Thing 3′s cookies

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Thing 3 has been demanding double chocolate chip cookies. Since I’m at home with Things 1 and 2 today pretending to be a domestic goddess (not), I thought I’d try to take care of that. After looking through a bunch of recipes on the internet–the font of all culinary knowledge–and not finding what I was after, I decided to make up my own. I’m quite happy with how they turned out, so I thought I’d share the recipe. They aren’t dramatically different from the basic chocolate toll-house, but I changed some of the standard ingredients to make the flavor richer and bring out the cocoa.

Ingredients:

2 sticks butter, softened
1 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 large eggs

1 1/2 cups flour
2/3 cups cocoa powder (unsweetened)
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons course salt (I use sea salt, but NaCl is NaCl. Its the texture that matters.)

1 bag semi-sweet chocolate chips or chunks

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. In a large bowl cream together the butter, sugar, and almond extract. Add the eggs one at a time. After both eggs are mixed in, gradually add in the dry mixture. Mix thoroughly. Fold in the chocolate chips.

Drop dough by tablespoon-fulls onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Be sure to leave plenty of room between them. Cook at 350 degrees for 16 minutes (smaller cookies will take less time). They are done when they are dry around the edges, but still fairly gooey in the middle. Pull them out, let them cool for a bit (they’ll set up a little bit more, but will stay nice and chewy), and enjoy.

Zen Poems for Lent

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A few weeks ago I went used bookstoring with Rich and the kids. Tucked away on a poetry shelf haphazardly stuffed between Ogden Nash and T. S. Eliot I found a book called Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill.1

In this poetic tradition, poems are a kind of a last rite; a Zen master writes a death poem, or a series of death poems, when he knows he is about to die. The striking thing about them, though, is that they all express an overwhelming sense of peace. For example, 

Lifting hands, I climb the South Star,
Then turn to lean against the North.
Step beyond the sky, look--
Where is there another like myself? (22)

is an expression of wonder, freedom, and joy from a 9th-century Chinese master. There’s nothing morbid or sentimental here.

The sartori, or enlightenment, poems are also fascinating and edifying. These poems are written to express a Truth hit upon in a single moment of contact with the Divine. This contact allows the student to see God all around him, even in the most mundane of objects and circumstances. 

How can I tell what I've seen?
Fall, stand–it's clear at once.
Wearing my cowl backwards, I
Trample the old path. And the new. (50)


There I was, hunched over office desk,
Mind an unruffled pool.
A thunderbolt! My middle eye
Shot wide, revealing–my ordinary self. (14)

Obviously, the Zen understanding of the Divine is very different from the Christian understanding of God, but even so I find the spirituality of these poems compelling because of their quest for peace and their understanding of an omni-present Divine.

I’m going to show my heretical tendencies again, but I happen to believe that God is rather more mature than your average middle-schooler; when Jesus says “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks fines, and to the one who knocks it will be opened,” he doesn’t imply, “assuming that you come from the right continent and intellectual tradition.”2 “Everyone” means everyone. So when genuine, devout men seek God (even from outside Judeo-Hellenist cultures), he answers them; their findings and experiences have value for all devout people.

For me, these poems exude peace, something I desperately need. The peace in them comes from a radical acceptance of the uncertainty and transience of life as not just unavoidable, but a part of its beauty. They also remind me of an understanding of God’s immediacy that I had as a child, but now—and I deeply regret this—only comes in fits and fleeting moments. I’ve loved reading these poems because they help me to remember, and in remembering to reclaim, what it is like to be blown away by God’s presence in the beauty and audacity of a blade of grass.

Footnotes:

1 Lucein Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto trans. with Tiagan Takayama. Grove Press, New York 1973. I’ll use parenthetical references for page numbers throughout the post.

2 Matthew 7:7-8, ESV

Emacs 24

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So this morning I took the plunge and upgraded to Emacs 24 on my laptop. I tried that last night on my Windows 7 machine and it was a complete disaster; it totally broke everything. Not that that is really anything to be surprised about; setting up any flavor or version of emacs on a Windows machine is a true PITA. Heck, Windows generally is a PITA, we only got that machine for Netflix and keep the install because I work on a CMS that is only compatible with Internet Explorer. Anyway, I figured it would be a bit easier on linux, but I was not prepared to install the package, run it, and have it just work. Pretty amazing.

A couple of the big interface changes aren’t up and running with my old config files, but evil, twittering, and gnus all work with no problems.1 I haven’t tried AucTeX or magit yet—those are kind of the backbone of my dissertation work-flow, so they have to work as well—but I am optimistic.

Footnotes:

1 One of the huge problems on the Windows machine is that I couldn’t get evil to work properly. That’s a complete deal-breaker because I can’t function without my beloved vim keybindings.

Lent

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I read a fascinating blog post about Lent this morning (linkey linkey here). The author suggests that we should think about Lent as a time of focusing on what we need achieve virtue, which she defines as “the mean between two extremes” after Thomas Aquinas. She is mostly concerned with women who are self-destructive with their need to give things up—but her basic point is widely applicable.

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