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Mother's Day Meditations II: Beautiful, Prickly Salad

Mother's Day Meditations II: Beautiful, Prickly Salad
Everything about a dandelion screams “childhood.”  Dandelions themselves seem to be the plant equivalent of children; correspondingly, you could say children are the human version of the dandelion.  They are sunny and smiley and errant and raggedy. Dandelions shout for children to pick them and give them to their mothers. This is a dandelion story... Read more »
By Julie,
May 11, 2012 at 8:03 am
• 2 comments

Mother's Day Meditations I: Breakfast for my mom

Mother's Day Meditations I: Breakfast for my mom
When I was a girl I was well aware of my mother’s opinion of Mother’s Day. She hated it.  And she made no secret of that. I don’t really know why, although now that I’m a mother myself I have my suspicions.  She had four kids and a full house–besides me, three boys who were... Read more »
By Julie,
May 8, 2012 at 11:47 pm
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Faith as small as a poblano seed

Faith as small as a poblano seed
So we joined the neighborhood community garden, our neighbors and us.  Two families working a 9 x 9 patch that’s heavy on the inherited rhubarb. One of our neighbors, Kat, sat with me and we talked of what we wanted to plant.  She drew a beautiful map of the garden.  She is an artist. The... Read more »
By Julie,
April 25, 2012 at 12:17 am
• 4 comments
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Greek Easter in a box

Greek Easter in a box
So I’m awaiting an important box from my mother-in-law.  She sends us Easter every year, or at least as much of it as you can fit in a box. It has not been our Easter yet.  Orthodox Easter falls after Passover, so we celebrate this coming Sunday.  In addition to our Holy Week services, our... Read more »
By Julie,
April 11, 2012 at 9:33 pm
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The eggs may have changed but the brunch remains the same

The eggs may have changed but the brunch remains the same
Red eggs. That’s what they do for Easter, the Orthodox. Red. Just red. This news was so bewildering to me—long before I joined the Orthodox Church—that I couldn’t process it at all. For years, actually. After all, how can you even have Easter with only red Easter eggs? But now the traditions of Orthodoxy are... Read more »
By Julie,
April 7, 2012 at 8:42 am
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A Feast Recollected During the Fast

A Feast Recollected During the Fast
At my overpriced market cabbage was sixteen cents a pound recently.  Sixteen cents!  Time to stock up, clearly. But really, how much cabbage can one actually use?  How many dishes can you make out of it? This blue light special on cabbage brought to mind a wonderful feast of cabbage rolls my family had this... Read more »
By Julie,
April 5, 2012 at 9:27 pm
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Irish Soda Bread, with a side of grace

Irish Soda Bread, with a side of grace
For many years in graduate school I shared a large rambling six-flat, that very typical Chicago residential space that more closely resembles a multi-story bowling alley than a house. But home it was to us, the five or six women who lived there, over the years. When we set up house, we arranged that we’d... Read more »
By Julie,
March 16, 2012 at 10:30 pm
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Sharing the Table: A Grade School Black History Month Celebration

Sharing the Table: A Grade School Black History Month Celebration
So another Black History Month has come and gone, and grade schools everywhere are taking down their Martin Luther King posters and putting up shamrocks, and lions and lambs. Our school on the south side takes Black History Month pretty seriously, and to generally good effect.  At our house, though, we have certainly also experienced... Read more »
By Julie,
March 1, 2012 at 12:58 am
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A Twenty-Year Love Letter to My Beautiful Frenemy

A Twenty-Year Love Letter to My Beautiful Frenemy
It happens to everyone sooner or later, I guess.  Our relatives, our family, perhaps our very home comes to feel like a source of embarrassment.  Anyone who’s ever had teenagers, or been a teenager, will know this to be true. I myself have reached a point in my Chicago life, my many-year absence from my... Read more »
By Julie,
February 25, 2012 at 3:08 pm
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A Little Girl Named Donna and the Recipe for Memory

Today is big on the food front. Not only is it Valentine’s Day, but more important, it is Arizona’s 100th Birthday (we’ll tend to that soon enough). But there’s something more important still.  I and many ChicagoNow bloggers are taking the opportunity today to post about Donna and the foundation created in her memory, Donna’s... Read more »
By Julie,
February 14, 2012 at 5:54 pm
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