Lamb Stew with Caramelized Vegetables

Roasting the vegetables ahead of time adds a caramelized sweetness to this stew. Grass-fed lamb is more expensive, but will add healthy omega-3s. Make this a day before serving to allow flavor to combine in refrigerator overnight. Prepare the stew in 3 stages, to give every component full flavor & texture:

1) Peel and cut into equal-sized chunks of a little less than 1 inch: 5 large carrots, 4 parsnips, 3 potatoes. Toss to coat with olive oil, garlic powder, salt and pepper.  Spread veg in a single layer onto two cookie sheets and bake in preheated 375 oven for 30 min, turning the veg and switching the pans halfway. Veg should have at least one golden-brown edge. Cut off any burnt parts. 

2) Cube 5 lbs grass-fed lamb shank/shoulder, trimming off fat, and toss to coat in a large ziplock or tupperware with 3/4 C gluten-free flour, 2 TB Onion Powder, 1 TB Garlic Powder, 2 t pepper & dash of salt. Heat 2 TB Olive Oil in large dutch oven or oven-proof pot on medium-high heat. Brown lamb in batches, leaving space between pieces & turning with tongs til golden brown on two sides. Scrape browned bits from pot to keep from burning, adding them to a side bowl with lamb and replenishing extra olive oil to coat pan between batches.

3) In same pot, add 4 medium onions, cubed, and fry until starting to brown on edges. Pour in half a bottle of red wine and stir occasionally until reduced to less than centimeter of liquid left. Add 2 TB dried rosemary, 2 TB dried thyme, 1 TB dried parsley, 1/2 t black pepper and stir 3-4 min. Add 3 TB Worcestershire sauce & stir 3-4 more min. Add a 28-oz can of San Marzano Tomatoes, crush up, and bring to a boil, stirring, for 4-5 min. Add back in your roasted vegetables and seared lamb pieces, stirring to coat. Pour in 6 C beef broth or stock in stages (veg will absorb liquid as it cooks). Add in a 5 sprigs fresh thyme tied with string into a sachet and a bay leaf. Keep on med-high heat until it bubbles, then reduce heat to low-med to simmer, stirring occasionally, anywhere from 20 min-1 hour.

Refrigerate overnight. To reheat, place pot with lid in oven at 325 about 1 hour, taking out to stir heat away from sides about every 20 min. Remove thyme sachet & bay leaf before serving. 

The true meaning of Christmas (cookies)

As soon as I gave the cookie away, I regretted it. “I don’t need money, but please give food,” read the man’s sign, conveniently matching the lack of cash and presence of a wrapped baked good in my pocket. I handed it off and took a moment of self-congratulation at my benevolence. It was soon replaced with an obsession that grew with each step away from that cookie.  Where could I get another one? What kind of grocery store carried that kind of cookie and would be open late on Christmas Eve? And the most embarrassing thought: Maybe he’d give it back?

the one that got away

Twenty-four hours earlier I hadn’t even known that soft spice cookies with chunks of crystallized ginger existed. But it had been handed to me, free, for answering the coffee shop trivia about what all snowflakes have structurally in common (six sides). It hung out in my pocket for a day, waiting for a moment when low blood sugar coincided with deciding I’d earned the reward. Without noticing, I’d developed a vivid conviction about how satisfying that cookie would be.

My friends and I had just finished dinner and a movie, in the vein of rewriting Christmas traditions for adulthood, when I spotted the man with the refreshing sign.  Logically, it made sense to give the thing away – my stomach was full with meal and movie popcorn; it would be hours before I should let myself eat again. I could practically feel myself getting fat. And here was a man who may have swallowed nothing recently, other than his pride. Objectively, giving the cookie away was the right thing to do.

But it all came so fast. Walking briskly, talking with my friends, there were only seconds to act before the man with the humble sign would be in the past, a point of Christmas regret. I hadn’t time to say my goodbyes, to accept full responsibility for what it meant to part with the cookie. Yet it was gone. My brain reminded me it was owed a jolt of sugar. My salivary glands scoffed at the insufficiently gingery selections on the menus I passed on the way back to my car.

An opportunity to practice acceptance of the loss inherent in life, I reminded myself. If I can get over this cookie, then maybe I’ll be ready for dating. Didn’t I hear that sacrifice and loss come with a relationship? Grandiose aspirations. At the next late-night grocery, I was buying some Tate’s White Chocolate Macadamias, closest thing I could find to the one that got away.

O heart, be thou not fickle. How does such a brief encounter make such a lasting impression? Was this love, or something more of a base, animal nature? During the movie, my hand kept returning to the cookie in my pocket, seeking that reassurance she was still there, that there might be the possibility of a more intimate encounter later that night. I did have a thing growing up for sampling the cookies put out for Santa. Perhaps my panic echoed Christmas traditions long dead?

Or was my cookie-love more related to the strangely dystopian advertising jingle playing when I’d entered the AMC theater – “If you’re feeling scared, go get a snack / If you’re feeling bored, have a snack….” It was Christmas, a time not without its heartstring puppetry. Many a lover in the past helped me both avoid and relive the disappointment of the holidays. Had I simply switched out partner for pastry, like so many obese Americans before me?

How long do we wait at dark buildings
 before realizing no one will show up?

The Tate’s rode next to me to church, unopened, as a testament to my virtue and restraint. I have to admit I was relieved to find the church dark as I arrived half an hour early. It’s been years since I had a regular church home, and this would be a new experiment, one that had called to me from the online newspaper listings of Christmas Eve services. Rather than feel pulled to go in early and socialize, the dark building gave me time to do what I most felt like – to start writing down the thoughts revolving around the cookie affair. In a strange twist, the only blank paper in my car was the disposable cup from that café where the cookie was obtained, and the first paragraphs of this essay literally circle around it.

Google, the overeager gift-giver

Ten-thirty came and went with the church still dark, and I checked the church service listing on my phone again. The top date on the page indeed said December 24, 2014. Then I noticed a second date below –from 1997.  Like an off-base gift from someone you didn’t get anything for, the published Christmas service listing I’d followed had been an ancient archive unearthed by an overeager Google. I was tracing a Christmas route that would have worked 17 years ago, but was clearly not appropriate tonight. Did I even want to be in church, with the confusion of a familiar story rehashed by strangers? A foggy mixture of duty and opportunity had guided my Christmas intuition back when I was 21, and it had shown up again in persisting toward a church service when what I most wanted at the moment was to write. It’s so easy, when searching for something in the present, to trip over the past.

How much of a Christmas answers the needs of today, rather than reverberating the echoes of the past? If we keep traditions alive, do they make room for the present, for realities and people with us now? Or do traditions rigidly aim to please those long dead – who perhaps never loved us as much as rituals seemed to promise? I saw this year that in less than 24 hours I can invest a piece of cooked dough in my pocket with all the fantasy and expectation I used to lay on imperfect loved ones. I dreamt about partaking, but avoided taking a bite. Like cookie, like family – on some level I knew it never could satisfy me completely, but that doesn’t make it any easier letting go.

I hope that cookie helped, and the man got more of what he needed this Christmas. How much similar unresolved internal conflict keeps us from sharing with the many homeless people who obviously have more pressing problems? If it weren’t for a man with a unique sign, I might still be holding onto my chewy symbol of the past. If we pattern our holidays based on 17-year-old information, sometimes they lead us to dark, abandoned places. There can be a freedom in letting go of traditions – and sometimes, a cookie is just a cookie. (I enjoyed half the Tate’s while writing this).

Christmases past have been stressful affairs about finding the “right” gifts for others, banking on a certain recognition for my efforts, and demanding enough of a haul to satisfy my own entitlement. Christmases recently have been more creative affairs, delving into what I might have authentically of myself to give – curated music mixes, pieces of writing like this. Like beggars asking for money, many people out there may be looking for the same kind of reducible Christmas experience. But if we don’t look up from the reverberating past, we may miss that something simpler and unexpected can bring more joy.

It may be the very thing you've been carrying in your pocket all along.

Why the suburbs suck

I've always hated the suburbs. What I didn't realize is that they were from the beginning designed to segregate blacks from whites, and used by the federal government as an instrument of institutional racism to economically disadvantage blacks. 

I was born in Chicago, and raised for eight years in the integrated South Side. The grandson of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan was in my second grade class. My black friends were so natural to me that I took offense, even at that young age, at racist comments I heard my family drop from time to time.  

I thought I hated Seattle when my family moved to Redmond in 1984 - the closed-in skyline, the grey weather, how people wouldn't invite you over for real. But after graduation, having a chance to explore Seattle on my own terms as an adult, I realized it wasn't Seattle I hated but the Eastside suburbs I'd grown up in. 

I never explicitly connected the problems of the suburbs to racial inbreeding before, until reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent piece on reparations in June's Atlantic Monthly. Turns out the suburbs were intentionally engineered to be the racially homogenous shit holes they are. Check this out:

In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist," claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. "He has too much to do."

But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."

... As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and 'a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.

The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.

http://www.theatlantic.com/…/the-case-for-reparatio…/361631/

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

THEATLANTIC.COM

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Violence is not the answer - nor the entire problem

[To a friend who spoke against the violence in Ferguson in absolute terms]

I agree with you that a huge problem in our society is lack of action, and people speaking authoritatively without having engaged with attempting to solve things with action, or experiencing directly the injustice they want to complain about. This is a problem both in times of protest and times of relative calm, as it promotes the illusion of isolation and makes it psychologically easier to do violence to others.

However, I also see a problem we have in reducing complex problems to simple solutions. The situation in Ferguson right now is not simple, there is a lot going on that is both right and wrong, and I think it adds to the problem - and works against peace - to oversimplify, and look away from evidence and opinions that are hard to fit into the picture. When things are complex, we are called to grapple with them, sit with the discomfort of uncertainty, and grope our way toward a new vision of truth.

In my life experience - which you know some but not all of - there has been physical violence, but there also has been emotional and relational violence that did not include physicality - but was far more damaging. Studies suggest that emotional neglect of a child can be psychologically as damaging or worse than physical abuse (http://www.apa.org/.../2014/10/psychological-abuse.aspx). This is to say there are forms of violence that can't easily be seen.

That is true in my life experience, and it is what I am concerned about in Ferguson and with Black Americans in general. It is one thing to say "stop being a thug, take responsibility, get over it," but if we fail to see there are forms of non-physical violence still being perpetrated on black communities - as can be statistically seen in things like unequal policing, incarceration rates, and economic discrimination - then unfortunately we are failing to get to the root of a complex problem. We are focusing on stopping one form of obvious violence, while we look the other way from another form, which perpetuates the problem. 

I agree with you that true peace and security is the goal. But to achieve that, we must root out injustice and violence in all its forms.

Childhood Psychological Abuse as Harmful as Sexual or Physical Abuse

Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face...

APA.ORG

Why I don't take the Ferguson Grand Jury decision at face value

[A response to a question received on a facebook post]

To trust the grand jury's decision, I would have to believe that the justice system operates fairly, without bias, in the objective pursuit of equal justice for all. There is an abundance of evidence that it unfortunately does not. Both in this specific case, and in general, our justice system consistently returns results that disproportionately disadvantage people of color and privilege whites. Because of both historical and current research, and the transcripts of the witness examination and presentation of evidence in this Darren Wilson grand jury, I have to conclude that justice was once again hijacked, rather than served, in this case.

Let me state that I do not believe that Darren Wilson is guilty. I simply believe he should stand trial, and let the judge and jury decide. The grand jury was not to determine whether Wilson was guilty. It was simply to decide whether he should face a trial to determine his guilt. In a case where an unarmed person is shot by another, I  believe this deserves a full investigation and trial, and to conclude (based predominantly on the shooter’s testimony) that a trial is unnecessary, is highly suspicious to me. In addition:

- There is statistical evidence that the Ferguson grand jury decision not to indict hardly ever happens. In a study of grand juries at the federal level, the grand jury failed to grant an indictment in only 0.007% of cases. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/). 

- Across America there is well-documented evidence that young black males are singled out and prejudicially treated at every single step of the criminal justice process, from the initial encounter to police, to the decision to arrest, to the decision to bring charges or not, through to sentencing, etc. King County’s Director of Adult & Juvenile Detention Claudia Balducci recently went on record that this is true in King County, WA in front of the Seattle City Council (her testimony starts at about 93:00 of this video: http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=2391472, and go to 97:15 for the specific information on how  discrimination was measured at every step of the process.) This same racial disparity occurs all across America, and it would be naive for us to think similar bias was not at play in favor of Darren Wilson at his grand jury.

- I know that prosecutors have to work closely with the police department, and would not take eagerly the task of prosecuting a cop. It’s a touchy area. The prosecutor also has a high level of control in structuring what and how evidence is presented to the grand jury. In the case of Darren Wilson’s grand jury, some questionable things were done. People who had heard about the event 2nd- and 3rd-hand were called as “witnesses,” many of whom contradicted each other. Michael Brown’s character was called into question, while Darren Wilson’s was not. It seems reasonable to me to conclude that the prosecutorial team's interests were not simply a pursuit of justice, but perhaps avoiding something uncomfortable for them (at least). http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/26/7295595/eyewitnesses-ferguson-grand-jury/in/7041840

- I have witnessed institutional racism firsthand. This is racism that embeds itself in seemingly harmless ways into systems, and yet adds up to ongoing oppression of people of color, while helping white people avoid guilt because specific examples are hard to pinpoint. I have written about institutional racism here (http://crosscut.com/2014/10/10/rights-ethics/122239/seattle-juvenile-justice-center-central-district/), and the Ferguson justice process, including the grand jury, seems to me to have cut a wide berth for institutional racism in the form of prejudicial decision making around its police officers.

- It is difficult for white people - including myself - to take in the full scope of what racism means and entails, and given the history of our country, I approach questions of potential racism with an intentional bias that it is probably happening, even if I can’t immediately see it. A good book for helping me see familiar systems differently is The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_New_Jim_Crow.html?id=reDzBZ3pXqsC)

Again, I don’t know that Wilson acted inappropriately, or whether there was racial motivation in his shooting of Brown. Because of many things - the habitual blinders we keep on about this stuff, and the grand jury decision - we may never know. All I’m saying is it was both extremely RARE for the grand jury not to return an indictment, and extremely PREDICTABLE in this case given the races of all involved, and I find that both sad and wrong. 

Ferguson: Riots are not the problem

To all of you condemning the riots today: if that is all you have to say, you are missing the point - and part of the problem.

It is easy to condemn the riots. But how vocal have you been on the side of justice, in the long months when Ferguson protests when on, predominantly peacefully? What do you have to say about the injustice in the fact that a killer will not stand trial, and the myriad ways Black Americans continue to suffer injustice to this day?

If you are not black, the most important question you should be asking today is, "How much have I looked the other way, or contributed to, the ongoing racism in our society? How hard have I tried to relate to the black people of Ferguson?"

MLK, known for his leadership in nonviolence, had this to say about the episodes of violence that sometimes erupt from long, unrelenting oppression:

"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."

http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/riot-is-the-language-of-the-unheard-what-mlk-would-have-said-about-the-london-riots/

He Got Game: Obama off the bench

Suddenly, this week, the president we voted for six years ago took the court.

Perhaps sensing a precious moment of opportunity before Republicans seize control of both houses of Congress, Obama issued two definitive statements this week - one on climate change, the other on net neutrality. When the president was elected, many of us expected a presidency that would be something of an extension of his campaign artistry, an implementation of his oratorical dazzle. We didn't get it. Rather, Obama has fallen short on all sorts of fronts, from immigration to the environment to racial justice issues, toeing a moderate line and selecting questionable advisors, leaving us to wonder whether he was perhaps patholigically committed to the dream of bipartisanship, or secretly in the pocket of corporate interests. 

The answer seems to be emerging this week. Tellingly timed in the wake of sweeping congressional and gubernatorial losses by democrats, the president came out swinging. First, Obama issued one of his most unambiguous policy statements while in office, taking a stand on a free and open internet, in opposition to the industry-tool FCC chairman he appointed. As reported in Democracy Now!,  Obama's statement so directly paralleled the talking points of protesters and the 4 million public commentors to the FCC (99% of whom favored net neutrality), that it signals a departure from Obama's hand-holding of corporate partners and his forced congeniality toward Republicans, and a step back into the crowds who helped elect him. With Obama's boldness in arguing that the internet belongs within Title II of the Telecommunications Act - moving it from a special classification (section 706) to on-par with public utilities (as was done with the telephone to oppose the Bell monopoly) - he summoned his talent for a visionary channeling of the founding fathers into modern context, which gave so many of us hope when electing him. (If the FCC breaks with Obama on this, one imagines a stronger, First-Amendment challenge to internet regulation on the basis that cyberspace forms a modern-day public square for the gathering of people for protest).

A deft political move to be sure, but this was only a warm-up. However much we may have fantasized about what Obama's basketball moves might look like played out in the political arena, the truth has been he's spent most of his presidency effectively on the bench. That changed this week, when he revealed he's been developing a trick play away from cameras with the Chinese, which they dunked on the Republicans by unveiling mutually binding climate targets contextualized into each country's reality, which require zero congressional approval as they draw entirely on existing law. With action steps focused on accelerating positive innovation, rather than enforcing punitive restrictions on American consumption habits, Obama simultaneously took the visionary reins back from environmental leaders, and preemptively siphoned the gas out of Republicans' messaging SUV. Whereas the clarion call of environmentalists has been that climate change is the consequence of America's irresponsible lifestyle choices - feeding into Republicans' defense of the American way of life - Obama reversed this polarity by linking responsible climate change action with American innovation and economic prosperity, as first sketched during his campaign with the green jobs playbook Van Jones had run.

Let’s hope the president's moves this week were just the beginning, and that he continues to drive the hoop with the same strategic timing and misdirection now that he's 1-on-1 with a Republican congress -- and leaves us scratching our heads wondering, ‘Who was that masked man?'