dinner with the Katzees

So Mojo showed up with an art project for dinner at our house. I had spent the day nursing a migraine in bed and had little motivation for cooking...this was just the antidote. She arrived with a plate of julienned vegetables and several packages of fresh fish.

Soon Baba was put to work slicing with a precision only Ronaldo can contribute.

Next, we prepped the fish in an array of aromatics within a parchment heart. Here is halibut prepared with minneola orange slices, green onions, fennel and olive oil.

This is dover sole rolled with a mixture of rapini, garlic, lemons, olive oil and salt.

Mojo is showing off the sea bass with mojo verde (roasted/peeled poblanos, cumin, cilantro and olive oil), onions, tomatoes, olive oil and salt.

Bodhi played the joker and tried his hand decorating the salmon.

Mojo added her flair with zucchini, sliced garlic, shallots, onions, red peppers, fennel, lemon, fresh thyme and olive oil with salt.

Here is the next packet of turbo with celery, red peppers, shallots, onion, tarragon, garlic, olive oil and salt.
She also made jumbo shrimp with tomatoes, onions, garlic, lemon, mojo verde and salt with olive oil. We baked them at 400 for 4 minutes and 13 minutes at 375. She reminded me that if we weren't so difficult (both shane and I are on a weird diet) she would have added white wine and pepper to each packet.

Owen was sadly in absence, celebrating his good friend Paloma's birthday and missed out on the culinary adventure.

I contributed a big salad

some roasted brussel sprouts, brown rice and steamed asparagus.

Here are the steaming packets revealed just prior to our gustatory feast.

We finished the evening with baked apples, a couple of Bodhi games and flying with Mojo. It pays to have a chef in the family.

Comments

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

the way of the sunflower

A few weeks ago, I sat holding a sunflower seed in my hand, just prior to the mouth popping, mastication phase, when it's perfect elegance floored me. I stared in awe at the tiny seed nestled in my palm and saw it, in all of it's possibility, for the first time. A flower, a million seeds, a million flowers. Each unique, each the same. And suddenly I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of human. A small seed, with no big beefy brain to catalogue, categorize, prioritize, conceptualize, quantify, qualify, justify and deify, had within it the flower it could become. Dissect the seed and there's no flower, nor any glimmer of the life that will unfold when the seed surrenders to soil, light, water. I wondered. What arrogant assuming is it, to think, with our over indulged brains and narcissistic lens of "self", that we need "do", "think", "struggle", "fight", "hustle", "cajole" and otherwise dance our way...

angelbirdflies

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