eggs plus caviar equals love

Ingredients
6 hard-cooked eggs, peeled and halved lengthwise
1/4 cup creme fraiche or sour cream
3 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Small pinch salt
4 ounces salmon caviar
Lettuce leaves, micro red cabbage or greens, for garnish
Small parsley sprigs, for garnish
Directions
Remove the yolks from the eggs and place them in a bowl. Mash the yolks with a fork. Add the creme fraiche, chives and lemon juice to the yolks and season very lightly with salt. Mix until the ingredients are well blended.

Spoon the yolk mixture back into the whites and top with a teaspoon of caviar. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Arrange on lettuce leaves, garnish each egg with a small parsley sprig and serve.

Peace Tea

I recently discovered Satish Kumar and am intrigued and humbled by his commitment to peace. Inspired by Ghandi, he travelled the globe on foot with no money, sharing the message of peace over a simple cup of tea.



Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth.
Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust.
Lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our hearts,
our world, our universe.
Peace, peace, peace.
- Satish Kumar

A Culinary Upturn

I don't know about you but I was inspired by Barack Obama's inauguration speech yesterday. He soberly laid out the facts that we are in tough economic times but with a twist. He said that our country's ability to produce has not diminished. We still have millions of hardworking creative people, a powerful stock market, and an infrastructure that can pump out lots of products to sell to the world. We still have great museums (I'm talking now here, not him), extraordinary cuisine, Rodeo drive and thousands of non profit organizations helping the poor. We still invented jazz and there are people who will take a whole year just to perfect the recipe for the Parisian macaron. I love America and I want to kick in my creativity to make it better. How about you?
www.miettecakes.com

Far too vast

Three men decided to run, yes, run, across the sahara desert. It took them 111 days--the equivalent of 170 marathons in a row with out even one day off. An amazing achievement to be sure. Perhaps even slightly insane. They finished their journey at the Red Sea, at sunset...and were speechless. No wild yelping and high fiving, just sober almost stunned expressions as they slowly moved their sunbaked bodies, aching joints and blistered feet toward the sea and together, placed their hands into the cool water. Charlie Engle described his experience this way. He said that it is perplexing to him that he can never fully process the experience. It was far too vast to put into any kind of structure or meaning. He said he knew that when he was in the moment, he had to savour it because he would never be able to describe it. Or, understand it. I don't want to moralize this. But I know what it means to me. The ultimate experiences with life are ones we can't put into human form and manipulate into words and meaning. To just let it be what it is, and humbled, let it transform us.

pray for peace

if i am a mouse
should god hate the cat?

if i am a cat
should god hate the rat?

if i am the earth
should god hate the sea?

because it is not
a towering tree?

should god hate the day
because it's not night?

does god hate the darkness
because its not light?

does god hate he for not being she?

if god could hate you,
could god hate me?

Leaping about

I am a compulsive list maker. I am always building lists in my head of things to do, things I've done, things to buy, things I don't need, ways to be more simple, why the internet is awesome, places I want to visit and what kind of person I want to be. I really can't stop it. I guess words are my way of creating something real. Just by putting it into word form, it seems more attainable, more imaginable, more...mine. Every year I think of a list of things I want to do differently in the new year. Go to the gym, work out, weed the flower bed. Or, things I want to do more of. Give food to the neighbors, write personal thank you notes, be in the present moment with my boys. But this year I have decided to take all my lists and all my words and boil them down into one word. Yes, just one word to describe who I want to be, how I want to live, in what way I want beauty to be made manifest in the world through me. That word is cherish. As I sat at the bagel shop in Claremont this morning with my 5 year old Jackson letting the sun dapple across his nose as he powered down a chocolate chip bagel, I sipped my coffee out of an environmentally friendly (I hope)cup and cherished the moment. Even though I was going to be late for work, and walk in late to a meeting and start my day late...i sat, and breathed and cherished the sun, my boy and life. Slow down. Cherish.

Exploding stars

I just learned that all components of life are created in the center of exploding stars. I really had no idea.