Mexican Chicken Stew
No food feast today, although a couple of friends did stomp in out of the rain for an exchange of presents and talk-story. Chris, the Feldenkrais teacher whose avocation for years was helping out on her neighbor’s now-decommissioned dairy farm, explained how to bale hay. Kris, the residential karate student from Hawaii, showed us YouTube videos of very masculine and martial traditional hula. Chris brought us an artist’s print of the Japanese ideogram for “friend,” which touched me.
Friend.
Our food feast was Wednesday night, when the core of the karate dojo came over and I had nine to feed. Since people, including two young boys, would be sitting on the couch and eating, I wanted to make some kind of easy-to-eat one-bowl meal. For some mysterious reason, Mexican chicken stew came unbidden to mind. Encouraged and supplied by Amy (the brown belt on the other side of J in our holiday card), and loosely guided by two recipes on the ‘Net, I made the following, which was easy and absolutely delicious. The only part of it that takes any time is cutting stuff up, and it’s almost impossible to ruin. Quantities and seasoning may be varied according to circumstances and taste. This fed 9 hungry people with 2 days of leftovers for two. (Note that I cut the ingredients pretty small so J won’t choke. You could cube them larger if you want.)
5 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut small (~3/4″)
flour
olive oil
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut small
1 green pepper, cut small
1 red pepper, cut small
1 large onion, chopped
several cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 cans corn kernels, drained
3 cans black beans, drained
1 large can diced or crushed tomatoes, with liquid
cumin, to taste
cinnamon, to taste
salt to taste
cayenne or chili pepper, ground, to taste
chopped cilantro, to taste
1. Toss the cut-up chicken in a bowl with a handful of flour (adjust to amount) to coat.
2. Heat olive oil — enough to spread out and coat the bottom when hot — in a large stew pot.
3. Toss in chicken and cook at medium high heat, stirring and scraping often, for a few minutes, till no pink is showing.
4. Remove chicken to a bowl. Replace olive oil and heat.
5. Cook sweet potato, peppers, onion, and garlic, covered, stirring often, 7 minutes or until onion is translucent and soft.
6. Add back chicken. Add corn, black beans, tomatoes, 1-2 cups water, conservatively generous amounts of cumin and cinnamon; salt; and a pinch of hot red pepper.
7. Simmer, partially covered, ~15 minutes or until thick.
8. Stir in chopped cilantro; let stand for 5 minutes.
9. Taste, and add more cumin, cinnamon, hot red pepper, cilantro, and/or salt to taste.
10. Serve with sour cream, grated cheddar cheese, and cut limes to squeeze juice on top.
Excellent with any kind of cornbread.
Merry Christmas!
Many thanks and blessings to the friends I have made through Annie and this blog! I hope each and every one of you have a wonderful Christmas.
We Want an Informed Faith, Too . . .
. . . and a faith-informed intellectual culture. Peter Steinfels, retiring his “Beliefs” column at the New York Times (why??), points out, and True Ancestor — now a grad student at the University of Chicago Divinity School — confirms, that great thinking is being done by theologians, virtually unheard by most of the mainstream culture:
I am constantly undone by how many great thinkers pace the halls. These are not merely great thinkers but great teachers, too. That they think about religion — both passionately and dispassionately — just makes them that much greater, in my mind. […] [Steinfels writes:]
Intelligence and critical reasoning are essential to adult approaches to faith. In short, theology matters. It is curious that so many otherwise thoughtful people imagine that what they learned about religion by age 13, or perhaps 18, will suffice for the rest of their lives. They would never make the same assumption about science, economics, art, sex or love.
People who do constantly reapproach those issues produce some great thinking and writing — much of which is marginalized, precisely because it is about religion.
A contemporary abundance of serious thought and scholarship about religion is marginalized. Thinkers and scholars who should have a presence in the intellectual and cultural landscape — whose books, for example, might well be noted in the annual “holiday” listings — are instead known almost entirely in their own religious circles or academic specialties. That is a loss this column has tried to counter.
And now the column itself becomes a loss. Maybe Steinfels will write a book, or collect his columns in one.
His insight sheds light on a phenomenon we take for granted that is in fact quite startling: the confinement to shrinking reservations of religion, which as recently as two centuries ago was still the basis of most philosophy, culture, and — science. I was amazed to learn through my researches for Natural History that almost all the early naturalists were “divines” who viewed learning about the natural world as a way to glorify God. The very fact that living creatures are identified by mostly Latin genus and species names is a deep thumbprint of its religious origins: virtually all education was once religious education. Now secular science has successfully unseated religion as the foundation of “mainstream” culture, as witness the fact that the brain is far more “real” to us than the soul. (Actually, “my brain” is at least as much a construct of imagination. You can experience what was once called your “soul,” or psyche, much more directly than you can experience your own brain. There’s a weird alienation, a flattening relief, in talking about your serotonin levels instead of your sorrow.) To the extent that religion remains influential in the public square, it is often in the form of basic ritual and piety, with an anti-intellectual slant. (I have to say that this cannot be said of the Catholic world, but how many of us outside that world ever encounter, much less seek out, robust contemporary Catholic thinking, including on the discoveries and powers of science? It’s all William Donohue as far as we’re concerned.)
My own bro wrote a fantastic paper, for a course on the Book of Job, that used the physics metaphor of wave and particle to examine the differences between Simone Weil’s and Joseph Soloveitchik’s theologies of suffering and affliction. (Note that the Soloveitchik link — he was the founding rabbi of Modern Orthodoxy — appears to lead to the website of Jesuit-founded Boston College. The link I found for Weil is even wilder. The Internet could break down the ghetto walls segregating religious thought, if only people would navigate it in search of surprise as much as validation.)
“Palin Is Like Obama”
Phrased like an Althouse tag (though I don’t know if she’s ever made it a tag), a meme I picked up on before Sam Tanenhaus of the New Yorker:
The fascination with Palin owes something to the way that her cultish aura mirrors, or refracts, the aura that surrounds Barack Obama, the other political figure who comfortably inhabits the nexus of politics and celebrity. It has become fashionable to ridicule Palin as a tabloid creature, but it was not so long ago that Obama was being depicted as the chum of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Even now, the nimbus of celebrity clings to him, often with deflationary effect—for instance, during his recent visit to China, when at times he seemed less the leader of a major diplomatic mission than an attractive student ambassador, genially exporting good will and posing for photographs. When CNN intercut its evening coverage of Obama’s trip with Palin’s first bookstore appearance, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the two mise en scènes seemed eerily equivalent.
For the moment, Obama and Palin divide the electorate, and are bound by a strange symmetry [my point exactly]: born in the nineteen-sixties, the only candidates from outside the Lower 48 ever to grace national tickets, and the beneficiaries of powerful social movements that they were too young to have participated in (civil rights in Obama’s case, women’s liberation in Palin’s). Just as Obama, with his “post-racial” affect and his Ivy League pedigree, made an older African-American political figure like Jesse Jackson seem the relic of a vanished era, so Palin—with her lustrous mane and form-fitting skirts, her coddling of her infant son in the full glare of TV cameras—presented a new model of the spontaneous woman politician, free of the overmanaged self-discipline that constrains Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
Enthusiasts of either one who disagreed or criticized me for comparing them were focusing on content; I was focusing on form. They are similar and symmetrical containers for antithetical contents: avatars of the two poles of a riven America.
Holiday Greetings
To each of you whose snailmail address I don’t have. And for those I do, a sneak preview.
Althouse: the Algonquin of Our Time
Okay, so I’ve outed myself by publishing this prematurely. I was reading the 200+ comments on this Althouse post about Tiger Woods’s women (even if you don’t care about celebrity, and I certainly don’t, this is such an archetypal plunge-from-grace story; how many public men throw it all away for nookie? but how many have quite this much to lose?) and admiring the display of flashing wits at that virtual Round Table. I have trouble making it through all the comments (I don’t get updates), so I thought I would pick out some gems for you. (It takes nothing away that you often have to pick them out of the trash. It’s enough that there are so many.) I didn’t get all the way through the comments, though. So I may add more, little by little.
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said: “A rewarding marriage is hard and somewhat angular. Eventually you grind the worst points off each other.”
William said: “Repression is like a weight bearing exercise that strengthens the libido.”
bagoh20 said: “Being good is easy when you have few temptations.”
Arturius said: the truism that rich men go for looks, beautiful women go for money “explains why guys like Mick Jagger or Steven Tyler who look like science projects gone awry can score supermodels.”
William said: “People with Tiger’s money and Elin’s looks do not suffer tragic ends. They live high up on Olympus and the ordinary rules do not apply. They play at normalcy for awhile–the way Marie Antoinette played at being a milk maid–but then the upward lift of their world pulls them from our banality. They go back to frolicking among the immortals, and we go back to our dull marriages and higher morality.”
shoutingthomas said: “What kind of world is it when a guy who has $100 billion can’t get a little pussy?”
Ambiance 