Feeding the Hungry Ghost (2 page)
Read Feeding the Hungry Ghost Online
Authors: Ellen Kanner
Gentle Nudge the Sixth: Season to Taste
R
ECIPE
:
Roasted Beet Salad with Chili-Lime Vinaigrette
What I Learned in Summer School
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ECIPE
:
West Indian Mango Madness
Gentle Nudge the Seventh: Tending — and Harvesting — Your Own Garden
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ECIPE
:
Summer Tomato Salad with Za’atar
Gentle Nudge the Eighth: Stocked and Stoked
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ECIPE
:
When-All-Else-Fails Pasta (a.k.a. Ten-Minute Pasta with Zucchini, Tomatoes, and Chickpeas)
Gentle Nudge the Ninth: Get Caught Up in the Rapture
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ECIPE
:
Broccoli with Lemon and Mint (Broccoli for Beginners)
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ECIPE
:
Hungry Ghost Mood Modifier
Gentle Nudge the Tenth: Balancing Act
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ECIPE
:
Steel-Cut Oats with Goji Berries
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ECIPE
:
Pumpkin, Poblano, and Spinach Tacos
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ECIPE
:
Red Lentil Soup with Indian Spices
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ECIPE
:
Thanksgiving Kale with Fennel, Cranberries, and Walnuts
Gentle Nudge the Eleventh: Slow Food
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ECIPE
:
No-Knead Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread
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ECIPE
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Tuscan White Beans and Winter Greens Soup
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ECIPE
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African American Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew
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ECIPE
:
Multifaith Sweetness and Light Sugarplums
Gentle Nudge the Penultimate: Your Daily Serving of Ahimsa
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ECIPE
:
“We’ll Always Have Paris” Wild Mushroom Salad
Epilogue — Gentle Nudge the Ultimate: Practice Baraka
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ECIPE
:
Vegetable Couscous with Preserved Lemon and Olives
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ECIPE
:
Flatbread from a Starter
I have favorite quotes from this book already.
But before I share a couple, let me harken back. When I was much younger, I’d buy albums at the music store. Now that I have carbon-dated myself, let me say
why
I’m thinking this way in regard to
Feeding the Hungry Ghost
by Ellen Kanner. There were albums that you would put on the turntable and after two listens you would get a kind of
glow,
and that glow was due to the fact that you knew deep inside that this album was going to reveal more and more gems with each listening. Here’s one from Ellen that I underlined immediately in my copy of this beautiful new book:
“Prayer is attentiveness — what the yogic call mindfulness — and it’s what happens to me in the kitchen.”
Beyond being a collection of recipes, this is a book about living. Ellen is like having an elfin, white, Jewish, vegan Oprah whispering in your ear that “it’s going to be more than okay, honey — it’s going to be
magical
!”
Another favorite I starred in the margin of my copy:
“Every time I start to write about faith,
I wind up writing about food.”
A word to my fellow omnivores: you will find yourself
not
looking at this as a vegetarian cookbook that inherently contains restraints. Ellen would giggle and pinch you…metaphorically, at least! Her voice and wisdom roll off the pages without a bit of guilt-inducement or condescension. She is a seeker, not a proselytizer. She is here to awaken a more positive self in each of us. And I’m ready.
I’m also ready to have her gift me with the Ethiopian custom called
gursha
(see
page xix
). It is an act of friendship that translates as “hand-feeding.” And I hope her Haitian Soupe Joumou (see
page 12
) is in the ancient spoon her gifted hand is holding when the
gursha
comes my way.
Come to think of it…it has already.
— Norman Van Aken,
coauthor (with Justin Van Aken) of
My Key West Kitchen
Eating — we do it every day;
you’d think we’d have it down by now. And yet I hear from readers all the time who say they want a closer, healthier relationship with what they eat, with the planet, and with themselves. This should not be so hard. But it is.
I gave a talk recently, fashioned to be a sort of green’s greatest hits. I wanted my audience to understand the consequences of what we eat, and why that might make them consider eating more produce and less meat. They might even go vegan. It happens. My talking points went something like this:
1. A meatless diet is cool, and not just because celebs are doing it; it’s cool in terms of carbon output.
2. It’s good for our health. The USDA’s new dietary guidelines say so.
3. Even D. H. Lawrence got into it (at which point I threw in his line about figs being “
glittering, rosy, moist, honied,
”
to get the audience revved up about the connection between produce and pleasure).
People nodded. I had them. I ended big: change what you eat, then change your life, then change the world. Applause. Then I opened it up to questions.
A guy in the third row asked, “What do I eat for dinner?” Excellent question. Because you can’t change the world when you can’t even figure out what to eat at the end of a long day.
The French paradox enables the French to eat lavish, leisurely, artery-clogging meals while remaining svelte and chic, with cholesterol levels that don’t make their doctors scream and hurl statins at them. The American paradox, by contrast, is just depressing. We know more than we ever have before about what our bodies and our planet need — yet we’re in an obesity epidemic, and the earth isn’t doing so great, either. March is National Nutrition Month, but March 14 is National Potato Chip Day. We’re spending billions on diet books while consuming over a million Twinkies a day. I myself do not participate in this Twinkie fest, so don’t look at me.
We watch food shows and follow celebrity chefs, but we don’t cook. Many of us don’t even know how to shop for food, let alone what to eat. One friend uses her oven as a shoe closet. Since she doesn’t cook, she eats as though on an endless campout — processed sausage, packaged cookies, chips, candy, and cinnamon buns-o-rama, washed down with double mocha lattes, extra whip. She’s on a strict diet of nitrates, fat, and sugar, absent fruit and vegetables. A whole grain never crosses her lips.
This is a girl who knows better. I’m thinking you know better, too. Knowing better is easy. Making changes armed with that
knowledge is what’s hard, a bring-you-to-your-knees kind of hard. Sometimes it doesn’t even seem possible. But it is.
My friend is wonderful, brilliant, beautiful, the best person I know. I’m just ninety-six pounds’ worth of nervous. I worry about her. I worry about that guy, the one who doesn’t know what to eat for dinner. I worry about you, too. Because you’re probably as baffled as Mr. What’s-for-Dinner and on the same diet my friend is on. Maybe you’re not into cinnamon buns, but we’re all caught up in today’s frantic pace, fast food, big talk, empty calories, and empty promises — a diet of living that leaves us hungry and unfulfilled.