Notes from a Reluctant Housewife

(Scroll down to see recipes for Split Pea and Ham Soup or Garlic Butter Croutons)

So the clarity is crashing down with a sharpness I didn't ask for. But that's what yoga gives us, more vision than we usually care to see.

We found out my husband had a teaching gig in Harrisonburg, VA. Soon thereafter, I found out I was pregnant with our second child. So, I left my full time job and yoga community in Austin, TX and became a stay-at-home-mom (SAHM). No point in finding a job in Virginia for just a year, if I'm planning on quitting to have a baby. And, honestly, childcare is so expensive, it wouldn't have made much sense to work. I had all of those niggling fears from the first child, should I leave her in someone else's capable hands while I advance my career? Am I going to miss everything, all of those firsts? Thankfully, the decision wasn't so hard then, because we really were lucky enough to have her spend her time with a much-loved best friend, nanny, neighbor, goddess.

But we don't have our goddess in H'burg. So now that I've finally gotten into the groove of SAHM-hood, I don't want to leave it. I have an extensive to-do list that I want to accomplish. I want to cook more, write more, read more, knit more, practice more yoga, and giggle more with my children while teaching them how to make things. I don't want to go back to a full time job at a desk. So now I've decided to share more. What DOES a mom do at home with her kids, besides laundry? Well you're about to find out. 

So, mommy wars aside ... the biggest lesson I've learned moving from two incomes to one, is that my extravagant taste in food needs tweaking. I used to traipse through the local upwardly mobile grocery store and grab my fig jam, goat cheese, citrus-brined olives, pâté, freshly-baked French bread, and a bottle of Prosecco. See, I'm so bourgeois that I spell pâté with its diacritical marks. I'm so bourgeois, I know how to spell bourgeois.

Anyway, I have a refined palette and need to make a good meal on the cheap. So after we came back from Passover at the house of Vegetarian friends in NYC, my husband went shopping for food to restock the house. He came home with an Easter ham that had been put on sale for $10.

And yes, I'm a yogi, and my family eats meat occasionally. When we do eat meat, we are thankful for the sacrifice that animal made for us. Fabulous, filling vegetarian recipes also coming your way.

Grocery Shopping Tip #1
Be aware of holidays (that you might not celebrate) so that you can buy cheap meat (and veg) to cook and store.

Grocery Shopping Tip #2
When buying a ham (or turkey or other large meatstuff) make sure you have at least a week's worth of recipes in your cooking arsenal.

Grocery Shopping Tip #3
You can grow almost any herb outside in the ground or in a pot during the spring and summer months.Do yourself a favor and plant some chives, parsley, mint, thyme, rosemary and basil.

Eco Village International Network posted this pic on their Facebook page. Beautiful way to grow herbs!

So now we come to the recipe for ... drumroll ...

SPLIT PEA AND HAM SOUP

Whaaaaat, you ask? Seriously? Didn't you just say something about a refined palette, Brienne? Yes, if done well, even the most pedestrian of meals can be exquisite ... and cheap.

So here's a picture, and I'll take you through the process of making a Split Pea and Ham Soup to die for - with a bonus recipe for Garlic Butter Croutons.

Split Pea and Ham Soup with Garlic Butter Croutons and Fresh Mint

Ingredients
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large onion, rough chop
5 or 6 garlic cloves, minced (I LOOOOVE garlic, if you are not a garlic lover, drop this down to 2 cloves)
5-7 cups of water, enough to cover the ham bone from the spiral ham
2 cups of split peas (or add in red lentils, brown lentils, or mung beans)
4 sprigs of fresh thyme
handful of fresh mint leaves (or anything else you've got growing outside)
salt and black pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes (I like it spicier, but my 3.5-year-old doesn't)
1/2 teaspoon of chipotle pepper flakes
4 bay leaves
2 carrots, 1/2-inch pieces
1 celery rib, 1/2-inch pieces

This recipe serves about 8 people

1. Put the ham bone (with meat on it) in a large pot and barely cover with water, place 2 bay leaves, red and chipotle pepper flakes, and 2 sprigs of thyme in the water in order to make the stock. Simmer covered on low for about two hours. You can do this a couple days ahead of time, if you can't make the stock the same day. It'll keep in a tightly sealed container. On this bone, there was a lot of fat; I had to use a slotted spoon to sift it out and dump into the trash.

The Stock

1/2 tsp chipotle flakes, 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, 2 bay leaves, 2 sprigs of thyme

2. Heat butter in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add onion, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and cook, stirring often until onion softens - 4-5 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant - one minute or less. Add dry peas, 2 sprigs of thyme, and bay leaves. Cook for a few minutes until peas are fully coated with the butter.

Rough chop on onion, garlic to taste - to be minced

This time around, I only had a cup of split peas, so I added mung beans and brown lentils to make 2 cups.

3. Remove ham bone and any other gristle from stock pot. Dump contents of frying pan into stock pot. Increase to high heat and then bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until peas are tender - about 45 minutes.

4. Add carrots and celery, cover and cook another 20 minutes. (For those who feel "meh" about celery, it really does add a necessary umami aspect to lots of dishes. These days, I always have a bag of it in the bottom drawer of the fridge.)

5. Serve with Garlic Butter Croutons and mint.


GARLIC BUTTER CROUTONS 


You can also make the croutons a few days ahead, if you have some stale bread going to waste. Just put them in a tightly sealed container.

Ingredients

6-8 slices of sandwich bread (I used a multi-nut 10-grain, but anything will do)
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
pepper, salt, and minced (or pressed) garlic to taste

1. Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and preheat to 350 degrees. Melt butter (microwave in a pyrex). Cut crusts off of bread and cube.

2. Combine bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and minced (or pressed) garlic. Pour butter into bowl and toss gently with a wooden spoon, so bread gets coated lightly.

3. Spread bread cubes in a single layer on to a baking sheet (or dish) and bake until golden brown or crisp. I usually give them a stir about halfway through. About 10-15 minutes total.

I suppose you can use oil for this dish, but I'm a firm believer in the health benefits of butter. And, for a basic meal like this - that can taste bland very easily - garlic and butter are what takes it to the next level. Stay tuned for an upcoming rant about the myth of butter being bad for you. Obviously, anything is bad for you in large amounts, but your brain needs fat to work, and butter (produced correctly) provides the perfect fat molecules.

Fighting the Kapha

I was paging through my Sogyal Rinpoche today in preparation for teaching my evening yoga class, and found the one for my birthday. "Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts." Compassion is also the best protection. If you are strong and have a healthy sense of self, it's easy to focus on only the good things you've done in your life, the things that validate your beauty and strength. If you have less self-esteem, it's easy to focus on where you have "failed" in life. The fact is that you must have compassion for those who are not as strong as you, and resolve to to be there for them in whatever way they accept you into their lives. And, if you focus on your failures, compassion and learning from these stumbles is of utmost importance. As you find this equilibrium, you realize that you are part of a whole, and not even a permanent entity in this whole, but merely a fluctuation that makes the whole. My ups and downs are inevitable, but I can learn from them and use them.

This is why I love dabbling In the ancient system of Ayurveda. According to this sister science to yoga, spring is known to be the Kapha season: a marked difference from the dry, cold Vata-aggravation typical of winter. The surge of moisture in the spring prepares nature for leafing and budding but can upset the body's equilibrium. Many of us experience this excess of Kapha through increased phlegm in the sinuses and lungs, heaviness in the head, a sense of lethargy or stagnation and mood swings towards depression.

Last year and these last couple months, while pregnant and after I birthed my winter baby, I've been holed up in my cave, not getting much done in regard to my career, my passion, my meaning in life. My Kapha was not just seasonal, it was part and parcel of leaving my hometown, being pregnant without a support network, and preparation for nurturing a new alien being in my life who will be wholly dependent upon me for at least a couple of years (until he starts asserting his independence). But the time is to get moving and break out of the heaviness, to start nurturing myself more and living every moment like it counts. 

So, I'm creating a list of things to accomplish, and I'll add to it as more revelations come to me or as I hijack them from wiser people. Some may be very obvious, but obvious does not mean that we actually achieve an understanding of truth or think about them more deeply.

So here goes.

1. Treat every act in your day as if it were your last. 

 

Settling In

Well, I'd expected to get back to this blog more quickly. But, the facts of moving in, getting settled, turning my life around 180 degrees to become a stay at home mom (and yes, teaching 5 yoga classes a week) dropped the blogging pretty low on my priority list. But, we're baaaaack.

I must say that the culture of stay at home moms is still something that I find hard to get used to. It's a little like being an expat. When you're living in a different country, you hang out with Americans who you would probably never socialize with back home merely because the thing you have in common is being American. It's similar with stay at home moms. You're only hanging out with them at the park or the children's museum, because they have a kid around your kid's age. So, I had a couple of months of coming to that realization. Essentially, I started to recognize that I have a mountain goat of a 3-year-old on my hands. She has the the physical dexterity of a child twice her age and the bravado (and attitude) of a teenager. I swiftly came to the realization that I'm THAT mom, the one who lets her kid do "dangerous" things at the playground and therefore puts ideas into the other kids' heads. Though, honestly, I'm really not worried about MJ's climbing skills, and I'm not going to go running after her when I'm 6 months pregnant. This is one of those situations where she'll learn best if she makes some mistakes on her own. So far she hasn't made any.
I'm not without judgment myself; I'm horrified by the junk some of these moms are feeding their kids. Chik-fil-A is a big playdate meeting place here, because of the convenience of the "food" and indoor playground. I'm still working on that judgment; we all pick out battles. Being a full-time mom is rather grueling, and sometimes the diet falls low on the priority list. I get it ... sort of. 
I'm keeping this post short and will try to post again soon. An old friend of mine is stopping through town this weekend on the way back to Texas and we're going to drive through and hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We got a cold snap this weekend, and everyone tells me that will start the color change in the trees. I'm such a Texan - I know nothing about such things.

I'm posting these gratuitous pix of MJ at the children's museum today with her new friend Mya, who loves looking like a princess. MJ tried the princess outfit on for all of 5 minutes and was not impressed. I give her credit for trying it out, though. Then she went over to the area where kids were fixing a "car" and put in a new muffler.

The Cradle of the Future is the Grave of the Past



U.S. astronaut Cady Coleman after her space capsule
 landed in Kazakhstan in May 2011.



 "The cradle of the future is the grave of the past." - Franz Grillparzer, Austrian writer

I know the above quote seems obvious, the cycle of life and death, etc., etc., but it got me thinking. I taught my last yoga class at the health department yesterday, and I cried at the death of a practice I've devoted myself to for more than two years. And, it dawned on me fully that this move to Virginia represents an end to a long chapter, an end to my teaching in Austin, something I've been pouring love into since 1997 ... students and teachers I've devoted myself to and with whom I've forged close ties. Some have moved on, as all students should. In fact, the sign of a quick student is one who outgrows the teacher. I suspect that the sign of a good teacher is one who is not afraid to outgrow his/her students - or at least confronts that fear head on. This is not because there is no more to teach, but because the teacher needs to grow too. And to grow, sometimes one has to take drastic action ... like moving to another state. Change makes us work harder on ourselves. Change makes us work harder to adapt. And, successful adaptation is what creates rebirth, evolution, strength and wisdom.
As I was driving home yesterday, I heard an interview on NPR's All Things Considered with two astronauts, Cady Coleman and Leroy Chiao. They were discussing the dismantling of the space shuttle program. Though they had their regrets, something struck me as similar and familiar. Cady had this to say about the shuttle program: "In order to explore, we need a new vehicle. And we can't fly this one and operate this one. It's too expensive and it drains too many of the people that we need — we need their knowledge and expertise ... to develop new vehicles that will take us further. Because going further is what we're all about," she says. "It's a hard change, it's necessary and in some ways, I think it's OK just to take some time to grieve."

I teach my last class in Austin this Sunday morning. I have worked so hard to cultivate my practice and cultivate myself, to impart whatever knowledge I have to my students so that they have more tools to cultivate themselves. But this is Austin, and it is a community of very open-minded people who are considered a little (a lot) weird by the rest of Texas. We're the San Francisco of Texas. We recycle, we eat healthy, we exercise, we all know vegans and make sure there is a vegan option when we throw barbeques. we have the first zero-trash grocery store in the country. It's the place of my yoga birth, but it's also easy to teach yoga here: people are receptive.

Moving to Virginia is my new vehicle. The yoga culture is nascent, and I'm going to have to use a whole new skill set to create a yoga community as well as a new community for my family. I once joked to my beginner classes that learning how to do yoga can be compared to Kubler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief:

• Denial (this isn't happening to me!) - "Seriously, this yoga thing is hard! I hate having to work this hard!"
• Anger (why is this happening to me?) - "I will never forgive X for dragging me to this class. Why did I ever think I could do yoga? I can't stand this teacher; who does s/he think s/he is?"

• Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...) - "If I can just get through this, I promise myself I'll start going to the gym, or get on the treadmill, or go on a diet. I know I need to improve my life, but yoga is not for me; it's too hard!"
• Depression (I don't care anymore) - "I'm sore, I'm tired, I don't want to go to yoga. But I paid my money and promised my friend I'd go. I feel like a martyr. I'd rather just veg in front of the TV."
• Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes) - "Wow, I feel so much better! I can't believe I made it through the last couple of weeks. This is amazing! OK, it's a lot of hard work, and I don't look as good doing the postures as that 20-year-old in the front of the room, but if I keep working on this, I know I'm going to be doing something better for myself. I can already see the difference!"

I think I'm nearing acceptance in terms of moving on.