Our {Recent} Lives in Food

Sabbath Lunches with Friends

A couple of weeks ago, we gleefully accepted an invitation to Sabbath lunch with some dear friends, the husband of Serbian descent in the seminary, the wife of regular American mix in the music department with us.

We discovered that it is the Serbian tradition to eat simply--a bowl of good, hearty soup preceding the meal. In this case, we had a delicious butternut squash soup, made with the obvious squash with a bit of onion (and maybe potato) cooked and blended together. The seasoning was simple as well, the vegetable stock, salt, and a few herbs enhancing but not overpowering the flavors of the vegetables. We've already experimented with recreating this item from the menu.

Hearty bread, a lovely rice casserole, a soy-bean hummus, and a tomato-cucumber salad completed the meal.

Once the food was settled in our bellies, we took a walk in the sunshine, greeted the neighbor kitty, leaped through the harvested corn fields, arriving back at their house to jabber the rest of the day away...until 10:00 p.m.!

Also recently, some friends came into our home for Sabbath lunch. Thanks to an academy classmate of mine, a basic meal of spagetti and garlic bread had a special and very delicious flair.

Food Preservation

You would understand, wouldn't you, the drive to pick as many bushels of grapes as possible in the one hour you have available, only to find that picking the grapes went much faster than juicing and canning? And the urge that came only a day and a half later, when the kitchen STILL wasn't cleaned up, to pick more the next weekend?

You'd also understand how glad we are that, as we used our last jar of applesauce this week (made from the apples pictured above), we have fall break coming up so that we can make at least as much applesauce as last year? And maybe even buy twice as many so that we can make our own apple juice as well? Even though we know it's tons of work?

The Bread of Heaven

Most of all, I hope you understand how it is that a person could be stuck in the same three chapters of Isaiah for about as many weeks, searching out other texts that illumine them and learning life lessons from them every morning and evening--what it means to have Bible study in your life that not only fills your spiritual hunger for TODAY, but also quickens your mind regarding the eternal truths of the great controversy between God and Satan.