Someone Should Build a Statue of This Steer

A few days back, I found an old 2″-thick prime rib eye in the freezer (2010 vintage), and I decided to have it for Sunday dinner. Tonight I thawed it out, salted it down, fried it in butter and salt, and served with garlic butter and a baked potato.

Seriously, this is not normal. Food should not be this good. I have gone beyond the “good cook” phase. I think I am entering the “warped evil food genius” category.

I have never had restaurant food this good. I have never had restaurant food within a letter grade of this good.

The outside of the steak was crunchy and salty, with all sorts of what foodies call “umami.” The inside…buttery-garlicky-agey-tasting fat poured off it every time I cut a bite. It had the perfect touch of aged-prime-rib funk. I overcooked it slightly–I swear my thermometer plays tricks on me–and it was still about three light years beyond the farthest point a Ruth’s Chris steak can see with the Hubbell Telescope. Or even the Hubble Telescope, which, unlike the Hubbell Telescope, exists.

Frigging middle-aged spelling.

What am I supposed to do with this? I can’t eat these things. Not regularly. I would die in a month and a half. I have no practical use for this. I feel like a guy who plays better than Horowitz, but only on the spinet in his aunt’s attic.

Wheeeee. I am still enjoying that steak. Just thinking back on it gives me a thrill. And the potato was even better, especially when daubed in the beef juice and butter.

Surely–SURELY–God has a purpose in this. It makes no sense otherwise.

Time to call Mike and make him jealous.

These are a Few of my Favorite Things

People have complained that I don’t post recipes any more. See what you think of this one. I just tried it. I thought it would just be tolerable, but it was excellent.

INGREDIENTS
1 pork tenderloin (3/4 pound)
3 thin slices bacon
1/2 cup (packed measure) dried Granny Smith or other tart apples
Korbel brandy
1 powdered chipotle pepper
sorghum syrup or molasses
4 cloves fresh garlic
salt
pepper
butter

Open the tenderloin up so you can stuff it. You can butterfly it or spiral-cut it into a flat sheet. Salt and pepper both sides. Drizzle about a tablespoon of sorghum on it. Scatter the chipotle on it.

Chop up the apples and soak them with brandy. Fry the bacon until browned but not crunchy. Remove the bacon and fry the apples in the grease, plus a couple of teaspoons of butter. When the apples start to get done, throw in the garlic (sliced). fry until it’s cooked but not very brown. Toss in the bacon (chopped) and fry to warm it up.

Pile the fried stuff on the pork and wrap it up with twine. Salt and pepper the outside. Dump it in a covered Pyrex dish. Bake at 300 for about one hour. Remove the lid, baste with the drippings, and drizzle a little sorghum on top. Remove most of the drippings. Bake until it browns. Make sure you got all the pan grease in there.

Reduce the drippings until you like the flavor. Remove the twine from the pork and slice it across the long axis.

Serve with the drippings.

This could be made way better, but I was only cooking what I had lying around the house.

I don’t really like tenderloin. Today’s pigs are skinny and dry, and tenderloin is dry to begin with, and it’s dark. You could make a much tastier version with a better cut, like a shoulder roast. You could also brine the tenderloin. Really, though, it’s crap. Pigs have a tenderloin, and then they have those big loin things center-cut chops come from. I don’t know the first thing about pig anatomy, but I know the big light-colored loins taste better.

You could also work stuffing into it, which would be insanely good. And it would be good to top it with some onions sauteed at the end of the baking cycle. I wonder what dried peaches would be like.

Brown raisins would have been good in there. Some extra acidity could be a plus. I considered adding a touch of lime juice. I think a little orange juice mixed with lime juice might work.

Maybe you could use a boned duck! Oh, man!

Here’s what I did for a side:

INGREDIENTS
6 ounces (best guess) red and yellow peppers
8 ounces broccoli florets
2 cloves fresh garlic
salt
pepper
cheap olive oil (“for sauteeing and grilling”)

Heat a cast iron skillet on medium-high and add 2 ounces oil. Salt and pepper the vegetables. Add the vegetables and fry for maybe 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want a little browning here and there. Toward the end, throw in the garlic and keep frying until it’s cooked but not brown and bitter.

This sounds pretty dull, but it was excellent. I wouldn’t add a thing to it. Well, I might conceivably sneak a tiny amount of butter into the finished product.

Never use extra-virgin olive oil, except in salad. It costs a lot, and it tends to smell and taste bad when it gets too hot. I do not understand these people who say “EVOO” all the time and talk about extra-virgin oil like it’s God’s gift to the culinary arts. I rarely use it for anything. I used to use it, and it ruined my food. It’s swell on salad, or in applications where it doesn’t get too hot, but that’s about it. You really want to keep it away from pizza. Trust me on this.

Cheap olive oil is a phenomenal tool. It lends a buttery taste to food. It has a high flash point. It doesn’t have the fish stink of canola. It has versatility because it has almost no flavor. You can get a gallon for something like ten bucks. I don’t know why no one talks about it.

Okay, I posted a recipe. I’m done.

How Good Can it Get?

I wrote a long piece about the crazy “Seven Blessings of Passover/Pentecost/Atonement” doctrine that is sweeping charismatic churches, but something told me to keep it to myself for now. So instead I’m writing about PIZZA.

My pizza gets better and better and BETTER. Over and over, I find myself saying, “This is the best pizza I’ve ever had.” Every time it happens, I think it can’t get significantly better, but I’m always wrong. I’m positive God gives me food ideas. There is no other way to explain it. If the food were merely great, I could say it was me, but it’s so good it’s beyond explanation. I can’t do that.

A while back I made sourdough starter and froze portions of it in foil. Last night I thawed one out. I would say I got about 100 grams of usable stuff from it. I mixed it with my regular dough recipe, with the yeast reduced by two-thirds, and I stuck it in the fridge overnight. This morning I let it warm up, formed it into a crust, and let it rise all day.

I got Boar’s Head whole-milk mozzarella from the grocery deli counter because I was out of delicious Costco mozzarella, and I used Bel Gioioso provolone. Ordinarily I use frozen cheese, and it’s cheap and excellent, but freezing reduces the quality a little, so it’s not perfect. And deli-counter mozzarella is the only decent substitute I’ve found for Costco cheese.

I topped the pie with quartered Hormel pepperoni slices. I am not a pepperoni fan, because it makes pizzas sour, greasy, too spicy, and orange, but for some reason it WORKS with my recipes. Like you would not believe. So I cut 30 slices in quarters and used them.

I generally use very fresh dough, because it’s fast and convenient. The resulting crust is way better than anything you can buy around here, so I’m satisfied with it for most purposes. But sourdough culture improves the texture of dough, and I suspect letting dough sit overnight is also beneficial. I don’t have the patience to use pure sourdough for an ordinary meal, so I made the little starter packets. You get a lot of the improvements, and it’s easy.

Anyway, I made my usual sauce and put it on top of layers of provolone and mozzarella, and I baked it in the usual way. I somehow ended up with about one and a half times the right amount of pepper in the dough, and that worried me, but it actually made the pizza better. The crust was chewier, and the added pepper really brought out the fruity flavor of the sauce. The aftertaste was almost like cherry pie.

That deli cheese melts much more smoothly than anything frozen. It spread out so well some of it went off the edge of the pie. That’s a plus, though, because you get little bits of crunchy cheese at the edges.

Geez, it was good. I’m still reliving it in my mind.

What is the purpose of this? It’s too good not to have a purpose. If I couldn’t make my own pizza, and I knew of a shop that used this recipe, I’d stand in line to eat there.

The Vessels of the Temple are not Man’s Spittoons

Last night I had some fun. My chef friends Liz and Donna volunteered to prepare food for a fundraiser at my church, and they asked me to help, so I got to work in the big commercial kitchen Donna manages. There were about seven of us, all told.

I didn’t do anything all that interesting. I followed other people’s recipes. I chopped herbs and made herbed cream cheese spread, and then I grilled a whole bunch of chicken breasts and sliced them into hors d’oeuvre portions. I also got to use a deep fryer for the first time in my life. We have one at church, but I never fooled with it. Last night I used it to make piles of fried plantain slices.

This kitchen uses knives provided by a service. They come and pick up the knives every week, and they replace them with sharp ones. I didn’t bring any of my own knives, so I grabbed a 10″ chef’s knife off the wall and went to work on the herbs. I was very impressed. It took an edge very quickly, and it made short work of the herbs, much as a Chinese cleaver would.

I decided to check the brand and look into it further. The name is “Mundial.” It’s a European company, but they manufacture in Brazil to keep prices low. They’re not fancy. The blades are thin and somewhat flexible, and they have plastic NSF handles. But they seem to work extremely well.

Anyone familiar with this blog knows I have had bad experiences with expensive Japanese knives. They chip easily, they can’t be put in a dishwasher, and they cost a fortune. I think they’re a complete waste of money. My favorite chef’s knife is a $22 Forschner, and my favorite all-around knife is a carbon-steel Chinese cleaver that ran me $9. I love a good cheap knife.

I found the Mundials on Amazon, and I decided to try a cleaver, a santoku, and a 14″ slicer. I’m hoping the cleaver will work as well as my Chinese job, with the added convenience of stainless. We’ll see.

I don’t know if the fundraiser will work. I got an invitation, but I’m not going. I will make a total of four trips to or for church this week. I felt like that was plenty. On the way to the commercial kitchen, I got a text asking me to start teaching a class in a discipleship program. I’d love to do it, but I can’t do everything.

The church has a gigantic mortgage, and I don’t think there is any possibility that we will be able to pay it off, so the fundraiser doesn’t seem like a good idea. I think we would be better off moving to a building we can afford. Most people who attend the church are poor or middle class, and the size of the congregation (and therefore the offerings) is limited by the size of the sanctuary. It’s very obvious that this is not a good situation.

I don’t think God is going to swoop in and save the day, because we don’t take care of the things he has already given us. We’re doing many, many things badly instead of doing the important things well.

We’re also having problems because we attract the wrong kind of people. We’re using secular music and prizes and all sorts of other tricks to get people to show up. The problem with this is that we get people who want to party, while we offend serious Christians. Over and over, people come to me complaining. They hate the loud music. They find the rap beats offensive. I can’t defend these things. I just tell them not to worry about the services, because they can get what they need in the prayer groups.

We have something like 2,000 young people coming to the youth services every week, but an awful lot of them come to socialize, not to meet God. Let’s face it. They come to get laid. Kids have always used churches as cheap substitutes for clubs, and we are helping them by making our church as much like a club as possible.

Some people believe that anything that gets people to come to church is a good idea. They say, “It’s all about souls.” That’s wrong. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it grows a church full of weak people who will eventually fail. A human being is like a seed in dry soil. When you receive salvation, you’re like a seed that has sprouted. If you don’t get the right teaching after you sprout, you rot. You can’t grow a healthy church with stunted Christians who never grow up.

I believe we’re trading strong future souls for the weak ones we’re getting now. These people won’t have power in their lives. They won’t be blessed. They won’t have anything going on that will make other people want what they have, so they will be very poor evangelists. If we taught people to live for God and walk by faith, and if we made them understand that they are not to conform to the world, great things would happen to them, and down the road, they would be so blessed the unsaved would find their testimony compelling.

We worry too much about pleasing men. We never hear anything about the anti-Christian things our President does, because so many people in the church think he’s great. We have given special treatment to rappers, and I don’t mean the Christian kind. We hear a lot about the great things God will do for us, but we don’t hear much about getting in touch with him personally and submitting to him, and we don’t hear much about his angry side. God kills people. God gives people cancer. Sin and iniquity are still very dangerous. We don’t talk much about that. That puts the people in danger.

What can you do? No church is perfect. Some churches let the mob lead. Others reject the Holy Spirit. Every church has a weakness. At least our people acknowledge the Holy Spirit’s existence. He still has a foothold.

I would like to move north and find a church where I would not be faced with the amazing paradox of liberal Christians. How anyone can claim to serve God while voting for enemies of Israel, the church, God-given sex roles and the unborn is beyond me. People who know God well and study his ways inevitably become conservative, because the left is doing everything it can to oppose God. I never imagined I would see a charismatic church were so many people preach one way and vote another.

I know many wonderful people at my church, and I would really miss them if I left, but I know there will eventually come a point where the church changes or I move on.

God is still doing powerful things in my prayer group. More people are praying in tongues and learning about the Holy Spirit. The other day someone who has been heavily into carnal effort came to me and started talking about the way prayer in tongues was changing his life. This is someone who has become extremely intolerant of any kind of dissent, so it surprised me to see him talking this way. He hasn’t been learning this in the sermons, I guarantee you.

My friends are I are seeing more and more blessings in our lives. That will continue. We are getting more revelation. We are getting help with our character flaws. God is bringing people to us and slowly increasing our numbers. Maybe a time will come when there are enough of us to draw attention to God’s power, so others will turn away from baby food and try what we’re having.

The other night I felt God’s presence more strongly than I have in twenty years. I could physically feel the Holy Spirit moving in my body. For a time I felt a strange pressure in my head, and it reminded me of a tree root growing in a rock and splitting it. For a long time, I’ve been saying that the Holy Spirit is the living water that feeds the mustard tree within each of us, which is the kingdom of God. I’ve said it grows and splits the rock and changes us from inside. When I felt it inside me this week it struck me as funny. I felt that God was reminding me that my head is one of the hardest rocks there is.

What is happening to us is as real as dirt. I guess that means persecution is coming. Oh, well. I’ve started keeping a diary of revelations that come to me, and here is the latest thing I felt God was saying to me: “Satan isn’t that tough.” It doesn’t mean Satan is weak or stupid, or that we don’t have to give him the same respect we would give loaded guns or rattlesnakes. It just means he isn’t as hard to beat as you might think, and that you should expect to win. It should not surprise you. He has made himself seem bigger than he is, but he’s just a mortal spirit. He is very small compared to our God. He has an end, and we don’t.

I have to order parts for my next tube amp now. Hope this material is useful to someone.

Too Good for This Earth

Here are some cell phone photos of yesterday’s lunch extravaganza. It’s amazing what you can do when God is in control. Best pizza I’ve ever had, and that’s saying a lot.

The big orange thing is a mango cheesecake, made with homegrown mangoes. The little round things are obviously pineapple upside-down cakes made with tons of butter. The pizzas…are pizzas. Too bad we didn’t get a shot of the Hawaiian we made.

Zechariah 4:6

Samson yanked the gates of Gaza out of the ground and carried them up a hill. He beat a thousand idiots to death with the jawbone of an ass. How did he do these cool things? Easy. The Spirit of God rested on him.

In the movies, Samson is always a big steroid addict with no neck. In real life, Samson was probably about five two, with a thirty-inch chest and bandy legs. Seriously, why would God pick Victor Mature? When it comes to pulling city gates out of the ground, Victor Mature is no better than Burgess Meredith. The gates aren’t going anywhere without something extra. I think God picked someone who would make the Holy Spirit look good, so I really doubt Samson looked like Lou Ferrigno.

Why bring this up? Today I returned to my church’s cafe and made pizza and garlic rolls, and I brought two cheesecakes. My friend Liz brought individual pineapple upside-down cakes plus salad and chocolate-dipped strawberries. We were cooking for the pastor from the biggest AG church in the US. He works in a city known for pizza. And my pastor said we “blew his mind.” So you could say we did a good job.

In the past we were limited to pepperoni pizza and cheese pizza. Today I decided to open up the throttle. We made cheese, pepperoni, sausage, pizza with multiple toppings, and Hawaiian. I arrived at church at 8:15. We didn’t serve until 11:45. I didn’t eat until after 2:00. When I finally got to try the pizza, my skull nearly exploded. A shock wave of ecstasy shot up to the ceiling and rippled across the acoustic tiles. It was stunningly good. I have never had pizza like that.

The cheesecake…I made it with homegrown mangoes, of a cultivar I chose for its deliciosity. These things taste like ice cream, right off the tree. After I got home, a buddy texted me and said, “That mango cheesecake is probably the best thing I’ve ever eaten!!”

The pineapple cakes were perfect. She made them with real butter and lots of whatever that sauce is that gives pineapple upside-down cake its heft. Right on target. Could not have been better.

I don’t think I can cook as well as I cooked today. In fact, I didn’t do all the cooking. I got two young people, Travis and Eboni, to show up and help, and once I showed them what to do, they cranked it out like General Motors. Okay, bad analogy. Like Ford. Or some other company that actually functions well without socialist handouts.

We had a shortage of pizza pans, so we didn’t really have the equipment to keep pizza crusts rising fast enough to meet demand. Somehow, though, we ended up with three extra pizzas and some extra dough portions that had to be thrown out. I don’t know what happened, because I was too busy to watch.

It seems like things went much better than they should have.

I think it’s because of the Holy Spirit counterrevolution that has been going on among my friends. We commit to pray in tongues a lot, and we try to listen to the Holy Spirit. Things just plain go well for us. Life goes together like a dovetail drawer. So I feel like Samson. I shouldn’t be able to do the things I do.

We got to do the things I wanted to do when I tried to start this ministry last year. I made everyone pray in the Spirit for ten minutes, with worship music, as soon as we were able to get a moment. In my opinion, that is what assured our success, and it made an impression on my crew, whom I have been trying to reach for quite a while.

I don’t know if we’ll ever do it again, but it was a blast. I am so grateful. I know I’m not the reason it worked.

If you want what I have, do what I do. That’s all it takes. It’s not genetics. It’s not random chance. It will work for you just like it works for me. In many instances, better.

Wonder what great things will happen during the rest of the week.

Still Standing

As always, too much is going on to write about.

Some of you know I used to cook at my church. I made everything from scratch. I cooked pizza and garlic rolls, cheesecake, pies, brownies, and all sorts of other stuff. But some people there treated me so badly and decreased my duties so much, I realized it was wrong to reward them and waste my time by continuing to work there.

Since then, the cafe has not done well. Can’t tell you everything. It’s closed these days, except for a few hours on the weekends. Everyone who gave me a hard time and treated me disrespectfully is gone. None of them have ever apologized or admitted wrongdoing.

Last week, the pastor called and asked for a “huge favor.” He knows a pastor from a gigantic church in another city. That city is known for pizza. The other pastor sent my church four frozen pizzas from a well-known pizzeria. They sat in the freezer for a long time. When the other pastor scheduled a visit, our staff cooked the pizzas and ate them, so they would be able to say something about them when our guest arrived.

Our pastor thought it would be fun to make pizza for him, in our own kitchen. So tomorrow I cook for about 35 people.

I’m making Sicilian pizza and garlic rolls, plus two mango cheesecakes. One cheesecake is strictly for my team; the guests don’t get any. We’re also having desserts and pineapple upside-down cake.

I have helpers.

I got driven out of the cafe just as I was getting moving on a ministry there. A number of young people wanted to work with me, and I was going to show them how to cook. We were also going to ground everything in prayer. God provided me with a friend who is a successful chef, and she was going to help. I was doing all this at the urging of people above me in the volunteer structure and staff.

After I was asked to cook this big meal, I started looking for people to assist. Who showed up? You can guess. My chef friend was on board in about ten minutes, and she volunteered to leave work and bring salad and desserts. I also got the two young people who had been most interested in learning to cook.

On Saturday we cleaned the kitchen until it was safe to use, which was a horrible chore, and we made a pizza and some rolls. We had a fantastic time. Only the kids showed up. They did an excellent job, and they’re coming back tomorrow morning to help again.

The pizza we made was astounding. It was just pepperoni pizza, but it was better than anything I’ve had in a restaurant. And we’ll do even better tomorrow.

Right now I have cream cheese warming up for two cakes. I’m also going to prepare topping ingredients for the pizzas. I may also make a coconut flan.

I don’t know where this is going. The church is faring poorly, so I don’t know if the cafe will exist in six months. Nonetheless, it’s very rewarding to be able to accomplish the most important parts of the job. I’ll be able to improve my relationship with the people who are helping, and we will draw closer to God. And it’s nice to be vindicated, without lifting a finger to defend myself or harm those who mistreated me.

It’s not about vengeance or seeing obnoxious, carnal people suffer. It’s about God, being faithful and powerful to establish the things he begins.

Needless to say, some of the tools I got for the cafe have been lost, stolen, or destroyed. Here’s a great lesson for Christians: never give your church anything, unless you know they’ll make good use of it. The pizza stones that used to be in the cafe are gone, so I brought one from home, and today I bought a second one. Am I leaving them at church when I’m done? Forget it. I’m not a moron. I’ll have one stone to use, and I’ll have a spare. If the church needs pizza, I’ll throw them in the truck and take them for a visit.

It’s funny how things are working out. Someone else ended up paying for the cheese for the pizzas. When I went to Gordon Food Service to get flour, they only had one bag of the kind I wanted, and it had a tiny hole in it. A cute girl came over, put tape over the hole, and marked the bag down 50%. Today when I went to get the second stone, the store had stopped stocking them. I told God I was not going to any more stores. On the way out, I saw the last stone on a clearance rack.

I haven’t done much to make this work. People and things are coming to me. That’s how it should be. I would just mess it up, if I got in there in the flesh and started mud-wrestling. If the whole event falls through, it’s not my concern. God started it. If he wants it to happen, he’ll finish it.

In other news, my buddy Mike is divorced now. He met a nice lady, and they’re attending a charismatic church. Her dad owns a dog track that has legislated out of business. The dog track contains a fully equipped pizzeria. She also owns a storefront that needs a business. Mike is planning to open a place that sells pizza, rolls, and my cheesecake. How about that? He says I have to go up and help get it started.

I hope things go well tomorrow. I am already looking forward to resting on Wednesday.

Them’s Fightin’ Words!

A certain blogress grand diva has impugned my culinary skills by pointing out that my recipe for BBQ beans starts with canned beans and ketchup! Oh, the treachery! She says her beans have to be cooked from scratch!

You know, there are some things you shouldn’t try to cook from scratch. Try making Rice Krispies Treats from scratch some day. Not going to happen. I make my own guitars, amps, bullets, beer…but dang, I’m not going to make my own ketchup or grow beans again. The climate down here kills everything. I couldn’t grow tomatoes if I wanted to.

I respect the whole SHTF movement, but you pretty much have to take over a county if you really want to be self-sufficient. Even in the old days, people bought things like sugar, coffee, and flour.

Anyway, I will defend my beans to the death. They are totally righteous.

Forget Wind Farms; This is the Real Thing

I want to thank everybody who commented on the last piece I wrote. It shocks me to learn that God has managed to impact people through this site. It’s very encouraging, and it makes me feel that my effort has not been wasted, even with the drastic dropoff in traffic.

It’s funny; whenever I mention my lack of enthusiasm for blogging, people seem to get the idea that I’m threatening to quit. I don’t have any reason to quit, and the piece wasn’t about quitting. Maintaining this site at the present pace requires virtually no effort, and the hosting bill is paid, so I have no plans to disappear.

All sorts of stuff is happening in my life. It’s hard to decide what to write about.

Here’s something good. Maybe from a selfish standpoint, this is the most important thing that has happened. I think I now walk in the spiritual gift of joy.

As readers know, I am a big Holy Spirit man. I don’t believe human effort amounts to much. Human beings can’t even diet successfully, yet somehow, we think we create our success and our blessings. Does that make sense? I think it’s stupid. I believe every good thing–every breath–comes from God’s generosity. I think we are powerless to affect our circumstances in meaningful, lasting ways. I believe that only the transforming power of the Holy Spirit can improve us. And I think this comes through the baptism with the Spirit and prayer in tongues.

In the first letter to Timothy, Paul said, “For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.” He was talking about self-denial and hard work. He was talking about the things we do for God in our own strength. And he didn’t say these things were “pretty important” or even “a little less important than prayer and faith.” He said they profited little. He used a word meaning something like “puny” or “disesteemed.”

Think about that. “Puny”! That’s you, driving the church bus for 20 years. That’s you, swearing off all forms of alcohol. That’s you, becoming a nun or a priest and giving up normal, healthy sexual activity. That’s you, making a ridiculous pilgrimage on your bloodied knees, carrying a cross you made in your garage. This is what your extraordinary effort and self-sacrifice amount to, when they’re not initiated by the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, Paul could cure someone of cancer and lead him to eternal life by obediently handing him a handkerchief.

Seriously, think about it. What do you think God prefers? The hard work you do after trying to GUESS what he wants, or the easy jobs you do after you wait for him to guide you?

Mainstream Pharisees–oops, I meant “Christians”–will never agree with me on this. People love to punish themselves. They love to feel cleansed by suffering. They love to think they earned God’s forgiveness, and that they’ve obligated him through their wondrous works. And they like doing what they want to do for God, instead of the scary things he might tell them to do, if they listened!

They hate to give that stuff up. The sad (he said facetiously) truth is, that stuff is all “dung,” to use Paul’s expression. Worthless. You can’t earn anything. You are a welfare recipient. God owes you nothing, nothing, NOTHING. You will never be able to make up for the evil you’ve done, and you will never be able to stand in God’s presence without shame. Not in this lifetime.

The up side of this is that good things come from shame. We give shame a bad rap, but it’s really a blessing. It gives you perspective. It helps you not to get carried away by your own super-amazing holiness. It reminds you where you came from. It keeps gratitude and humility alive in you. Never criticize shame. It’s like criticizing penicillin.

Anyway, I keep seeing my understanding of the Holy Spirit and tongues confirmed. Now that I think about it, I have never seen it disproven in even the smallest way. I get confirmation after confirmation. I believe that the more you pray in tongues, the more God makes you similar to him, if you are willing to be changed. Part of the change is the fruit of the Spirit, and one of the fruit is the gift of joy.

I don’t think “joy” refers to bizarre religious ecstasy of the type that leads to you becoming the inspiration for gaudy concrete statues people put on their lawns. I don’t think it means you stand around with your hands spread out, staring at heaven with goofy look on your face. I think it means you feel like you’re winning. You have energy. You have gratitude. You have positive expectations which flow from a supernatural source inside you. You constantly sense the too-wonderful things God is doing for you. And this makes you strong. Like Nehemiah said (or like Ezra said, depending on who wrote the book), the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Let’s see what the Greek says. In Galatians 5:22, it’s something the Greeks call “chara,” and it is defined as something like cheerfulness, or being calmly happy or well-off. In Nehemiah 8:10, the Hebrew word is “chedvah,” which means “gladness” or “rejoicing.” This works for me. When I feel what I believe to be supernatural joy, I feel calm and assured, and I feel that the reason for the joy is God’s generosity. In other words, I feel sure God is at work doing great things for me. That makes me “well-off.” Therefore I have the sensation of rejoicing. The word “rejoice” is like “celebrate.” It suggests happiness that comes after something good occurs. That’s what I feel. It’s a reaction. I react to the good things God has done for me, and the good things my faith says he is DOING for me (and for others).

I feel this a lot of the time. I highly recommend it. It’s much better than caffeine, cocaine, Ritalin, or even (this is high praise) a good steak followed by cheesecake. It’s better than the hypomania I used to feel as a result of my peculiar brain chemistry.

I have often said that I believed drug abuse was a sad effort to fake the sensations God wants to put in us supernaturally, and now I believe it more than ever. I’ve tried antidepressants. I’ve tried alcohol. I’ve had those wonderful pills dentists give people after they pull their wisdom teeth. This is better, and it doesn’t come with a crash or a rebound. It’s like a stock market average that keeps going UP and UP and UP. It’s clean. It’s safe. It’s beneficial. It’s hypoallergenic, gluten-free, low in carbon emissions, and organic. It IS addictive, but that turns out to be a plus.

When you read the Bible, you see some pretty ridiculous examples of happy behavior. For example, Paul and Silas got flogged, which is a horrible, bloody, scarring torture, and then they were thrown in a filthy jail. Instead of venting and whining, which is what I would have done, they started singing and praising God, even staying up late to do it. And then God released them from jail, and the jailer and his house got saved, and everybody REJOICED. They must have been nuts. When I see things like this, the only explanation that makes sense to me is the supernatural gift of joy.

To most people, joy is…well, let’s be real. To many people, joy is a rumor. Something they will never experience. Everyone experiences misery, but not everyone knows joy. Anyway, to people who occasionally have happiness, joy is generally linked to circumstances. You land a great job. You find someone to have sex with on a given night. You manage to get a high enough credit limit to charge a $2000 Chanel purse. Stupid things like that. To a Spirit-filled Christian, joy is different. It wells up inside you. It isn’t external circumstances, reaching inside you and transforming you. It’s your Spirit-given understanding of your circumstances, seemingly reaching out from inside you and transforming THEM.

Our perception of the world around us changes because of the work of the Spirit within us. We know that all things work together for our good, regardless of how they look at a given instant. And the scripture that confirms this is about prayer in tongues! See for yourself! Some preacher on TV or a disk pointed this out to me the other night. It’s in Romans 8:

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

We are to be conformed to the image of Jesus. How do we do that? By gaining his power and his character or righteousness. What is his power? The gifts of the Spirit. What is his character? The fruit of the Spirit. How do we get these things? Prayer in tongues! “The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us.” Incidentally, the Spirit is actually a “he,” not an “it,” but still. We are the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, and we are expected to grow to be like him, and tongues make this happen.

The older I get, the better I feel. Life gets better and better and better, and it won’t even stop when I die. Good things keep happening to me. My enemies can’t get at me, because as a member of God’s team, I now have reason to expect to be defended. My dreams are coming true. I’m not swimming in oatmeal any more. Life is no longer one step forward followed by five steps back.

I don’t understand non-charismatics who claim to be full of joy, just because they’re forgiven and somewhat cleaned up. I am suspicious of them, truthfully. I think sometimes Christians exaggerate their happiness. They feel like they SHOULD be happy, so they pretend. Maybe they think that admitting they’re not happy is insulting to God. Or they feel that they have to claim to be happy, in order for their faith to bring them happiness. I don’t know how other people feel, or whether their joy is real, but I know I’m telling the truth. I believe this is a supernatural gift, so I am here to testify. See if it works for you.

Cheap, Easy Feast Guaranteed to Please

Oh, man. How good can food GET? I am starting to wonder.

I felt like I was insulting God’s gift by cooking halfheartedly, so I stepped it up. And I’m also rotating out my survival supplies, so that means I’m going through corn meal and dried beans. The result? A weekly soul food dinner. It’s whitey soul food, but it’s still soul food.

Yesterday I made white beans with ham hocks, plus cornbread and kale. I don’t know why my mother wasn’t big on kale when I was a kid. We ate a lot of collards and turnip greens. Kale is wonderful, provided you cook it right.

I used the cornbread recipe I posted yesterday. You really need to try it. You won’t be sorry. I just had two slices, and I’m borderline high.

I reheated the beans and cornbread today. Naturally, they’re better than they were yesterday. And I made fresh collards. There is a company called Glory, and they make wonderful greens, ranging from fresh to canned. I went with their bagged collards today because the price difference between bagged and bundled was so small.

Look, try it. Just trust me.

BEANS

1 big ol’ bag dried beans (I like navy, great northern, and pinto beans)
1 sliced white onion, softball-sized
1-5 cloves mashed garlic
salt and pepper to taste
2-4 ham hocks

Dump the beans in a big pot the day before you cook them. Rinse the filth out of them. Leave enough water to cover them, plus three inches or so. Cover them and let them soak overnight. I like to dissolve a Beano tablet in the water. Someone told me the gas in beans comes largely from the skins, so the Beano should be able to make a difference. I don’t know if it’s true, but I am getting wonderful results.

In the morning, drain and rinse the beans. This is also supposed to reduce gas. Bury the hocks in the beans. Chop the onion and toss it in with the garlic. Add lots of pepper. If your hocks are salty, you may want to omit the salt until later.

Simmer this stuff for several hours, and make sure you boil it down so the sauce is thick. If fat forms on the surface, scoop it out with a ladle and discard it. You won’t lose more than half a cup of bean sauce if you’re careful. Adjust the salt and pepper.

GREENS

1 pound chopped greens
2 thick slices bacon, nuked until browned, with grease
1-4 cloves mashed garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1-2 teaspoons butter
12 ounces water

I saw that Paula Deen was using butter in her greens, and I had to follow suit. I try to sneak a little butter into everything. You just plop the whole list of ingredients in your pressure cooker, get it up to temperature, and cook at 16 psi for 15 minutes. Open it up and boil the water down until it’s green and soupy. This is enough greens for two hungry people. If you don’t use a pressure cooker, you may have to cook the greens for two or more hours. You want them wilted, not crunchy. They have to totally surrender and mingle with the pork.

I nuke the bacon in a Pyrex cup covered by a saucer.

If you can stand it, refrigerate everything and don’t eat until the next day. Slice a ripe tomato and a big onion and serve them on the side.

You can’t eat this in a civilized manner. You have to let it mix up a little, and you have to make sure everything gets on the cornbread. If you don’t sop, you’re blowing it.

When you reheat the cornbread, it’s okay to use the microwave as long as you finish off with 5-10 minutes in a 350° oven.

This is just fantastic. Food doesn’t get much better. Eat the fat on the ham hocks. You can always fast tomorrow.

I have to credit God with the improvements I’m making in this stuff. It’s amazing.

Better Cornbread

I decided I was too hidebound in my approach to cornbread, so I made the changes I knew had to be made. The result is beyond wonderful, but still your basic Appalachian non-sweet, white-meal cornbread.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups self-rising white corn meal
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups milk
1/4 cup bacon grease
3 tbsp. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar

Heat a seasoned #6 cast iron skillet in your oven at 450. Pour the bacon grease in and give it five minutes or so. You want it hot enough to smoke. Mix all the other stuff (except the butter, which you should melt) in a heat-safe bowl.

Pour the hot grease into the batter. Pour the butter in. Stir thoroughly. Pour into the hot skillet and bake at 450 for around 22 minutes. Make sure it’s low enough in the oven to keep the bottom of the skillet hot. This will brown the bread.

Flip the pone out, right it, and eat!

This is less crumbly and more flavorful than the version with no butter and only 1 egg.

There is no reason why you can’t add even more of the good stuff (butter, grease, sugar, salt, eggs) or use different fats, but this will make you very, very happy.

Food for Faith

Thought I would write a little about my continuing dehydrator adventure.

Yesterday I dried papaya. I have some trees, but I don’t eat the fruit, because it smells a little bit like dog poop. I wondered if dehydration would change that. I suppose I’m picking the papayas too late, and that’s why they stink, but it seems odd to pick a fruit that isn’t sweet yet.

Anyway, I sliced up a papaya and tossed the chunks in lime juice and simple syrup. After about seven hours in the machine, they were dried up to nothing. I tried one, and sure enough, it doesn’t stink like it did before. So now I have a use for all the papayas that come off the trees.

Funny thing…the product is not like the dried papaya you get in stores. It really shrivels up. I’m wondering if there is a difference between “dried” and “dehydrated.” Guess I’ll have to figure that out.

I have not made jerky yet. I think I’ll get ten boliches (eye round roasts) and dry them. It would probably be best to smoke them, too, but maybe I can fake that with Liquid Smoke and avoid the aggravation.

Mike says he has a yogurt machine. Evidently you can make your own yogurt for a small fraction of the price of store yogurt. How exciting. I guess it’s a big blessing, but I’ve never been a huge yogurt fan. I always identify yogurt with the feminist/greenie/Mac/vegetarian lifestyle.

You can use a dehydrator to make yogurt, and you can even turn the yogurt into dry sheets. Weird.

Yesterday I realized I can make shucky beans in the dehydrator. Man, that would be sweet. I need to find a farmer’s market and load up on green beans. Or I could just chicken out and hit Costco. I don’t know if the beans would brown up the way they do when you dry them on strings.

I just got an idea for food storage: corned beef. I look up a recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated site, and it says corned beef is just cured beef. You stick it in a sealed bag with a salt and seasoning preparation, and you let it sit for 7 days. If that’s all it is, it’s perfect for freezing. Seal everything in a bag, refrigerate for a week, and then freeze. That should work, shouldn’t it?

I Googled flooding and crops again, to see if Perry Stone is right about his vision of upcoming food problems. Things don’t look too good. We have no corn reserves, and the weather is not great. The food situation in China is bad. I guess this year will teach me whether I should pay attention to this man’s visions in the future.

The dehydrator looks like a good investment. I still want to get out of here and put some land around me, but until that happens, I think I’ll be fine with stored eats. And I didn’t lose anything by buying a refurb unit. It looks and works like new.

Mike is jealous. Oh well. Now he has something to put on his shopping list.

Food Hoard Grows

My Excalibur food dehydrator showed up this weekend. Yesterday I fired it up, dehydrating a bunch of Granny Smith apples. I bought four dozen at Costco, and I did two dozen a week or so ago, and the aggravation was what led me to order the dehydrator.

It took seven hours to dehydrate apple slices prepared with a slicing and peeling machine. I’m sure hand-sliced apples would be different, because the thickness would vary. The machines make slices about 1/4″ thick.

The dehydrator expels wet air from the front, and water will condense on anything close to the machine. I guess there is no way to avoid that.

I didn’t dip the apples in lemon juice or sodium bisulfite or anything else that might inhibit oxidation. I wanted them to taste like the apples my grandmother used to dry. Apples that are heavily treated don’t have the same flavor. I figured my apples would come out brown, like the ones I dried in the SUV and oven, but they came out very white.

Here’s the surprising thing: the flavor is amazing. It’s almost like a green apple Jolly Rancher candy. Very strong, and extremely sweet. I can’t figure that out. I don’t know if they’ll make good dried-apple pies, but they’re great to eat as a snack.

The dehydrator has plastic shelves that slide out, and each shelf has a sheet of plastic mesh on it to hold food. You can put the trays in the dishwasher (top rack), but the mesh has to be washed by hand. This is a major pain. But if Perry Stone is right, and food gets expensive, the effort of keeping my dehydrator clean will seem trivial.

I look forward to drying some bananas in it. My trees are producing well.

This dehydrator is a refurb, but I can’t see anything wrong with it. I think I made a good choice. You can get a cheaper Chinese knockoff, but I wanted a warranty and decent customer service.

It’s too Bad Blessings Can’t be Delivered Using Restraints and an IV

Today I had a couple of experiences. One was encouraging, and the other was discouraging.

I am too tired to write much about the first. Just that I found new fire and enthusiasm for prayer and supernatural warfare, and I unleashed it here and at my sister’s house.

The other thing happened at church. I was there for a prayer meeting and to help a friend with a baby shower.

While helping with the baby shower, I had to do some work in the kitchen, where I used to make pizza. Background: I was driven out out of the kitchen by mismanagement and antagonism from coworkers, as readers may recall. I made the church a lot of money with pizza, but when I tried to increase the professionalism and the spirituality in the kitchen (as instructed by church leaders), I provoked a backlash from people who preferred the status quo, and out I went.

Since I quit cooking, a strong Christian man has taken over the cafe, and the kitchen and the serving area are doing well. But he has limited authority, because of the twisted, amorphous chain of command at the church. He has to share a back room with a bunch of other ministries, and this is the area where I used to make pizza.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at the back room today. The kitchen and serving area looked very good, so I had high hopes. But I was amazed at the chaos and filth.

Flour and sugar I left at the church when I quit were still on the counters, in plain paper bags. Near the bags, I saw a stack of unopened boxes containing glue traps for mice. I opened a couple of drawers. For some reason, the church keeps hundreds of sets of unused stainless flatware, along with unused china, and all this stuff is in cabinets and drawers. It should have been disposed of years ago.

The drawers contained so much mouse and roach poop, I was amazed. But it made sense, given the presence of the unused flour and sugar. Why they thought glue traps were the answer is a mystery, given that they put the traps next to the food supply the vermin were using, leaving the food in place.

The church serves free hot dogs and popcorn on Saturday afternoons. That’s great. But they store the cooking and service equipment in the back room, out in the open. Where the mice and roaches play. I was horrified. This is not a trivial health hazard. It’s extremely serious. Rodent feces kill people in a number of ways.

When I worked in the kitchen, I donated some Japanese cutlery I didn’t use. I didn’t like it much, but it’s very expensive, and most chefs love it. I also donated a diamond hone. I checked today, and all of this stuff was gone. Was it stolen or just put away for safety? I don’t know, but I noticed they left the cheap Chinese cleaver I donated, so whoever moved this stuff knew which pieces were valuable.

The drawer where I left the cutlery was full of poop. I had sterilized it, but the mice had returned.

The obvious conclusion is that the place is still a mess, and I would be losing my mind if I had to work there. So I had to thank my superior in the Armorbearer organization, who strongly advised me to get out of the cafe.

It’s so hard to bless people. They treat good things like trash. They show no gratitude for the good things you do. They fight improvement as though it were a fatal disease. This must be how God feels every day. And it reaffirms my conservatism. Liberals give people what they want, regardless of what they deserve, and it destroys them. Conservatives know that the best way to keep a person poor is to give him money.

I guess I better alert the pastor before someone dies.

Son of Man, Can These Dry Bananas Live?

I have given up. I hate blowing money on things I should be able to make, but drying apples in my dad’s SUV is too slow, so I bought a dehydrator. I got a refurb Excalibur. It ought to do the job.

I put a dozen sliced apples in the SUV on a sliding door screen and gave it two days, but the apples just were not dry enough. Maybe it would work in the summer, but I can’t keep fooling around, trying to get it right.

I was looking at dehydrators online, and I felt stupid, but then I thought about all the stuff I throw out. Most of my peppers and bananas end up rotting because I don’t have any place to put them. I never eat my papayas, because they smell funny, but if they were dried, I think that problem would go away.

Bananas are fantastic. They keep you regular and they taste good. But what do you do when twenty pounds of them get ripe over three days?

Ooooh…pineapples. I wonder how hard those are to grow. Dried pineapples are great, and I have a special culinary use for the fresh stuff.

I guess now I can look into jerky. I don’t even know what cuts to use. It would sure beat paying tons of money for the protein bars I eat when I work at church.