Cooking With Ivy

Last year, Robert and I took a once-in-a-lifetime Mediterranean cruise. It has taken a year to sort through the pictures and get my act together to post pictures and reflections. I have to start with pictures that have the longest history. So, the back story. In 2009, when I started this blog, I joined an international group of food bloggers called BloggerAid. Our biggest project was publishing a cookbook the proceeds from which were donated to the UN Childrens' food program. In the course of that project, I met a few women with whom I continue an internet relationship. So, when I realized our cruise was stopping at Nafpion, Greece, and Ivy Liacopolou of www.kopiaste.org lived near there, nothing would do but that we cook together. Ivy and her husband, Dimitri, picked us up at the pier.

The island of Bourji is a favorite tourist destination, but we had to forgo tourism in favor of food.

After a bit of a morning snack of delightful pastries, we got busy with the cooking. I love to work with phyllo dough, but I've never made the dough because I thought it would be very difficult. Little did I know that it is as easy to make as pasta and far more versatile.

My husband is a very precise cook, but he rarely tries anything beyond pancakes and BBQ. Here, he is preparing a lump of dough for rolling.

He took a turn at running the dough through the same machine we use when we make pasta.

Then Ivy guided him through the process of putting two strips together to make a sheet of dough. Then they put a strip of a spinach mixture on one end, rolled and twisted to get this:

After baking, but before cutting into servings:

I took a spin at the dough for spanikopita.

Ivy showed us that slight variations gave us very different end results.

From the same dough, we made:

  Spanikopita

  Mushroom Ravioli

  and lucious fried pockets of cheese.

We added some cheese,

saganaki,

a salad,

and had a feast.

Which Dimitri photographed.

New friends, great food and all in a field of fragrant orange blossoms.

What Happens to the Union Now?

Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP candidate for President of the United States. He's been called a loose cannon, a liberal in conservative clothing and, as one political operative for a suspended campaign described him, a chimpanzee with a machine gun. I think a President Trump wuld be the worst thing that has happened to my country and, possibly, the world in more than 200 years.
That said, I am not particularly encouraged about what might happen to my country if Donald Trump is not elected. For, if he is not elected, we have a pattern for what will happen here in the next eight years. The only good things that have come out of Washington in the past six years have been Executive Orders issued because Congress has a two-letter response to every major policy proposal put before them that would benefit the citizens of the country.
The dirty little secret of my country is that we have a lot of racism, ageism, and sexism. Sure, there were a couple of people who questioned if Ted Cruz was a natural-born citizen, but he is white and his middle name is not Hussein. Not to pick on Ted Cruz, but he is a member of a very odd sect of Christianity that believes they must control all governments of the world to enable the second coming of Jesus. But, he is not linked to an outspoken Black pastor, so his religious life was not an issue.
No matter which candidate prevails in the Democratic party, the winner can expect treatment similar to that experienced by our current President. Both can be targeted with the "old" label. The ageism is not so obvious for the older of the two, perhaps because of his gender. He, however, has two strikes that will be used against him -- he calls himself a Demcratic Socialist and many people will hear only the Socialist part of that description and, despite this country's years of support for Israel, he will be the victim of bold and subtle objections to his religion. David Duke has already talked about the Jewish extremists who are anti-American. I've already heard concerns about Hillary Clinton's age phrased in terms of "She looks tired." We have more than twenty years of the hatred of the Clintons, lies about them, holding them to higher standards so they can be criticized, etc.
Just as we have seen obstructionism based on the color of President Barack Obama's skin, we will see obstructionism based on Bernie Sanders age, religion, and political affiliation or we will see obstruction based on Hillary Clinton's age, gender, and history. I worry that our country will not survive no matter who is elected.
Lest I appear to be Chicken Little, I do see potential for our survival. It will not be easy. It will require that all our Congressional leaders of both parties develop the spine to do what they are supposed to do -- government of the people, by the people, for the people. Stand up to the elite who purchased them with campaign contributions, get rid of the effect of Citizen's United with legislation, and remember that most of them have the title of Representative. Can that happen? Yes. Will it happen? I am doubtful. But it has to happen if this country is to survive as a democracy, not as the theocracy or the meritocracy with which it is flirting.

The Consequences of the Tea Party

Back in 2009, April 15 to be specific, I wrote a blog describing Fox News invovement in the Tea Party as a modern form of yellow journalism. If you remember your journalism history (thank you Calder Pickett), you'll know that newspaper competition in the 1890s was fierce. Pulitzer and Hearst essentially created news to sell newspapers.
Fast forward and we see the consequence of those 2009 tea parties in the shape of Donald Trump. At that time, we had a new President, a black President with a Muslim-sounding middle name, a President born in Hawaii the validity of whose birth certificate was questionned by a businessman named Donald Trump. We had a Senate leader, Mitch McConnell who openly said his purpose was to assure that said President would be a one-termer. Well, Senator McConnell failed in his purpose, but he has remained a thorn in the President's side -- most recently refusing advise & consent to the President's Supreme Court nominee, citing non-existent precident.
Since 2009, we've come into a time when a lie repeated sufficiently is treated as truth, when shutting down the government is an accepted means of law-making even if it damages our bond rating, when obstruction is a way of life in the U.S. Congress, and the House has voted more than 50 times to repeal landmark legislation governing the healthcare industry. We've come from the brink of economic depression to relative financial security. In 2009, the unemployment rate was in the double digits; right now it is below 5%. But one area that hasn't been great has been that the new jobs created are low-paying jobs. And that may play into the current political nightmare that is the Republican party, a situation they caused in blocking as many bills from Pres. Obama as they could.
In 2009, Tea Partiers protested big in business, government, national debt and taxes. They detested the elite and were furious that the governent bailout to bring the country out of the recession helped Wall Street and automakers without helping regular citizens. So it is a bit ironic that they celebrated the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United which held that corporations had the same right as average citizens to influence elections.
The Republican Party welcomed the energy of the Tea Partiers, but, 2012, the bloom was off the rose because the party stalwarts began to see that they couldn't control them. By the 2014 elections, the GOP was running their candidates against Tea Party candidates and winning. I think the mainstream GOP thought they had figured out how to have the best of Tea Party energy without their volatility. I don't think they understood the firestorm that was coming.
After years of repeated lies being treated as truth (birthers, Muslim President, PPACA death panels, etc.), the rank and file in the Republican party learned to accept grandious statements of dubious validity. That made it easy for that birther businessman Donald Trump to make grand promises with little chance of implementation like the beautiful wall on the US/Mexican border with Mexico paying for it, repealing the PPACA and replacing it with a wonderful plan that was just a return to the old way but with insurance sold across state lines, deporting millions of Mexican undocumented workers, and special badges for Muslims living in the US. Some would say his biggest unrealistic promise has to do with bringing American jobs back to America. While much, maybe most, of his manufacturing is done in China and Mexico, his followers believe that he will bring jobs back by imposing tariffs on foreign manufactured goods.
The Tea Party fomented the outrage, the GOP conditioned them to believe lies, and Donald Trump has capitalized on the situation. Now the leaders of the GOP are expressing panic that they have an uncontrolled candidate headed to the top of the party ticket. They are talking brokered convention, alternative delegate counts, etc. What they do not seem to understand is that they have the candidate they built. As you sow, so shall you reap. Time for them to reap the onsequences of the Tea Party Express of 2009.

At war with an Ideology

I usually try to limit my posts to things about which I have some knowledge or about which I have read substantiated articles. This post, however, is more of a wondering and I have absolutely no idea if this has merit.
I'm wondering if the old way of responding to an international event, attack, whatever, is just that, an antiquated response. Through the years, our enemies have been countries or political entities, distinct bodies we could attack, conquer or subjugate, and cause to back down and behave in ways we deem acceptable as was the case in WW I & WW II, the Korean Conflict, etc. It was even, probably, the case in Vietnam even though "our side" didn't win. We knew who were at war with -- Germany, Italy, Viet Cong. We could shoot them, bomb them, kill them, etc.
Today’s enemy is ideological. They have no geopolitical boundaries, no readily identifiable location, not even a reliable way to isolate them. When we attack them with conventional warfare, the response is not conventional warfare, not even the counterinsurgency we saw in Vietnam. It is what we have come to see as seemingly random terrorist attacks.
It is becoming apparent that what we have been doing with rather conventional warfare in Iraq & Afghanistan cannot stop this new enemy. Taking off our shoes and swabbing our hands at TSA airport checkpoints does not stop this enemy. All our current techniques are no more successful against ideology than it was in preventing Ebola entering the U.S. While the ideology has some connection to a particular religion, banning that religion from our country, or any country, cannot stop it and can inflame it as well as being every bit as dreadful as Japanese internment camps or the Holocaust. And, because it is ideological, but not descriptive of the entire religion or an entire country, we can't blanket bomb the entire Middle East and eliminate the ideology.
So nothing we have done or proposed has been effective. If anything, these ideas have fed the hatred and violence. Now, the hard question. What can we do? If I understand, the ideology at play is similar to the Christian Dominionist ideology that Jesus cannot return until Christians have control of the socio-political systems of the world and return to a literal interpretation of scripture, Allah will not be satisfied until Islam with a literal interpretation of the Quran is the religion and law throughout the world. At this time, the Dominionists are approaching their ideological goal politically. The Islamic fundamentalists are taking a violent approach to conquer. I don't have the answer. I don’t agree with literal interpretation of any scripture. I don’t see violence as an answer any more than I believe we need to conquer. I'm looking for a way to end the situation.

What Sesame Street might have to teach about our current government situation.

I have a lot to say about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care law. I have a lot to say about fiscal policy of the United States, Congressional organization and powers, appropriations bills, continuing resolutions and government shutdowns.

One of these things does not belong with the others. One of these things is not the same. Can you tell which one is different?

If you said, Patient Protection and Affordable Care, you are correct. There is room for discussion on the law and there are many ways it could be improved, but that discussion and those improvements are not related to current funding of government operations. It is certainly not related to protecting the full faith and credit of the United States.

I have been accused, probably correctly, of convoluted logic, so I am a perfect person to recognize convoluted logic in others. The Republican Party, probably at the urging of its "Tea Party" subsidiary, is making a mountain of confusion, obstruction, uncertainty and doubt by mixing things that are unrelated, that are only together because of convoluted logic.

The job of Congress, at this time, is to keep the government of the U.S. running and protect the faith and credit of the country. Because 18 times, the Senate asked the House to join a conference committee to reconcile conflicting budget resolutions and 18 times the House refused, Congress ran out of time to pass the budget that should have been the Congressional work project. They should have had a plan for the spending in the country. They did not. Time ran out. There is a technique to buy more time for discussion of budget priorities and that is called a continuing resolution which continues the government function at prior funding levels. It is a rather specific piece of legislation that should perform a specific and necessary function on rare occasions.

I must say that Congress has fallen back on the continuing resolution technique so often lately it has become the norm rather than the exception it was intended to be. That is another discussion we might have at another time. What I want to concentrate on here is that the continuing resolution should not be a ransom note that holds any or all of the government hostage. It shouldn't even be a tool of negotiation.

The place for negotiation comes in the budget resolution. It might be useful to borrow a definition of negotiation (n) from Bing Dictionary

• ne·go·ti·a·tion
• [ nə gshee áysh'n ]

1. resolving of disagreements: the reaching of agreement through discussion and compromise
2. navigation: the tackling of a hazard or problem
3. discussion sessions: one or more meetings at which attempts are made to reach agreement through discussion and compromise

A term that plays prominently in this definition is compromise. A very simple working definition of compromise is an discussion that offers concession and gain to reach a middle ground that is acceptable to both parties. Compromise cannot happen around non-negotiable values and human needs.

Consider the negotiation and compromise of buying a house in need of a new roof. The seller has an asking price for the house. The buyer has a budget for purchase of a turn-key house. The buyer says, "This house needs a new roof before I can live in it." The seller offers "I'll reduce the price by $1000. Then you can fix the roof." The buyer says, "I've done some research. It will cost $15,000 to fix the roof. I'll reduce my offer by $25,000 to cover repairs and contingencies." The buyer says, "There is only one house for sale in this neighborhood where you really want to live. I need to sell this house. Let's meet in the middle. I'll reduce the cost of the house by $15,000 and you make the repairs."

Notice how all the negotiation was clean. They talked only about the roof (though the buyer brought in a little thing off the subject -- the contingencies), not about the buyer's desire to adopt a child or the seller's lost job. That's a basic tenet of negotiation and compromise, stick to the subject at hand.

What we see in the current Washington situation is a negotiation of apples and oranges. "I want to keep the government running, let's pass a continuing resolution to buy us time for further negotiations." "I want to keep the government running, but I want to destroy the Patient Protection and Affordable Care law more." "The PPAC law is irrelevant, let's stick to the matter at hand." "I want to make the President look bad, if you don't agree to get rid of the law, we'll shut down the government until you do."

See what I mean? One of these things does not belong. When an irrelevant topic is introduced into a negotiation, it is reasonable to question the motivation of the party introducing the irrelevancy."

My personal take? Sure, I've already included the irrelevant topic in the discussion -- We've got a case of sore loser. The PPACA was passed into law following the normal procedure. The fact that one party held control of all three relevant bodies -- President, House and Senate is irrelevant. Lots of laws are passed when all three are in the same party. Some people don't like the law for some reason (I could speculate as to why, but that is yet another irrelevant topic). They run the next election based largely on repealing the law. Some are elected to Congress on that basis, some are not, and the President whose name has been attached to the law is re-elected. Those who don't like the law don't have the votes to repeal it, can't use the normal channels to repeal it, and won't wait for another election where they might get the votes to repeal it. They resort to injecting the repeal, gutting or delay of the law into the negotiation. There's a term for that, but that's another episode of Sesame Street.

Sadly, We Maintain the Status Quo

Holy Week is always something of a roller coaster ride. We go from the triumphant march into Jerusalem during which "sweet Hosannas ring" to a steady plodding toward death. We know, even as we sing Hosanna, that we will, before the week ends, be singing "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded." And then, in the dark at the start of the Easter Vigil we see the new fire, we baptize new brothers and sisters in Christ and we begin the rejoicing of the resurrection. For church musicians, the rapid cycling of Holy Week comes in two hour blocks of rehearsals, so we are really buffeted.
For most believers, this Holy Week roller coaster ride is tempered by "normal" life, the life led outside devotion and worship. For those of us who supported repeal of the death penalty in Colorado, the roller coaster dominated more aspects of our lives.
I was struck by a meditation I read this week:

But, let me ask you, what of someone who is not a good person?  How do we feel about that person's death?  I think the basic human reaction is one of justification -- they got what they deserved.  So, in considering the death of Judas, don't we withhold our sympathies?  Maybe shake our heads and purse our lips?
The thing about death is that it is so final, whether it is the death of a good person, like Jesus, or a "bad" person, like Judas.  Scripture tells us that God does not value the death of anyone. But we, in our humanness, do make a distinction. In the death of Jesus, isn't that fallacy uncovered as well? Are we not to seek and serve Christ in all persons, regardless?
The demands of the Gospel are both for compassion for those who suffer, and for action that raises the dignity of every person. Sin does much to devalue human life. As disciples of Jesus, should we not, as he did, do what we can to be a corrective to that trajectory?

 I was hopeful that our House Judiciary committee would do their part to correct our death penalty trajectory, Sadly, they did not. Maybe they salved their consciences with the possibility of putting the death penalty before the people, but that will not happen. We will continue to kill people as our way of saying that killing someone is deserving of death. We will maintain the status quo.
This year, the roller coaster of Holy Week has a different perspective for me. I've hit an extra bottom this year, the disappointment of today's vote on the repeal of the death penalty feels like an extra trip to Golgatha. It is only in the certainty of the coming Easter that I find hope.

Politics, Faith and the Death Penalty

It has been a strange couple of days. Unlike last year when I was a volunteer advocate for both health care and juvenile justice, this year we have more volunteer advocates and I thought I could concentrate on health care. But there were few health care bills early in the session and my justice friends started begging me to sign on with the repeal of the death penalty, so last week I agreed. The repeal bill was introduced late on Friday and the first hearing, before the House Judiciary, came yesterday. It was a long hearing -- more than nine hours of testimony from families of victims both for and against the death penalty, former wardens, people speaking from their faith perspectives, exonerees, District Attorneys both for and against, prosecuting and defense attorneys, professors, law enforcement officers, even a death penalty jury foreman. We heard a letter from a former corrections official who said "when you execute the death penalty, dig two graves -- one for the prisoner and one for the executioner. My grave is a psychological one." Those words stuck with me, echoing in my head much of the afternoon and evening. I can quote them almost exactly even more than 24 hours later.
Those in favor of repeal, in purple clothing and wearing purple ribbons, far outnumbered those opposed to repeal. Even most of the families of victims testified, amidst tears, that the lengthy process of a death penalty trial constantly kept their wounds open, that the execution itself was painful and did not bring the healing they had expected. Several said "killing him did nothing to bring back my brother/sister/son/husband/etc."
Even though I testified in favor of the death penalty, I had to wonder about the victim's families who felt confident that an execution would bring justice and/or resolution to their suffering. In one case, there are many years of appeals to come before the execution. For another victim's brother, the execution was converted to life in prison without possibility for parole (LWOP). For him, it seemed there was no hope of resolution. He testified in great, gruesome detail about the grizzly details of his sister's kidnapping, torture and murder by a gang. It sounded like a story he felt compelled to tell, almost as if the telling of it might eventually relieve his pain.
I wondered if hearing so many witnesses quote  the Bible about "Vengeance is mine. says the Lord" was painful. Did they still have faith in God? Had that died along with the relative? Had their need for revenge or justice or whatever replaced their faith? Did it anger them to hear others who lost loved ones in a violent murder scene take a different view than theirs? Is their grave a psychological one, dug along with their loved one's grave? I heard one victim's sister testify in a hearing today say that it hurt to see the attorney that initially represented her brother's murderers. Her anger extended to that attorney and his mere presence at at the hearing the night before upset her.
I found myself praying for the families, that they might come to some sense of peace within themselves, that they not have a psychological grave.
There was no vote on the bill last night. At the time, I took the Chairman's words at face value, that the decision was too serious to be made at such a late hour after so many hours of wrenching testimony. The technical term is that the bill was laid over until a later, unspecified time. It was sadly unfulfilling. There was no resolution. I began to identify with the victims families, needing resolution. What I did not know until much later was that the Executive Director of the Department of Corrections had been murdered in his home. Apparently, word of the murder had reached the members of the committee.
In the middle of today's flurry of calls about what might or might not happen with our repeal bill, a friend called to tell me that her father decided not to have surgery to remove the large tumor growing in his brain. He is at peace with his decision to die, but his daughter is not there. Everything in her screams that it is too soon for her father to die, she is too young to be without a parent. Her son doesn't understand why his grandfather is not fighting this tumor. We talked about how hard it is to relinquish control or our perception that we are in control. I wonder if my friend will find her sense of peace and resolution at her father's death, if she will recognize that the decision was not hers to make or if she will wonder if things would have been different if only... I pray she will not find a psychological grave, but instead bury her need to "fix" in time to share a few peaceful months with her father. She has that opportunity.
The families of the victims don't have that possibility and I do not think the death penalty will help.