Lotus petal, anyone?

I don’t have a good excuse for my extended absence from the blogosphere. It started with two weeks in LA, where I bravely soldiered on with my borrowed laptop until – well - there is just something about Los Angeles. I find that getting anything accomplished there is, to borrow a phrase from Nik’s most recent (antipodean) stage director, like marching through treacle. It doesn’t help that so few of my husband’s relatives are engaged in regular employment, and that those who are tend to keep irregular schedules. Lots of coffee drinking, crossword puzzles, wandering the neighborhood on missions to drop by cousin so-and-so or Thea something’s house to pick a basket of lemons or to drop off some figs; a schedule of general time-wasting punctuated by leisurely meals at strangely late hours. It’s hard to be productive during a sojourn in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. I did manage to plan a few posts, but it would be best not to bore you with outlines. Maybe I’ll still get around to writing some of them up. I do promise a complete report on my immersion into kollyva-making with Aunt Koula, though, since that was one of the main reasons for the trip south.

Since LA, I’ve been to Nevada City, where I kept Mom company at home for a couple of days while my sister trained for a new job. Then back to Medford for the invasion of the twenty-somethings: our boys Kosta and Dimitri were up from California along with five of their closest friends to watch youngest brother Nik perform as Fleance in Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Macbeth. Lots of food and wine happened that weekend, including an all-day stint in the kitchen preparing a family favorite - lamb osso buco with risotto Milanese – for the twelve of us. Then there was a church retreat, a couple of dinner parties, and finally a last-ditch (and successful) attempt at squeezing out the last little bit of summer with a weekend in San Francisco. Lots of cooking, lots of eating, just not a lot of writing.

So here’s a little something I need to get off my chest. For the past five years, the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship has held a weekend retreat at Camp Latgawa in the Rogue National Forest. One of the great attractions for our congregation is the tasty home-cooked camp fare served in the dining hall. Latgawa’s hosts, Greg and Eva, are a young couple who bake their own bread and use fresh local ingredients wherever they can. This year the meals were yummy as always, but we were disappointed to discover after we arrived that the Forest Service had suspended all burning due to extreme fire hazard. No campfire! Unitarians love to sing around a campfire – without Unitarians, “Kumbaya” would have died a natural death before 1980 – but we are resourceful, so this year the singalong took place around a camp lantern.



A camp lantern, however, was not going cut it in the s’mores department. (I hope I don’t have to explain what a s’more is, but just in case my readers come from another planet: a s’more is a sticky sweet camp treat, purportedly invented by Girl Scouts, involving a toasted marshmallow and a square of Hershey’s chocolate sandwiched between the two halves of a graham cracker.)

So… it came to be revealed that some of our members were along on the trip just for the s’mores, and that the retreat experience would be completely worthless without said s'mores (these are adults we are talking about here, by the way). I can sympathize maybe a little bit – there is something special about a perfectly toasted marshmallow when camping. But the way I see it, no campfire, no s’mores; that’s life. My husband, however, is ever obliging to a lady in distress, and got the bright idea of making s’mores in the kitchen's convection oven. Eek! I had to leave the room and join the lantern singers at that point. There are some things that just have to be done a certain way, and to my way of thinking you cannot make a proper s’more in the oven. It ain’t right.

All who participated in this horrifying crime against nature had good things to say. In fact, they had the nerve to suggest that s’mores were EVEN BETTER this way. Then they told me about S'more Kits. They told me about microwave s’mores ("in a fraction of the time and without the mess.") One person even said she'd been known make a whole batch at night at home in the oven and eat them cold for breakfast. I find this alarming in the extreme. To me it is evidence of a strange trend toward out-of-context consumption. Call me old-fashioned, but I say cotton candy has to come from a carnival or county fair. Retsina only tastes good in a Greek café, outside. And a s’more has not earned its credentials unless the marshmallow has actually spent time at the end of a stick, in or above a burning pile of wood. Sheesh. What is this world coming to? I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture. But here’s a video my daughter Alekka (age 12) made in her animation class this summer.