5 on Friday--Happy Memorial Day!
Good morning friends! Happy Memorial Day weekend! Does it feel like it's taken 18 years to get to this weekend? Or are you sitting there thinking "how are we at summer already?" Wherever today finds you, I hope you have a weekend full of some sunshine and rest, maybe some delicious food, a great novel and a movie night. If nothing else, this forced time out from the busyness of life has shown me that these are the things that matter far above all the scheduled activities and organized practices. Those things have value. I miss schools every day (teachers, you are truly essential workers, let no one ever tell you differently!), but I'm also grateful for this time of these simpler things. And now, here are this week's 5 things...a "recipe", some books to get lost in, a podcast series, a new foodie thing that is making my heart so happy, and thoughts on The Last Dance.
ONE
If you're anything like me, you're looking for the simplest way to get dinner on a table. You're craving some fresh produce but definitely don't want to do a lot of prep. A mom I follow on Instagram posted a picture of this meal recently and it looked so good I recreated it. It was a HUGE hit with my family because everyone could choose what they wanted on their plate and it was the easiest thing I've put together in ages. So I knew I had to share! It's not even really a recipe, more a list of ingredients to throw together in a bowl. Without further ado, here's a "recipe" for Greek Chicken Bowls your crew is sure to love. (you can absolutely do this without chicken if you’re vegetarian!) I've made the ingredients below bold…
Step 1: Get some rice cooking--white or brown--on the stove or in a rice cooker.
Step 2: Take either two raw chicken breasts or some chicken tenders and chop them into bite sized pieces. Put them in a ziplock baggie and pour in some Greek Salad Dressing from a bottle. Refrigerate for a bit while you chop the veggies.
Step 3: Dice into pieces the following (or if you hate something, leave it out!): Red bell pepper, cucumber, red onion, tomatoes. If you want to get fancy you can place the cucumber in a Tupperware with a splash of red wine vinegar to marinate until serving. But you can leave it plain too.
Step 4: Cook the chicken pieces in a skillet with a little olive oil until cooked through.
Step 5: Serve the meal in a bowl with rice on the bottom, chicken, veggies, crumbled feta and a dollop of tzatziki sauce on top. Use Naan bread for dipping.
This is the perfect deconstructed meal--meaning you can eat it all together in a bowl or pickier kiddos can eat the pieces separately. Aidan likes his with hummus instead of tzatziki and will eat all the veggies and chicken but no rice and lots of naan. Asher will eat rice, chicken, feta cheese and naan but no veggies. Charles and I love it all. Happy cooking my friends!
TWO
You’ve probably all at least heard of the enneagram by now, even if you have no idea what it is or what people are talking about when they refer to what their “number” is. Whether you are brand new to the enneagram, you want to understand what your type is, or the pandemic has shown you you have a LOT to understand about the people you live with, there is a podcast series rolling out this summer that’s an excellent primer on this ancient personality typing system. Jen Hatmaker’s For the Love podcast is doing a 10 week series on the enneagram this summer. Last week she had enneagram expert Suzanne Stabile on to give us an overview of the 9 types, how it works, and why it truly is one of the best spiritual and personal growth tools out there. This week she started with the 1’s and had Father Richard Rohr who is a modern pioneer in the enneagram talk about it and also what it’s like to be a 1. It was a fascinating conversation and I learned a ton from him. Next week will be a guest who is a 2 and so forth until she’s spent 10 weeks on the topic hitting each of the 9 numbers. If you’ve never entered into the world of the enneagram, I’d love to invite you to check this series out. Simply listen and see if you can identify yourself in anything you hear and if you want to chat about it further let me know, I’m always up for a great enneagram conversation!
THREE
I think I mentioned last week that when this whole pandemic began I pretty much stopped reading. It felt too hard, like it took too much focus and concentration that I just didn’t have. But lately I’ve gotten back into a good rhythm, and it began when I finally took the social media apps off my phone. Those are pesky addictive little things aren’t they? I love sharing life with others digitally, documenting what we’re up to for far away family especially, but the reality is they aren’t awesome for my mental health. Not only were they eating up all my time, but the non stop scrolling through everyone else’s stories and photos just was sending me spiraling into a rather angry place for some reason. I recognized the warning signs and knew it was time to make a change. So I started picking up books again and that has felt so refreshing. I did feel a little bit like my brain was turning to mush with all the screen time I was finding myself getting! I have read several books in the past few weeks but two that I really really loved I’m sharing with you here.
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. I’m just going to say it, I am super hesitant to tell you all what this book is about because of the side eye it may cause! But I loved this book SO much I can’t not share it. This is a book set in the years 17 AD-33 AD in Nazareth and Jerusalem. It’s a historical fiction novel that centers around Ana, a young woman who ends up becoming the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I know. But really, stay with me here. This was an incredible story. Sue Monk Kidd is a phenomenal writer who pulled me into Ana’s world hard and fast. I was so sad when this book ended. Reading her author’s note at the back of the book was really helpful. She wanted to bring out Jesus’ humanity—we talk so much about his divinity but we often forget he was a fully human male living in 1st century Palestine who would have had a place in the Jewish customs and family culture of Nazareth. She wanted to address those “lost” years that scripture doesn’t say anything about—from when he was a young man until he appears on the scene at his baptism. What was Jesus doing at 20? 25? He was the oldest son in a family where his earthly father was believed to have died young. As an oldest Jewish son there would have been some expectations on him in terms of marriage and providing for his mother and family. Obviously Kidd isn’t saying anything in here is factual. But she wanted to paint a picture of his culture and human experience and she does so in a way that is so gorgeous and honoring I fell in love with this story. In all honesty this book doesn’t center around him at all. This is Ana’s story. Ana is a girl who has a strong personality and a deep desire to be a scholar and a scribe, documenting the stories of women from both the Old Testament and from the world around her—stories of women who were mistreated by the patriarchy around them—Tamar, Bathsheeba, her aunt, her dear friend and then her own story. But in 1st century Palestine, women weren’t educated and women were property. Watching Ana fight for her own voice and how her story intersected with Jesus’ was beautiful. If you love historical fiction, give this one a try. And then tell me if you read it because I don’t know anyone who has yet and I need to talk about it with someone!
I’m going to take a hard pivot away from 1st century Palestine and recommend a fantastic contemporary fiction/romance novel that I flew through in 2 days. Beach Read by Emily Henry just came out, it was my Book of the Month club pick for May so I got a copy before it was available in bookstores, and it was delightful. Romance author January Andrews finds her life as she knew it imploding in the first chapter. She retreats to a beach cottage in Michigan to try and pick up the pieces and write the new happily-ever-after book her agent is pressuring her for. But how do you write a happily ever after story when your life is in shambles and you’re not sure you believe in love anymore? Next door happens to be another author. A rather broody, “serious” author who just so happens to be her writing rival from her college writing program. Both are struggling with writers block so they make a bet. She’s going to write the next great American novel for him this summer while he writes a romance novel for the first time. And of course romance ensues. There are a few steamy scenes you can skim but the story was so much more in depth than I expected as they each unpack past pain, hurt and experiences that make them approach love the way they do.
FOUR
So this next one is going to make everyone think I am a total nerd, but I have a new favorite afternoon each week and it’s for a ridiculous reason. My friend Becky did an excellent job selling me on the Local Fare produce subscription program and I decided it sounded really fun and I needed some new excitement in my kitchen these days. So I signed up for a bag of farm-fresh produce, grown right here around Jacksonville, to be delivered to my house every other Thursday. Yeah well I loved it so much and was so excited by the delicious fresh food and the fresh loaf of bakery bread that came with it that I switched my subscription to be weekly. Y’all this bag arriving on my porch each Thursday is ridiculously fun to me. Every weekend you can sign into your account online and see what produce items will be available that week. You can swap out any items you don’t want for something you do (like I didn’t need jalapeño peppers this week, because I don’t use them, so I swapped those for an order of corn on the cob instead). Then they bring it right to your doorstep on your assigned delivery day. It’s fantastic. I love seeing what is available, building my weekly menu around those items, all the while supporting local farmers. My kids have gotten really into it too wanting to taste test the items as we unpack them and devouring the fresh bread we get each week. This week’s bag included peaches, Roma tomatoes, red potatoes, corn on the cob, sweet Vidala onions, blueberries, romaine lettuce and a loaf of fresh baked country bread. So this week we’re having BLTs with the bread, lettuce & tomatoes, foil wrapped shrimp packets with the onions, corn and potatoes, and blueberries and peaches for snacks. We’ve also discovered the Safe Harbor sea food market up the coast from here and it’s become my new goal to make a trip up there once a week for some fresh seafood item for our meals—last week we did salmon for Chuck’s birthday dinner from there and this week I’m going to grab some of their fresh Mayport shrimp for foil-wrapped shrimp packets with the potatoes and corn. In this season where I’m in the kitchen a TON I needed something to make things feel fresh and exciting and a bag of fresh produce and straight from the Atlantic seafood is proving to be just the ticket.
FIVE
Did anyone watch the Michael Jordan documentary on ESPN, The Last Dance? I found I had such an interesting reaction to it and left with a feeling of disgust for Jordan. Don’t get me wrong, the man is an absolute legend on the court, he has an athleticism that not too many people in this world have and his work ethic is just unmatched by most people and I grew up watching him play which was an incredible thing to behold. But my goodness it felt like he thought he was justified in being an absolute jerk to a lot of the people around him in the name of “inspiring them to be great.” I think he’s a complicated person and obviously there are so many things that happen in a person’s life to form a person into how they behave, but I found myself irritated by him more and more the further we got into the series. It was definitely fun to see the Bull’s opponents in all the scenes though, I was a gigantic NBA fan in the late 90s and grew up watching the Jazz, the Pistons, the Lakers battle it out with the Bulls, so names like Reggie Miller, Shaquille O’Neal, John Stockton and Karl Malone were part of daily conversations with my friends and I (especially in middle school, oh goodness I was obsessed with basketball in middle school!). It’s led to several conversations between Charles and I about what it takes to achieve some level of greatness and is that possible without treating others poorly.
That’s it for this week folks—have a wonderful 3 day weekend and we’ll see you back here next week on what will be our last day of school!
