HOMILY: Broken and Beloved by Fr. Brian Zumbrum, OSFS, calls each of us to see ourselves in the Samaritan woman and to recognize God’s transforming love. It’s much easier to count our transgressions than our blessings, but when we open our hearts to see the flowers amidst our struggles we find God blessing us with his living, cleansing water.
Category: Editor’s Note
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Notes on Peace and Justice
In 2006, I started working for the Sisters of Notre Dame in California and launched their human trafficking awareness campaign. At the time, there were few people who had heard of modern slavery, but Sr. Jean Shafer was one of them and her newsletter was an invaluable resource to me.
Roberto and I decided to celebrate my Irish heritage with that traditional American immigrant dish, Corned Beef and Cabbage (the dish was transformed when it crossed the water). I’d never made it before and started researching. The traditional recipe involves hours of boiling, which frankly just sounded boring. It was time for 21st century twist, but how would I bring this centuries old dish into the digital age?
Initially, I planned to use this great recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes for baked corned beef and sautéed cabbage but it turned out that our day was going to be busier than expected. We needed a recipe we could assemble quickly and forget about while it cooked. Fortunately, slow cooker recipes abound. Unfortunately, very few agree on any thing other than the amazing tenderness that can be achieved from cooking a brisket of corned beef for hours and hours. Both the recipes and the comments sections offered various theories about whether beer helped and if so, which brand; when the cabbage should or shouldn’t be added and how the food should be layered.
Here’s what I did:
- 2.25 lbs. corned beef brisket
- 10 cloves
- 1/3 cup sweet hot honey mustard
- 2 tbs. brown sugar
- 1/3 cup bourbon
- 1/3 cup water
- 1 lb. bag baby carrots
- 8-10 red potatoes, quartered
- 1/2 cabbage, sliced in wedges or however you like it
- 2 small onions, thickly sliced
- Prepare the slow cooker.
- Trim the fat from the corned beef.
- Add the cloves to the top of the corned beef.
- Mix the mustard & brown sugar, then slather on top of the corned beef.
- Place the corned beef in the slow cooker.
- Pour the bourbon and water into the slow cooker. Cover and cook on high for 1 hour.
- Remove the meat and layer the slow cooker with the carrots and then the potatoes.
- Return the meat to the slow cooker and add the onions and cauliflower to the top. Cover and cook on low for 4-5 hours until meat is tender.
The hour of cooking on high probably isn’t necessary if you’d rather prep your meal and leave it all day. According to Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker, my guide to that magic ceramic pot, one hour of cooking on high equals two hours of cooking on low. Giving the meat a head start allowed me and Roberto to pull the whole meal together within our time frame, but I’d love to try this as a full day recipe and let it simmer for seven or eight hours on low.
When the hour was up, I pulled the brisket out of the slow cooker and we layered in the potatoes and carrots, then added the meat on top of that. However, we broke a golden rule of slow cooker cuisine by packing nearly every inch of the slow cooker with food. The usual practice is to leave at least an inch and ideally more space since it’s the steam and the fully surrounded cooking element that make the slow cooker work so well. Yet in this case, it worked out perfectly. The cabbage and onion were nicely steamed, still crunchy but flavorful. The carrots were firm and the potatoes were perfect. There was just the right amount of liquid, a bit runny but tinged with a balanced mix of mustard, bourbon and that hint of clove. Plenty of mustard also stayed on the brisket, and Roberto kept the bottle at the table as a supplement.
It was delicious, the perfect meal for a mid-March evening of snow. Enjoy! Let me know how your kitchen adventures go…
A little choir humor as we prepare for Easter
My friend and former choir director Randy shared this on Facebook, underscoring why I really, really like to stick with the melody.
Let’s be brave and set up that field hospital in the trenches that Pope Francis is calling for… like this young woman taking care of people without homes, facing her fears and overcoming anger and disappointment.
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HOMILY: Love Anyway
How do you translate the dictum “Love Anyway” into your daily life? It’s an easy catchphrase but a tough mission. Fr. Brian Zumbrum gives us some insight and examples in this week’s homily.
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Not Your Typical Valentine’s Day
This post is so true, a lived experience of what the pope said yesterday in his advice about living together and how married couples should pray “‘give us this day our daily love,'”, teach us to love each other, to care for each other. The more you entrust yourselves to the Lord, the more your love will be ‘for ever’, able to renew itself and to overcome every difficulty.”
It snowed in Atlanta, causing a traffic jam that lasted into eternity (or somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours) and eventually required the assistance of the National Guard…
…and Rolling Stone put Pope Francis on the cover. Crazy, huh? Next, Deadspin will send a journalist along during the pope’s visit to the Holy Land and the apocalypse will really begin. Except that it won’t.
A lot of times, what seems weird, shiny, ridiculous and portentous is just one more cycle of life in on our big, complex planet. This was not the first big snow storm that ever caused a traffic jam in Atlanta. In fact, a blizzard hit in 1993 (though that was a Saturday and kids weren’t trapped in their schools).
Pope Francis was not the first pope to be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. He was the third. He may be the ultimate in Catholic click bait, but what he’s saying is about 2,000 years old. Seriously.
We are not about to face the zombie X-Games. In three days or three hours, our lives will slip back into their quotidian rhythm. But perhaps we can gain something from this week’s headlines.
Northerners may pride themselves on being able to handle blizzards, but Southerners are smart enough to live in a warm climate in the first place. For me, the inconvenience of one snowstorm every few years definitely beats weeks of subzero temperatures. There’s no point in mocking the people of the greater Atlanta region; they have suffered enough and (hopefully) learned from their troubles.
Nor is it necessary to speculate about when coverage of the pope will jump a shark, because being the top ranked search term is not really the core of his job. Sharing the joy of the Gospel is his key mission. Yes, he uses modern means of communication to do that, but no, the medium is not the message.
What we can learn from all the media chatter this week is to be prepared. Like, seriously, get ready for a winter storm in Georgia even though it’s been a few years since that happened. And let your heart be open to find God in strange places, including the pages of a magazine better known for encouraging hedonism than prayer.
We did it!!
Despite my fears of being last, a recurrent neck injury and my truly messed up final month of training, Roberto and I finished our first half-marathon. Yep. I said our first because it probably won’t be our last and we are already planning to be part of the Parkway Classic in April. The blisters that emerged somewhere between miles six and eight are going to have to be popped soon to prevent real trouble, but they don’t hurt much. I’m still glowing and a bit high from our accomplishment. We had set a goal of finishing in 3 hours and 30 minutes and made it with 42 seconds to spare, crossing the finish line together.
The Team in Training inspiration dinner proved to be both funny and heartwarming, partly because one of the presenters spent a good deal of her time photo-bombing. That might sound rude, but eight year old Emily Whitehead is a survivor whose parents shared the story behind the amazing film “Fire With Fire” and the hijacked-HIV cure that Emily was the first child ever to receive. Watching Emily give her parents bunny ears while her father talked about his frustrations and fears during the process underscored the importance of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s mission of funding researchers and supporting families. Thanks to our donors and the donors before them, Emily is now a pretty normal child with an extraordinary story.
There were more immediate, selfish pleasures too. For the first time since going gluten-and-dairy free, there was something for me to eat everywhere we went with a minimum of fuss. All I had to do was ask. In fact, I even got a free lunch because my post-race pasta took longer than the kitchen felt was right.
The weekend was not perfect by any means — in fact it was raining when we landed in Orlando and headed over to the expo to collect our race materials. I chickened out of my impulse to carry Donald Duck along for the race in the spare water bottle slot on my belt, a slot that was there because one of my water bottles went missing the night we packed. The back of my race tee wound up a bit more stylized and urban than I intended when it slid to the ground right after I decorated it with glitter glue. On race morning, I felt significantly less than 100%. Those white shorts may never be truly, perfectly white again. But never mind perfection — there’s still a medal at the finish line no matter how much chocolate fuel you spill in your pockets.
It felt great to be part of such a huge community of volunteers, athletes and families that converged upon Walt Disney World and woke up insanely early for the sake of a race. Perhaps there’s something deeply ancient within us that calls us to achieve beyond our known limits, to challenge ourselves and give witness to the extraordinary.
Tomorrow is another day, a return to work and deadlines and the rest of life. It is also a new day, and each day forward will glow a bit brighter for me with this medal in my heart.