The Essentials Redux

There is another quote from The School of Essential Ingredients that speaks to me. Lillian, the owner of the restaurant and the teacher of the cooking school, receives a phone call from one of her students, Ian:

“Ian, what is it?”

“She said yes to dinner – what do I do now?”

“You cook, Ian.”

“I know, but what?”
“Well… how do you feel about her?”
“She’s beautiful and smart and…”
“I mean,” Lillian’s voice was patient, “what do you want?”
“I want…” Ian paused, and then his voice cleared. “I would want her for the rest of my life.”
“Then that is how you cook.”

That is how I cook for Sue. I would want her for the rest of my life.

Shenpa: The Internal Thought Tornado

It’s tornado season in the Midwest, and so it seems appropriate to ponder over a word that Sue’s Buddhist meditation group discussed recently: shenpa.


In Practicing Peace in Times of War, Pema Chodron writes that shenpa is a Tibetan word that points to the root cause of aggression and all craving and that is “at the root of all conflict, all cruelty, oppression, and greed.” The usual translation, she writes, is “attachment,” but she thinks of shenpa as “getting hooked,” or “the charge behind our thoughts and words and actions, the charge behind ‘like’ and ‘don’t like.’”


Once you begin to notice shenpa, which has a “familiar taste, a familiar smell,” we realize that “this experience has been happening forever.” That “sticky feeling,” says Chodron, “is shenpa. And it comes along with a very seductive urge to do something.” Something negative, like blaming others or the self, or wanting revenge, or, or, or. “Then you speak or act. The charge behind the tightening, behind the urge, behind the story line or action is shenpa.”


Chodron continues, “You can actually feel shenpa happening. It’s a sensation that you can easily recognize. Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there. Someone looks at us in a certain way, or we hear a certain song, or walk into a certain room, and boom. We’re hooked.”


If we can “catch” shenpa when it’s just beginning, Chodron says, we can simply acknowledge that it’s happening and live with the moment without having to act on it. There’s an “underlying insecurity of the human experience, the insecurity that is inherent in a changing, shifting world.” The antidote is to cultivate a loving kindness toward the self, and to observe, rather than act, on shenpa. If we can just observe, it will eventually pass.


Here are a couple of ways that we experience shenpa:


Sue: I can get very rebellious when someone assumes I’m ultra-religious just because Chuck is a Methodist minister. Indeed, I get that “sticky feeling” and then the “seductive urge” to say something mouthy, trying to prove that I’m not your typical minister’s wife – as if there really is such a creature, anyway – and that I’m curious about many faith traditions in addition to Christianity.


Chuck: Another way that Sue described shenpa to me was when she explained the concept was “button-pushing.” I must admit that my button gets pushed when I encounter the legalists of life, especially religious legalists, which can be a problem considering I’m a pastor. I flinch when I am reprimanded for not doing church the right way – in other words, in someone else’s way.


We take to heart Chadron’s four R’s for dealing with shenpa: “recognizing the shenpa, refraining from scratching, relaxing with the underlying urge to scratch, and then resolving to interrupt the momentum like this for the rest of our lives.” She says, “If we can learn to relax in the place where the urge is strong, we will get a bigger perspective on what’s happening. We might come to see that there are two billion kinds of itch and seven quadrillion types of scratching, but we just call the whole thing shenpa.”


Realizing that there will always be opportunities for the “sticky feeling,” can we learn to pause a moment next time, rather than spiral into the thought tornado known as shenpa? We’re going to try. Stay tuned.

The Essentials

Today we’ve been as energetic as our favorite canine. And yes, the tapas dishes and wine won my heart last night upon my return from Ft. Worth and Shreveport. Especially because on the plane I’d read Erica Bauermeister’s novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, which, I have to say, made me think of my foodie mate.

Essential Ingredients, a first novel by Bauermeister, is about a chef named Lillian and her eight students who gather at her restaurant once a month for a cooking class. Lillian, like Chuck, tends not to use recipes, and she uses her cooking to elicit good experiences for those who eat her food. With bits of magic realism tucked in here and there, the book is slightly reminiscent of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.


Here’s one of the many passages that made me think of Chuck:

Lillian looked out at her class, at Claire’s hair, still tousled from her baby’s exuberant good-bye, Antonia’s sleek black work blazer, Tom’s business shirt, rumpled at the end of a long day.


“It’s not always easy to slow our lives down. But just in case we need a little help, we have a natural opportunity, three times a day, to relearn the lesson.”

“Food?” Ian suggested with a grin.


“What a lovely idea,” Lillian responded.

Chuck is able to achieve a kind of slow-the-day-down, present-moment mindfulness with his cooking. I hit it sometimes with drawing or writing. How do you slow down the day?

By the way, the azaleas in Shreveport were amazing this week.

Remains of the Day

I really wanted to show you the meal that I created in anticipation of the return of my love. Sue has been gone this past week to Texas and Louisiana visiting colleges so that she can write descriptors that will entice naïve high school seniors to leave their comfortable, known lives and risk four or more years living with strangers. I missed her.

So, in anticipation, I perused the hallowed aisles of the New Pioneer Coop in Coralville, Iowa and selected the ingredients that would suggest to her there would be no risk in spending the rest of her life with me.

Of course I chose a Tapas theme. Olives with wedges of pecorino reggiano cheese, a spinach salad with fresh strawberry vinaigrette, tournedos of honey-glazed pork tenderloin accompanied by an assortment of heirloom cherry tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and shredded parmesan, sea scallops with roasted red peppers, and a nice Tinto wine from Spain.

I really wanted to show you the meal but Sue had the camera and in the excitement of seeing her all was forgotten until the meal and each other were devoured.

Spring Reflections

It’s spring, a time of new beginnings, but also a time to reflect about past seasons. Having been married 34 years, we have a few seasons by now to reflect upon. We realized tonight over dinner at one of our favorite restaurants – Devotay in Iowa City – that one thing we’ve never done intentionally is recount our favorite dining experiences. Those who know us know that Chuck is the foodophile, but for a person who grew up preferring peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches over most other kinds of sustenance, Suzanne does fairly well at speaking foodie. So we’re going to take a few posts to recount our top ten dining experiences, but for tonight, we’ll focus on a meal we had a little over four years ago.

Here’s Chuck’s recollection:

In the category of most amazing meals shared with the one I love, ranking in the top 10 without question is the tapas meal Suzanne and I experienced at Jacinto’s in Gaucin, Spain. Gaucin is one of the quant “White Towns” of Andalucía. We traveled to Spain with some dear friends for our 30^th wedding anniversary.

After exploring the outlying area on New Year’s Day we arrived back in Gaucin expecting to find some place to have a late supper (early supper by Spanish standards). After walking the narrow streets for a considerable time without discovering anything open, enduring the distain of some local revelers, and feeling the blood sugars drop while the lack of food frustration rose, we discovered ( I discovered) tapas nirvana: Jacinto’s.

With no sign to suggest that it was an eating establishment and a front door that was more like stepping through someone’s front window, we entered the sanctum sanctorum sheltering jamon Serrano, aceitunas, and manchego cheese.

It should be noted at this juncture in the story that our co-travelers were vegetarians and Jacinto’s had hanging from it walls copious amounts of air dried porcine hind quarters. At that particular moment I wasn’t focused on their epicurean sensibilities, I was too entranced with what I had discovered to be the quintessential tapas eatery. We stayed.

Sue’s aside: Everyone who knows Chuck knows that he’s as easy going as they come. I have to say, though, that on this night, and for the first time in our then 30 years of marriage, I saw Chuck come close to having a temper tantrum – after I insisted to him, sotto voce, that we find another restaurant that wasn’t so…meat oriented. He wasn’t having it. He was hungry; he was, indeed, entranced.  

Back to Chuck’s recollection: Food must be a universal language. None of us spoke Spanish (European Spanish with a lisp) well enough to communicate that we needed sustenance immediately, however, I was able to greet Jacinto and feebly began pointing to various raw delicacies residing in his counter top cooler and displayed from his ceiling. With the calm assurance of the wisest Jedi food master Jacinto began to create.

Mussels, mushrooms, shrimp, Spanish ham, olives, and a myriad of other common ingredients were transformed both linguistically and delectably into an indescribable feast that satiated my soul.

At the completion of this epicurean epiphany Jacinto humbly came to our table to place his last offering in front of us: a simple palate pleaser of walnuts, soft cheese, and honey. It was then that he smiled his first smile of the night. I’m still smiling.

Sue’s memory: And I’m still smiling about the way our good friends rolled with Chuck’s insistence that we stay, in spite of the myriad ham hocks dangling everywhere from the ceiling. They found some fish and veggies to eat and let Chuck have his way with all that meat. “You’ve found your avatar,” they said to him – our good-natured, gracious friends. And when they visited Italy a few years later, they sent us a postcard with – you guessed it – a large ham on the front.