Yesterday, while waiting in line at the Space Needle in Seattle, I got the news that Rabbi David Wucher had died. I can’t overestimate what a personal loss this is for me. Twenty-two years ago, I was 21 and without much direction spiritually. For reasons not important for this story, I had left the Christian roots of my childhood behind and found myself, like the vast majority of the species, seeking meaning, seeking something greater than myself, and seeking a way to connect to it.

I was living on Kanawha Terrace and 13th Street in Huntington, just a few blocks from B’nai Sholom, and working at the Huntington Museum of Art. It was at the museum that I met amazing women such as Rose Riter, Joan Lerner, and Joyce Levy. Joyce invited me to attend the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, and since it was just a short walk from my apartment, and I had very little to do on a Saturday morning, I went. From the moment I set foot in the sanctuary I felt welcomed and at home. There could have been no better person to be my introduction to the faith and religion than Rabbi Wucher. I already knew that I loved the people, and the love of the ritual, liturgy, language, and music came quickly. I immediately began the weekly practice of attending Friday evening erev Shabbat services, a practice that I kept faithfully and without exception for as long as I lived in Huntington. Week after week I would learn, not just the liturgy and the history of the Jewish people, but more about baseball than I ever cared to know, and generally how to be a Mensch from Rabbi Wucher.

Judy Williams coerced me into joining the choir and my knowledge and love of Judaism continued to deepen. It also allowed for more, and more personal time with Rabbi and Tori Wucher and my fondness for them grew deeper. Leaving B’nai Sholom was the hardest thing about moving to Cincinnati and I always tried to arrange trips home to include an evening there. Rabbi Wucher always asked how I was and would give some interesting tidbit of information about wherever I was living, usually about baseball. If he saw me, but couldn’t get to talk to me, he would, just like his mother Violet had done, flash me the Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” hand sign.

After 5 years of services and life cycles, I was ready to commit. My conversion to Judaism officially was overseen by Rabbi Wucher. Our regular one on one meetings to discuss my knowledge and commitment to Judaism still remain as some of my fondest memories. When the discussion came about choosing a Hebrew name, I asked if it would be okay for me to honor him, and all that he had done for me, to choose David as my middle name. And so, on June 23, 2006, under the supervision of Rabbi David Wucher, I became Daniel David Ben Avraham V’Sarah.

Today is Friday and in accordance with Jewish custom, the funeral was scheduled for today, before sunset. I am nearly 3,000 miles away and travelling by train so I could not attend in person. One good thing that came from COVID was that “community” became no longer purely physical and I was able to fulfill the mitzvah of helping bury the dead by watching the funeral on YouTube. The downside of that is that it left me ugly crying in a busy train station in Seattle.

As I have moved around, I have sought congregations and Rabbis and places to feel at home and I have been taught and comforted by some awesome Rabbis, Sandford Kopnick, Jean Eglinton, and David Spey to name a few, but no one can ever be such an integral part of whom I have become as a Jew and as a man as David Wucher. I know for sure, that for me, his name IS a blessing. זיכרונו לברכה‎🖖

Everyone is influenced by their teachers. It sort of is the definition of “teacher.” I have had the good fortune to have a lifetime of spectacular educators. That said, when security questions asked “What was the name of your favorite teacher in school?” one name always came to mind first. Hearing of her recent death affected me profoundly. I’m not young, and my high school days are nearly 25 years behind me, so it shouldn’t be such a shock, but some people never change in your mind, always young, attractive, energetic, and a little bit wild and crazy.

Despite being no stranger to funerals, I used to think that a Eulogy was a speech that the person or people closest to the deceased gave as sort of an exposition to those gathered in memory. A few paragraphs to tell a history, some accomplishments, and statistics, but that’s not it at all. A eulogy is a chance for people with unique personal relationships to share with those closest to the deceased that unique perspective, the funny stories, and their unique personal connection. It’s a chance to show just how wide and far-reaching the influence was of their life. There is a theory in physics that says that there is nothing without interaction, that there must be interaction, either directly or through observation, for anything to even exist. As below, so above. Who are we without the interactions we share with others? The time, and the stories, we share with each other is more than precious, it’s how and why we exist.

In the hills of West Virginia, there’s a school we love so well…

I’ve been told, and life has proven it to be true, that it is a very unusual thing to remember 24 years after graduation, whether or not you took French in high school, let alone remember who taught the class, to still know her, to consider her a friend, and to wake up from a dream about her sad knowing that she is gone. Maybe it is a Mountain thing, maybe an Appalachian thing, maybe a West Virginia thing, maybe it is unique to Wayne County, or Wayne High School, or the class of ’99. However rare it may be, I’m grateful to be a part of it.

When I was asked if I remember any funny stories about Mme Oyler I didn’t know where to start.

Charlotte Marie Rachelle Tessier Maille Oyler of New Liskeard, Ontario was a…feisty one, apparently from a very early age.

I know the story of how she took a dare in primary school to lick a cow salt lick, acquired foot and mouth disease from it, which lead to her being jaundice (the French word for yellow is jaune) and how her treatment made it so that she couldn’t take the simple TB test.

I know the story of how, in Catholic Girls School, she used to get in trouble with “Sister RADAR” who always seemed to know when she tried to slip over to the Catholic Boys School next door.

I know that once, either from a dare, defiance, or just curiosity, she ran through the cloistered part of the convent to see the nuns without their habits on, and how she scrubbed the hall with a toothbrush in penance for it.

It is from her that I learned to take confession en français; “Pardonnez-moi mon père, j’ai péché.”

I remember the story of how, waitressing in the family business, she met her bear-hunting future husband, Michel, and fell in love with his shortened diphthong and pronunciation of “ice.”

I know that she loved being an American citizen…all except that it meant that she could no longer go to Cuba.

This is just where my personal funny stories with her begin.
I took six semesters of French Class in the four years of high school, French 1, 2, 3, Advanced French (which was mostly reading back issues of Côte Sud Magazine), and Marshall French 101 with her as the teacher. I have LOTS of fun and funny stories from those years.

One of my first impressions of her was what a good typist she was. Remember, this was when typing was still taught on typewriters and tests were hand-typed. She would set us to work on something and watch us over the typewriter and her glasses, perched on the edge of her nose, as she typed up the tests, her mouth moving silently as the words rolled across her mind and her fingers.

She definitely had a way of making class fun, funny, and something to look forward to, whether she was throwing a Koosh ball at us, pulling out her jeopardy buzzers, making us play time bingo (well, maybe that wasn’t so much fun) or writing plays using the words that we had learned.

Solange (that’s Crystal “with the crystal blue eyes” to most people) and I always did our best to take our little plays to the limit and beyond. Inspired by our field trip to Charleston to see a play by Molière, our “Buying Plane tickets” play went so far beyond that it involved someone “dans la section feumers” catching the plane on fire, a crash, a passenger with a pain in every part of their body we knew the word for, and another passenger who “est tombé et a cassé sa pipe.” She must have thought that we had araignées au plafond (spiders on the ceiling).

Once, she met me and Sarah at the Marshall Artist Series Film Festival showing of The Horseman on the Roof, Le hussard sur le toit, starring Juliette Binoche, who in one scene bares it all. Slowly and quietly her hand came up to cover my eyes. Later, at the Renaissance Bookstore, while we were discussing the film, we had a entertaining conversation about how “tomber et casser sa pipe (to fall and break one’s pipe)” was an idiomatic expression for “to die,” how “sa pipe (one’s pipe)” was a euphemism for one’s…well, you know, and how “la petite mort (the little death)” meant an orgasm, and how the three were weirdly related, somehow…maybe?

Charlotte was indeed an educator. From her I learned to read, to write, and to speak French. That’s a gift that I have used so many many times in my life, way more often than I have used the formula to determine the area of a rug (Mr. Mills), been asked to recite The Raven from memory (Mrs. Hagar), or been called upon to name the genus and species of a wildflower (Mr. Smith), though they come up occasionally as well.

My trip to France came not too long after 9/11, at a time when Americans were not well-loved in France (is there a time we are really?), a time of “Freedom Fries” and other Nationalist rhetoric. “Je m’appelle François Tessier. J’habite à New Liskeard, en Ontario. Je suis canadien.” Charlotte had taught me enough about her language, and her life, that, when accused of being an American, I was able to lie and get away with it. She thought that was hilarious.

Who would have ever thought the need for the French language would have been so great moving to Southern Florida? Did you know that Hollywood, Florida is the number 1 Quebecois tourist destination in the US? Every Canadian woman I saw with short cropped slightly burgundy colored hair made me think of her, and I saw a LOT of Canadian women with short cropped slightly burgundy hair.

Did you know that the third most spoken language in Florida is Haitian French Creole? During the 8 years that I lived in Florida not a single week went past that I didn’t use the skills I learned from Charlotte, how to speak french, but also how to navigate the murky waters of “horse french.” I would hear, “Oh! tu parles français!?” And I would give the answer I learned from her, “Absolument! Tout le monde parle français! C’est la langue de l’amour! (Of course! All the world speaks French! It’s the language of love)” and la glace a été brisée (the ice would be broken).

I went to see her when she was in the hospital after having her brain tumor removed. I knocked lightly on the door and said softly “Bonjour Charlotte. Ca va?” She smiled, barely able to open her eyes and said, “Is that Danny? I was just thinking about you.” The woman had just had a softball removed from her skull! Her head was bandaged up like a turban, and she was thinking about me?

She said that she was trying to remember what signs there might have been that something was wrong. She had noticed that her hair wasn’t parting quite like it used to and that she didn’t care so much about makeup, but thought that could have just been because she was getting older. Though the lack of makeup should have been as obvious of a sign as could be, she thought that it was too subtle. She said the first behavior that really struck her as being off the charts “not normal” was how she didn’t have time to talk to me when I came to visit her at the high school earlier in the year. I had just shown up at the school unannounced during the middle of a class. I didn’t think anything about her being too busy to chat with a former student, but it should have been as obvious as her lack of eye shadow and she knew it. She said that she normally would have put me to work teaching the class for her or at the least had the students translate our conversation in real time. Charlotte always had time for me. Charlotte always had time for anyone and everyone.

One lesson I learned from her that transcends just the words and the language is that in French, the word “toujours” means both “still” and “always.
Charlotte Marie Rachelle Tessier Maille Oyler, vous est ma professeure, et mon amie, pour toujours.

Despite often being plagued with writer’s block, frustrated with editing, and eternally impoverished, writing brings me tremendous pleasure, or else I wouldn’t do it. One aspect of writing with which I have never had a very good control of is Poetry. Yeah, I’ve written a couple homeruns, but it is exhausting wahmish work if it isn’t your gig. NPR has this app on it’s page called the Joy Generator (see https://apps.npr.org/joy-generator/#story=intro&page=0 ) and one of the possible generators of joy was Poetry Writing. They suggest creating a blackout poem, using existing text and blacking out all of the words except those that call to you. They even give you a few sample texts to mark over. We won’t get into what was going on the day I felt I needed joy bad enough to write a poem…but here is the one I came up with. (I also decided to call them “Reductionary” poems instead of “blackout” poems. “Blackout” has the connotation to me of the party’s they have at the bathhouse…but we won’t get into that either).

 Summon the Clouds;
  A Reductionary Poem 
 By
 Daniel Blankenship

 Summon the clouds,
 Ever so high.
 Mount them
 And ride them heavenwards.
  
 Carry the stones.
 Reach the corner of the sky.
 Apply and mend it.
 Do this, and turn attention to the broken pill,
 And mend it.
  
 Mount the clouds.
 Descend to the earth.
 Find all now right…
 But dark. 

           

When I was in culinary school I had to write a paper on sauces. I will now wahmish you with it…

From antiquity to the present day man has tried to increase the taste, appearance, and mouth feel of meats and vegetables with the addition of sauces.  Over the centuries, the appearance and composition of these sauces has changed dramatically, but their purposes have not.

            References in print to sauce usage date back as far as the early 16^th Century, but sauces were utilized much earlier, dating at least to the late roman period.  The objectives of the sauces used in this period were different than our approaches to sauces are today.  These Roman period sauces were used primarily to cover or conceal the questionable freshness of meats.  They were highly flavorful, often indistinguishable, concoctions of dozens of ingredients.  The cooks of the day would add as many spices as possible to a sauce to confuse the pallet and demonstrate the wealth of the host.  Attention to complimentary flavors was not important.

     Fish stock sauces were among the most popular due in part to the extensive Roman fishing industry and in part to the overwhelming qualities of fish.  One of the most popular sauces was a highly pungent sauce made from sardines known as liquamen.  It was so widely popular that it was mass produced and marketed throughout Rome. (Stradley).^[1]

     Sauces continued to be reformed and perfected over the coming centuries.  In the common court, they continued their role of covering and concealing .  In the aristocratic court where only the finest and freshest meats and produce were prepared and served, chefs were allowed to work and adjust their sauces to be complimentary to, rather than overpowering of, their primary dishes.

     By the height of French Aristocracy, a good chef in the court of a nobleman was a prized possession.  Nothing in his repertoire was more prized than his ability to make a good sauce.  It showed a level of cookery above that of the common cook.  The food of courtly France was produced by guilds, each guild producing a certain aspect of the meal with the Chef in charge of meal planning.  Chefs often acted as saucier, or sauce chef, as the final test of taste and mouth-feel rested on his shoulders. 

     With the fall of the French kingdom, the guilds were abolished and Chefs were allowed to share and combine recipes into common groups.  In the world of sauce production, the French Master Chef Marie-Antoine Careme, simplified recipes into a list of what he referred to as Mother Sauces.  His list began with the two oldest sauces even of that day, hollandaise or mayonnaise and béchamel.  These types of sauces have remained a staple for centuries because they are easily produced and make for a good, adaptable base for a number of other sauces.  The three remaining sauces take longer to produce, have more ingredients, and are more complex in flavor but were still the main base sauces of the French Revolutionary Period as well as the following hundred to hundred and fifty years.  These three sauces are the Brown or Espagnole, Veloute, and Tomato sauces.  Each of these sauces relies heavily on the prior production of a good stock.  To make one of these sauces of notable quality it took as long as several days.  The first day was spent rendering a quality stock from bones and mirepoix, and the next day was spent turning this stock into a high quality, yet highly volatile sauce.  These sauces did not keep well, especially in the days prior to refrigeration and deep freezers, and had to be used immediately and just prior to serving.  The time and effort involved continued to make these sauces for the elite.

     Within France, anyone well to do enough to go to any restaurant could, and still can, eat in a very formal and traditional style complete with small sauces created from Careme’s Mother Sauces.  Even as late as the 1950s in Paris, the saucier was considered a position in a kitchen of great acclaim.  Jacque Pepin wrote in his memoir, “The Apprentice; My Life in the Kitchen,” “…I found opposite my name the words ‘first commis’  If a second commis is the buck private of a kitchen brigade, a first commis is more like a lieutenant, someone who has survived a few battles, who remains calm under fire, and who has earned a measure of trust.  Before my second year was out, I had attained that was considered the ultimate first commis posting: the sauce.  To be considered a great saucier was the highest accolade a cook could receive.  The subtlety, intricacy and lightness of sauce could make a dish.” (Pepin).^[2]

     Outside of France, however, fine French cuisine, and the sauces that came with it became something of luxury that most people would never experience. Over the previous centuries the rift between the fine sauce eating elite and the common man of the villages and rural areas widened.  Cookbooks of the early 20^th Century meant for the common household cook, rarely even mentioned the Mother Sauces.  This was, of course, except for the ever popular béchamel and hollandaise sauces.  Fine French restaurants in London, Berlin, New York, and Chicago still featured all of the complex sauces, at a price however. 

     It wasn’t until the 1960s, when all eyes were turned to the Kennedy White House, that serious French cuisine slipped into the kitchens of mainstream Americans.  The Kennedy’s had as their personal chef, Chef Rene Verdon.  No less scrutinized than the hats of Jackie Kennedy were the fine French meals being served in the White House.  Housewives across America scrambled to snatch up recipies and techniques wherever they were to be found.  One such American housewife was there to provide.

     Having spent several years in Paris with her husband, Paul, a young Californian woman named Julia Child had learned the art of fine French cuisine and, with the help of a circle of other displaced American and British housewives, prepared a cookbook of simplified, yet refined, French recipes.  Upon her return to the United States, she began broadcasting her secrets, the secrets of the French masters, on February 11, 1963 on Boston’s WGBH-TV. (Child).^[3]  The program quickly took off and was widely syndicated.  She was an instant hit.  Everyone was a fan of her, her personality, and her easy to follow classic recipes.

     Within a decade, she had substantial help spreading the word.  Every cook at home, every small restaurant, every caterer, every fine dining restaurant was serving French food, or some vague resemblance to it, again. 

     The 1970s and the early 1980s were a time defined in the kitchen by thick, gluey, improperly prepared sauces.  The only thing classical about this onslaught was that, like the early Roman sauces, these sauces were going a long way to cover less than appetizing main courses.  Cooks, and chefs alike, had forgotten the importance that Careme and Escoffier had placed on sauces being a flavoring enhancer and not the star of the show.  Sauces had become too popular to be sustainable.  Shortcuts were taken in the stock production that carried on through to the final small sauces. 

     It wasn’t long before the consumer was tired of every menu item being “dressed” with some sauce.  A return to the simple, plain, healthy, even organic, was soon to sweep the nation.  There was no room for sauces thickened with flour and finished with butter in this new wave of culinary preference. 

     This wasn’t to say that there was no longer room for sauces, but rather the way that a sauce was defined needed to be rethought.  In the book “The Elements of Cooking” by Michael Ruhlman, a sauce is defined as such; “We tend to think of sauce as something we pour over something else just before serving it, but practically speaking, sauce is any seasoned fat, acid, cooking liquid, juice, plant puree, or combination thereof, that we add to a main ingredient to enhance it, and it’s helpful to the cook to think of it in this fundamental way.” (Ruhlman).^[4]  No longer are we held to the belief that the mother sauces and their small sauces are the Way and the Truth.  Our eyes have been opened to view a whole new world of possibilities.  Many of these other sauce possibilities have been around for decades, or even centuries, themselves but only recently have we given them the endorsement they deserve.

     Eyes turned to the Mediterranean and to Asia for ideas. 

     The Italians had, for the most part, dropped the stock from their tomato sauces.  This eliminated the hours of pre-production time needed.  Italian pesto sauces had existed since Roman times, prior to the introduction of tomatoes from South America, and again became popular.  “Pesto” is Italian for “pounded,” in reference to the herbs and spices being pounded and ground into a paste.  It refers to not only the familiar basil pesto but also other pounded or ground sauces like mustards.

     “Salsa” is the Spanish word for “sauce” and the chunky fresh salsas we have come to know and love from Spain and Mexico are far from the laboriously cooked and processed Mother Sauces of Careme’s day. 

     The Middle East gave the culinary world a wide assortment of dips and sauces from firey tomato and pepper dishes to the soft creamy tahini.

     Asia contributed entire tomes of recipes for sauces.  Simple fermented soy products are used for dipping or as a prepared ingredient in larger main dishes.  Some Asian, or Asian-inspired, sauces, like sweet and sour sauce, take a week or more to produce, but still can not be categorized as any of the Mother Sauces categories.  Spicy sauces on meat and vegetables, pastes of hot wasabi root, and acidic fish sauces are just a few of the myriad of Asian sauces.

     One simple sauce that has survived throughout the ages in both the European kitchen and in the American heart is butter.  A butter sauce can be just a simple piece of raw butter infused with spices and herbs put on a piece of meat, or a melted butter sauce like beurre blanc served with fish.  Even during the nearly sauce-free era of the 1950s, “Butter Steak” was found in every grocer freezer.  Today many steak and seafood chain restaurants still serve steak with infused butters.

     Even desert has it’s list of sauces.  Everything from caramel sauce, syrups, fruit purees, melted chocolate, and the ever present butter sauce top deserts globally.  Perhaps no desert sauce is more prevalent than nature’s own inert sugar sauce, honey.

     No matter how much you think you “don’t really like sauces,” if you look in your refrigerator and check out your menu selections when eating out you‘re certain to see a whole list of things that can be considered a sauce by our new definition.   Everything from sausage gravy you made for breakfast, to the condiment packets handed to you in handfuls at the drive-thru window is a sauce.  Even the 6 bottles of assorted salad dressings in the fridge can be considered sauces for salads.  Sauces, whether we think we like them or not, play a huge role in our menu choices, and are here to stay with us forever.

     It is safe to say in this world of culinary experimentation and awareness of worldwide cuisines, our selections of sauces will only increase.  The Mother Sauces of Careme’s day are still around too, waiting in the shadows, a throwback to an all but forgotten world of cookery.  In our new, more health and time conscious, economically struggling times, we turn our eyes to fresher, healthier, and more easily produced but no less satisfying sauces.  Someday, who knows when, we will again reach a golden age of French Revival Cuisine, and it can be assured that Careme and his list of Mother Sauces will be there again leading the way.

---

^[1]   Stradley, Linda. “History of Sauces” What’s Cooking America 2004

^[2]   Pepin, Jacques. The Apprentice; My Life in the Kitchen  New York. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

^[3]   Child, Julia. The French Chef Cookbook New York. Alfred A Knopf, 1996

^[4]   Ruhlman, Michael. The Elements of Cooking; Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen New York. Scribner,

In Culinary School I wrote a report on Fried Chicken. It was recently found, and now I share it with you. Total Wahmish…

Fried Chicken is a dish as old as any in the modern repertoire, if not older.  The dish has been produced and altered by every generation and by every chef for thousands of years.  There is something about the subtlety of the spices and the flavor of the oil that have made this “Finger-Licking Good” dish survive the test of time and continue to thrive.

            Chickens are thought to have first been domesticated 10,000 years ago in Vietnam.  They spread over the millennia to encompass the entire globe.  With a population estimated over 24 billion, they are currently the most populous bird on the planet.  It is no wonder that their meat is the most often eaten meat of any animal.

            The Vietnamese, having first domesticated the animal have their very popular fried chicken recipe, Ga Xao, Fried chicken with lemongrass and chili.  The exact origin is unknown but the dish is still served in Vietnamese restaurants daily.        

            The first portrait of a chicken to appear in European artwork was on a piece of Corinthian pottery from the 7^th Century BCE.  The chicken was considered a rarity and a luxury bird used more for divining than for eating.  Over the next few centuries these fattened birds became too much of a temptation for the Romans and in 161 BCE a law was passed in Rome forbidding the consumption of the bird.  Even though the law was renewed a number of times the practice of eating these ever-increasingly populous birds became more common.  

The first fried chicken recipe to grace the pages is in the Apicius of Ancient Rome.  The recipe is similar to the one used today in it’s process. 

By the end of the Middle Ages the English preferred their chicken boiled, or poached.  The Scotts, however, took a greater liking to the Roman method of frying chicken meat in hot oil or fat.  This is the dish that was brought later to the future United States of America with the immigration of Scottish workers to the Southern areas of the continent.

As the nation rose and with it the practice of slavery, the dish fell almost into obscurity, favoring instead the more English approach.  The plantation slaves were rarely had any costly meats but were often allowed to raise the plentiful chicken.  The slave population of the South added their contribution to the plain, breaded, fried chicken of the Scotts by adding cayenne and other spices.

Following the abolition of slavery in the United States the “Jim Crow Laws” of the nation continued to oppress and deny service to many African Americans.  The recipe of fried chicken that had become a mainstay during the years of slavery was now useful in the keeping qualities it gave to the chicken.  Many restaurants denied the service of the former slaves and their descendants so while traveling they would have to take their food with them.  The fried chicken would keep for longer periods and was as edible cold as it was hot.

The term “Southern Fried Chicken” was represented with racial comments and slurs through the early half of this century.  Everyone recognized how good it tasted, but continued to associate it with slavery.  “This was commercialized for the first half of the 20th century by restaurants like Sambo’s and Coon Chicken Inn, which selected exaggerated blacks as mascots, implying quality by their association with the stereotype.” (Wikipedia.com)

By this point in history, the rare off-color comment about fried chicken and watermelon is met with a much-deserving low brow and instead the true taste and quality of the dish is more fully appreciated. 

The recipe we are now going to examine in detail comes from the self-proclaimed “#1 Cookbook in America,” (Better Homes and Gardens Books) the “Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.”  This book may not be the most Epicurean, nor  the most professional cookbook in print, but it is easily the most widely used in the home kitchen.  Generations of housewives (and househusbands) pass this book on.  It is still a common wedding gift to the not so kitchen-talented new couples.  If the average person in America wanted to make a standard American recipe, this is where they would turn.

The All-American Standard “Buttermilk-Brined Fried Chicken” Recipe can be found in the poultry section of the cookbook.  The initial step of this recipe is the brining of chicken, we however, are going to go back a step for comparative purposes.

In this troubled economic time, meat of any sort is starting to rise in cost.  The simple act of cutting a chicken up can add several dollars to the purchase price.  The recipe calls for “2 ½ to 3 pounds meaty chicken pieces (breast halves, thighs, and drumsticks).”   These can be purchased in bulk packs or as single whole chickens quartered.  A more cost effective option would to be to purchase a whole chicken and vivisect it into pieces, leaving the bone in for added support.  You have the added benefit of being able to personally inspect the entire chicken for signs of ill health as well.

The first step as is listed in the recipe is to brine the chicken pieces in a plastic bag set in a bowl.  Not only does the plastic bag make cleanup easier, it also helps prevent cross-contamination. 

The brine is made from 3 cups of buttermilk, 1/3 Cup of coarse Salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar.  The buttermilk is an acidic product that helps the proteins in the chicken meat denature.  This unwinding of the protein strand and breaking of peptide bonds helps to tenderize the meat.  The salt, which the author warns “Don’t be surprised by the amount of salt in the buttermilk brine.  It gives the chicken great flavor,” helps draw any remaining blood out of the meat, and imparts flavor into the meat via osmosis.  The sugar helps sweeten the otherwise salty and sour brine, adding a complexity of flavor.  The brine smells strongly of the culture in the buttermilk, but the sweetness also carries through to the scent.

After the chicken pieces have marinated in the brine the suggested length of time, a modified breading station is set up.  In the first station is a mix of 2 cups all-purpose flour, ¼ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon black pepper.  A note after the recipe suggests the addition of 1 ½ teaspoons of ground red pepper to the flour mixture for a spicier breading.  The second breading station contains the second portion of buttermilk, ¾ Cup.

The Chicken pieces are removed from their brine and immersed in the flour mixture for dredging.  This wet to dry step holds the four tight to the chicken.  The dredging layer is thin.

 The pieces are then dipped in the buttermilk.  The flour holds to the buttermilk.  The buttermilk will wash off some amount of the four mixture but this is ok because it thickens the buttermilk into a thin batter over time.  The chicken is then placed back into the flour mixture for final breading.  The breading is now two layers thick and, although coats like a batter, is dry to the touch.  The chicken pieces can be all breaded and set aside for frying.  The double breading and the thickness of the buttermilk made the breading very stable. 

One of the secrets to the success of the recipe is the frying oil and its vessel.  The recipe calls for a “deep, heavy Dutch oven, or kettle or deep fat fryer” to be used to heat 1 ½ inches of cooking oil to 350°F.  The amount and type of oil is important here. 

The recipe simply calls for “cooking oil.”  In this age of health-consciousness, we steer away from fried things.  Even the King of Fried Chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken, changed its name officially in 1991 to the acronym KFC.  It cannot be denied however, that fried food tastes good, perhaps even better.  This is primarily because the fats in the oils used for frying transport the flavors more directly to the taste buds on the tongue. 

We can reduce the ill-effects of cooking oils and fats in our diet by choosing oils and fats that are lower in saturated fat.  The lowest of these commercially available is safflower oil.  It is a very expensive alternative to the more saturated vegetable oils and animal fats, however.  Olive oil is low in saturated fat but has a smoke point too low for deep frying.  Peanut oil runs the risk of causing allergic reactions in persons allergic to tree and ground nuts.  Soy derived oils are another alternative that is now getting a second look.  It is believed by some that an ever-growing prevalence of soy allergies is a result of the over-use of soy bean products.   A good choice that has a high smoke point, is low in saturated fat, and cost effective is canola oil.

The recipe suggests 1 ½ inches of oil in the cooking pot.  This recipe is for a deep fat fried chicken, not a pan fried or fricassee.  The entire piece of meat should be covered in the fat. 

The fat also needs to maintain a temperature between 325°F and 350°F.  This is easily done in an electric fryer or skillet and on the stove is more easily accomplished in a heavy cast iron Dutch oven or deep skillet.  If the fat gets too cool it will not cook the breading quickly enough and the fat will absorb into the breading making it greasy tasting with poor mouthfeel.  If the oil is too hot the breading will overcook before the meat inside has had time to cook completely.

As the pieces of breaded meat are put into the oil, the temperature of the oil will drop slightly so attention must be paid to keep it within ideal range.  The meat neither sinks to the bottom and sits, nor floats to the top like a light doughnut.  Instead, it hovers in the oil, just above the bottom.  The meat bubbles furiously as the water inside the meat is turned to steam and released through the breading.

It takes the larger pieces of meat about 12 to 15 minutes to cook fully. During the cooking the aroma of the hot oil carries the tartness of the buttermilk in the air.  The breading becomes solid within the first minute as all of the liquid from the buttermilk evaporates out. Over the following few minutes a golden brown color begins to appear, first on the bottom of each piece.  The pan should not be over crowded, this is to avoid uneven cooking, and the meat should be turned at least once.

Recipes from the turn of the century had a more hands on view of when the meat was cooked; “The chicken is done when the fork passes easily into it.” (Fisher)  Today most everyone has at least one instant read thermometer.  The temperature should be taken in the thickest part of the meat, without touching bones.  This recipe says that the temperature to look for is 170°F in the breast and 180°F in the thigh or drumstick.  The safe minimum temperature for all parts of chicken are listed at 165°F.  It is unclear why this recipe says to cook the dark meat to a higher temperature than the light meat.  It will, however, take the fattier dark meat longer to reach the safe minimum temperature.

Once the chicken is cooked, it should be drained of excess fat.  The recipe suggests draining on kitchen paper and holding in a 300°F oven until service.  If the fried chicken is covered tightly, the crunchy crispy crust will become soggy and unappealing.

Traditionally in the US we eat fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn, baked beans, or green beans.  The flavors of these sides do not, themselves, enhance the flavor of the chicken, but are instead traditional accompaniments.  Another side item that is popular with fried chicken is coleslaw.  The breading in this recipe uses buttermilk, the tartness of which is brought out by the tartness of the coleslaw.  The subtle seasoning of the meat and the breading make it good with nearly any side item.  In Maryland, fried chicken is often eaten with gravy directly on the meat.  This gravy is made from the frying oil and the brining milk.  A dill pickle slice is often seen as a garnish on fried chicken in New Orleans’ restaurants, a tribute to Austin Leslie.

In the many commercial fried chicken restaurants the method of pressure frying is often used.  In this method the oil and chicken are cooked under the pressure of the steam released from cooking chicken.  This allows the temperature of the oil to be lower and ensures that the meat stays moist as the breading crisps.

A variant of this method is now being studied.  Instead of steam for the element of pressure in the pressure frying method, Nitrogen is being used.  Studies are showing that, “Products fried with nitrogen gas as the pressurizing medium produced samples that were comparable to or exceeding the quality of products generated by frying with steam, as it relates to product crispness, texture, pressed juice, moisture content, fat content and color.” (Ballard)

With the advent of new scientific methods of frying and healthier oils, someday fried chicken might be eaten without concern.  Thanks to the proliferative nature of the chicken, the cheap meat will continue to be eaten globally for thousands of years to come and frying as a method of production will continue to be a favored way for those who value taste over health

Works Cited

Ballard, Tameshia. Application of Edible Coatings in Maintaining. Blacksburg, VA: self published, 2003.

Better Homes and Gardens Books. Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. De Moines, Iowa: Meredith Corporation, 2003.

Fisher, Abby. What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. Bedford MA: Applewood Books, 1881.

Wikipedia.com. Fried Chicken. 7 March 2009. 7 March 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken>.

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Public school teachers in my home state of West Virginia have taken to the picket lines for the second time in as many years in protest of the corrupt State government trying to defund education.  This is a problem that extends to the four corners of our nation and beyond.  The reason is simple.  Smart people are harder to control.  Well-educated, critical-thinking individuals are far less likely to hand over power to people that have nothing but their own power gain in mind.  When the government strips education funding from the masses and then follows up with a message of racism, xenophobia, and hatred, the ignorant masses eat it up with a spoon, while those in power are revered as being sent from God Himself to save them from the enemies that they themselves created. 

I’ve encountered a lot of stupid in my life, everywhere I’ve lived and traveled, but it seems that no place is as Hell-bent on perpetuating the situation as in the Great State of West Virginia.  From the creation of the State, mired in political hoodwinkery, through the empty promises of coal mine and steel mill operators, to today’s political snake oil salesmen, the West Virginia public at large, buys into the pipedreams and get rich quick schemes, all the while handing over what little they have to the men in charge.

Education in the State rates 49^th in the nation. Thank God for Mississippi!  The State was also Trump’s largest supporter in 2016…. Coincidence?  I think not.  What’s worse than that is that he’s methodically and systematically kidnapped, in plain sight, their tax returns, their education funding, their healthcare, and their very welfare, and they still worship the quicksand he walks on because he and his hand-picked play into their hatred and fears.  When you strip away a person’s intellect and intelligence, hatred and fear is all that’s left.

There is a movement on Facebook at the moment to name the West Virginia Public elementary, middle, and high school that you attended and express how that education made you into the person you are today.  Mine reads as follows because, though I love my home, and home it shall always be, I’ve all but given up on them.  They have the power to vote and change things and make the State, and the nation, a better place.  So if they want it this way, fine, let them have it.  I want no part of it.

My support is strongly with the teachers!  Few jobs on this planet can be as tough as being a teacher anywhere, but especially in number 49.  What we need, above all else, is to fund education so that our children can salvage this damaged world we are leaving them.  If education became our nation’s highest priority, some bright young kid would figure out every science, medical, environmental, and social problem we can throw at them, and that would truly make America great again.

That said, I’m afraid that the lessons learned here by this strike, by the law-maker’s reactions to it, and to the polls in the following election, will be how easy it is to control the masses the more that’s taken away from them and that it will bring about another generation of power-hungry fascists.  Like a disease, we have to stop the spread of this ignorance, fear, and hate before it takes over the nation.

I am a product of:
Lavalette Elementary School
Wayne Middle School
Wayne High School

Because of the AMAZING teachers and experiences I had in West Virginia public schools I knew when it was time to cut my losses and leave a State, my family, and my friends, that I love dearly. 
I was educated well enough to see when greed and corruption has completely taken over, at the expense of children and the poor. 
I was educated well enough to see when politicians line their own pockets and coddle their special interests at the expense of the land and the people that make their State home. 
I was educated well enough to see when racism and bigotry win out over love and acceptance. 
I was educated well enough to see when people are willing to cut off their own lives and livelihood in order to embrace that hatred of the unknown. 
I was educated well enough to see that lack of opportunities and boredom lead straight to the bottle…pipe…needle… 
I was educated well enough to see that there was no place for me there and that there probably never would be.
West Virginia will always be my home. I will always look to those mountains for my help. My teachers were some of the bravest, most intelligent, and devoted people this world has seen and they produced another generation of teachers just as brave, intelligent, and devoted to the betterment of the State, one child at a time. 
Until the average mountain voter breaks the century old habit of being hoodwinked and sold false promises by the greedy operators, however, and votes for someone that actually CARES about them and their children and their State, the place is doomed. 
My heart breaks for my friends and family who either cannot leave, or have chosen to stay in order to try to recover what’s left of the place. I commend anyone who has chosen to take on that Herculean (or is it Sisyphean) task. The war against ignorance and greed is a noble one. This battle might be won tomorrow, and it very well may be lost. Another battle might be won in 2020, and it too may very well be lost. My best wishes to the soldiers.

Oh, also, I was educated well enough that I dreamed in French last night. Thank you Mme Oyler!

Getting clear on what I want.

What brings me joy?

In The Secret, author Rhonda Byrne suggests that in order to receive what we want, we need to get clear on what it is that we want.  We want a life of Joy.  What brings us Joy is what we want.  A quick look at the bookshelves in my home office answers that question quite easily.  The books are arranged by category;

• Travel

When I was a kid we would go on annual family vacations, usually to Myrtle Beach, SC, but it didn’t matter if we were going to Charleston, WV to Hawk’s Nest or Mount Olive, KY to get gravel, I loved going somewhere.  When I was nine my family went to Florida, to Disney World.  When I was 12 I went with the Talented and Gifted program to Boston.  In high school, band trips to Atlanta, Williamsburg, and Gatlinburg kept my interest piqued.  Other kids were always happy to get home, but I wanted to see more of the world, much more of it.  After graduation I went back to Florida for three weeks.  The following year I took a train to San Francisco from Huntington, WV, alone.  Though at 19 I was not quite an “adult,” solo travel was fantastic!  That fall there was another trip to San Francisco, a third the following spring.  As I met people and became friends with them, my desire to make more friends and visit more places grew.  On the third trip to San Francisco I met Christoph.  That summer I was on a plane to Germany to visit him.  I spent 28 days backpacking across the continent.  I returned to Europe 4 more times over the following few years.  I made as many trips to California, including Los Angeles in my adventures.  At 26 I went to Israel on my Birthright trip.  It rounded out my travel to 26 states, including Hawai`i, 10 countries, on 3 continents.  Other than a couple trips back to WV to visit family and two trips to Cincinnati to visit friends, I have traveled very little over the past 5 years.

TRAVEL BRINGS ME JOY!  I WANT TO TRAVEL!

• Food

As a kid I loved helping mom in the kitchen.  I loved learning from my great grandmother how to make chicken and dumplings, watching my grandfather fry chicken, and being part of every Sunday dinner at Granny’s.  All West Virginians love food.  In high school I started my own hope chest of kitchen wares.  I would get things like a stand mixer and flatware for gifts.  I would unwrap them, express gratitude, box them back up and store them in the attic until that time I moved out and needed to supply a kitchen.  I also loved to go out to eat, trying new foods, savoring the favorites.  When I was at Marshall University I got a job at the Huntington Museum of Art’s Café Bauhaus waiting tables.  Soon thereafter I became the Café Bauhaus Coordinator.  I did all the menu planning and cooking, shopping and financing.  I made decided to go to culinary school.  Eight years later I went to the Midwest Culinary Institute and graduated Magna Cum Laude.  We moved to Florida and one thing that we regretted about leaving Cincinnati was the fantastic culinary scene.  We wished that we had spent more money eating out while we were there.  I cook regularly, and every meal I produce is delicious and appreciated.  We go out to eat about once a week, but over the past 5 years we find ourselves eating at the same places.

FOOD BRINGS ME JOY!  I WANT TO EXPERIENCE MORE FOOD!

• Language

My mother wanted to be a French translator when she was younger.  She learned the French that one could learn in Wayne County in the early 1970’s.  Even though she was dissuaded from that career path before entering college, she did teach me and my sister the French she knew.  In elementary school I carried a pocket English dictionary with me always.  When I didn’t know a word, I looked it up.  When I was bored, I would read random pages of definitions.  When I started high school, I couldn’t wait to take more French classes.  I took French all four years in high school.  I received an award for Oral Proficiency in French as a senior.  I also fell in love with a little red German-English dictionary I found on my parents’ bookshelves.  My friend Tanya, whose mother was German, and I practiced our German while Crystal kept me up to speed by writing me letters in French.  She loved other languages too and tried to teach me the Phoenician and Sioux words that she knew.  At Marshall I had two more years of French classes.  By the end of my formal education I could watch French movies without subtitles and read Voltaire.  Traveling introduced me to more languages.  I had long held a love for Italian Opera (see below) so learning Italian was a must.  At that point in my life I was studying Art History at Marshall (see below) and I fell in love with Florence, Italy.  I had planned to spend four days in Italy my first trip, but it turned into nearly two weeks.  Converting to Judaism in my early 20’s (again, see below) meant that I had yet another language to learn, Hebrew.  A half a dozen languages are spoken in my place of employment every day still.

LANGUAGES BRING ME JOY!  I WANT TO SPEAK MORE LANGUAGES!

• Writing

My grandmother is an expert storyteller.  Whether the story was of a life experience or a fairy tale of princes and castles, my grandmother could tell you a story and keep you captivated.  I hated the act of writing as a kid, but loved story.  In middle school I had a writing teacher that encouraged me to hone my writing and story-telling skills.  She told me that I was especially good and narrative and that I should do something with that skill.  Every assignment was twice the required length and more in depth and thorough than any other student’s.  I overcame my hatred of the act of physically writing by writing continuously in high school.  I churned out pages of notebooks a day in journal writing.  Over four years I hand wrote nearly a thousand pages of journal.  In college I turned my journal writing into a creative work, a novel.  Chapters of novel came pouring now from my finger tips as I had finally mastered the keyboard.  Friends said that my fingers would twitch in my sleep as I continued to write in my dreams.  I wrote several papers in a creative writing class in culinary school.  Last year I took up the mantle of helping my grandmother turn the stories that she told us as kids into a children’s book.  I started a blog page to share my thoughts and feelings on the world.

WRITING BRINGS ME JOY! I WANT TO WRITE MORE!

• Art and Architecture

In elementary school my mother confessed that she was worried about me because I couldn’t color inside the lines in coloring books.  By middle school my artistic abilities had increased.  I was even asked to be in the middle school’s “Advanced Art” class.  I didn’t take high school art classes, instead I took Mechanical Drawing and AutoCAD classes at the vocational school and a community oil painting class on Tuesday evenings in Huntington.  Architecture and Architectural Drawing was amazing.  I was the best student Mrs. Evans had had in years and she wrote me glowing letters of recommendation.  I bought a drafting table for my home and one weekend after an especially vivid dream, I drew full elevation blueprints for my “dream home.”  Tuesday evenings I produced quality student works that I gave as gifts and have kept and cherished.  At Marshall I studied Fine Arts.  I took every studio class I could get into, drawing, painting, sculpture, and weaving.  Trips to museums were always a highlight of any vacation and how many weekends in Cincinnati were spent.  No trip home to WV is ever complete without a trip to The Huntington Museum of Art.  Over the last 5 years I have gone from painting landscapes to painting kitchens, bedrooms, and porches, but even that gives me joy.  I have crocheted a dozen blankets, and have done some sewing.  I love adult coloring books, too.

I LOVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE!  I WANT TO PRODUCE AND EXPERIENCE MORE ART!

• Photography

When I was ten years old my Granny gave me my first camera.  It took 110 film cartridges, which I went through like mad.  I took pictures of anything that would hold still.  I later upgraded to a 35 mm film camera.  My family was sort of nuts about still photography.  Full bookshelves of picture albums were to be found in my home and in my grandparents’ homes.  Pop always had his ’76 Minolta SLR camera close at hand, my Dad had the next year’s model.  At the Huntington Museum of Art I took beginner and advanced photography classes.  I loved working in the dark room developing my pictures and as an employee there was given free access.  When I traveled (see above) I carried the two Minolta SLR cameras, now mine, with me, one loaded with color film, one with black and white.  I saw beautiful composition everywhere and wanted to capture it.  In the years leading up to our move to FL I took all of those thousands of pictures that I had taken in my lifetime and scanned them and organized them in folders on my computer by date and location.  The hard copies I put in physical albums that now line my shelves.  I swore I would never go digital, but film has become scarce and dark room access even more so.  The last few years my phone has been my camera, always on me and always ready to take color, black and white, sepia, or video.  I upload my pictures onto my hard drive and organize them using the same nomenclature I set up years ago.  As the main folder is entitled, it is truly “My Life In Pictures.”

I LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY!  I WANT TO TAKE AND SHARE MORE PICTURES!

• Music and Theatre

Everyone loves music, but not everyone loves as much music or music as much as I do.  I grew up listening to the music my parents listened to, the same as all children, but early on my introduction to, and love of, other styles of music began to grow.  Not only was the record collection of my parents available to me, but that of my grandparents as well.  I had a radio of my own for as long as far back as I can remember.  I would scan up and down the dials, listen a while, move on.  I found that I loved the oldies, big band, country, and classical.  I liked some contemporary music as well.  West Virginia Public Radio introduced me to classical music.  One year, when I was about 10, before a trip to Myrtle Beach mom gave me a two cassette set of Mozart.  I couldn’t have been more thrilled.  One night on PBS there was a broadcast of La Boheme.  I watched it in my bedroom.  Despite being unable to read the subtitles, I was spellbound.  Public radio also introduced me to “New Age Music” and international music.  In middle school and high school I was in band and later took piano lessons, and learned to read music as if it were just another language.  High school was my age of musicals.  As a child I loved South Pacific and The King and I, now as a senior in high school, it was all about Rent and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Phantom of the Opera.  We didn’t have a drama class in high school.  Our school didn’t even have an auditorium or a stage!  My friends and I would sit around the lunch table and read aloud plays.  I remember an especially dramatic lunch reading of Salome!  Many of the friends I made my senior year of high school were in the drama class at Huntington High School and I saw them all again at Marshall.  Everyone had to take an “appreciation” class their freshman year at Marshall.  I got my dean to allow me to take the introductory theatre class instead of an appreciation class so I could actually learn more about the stage and life upon it.  I learned the basics of Acting as well as Set and Costume Design, and Lighting.  I love reading plays.  I love going to plays.  Whenever possible, vacations have always included a trip to the opera and a performance of a play.  As a child I loved going to church and singing.  Years before I converted to Judaism I started attending services at the synagogue.  I began singing with the choir.  Liturgical music is very moving.  I feel a connection to the divine that goes beyond the words of the music.  To keep services consistent over centuries much of the music is ancient and the chant puts one in the place of the original recitors.  In order to keep the services fresh and new, congregations are always learning new tunes.  I don’t know if I make a pleasing one but I know that I make a joyful noise.  I love reading music scores.  Music plays around me continuously.  Spotify is an amazing friend to have and I recently completed the life-long goal of being able to listen to the same music in my entire home.

I LOVE MUSIC!  I WANT MORE MUSIC IN MY LIFE!

• Gardening and Nature

Working the land has been something that has passed down from ancient ancestry and still burns strong in me.  As a child my family grew a garden, roughly a half an acre of tilled land.  We grew corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, etc.  We ate what we grew, canned and froze what we couldn’t eat.  It was work, nearly every day, all summer long, often backbreaking labor, but the rewards of it cannot be measured.  To sit down to a meal that you produced yourself from the dirt is gratification that cannot come from any other meal.  Always at the edges of the garden we grew flowers, to attract pollinators, to detract deer and other pests, and to add to the beauty of the garden.  Watching a handful of seeds, that I myself collected the year before, turn into flowers delighted me as it had the generations before me.  In high school I cordoned off a section of our back yard and turned it into a flower garden.  Growing that garden, tending it, weeding it, loving it gave me a peace during a very difficult period in my young life that I have never been able to yet replace.  During the summer months, my entire day was spent in the garden.  I worked and weeded it, ate my meals in it, read, napped, lived in that space.  When we moved, I took the flower bulbs, that had been passed to me from my great grandmother, with me and planted them elsewhere where they could grow and bloom for another generation of admirer.  When I moved into an apartment I kept a porch full of plants.  When we bought a house, the first season we lived there a planted a vegetable garden and spent the following 4 years tending to the flowerbeds.  Now I grow pineapples on my porch and every year when the red geraniums are available I plant them in my Granny’s flower pots on the porch.

Growing up in the mountains of West Virginia, nature is your closest friend.  It is everywhere and all around you and inescapable.  Walking the trails was something I did with my father and grandfathers from the time I could walk.  An appreciation of the earth and it’s natural way came very early.  By high school I had begun to gain appreciation for the billions of years of geology than had made my coal filled mountains, the evolution of the plants and animals that lived on them, and the original humans, some of whom were my ancestors, that called them home.  The wildflower collection project in my senior biology class really focused my attention on the flora that surrounded me.  Any chance I could get to get to “the woods,” I took, and still take.  When I met my husband we took many vacations to state parks, with trails, peaceful lakes, quiet nature.  In Cincinnati there were many hundreds of acres of wooded parks to explore just minutes from the house.  Florida has a different kind of nature, but we still love going to the Fern Forest, the Everglades, or the beach and walking the trails.

I LOVE GARDENING AND NATURE!  I WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME IN NATURE AND GROWING THINGS!

• Literature

I was slow to learn to read.  My mother noticed early on that I was better at remembering what a page said and reciting it at will than I was at actually reading the words on the page.  Despite rarely seeing my mother without a book in her hand, I just never got into it as a child.  In middle school I had no choice.  I was assigned the task of reading a novel, any novel, and writing my first book report.  I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh.  I quickly jumped from being a 12 year old, reading a book written for a 12 year old, to a 12 year old, reading books at a 12^th grade level; Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and any other Michael Crichton book I could get my hands on.  By the time I was in high school I had progressed to classic literature.  On the long bus ride from home, to high school, to vocational school, and back every day I read Jane Eyre, which, to this day is my favorite novel.  I love being told a story page after page.  Science fiction and 19^th century English novels are my favorites.  Perhaps a throwback to my mother’s love of Nancy Drew, I also love mystery novels, though I think any book of any genre has to contain a certain level of mystery to be of any quality.  In the fast-paced world I have found myself in at this point in life, I often consume literature in the form of Audio Book.  I can do just about any other activity while listening to an audio book except read or write.  That is multitasking at its best.  In the past five years I have “read” over 60 audio books, including the entire 20 book Dune series, TWICE!  I’ve also recently fallen in love with the book Mrs. Dalloway.  Storytelling and storylistening are one of the greatest expressions of self possible.  You become the characters, you see what they see, feel how they would feel.  There is no greater empathy building exercise than reading.

I LOVE LITERATURE!  I WANT TO READ MORE BOOKS!

• Spirituality

My parents were not very religious at all.  Going to Sunday School and church was never part of their plan for us kids.  My Great Aunt talked mom into letting us go to church with her and her family.  My mother had read us the stories of the Bible, but with equal sincerity had read us Greek and Roman Mythology, and I held both with equal viability.  I was, however, swept up in the passion of the Baptists.  They held passionate beliefs about Jesus, and G-d.  They preached passionately, they spoke passionately, they sang passionately, they believed passionately.  I found that even as a little kid I couldn’t always reconcile the inconsistencies between what was said at the church and what was known by science to be true, but they spoke with such conviction I knew that if I studied hard enough and learned all the scriptures as they had done then I would see how both Truths could be true.  I went to Sunday School, Sunday Church Services, Sunday Evening Services sometimes, Wednesday Awanas Bible Study, Wednesday Evening Church Services, and Vacation Bible School.  It appeared that I was a very religious child until the question of being baptized came up.  I refused.  I had still not found the missing link of reconciliation and had instead found more and more and more inconsistencies.  By 10 years old I was already having a crisis of faith.  When I started 5^th grade I noticed that my teacher gave preferential treatment to the kids that were also in her Sunday School class.  I boldly changed churches from the Baptist doctrine to the Methodist doctrine.  A few things became apparent right off the bat; 1. Methodists were not nearly as passionate about their religion as Baptists, 2. Their god wasn’t as passionate about following rules, 3.  Both doctrines taught a love of their version of god, but Baptists also taught fear, fear of their god’s wrath, fear of the devil’s tricks, fear of death before being Baptized, and 4. I, too, was given preferential treatment in my elementary school class.  I found the first three lessons fascinating.  How could, what was supposed to be the same religion, Christianity, be so vastly different?  I had assumed that all churches said the same prayers, sang the same songs, worshiped the same god.  This was amazing!  Maybe the Methodists had the answers I couldn’t find.  They didn’t.  The Baptists didn’t have the answers because it wasn’t allowed to ask the questions.  The Methodists didn’t have the answers because they just disregarded the inconsistencies.  Then the fourth lesson really took over.  I had learned the political nature of religion.  It didn’t matter what you really believed, or how you worshiped, just so long as you agreed with and followed the people in control.  This was disgusting to me.  Within a year I had stopped going to church completely and was studying the most feared opposite of both churches, Wicca.  Wicca did a fine job of explaining the inconsistencies, they just had a deity for every natural, scientific, occurrence.  All of these gods and goddesses and rituals and all of the equipment needed to practice this religion soon made it too cumbersome and I dropped it.  At this point in life I wondered godlessly for a few years until an event my freshman year of high school forced me into questioning my thoughts, feelings, and sexuality, and by proxy, what I believed in religiously.  At the same time, I was given a copy of The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  I had finally found the link between the science I knew to be true and the religious philosophies that I had been taught and continued to study.  Over the following four years my spirituality increased, though I had no religious practice or doctrine.  When I was working at The Huntington Museum of Art’s Café Bauhaus, I was in constant contact with the Jewish population of Huntington.  Joyce Levy invited me to the bar mitzvah of her grandson.  I went.  I felt more at home in the synagogue on the first visit than I had felt at church after 7 years.  There is a great line in the Siddur, or prayer book, that says, “I am a Jew because it requires no abdication of mind.”  This was a fabulous concept to me.  In my Baptist upbringing questioning what you were told was blasphemous, the Methodists used their religion only to make them feel better in times of need (and really what better use of religion is there?) but never even bothered to question.  Jews were allowed to question, forced into it in fact.  It wasn’t just man’s right to question G-d, it was his job.  How can you know what you believe if you do not question it?  All the answers were there in the Torah, the Mishnah, and the commentaries, and all the answers were interpretable, and re-interpretable, generation after generation, in order to make sense to the person reading in the time that they were living.  There was no “abdication of mind,” no disconnect from reality.  The Jews knew the value and purpose of parable, where its Truth was.  There were, as my husband calls them, “Unicorn and Fairy Stories,” many of the same ones that I had learned in my early Christian upbringing, but the practitioners knew that the universe was billions of years old and no one believed in a literal zooboat.  They understood what I had spent years learning; 1. Knowledge is what you know to be True, for which you have clear empirical data 2. Faith is what you believe to be True, for which there is no clear empirical data, 3. Religion is a set of rites, rituals, and daily practices used to keep Faith in the things that you have no proof of.  A person can know without faith or religion.  A person can know and have faith without religion, but faith falters easily without ritual.  Judaism is overflowing with ritual.  There are rituals regarding everything from waking up to going to bed and every action and bodily function in between.  The purpose of these isn’t and never was to be a codex of secular laws, but rather minute by minute reminders to keep faith in the unseen truth of the Divine.  Over the next 5 years I learned more and more and never had issues reconciling my Knowledge with my Faith, so I converted to Judaism.  I became a Jew.  I never missed a Friday evening service, even on vacation.  At the apex of my living Jewishly I wore a kippah always and kept kosher.  At 26 I took my birthright trip to Israel.  I kept the faith and it kept me.  When we moved to Florida I made it to temple less and less.  I often found myself working…or playing on Shabbat.  Since Rosh Hashanah this past year I have gone regularly to Friday Night Services at Temple Bat Yam.  When I can’t make it or don’t feel like leaving the house, I like the Shabbos candles and watch the live video stream from Valley Temple in Cincinnati.  Also since September I’ve been rebuilding my spiritual life by re-examining the texts that inspired me when I was younger and adding to them the newer “self-help” books and programs.  I am trying to start a Celestine Prophecy Study Group and am actively working with the Law of Attraction.

I LOVE SPIRITUALITY!  I WANT TO BE A MORE SPIRITUAL PERSON!

• Friends and Family

One thing that brings me great joy doesn’t have a shelf in my office.  It is rather something interwoven in all of the books, something that is in all of them and greater than all of them.  My friends and my family bring me joy beyond what can be expressed.  I love the friends I made growing up and through life and in my travels around the world.  I love the friends that I learned languages with and the friends that I had to learn languages to make.  I love the family from whom I began my love of cooking and food.  I love the family that I’ve shared meals of celebration and of loss with.  I love the friends I’ve made in kitchens around the country.  I love the family whose stories I’ve learned and am writing.  I love the friends who read my works with interest, and those that read with a critical eye and mind.  I love the friends who make it into my stories.  I love sharing the enjoyment of Art with friends and especially love making art with friends.  I love sharing my life with my friends through my camera lens.  I love sharing music with my friends.  I love sharing the stage of life with my friends.  I cherish the long walks in the woods with my family, especially my father.  I love the love of gardening that I inherited from many generations.  I love when my friends suggest a good book.  The characters in some books are like old friends.  My Jewish family is my family.  I love sharing the spiritual adventure of life with everyone.

I LOVE MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY!  I WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME WITH MY FAMILY AND THE FRIENDS I HAVE AND MAKE MANY MANY MORE FRIENDS!

When I look back on the last few years it becomes apparent why I have suffered from depression and my life hasn’t moved forward.  I haven’t been chasing joy.  I have done very few of the things that bring me Joy!  I have been living, and I’ve been happy, but I haven’t engaged in the adventure of life.  How can I further my evolution without doing the things that I love to do?  Sure, bills have to get paid, and some of the things on my list cost money, lots of it, but it isn’t necessary for me to figure out the details.  The Universe is abundant.  There is more than enough for everyone to have everything they want.  My goal today was to look for a new job, to try to piece together a career that would incorporate the things on my “Joy List,” but that isn’t necessary.  Now that I am clear on what that list is, all I have to do is focus on going after the things that give me Joy and the rest will fall into place.  All I have learned from life tells me that this is true.  I’m looking forward to proving it.