
• 1 clove garlic (we usually use the pre-minced stuff from a jar)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• pinch oregano, crushed up, preferable Mexican, but that isn’t super important.

Blend briefly, then add another 2 cups water and blend briefly again. Put in a saucepan and bring to a slow simmer, and cook, gently stirring from time to time with a flat-ended spoon, to keep the chiles from sticking to the bottom and to keep a skin off the top, until the sauce thickens. This usually takes 10 to 20 minutes.

Congratulations, now you have an excellent red chile sauce. It is great as an enchilada sauce, or on huevos rancheros, or as a marinade for carne adovada.

[[ Note: For the curious, Chimayo Red Chile powder can be mail ordered, from many places, including this source ]]

Red Chile Enchiladas

In Northern New Mexico, enchiladas are not rolled, they are flat. They can be prepared on individual plates, or as a casserole. I will be describing the latter. You will need corn tortillas and shredded cheese and your sauce, also a baking dish (we use a pyrex one) and preheat the oven to 350F.

- 12 Blue corn tortillas. Blue corn tortillas are the go-to tortilla for red chile enchiladas in northern New Mexico, but you probably won’t find them much outside of New Mexico, so use regular corn tortillas.
- 12 ounces shredded Mexican cheese blend (make your own, half cheddar, half jack, as a good approximation)

The tortillas need to be softened up in some oil, so get out a small frypan and put about 1/2 cup of oil into the pan. Heat the oil up over medium high heat. While it is heating, get out a plate and put a couple of paper towels on it. Using tongs, dip the corn tortilla into the oil for 3 to 5 seconds, then turn over and get the other side of the tortilla in the oil for 3 to 5 seconds. Set the tortilla on the paper towels to help rid the excess oil. After 2-3 tortillas are on the plate, add another layer of paper towels and repeat until all the tortillas are softened. Once the oil is off the heat, it is time to assemble the casserole.

To make cleanup easier, spray some nonstick spray (like pam) into the baking pan. Spoon a thin layer of sauce onto the bottom of the pan and then add 3 tortillas in an even layer on the bottom of the pan, somewhat overlapping. This tells you how big your pan should be. Sprinkle a quarter of the cheese over the layer, and then add sauce until the cheese is well saturated with sauce. Add another layer of 3 the same way. On the last layer, add the sauce before the cheese, so the cheese layer is on the top. You will probably have some leftover sauce — it is great on your eggs at breakfast!

Bake until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese is slightly browned. About 20 to 25 minutes.

While it is baking, cut some lettuce up into fine strips (2-3 leaves per person) and dice some tomatoes (probably 1/2 tomato per person) to serve on the side (but serve whatever amount suits your tastes!)

When done, let sit and cool for 5-10 minutes, and then serve with the lettuce and tomato as garnish. Add sour cream as desired.

You may even choose a common (and delicious) Northern New Mexican option, and serve the enchilada with a fried egg on top of each serving for those who desire it.

At our house, this makes about 5 servings. Black beans or Pinto bean make a nice side dish, but are completely optional.

Enjoy!

Operating on the premise that forgiveness is easier than permission, I have left it there. It’s out of seed anyway, because the last bag John bought, “Finch Supreme” (it’s kind of like a caramel pecan hot fudge sundae, only for birds, and healthier) was not non-germinating. Meaning, I have a bunch’o little green sproutlings in the rocks under the feeder. Another neighbor told me not to use weed-b-gon on the sproutlings because of the birds. The birds who liked this feeder best was a family of house finches that live, well, in our house. Or at least a little hole in the eaves or where the fascia board meets the brick…bascially in a little corner. Please pardon my shameful lack of construction vocabulary.

One reason I wanted to hang the feeder in the front is because I understand that the life of an indoor cat affords precious few opportunities for entertainment. At its current location, Gloria is able to sit in the front window and keep all manner of watches on the comings and goings of finches and sparrows. (Side note: a sparrow is not a chickadee. You don’t have to get yourself locked out of your house with your field guide to birds because your son was fooling around with the door lock while you investigated and then had to use a neighbor’s phone to call your husband to take an hour off work to come and unlock the stupid door. You likely don’t have chickadees, because they make too pretty of a sound, and you’d recognize it. Sparrows are cute too, though, and I am proud of you for not even losing your cool one bit at being locked out).

Now, however, the front feeder hangs empty and the cat has resumed her summer nap rerun schedule.

But! For my birthday, one of my clever friends gave me another feeder, and a bag of black oil sunflower seeds! This feeder is very cool, it looks like a lantern. We hung it in the back tree. I was concerned about squirrels, but I haven’t seen many of them lately (plague? it’s going around, you know). Apparently black oil sunflower is like a steak dinner followed by a caramel pecan hot fudge sundae, and you don’t even have to do the dishes. This bag does not say “non germinating” either, but I don’t care. The grass in the back yard is so poor, and it’s in a shady spot to boot, that I don’t think anything could grow in it. Plus, from the looks of it, there won’t be any seeds left to germinate. I have been finding shells all over the place.

We hung it up on Friday, and refilled it Monday night, and already it’s empty again. Our neighbors also have several feeders.

Who said pigs don’t fly?

It’s interesting, though. There is a definite pecking order here. Grackles are punks, both at the feeder and the birdbath. They try to scare all the smaller birds away. The doves, finches, sparrows and starlings all share pretty well. Worst of all is the downy woodpecker. He will even squawk at the grackle. Today he hogged the feeder while about twenty other birds were on the ground pulling up the seeds. We haven’t seen the robins lately, not sure where they went. It’s too bad, because I like Mr. Robin. He is cool with just the right amount of attitude. I speculate that because their nest got blown out of the tree in earlier storms (twice!) they may have had to relocate.

As I type this, a grackle is out there squawking at the empty feeder. Worse than a toddler at snack time.

And no, I am not concerned about wood peckers. I have a secret hope they or the squirrels will kill the big tree, so we’ll have to remove it, and will get more sunlight for the garden, and can plant a cherry tree or chokecherry bush or something better than a stupid water sucking, shoot sending, aphid attracting cottonwood.

It’s a tough call, though, because where would I hang the feeder if the cottonwood were gone? I’m sure not willing to share cherries or elderberries with the avian crowd. I can buy sour cherries but for the price of some seeds you can have cheap Cat TV. No long term contracts, no satellite required.

That, my friends, is a picture of hope. Okay, in truth it’s a picture of my Early Girl tomato plant. Oh, but the hope it instills in me…and maybe you can see the yucky dirt we have, even after it’s been amended three times in two years. The bricks are there to stop all the water from rushing down out of Tomato Valley. And yes, Kira, I applied mulch today–grass clippings! I was too lazy to save eggshells for the holes so I just sprinkled on some dolomite lime and mixed it in with my new Garden Claw Gold. Love the Garden Claw. My neighbor loves it too, and now she’s glad I won’t be asking to borrow hers every other weekend.

Above we have a Brandywine Tomato plant. It’s some kind of heirloom, maybe Amish…but I liked the cool name. Which came first, the river in Middle Earth or the tomato variety? I am only planting these two plants, because we joined a CSA this year and I’m waiting to find out what kind of tomato output we’ll get from them. I am through with cherry tomatoes. Done, I tell you. All the work of a regular tomato plant and just silly little tomatoes that don’t seem to yield much flavor. Next year if I get my act together sooner, I might order some funky heirloom seeds and put in a few more plants. The truth is, my biggest use of tomatoes is for green tomato mincemeat. Ah, but it’s much too early to hope for that now.

“Plant a zucchini,” they said. “It’s the one thing you can’t mess up,” I was told. Ha! So here we have another picture of hope, and evidence that gardeners are not insane…at least this one. Given that a popular definition (thanks to Thos. Jefferson) for insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result, I am here to tell you I am not insane about gardening. This zucchini is in a different, sunnier spot than last year. I think that’s what did it in last year, not enough sun. We have a huge cottonwood tree hogging up most of the water and sunlight in our back yard, so even though I have space, I don’t have ideal vegetable growing conditions. My friend and fellow CSA member Helen warns me that we’ll be getting tons of zucchini, but I’ll believe it when I see it. One can only hope!

Here again, more proof. This watermelon is planted in the same spot as last year, but it’s a different variety…smaller with a shorter growing span (sugarbaby sweets). There were two watermelon plants last weekend, but an early hail storm destroyed one of them. Better now than in August, methinks.

And here, my daughter’s attempt to be a gardener. It’s chamomile, which she planted from seed. Interesting how her enthusiasm waned as soon as they were planted. She put popsickle stick markers in everything but hasn’t even labeled them yet. Luckily she knows that these are chamomile and not the basil.

This year, I have accomplished (well, I’ve attempted) something I’ve wanted to do for about ten years now. Yes, I’m a slow roast. Finally I have some forget-me-nots in for the girl (and my mother) and some sweet williams in for the boy. Forget-me-nots are perennials but you can grow them in pots! Sweet williams are biennial so I probably won’t get flowers until next year. But good things come to those who wait. And hope.

Will got sick the day after we arrived. Then my allergies kicked in. Then I got pretty sick (a sinus infection). We had a wonderful time, but it was hard being so sick. William loved it — since returning, he has cried a few times sorrowfully, and when asked what is the matter, says he misses the monastery.

But! We are all well now, and we had a wonderful Holy Week and Pascha — Carolyn again was one of the myrrh-bearers, and I was privileged to serve in the altar on Great Friday afternoon and evening. Yesterday was a wonderful vesperal leave-taking of Pascha and FUN celebration at church — lamb, food, food and more food, and dancing (both American and Greek)… a little swing for us. We have yet to learn any Greek dancing! We were there celebrating for about three and a half hours after Vespers. My soul is happy, and I am so joyful and blessed to be part of such a wonderful family of the Orthodox faith.

Save O Lord your people and bless your inheritance. Grant victory to the faithful against the adversaries of the Faith, and protect your people through your Holy Cross, Your Holy Cross!

I hope you all had a blessed celebration of the Holy Cross!

Prayers for Carolyn, please — she has had a fever all day. I stayed home from liturgy with her and we had our own procession with the cross pictured here, while singing the troparion.

The icon of the ‘Holy Trinity.’ Also known as the ‘Hospitality of Abraham.’ This icon is one we are blessed to have in our home, and it is based on the story from Genesis:

“And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, And said, My Lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said. And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth. And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf that he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat” (KJV, Genesis, 18: 1-8)