Tag: Lent

Not-So-Sweet Jesus

If you take a stroll down your supermarket’s greeting card aisle today, you’ll find Valentine’s Day cards long gone and Easter cards in full force. It’s only the start of Lent, yet the aisle is bursting bright with pink bunnies, yellow chicks, and painted eggs. I won’t be sending Easter cards this year (haven’t done so since my kids were little) but I will give up something for Lent. I’m thinking “foods with added sugar”.

I know what you’re thinking.  We live in an age where giving up tempting foods isn’t as difficult as it used to be.  Whole foods are so available we have an entire chain of stores called “Whole Foods”.  Sugar has so many alternatives I should revise my sacrifice to “foods with added sweeteners“.  Even processed foods have matured to where “healthy snacks” are pleasing to the palate.  I have options.

Doesn’t matter.  Dropping added sugar will still be a challenge.  My desk drawer (second one down on the left if you’d like to help yourself) is replete with black and red licorice, and some form of chocolate, be it a bar, a cookie, or those little baking morsels straight out of the bag.  Giving up licorice for forty-six days and nights won’t be a stretch, but NO chocolate for all of March and half of April sounds like an eternity.  What can I say?  Everyone has a weakness and mine is chocolate.  It speaks to me from my closed drawer with “come hither” seductiveness.

Straight out of the bag…YUM!

I’ll bet you’ll find thousands of blog posts about chocolate with a quick search.  I’ll bet you’ll find entire blogs about the sweet stuff.  I just checked my blog’s history and unearthed a dozen takes on chocolate (including this one from a year ago talking about the things people give up for Lent.  Chocolate tops the list).  So let’s make it a baker’s dozen because I invented a chocolate challenge.  I call it the “85 Percent Ascent”.

Let me explain.  There was a time when I liked my coffee sweeter than a Starbucks Sugar Cookie Frappuccino.  Together with artificial creamer I’d dump in sugar cubes or pour the white stuff straight from whatever you call those pourable glass containers.  That was a long, long time ago.  At some point (probably, er definitely my college year abroad in Italy) I realized coffee tasted pretty good all by itself.  I started to wonder why you’d “taint” coffee by adding the other stuff.  But let’s be real: it’s not like you go from Frappuccino to Americano cold turkey.  You’ve got to ease into the one extreme from the other.  Slowly I backed down the sugar (like years-slowly).  Slowly I backed down the creamer.  One day I eliminated the sugar altogether.  Today, I still go with a tablespoon of (almond-coconut non-dairy no-sugar) “creamer” but otherwise it’s straight dark-roasted coffee for me. I even fancy an espresso shot every now and then.

It’s a good analogy for my Percent Ascent challenge.  85% cocoa content is seriously dark chocolate (meaning not sweet at all).  If your go-to is a Hershey’s Bar or a Milky Way you’re down below 50%.  And moving from 50% to 85% is a serious ascent with chocolate.  It’s like standing on top of Kilimanjaro and seeing how much further you have to go to summit Everest.

A recent article on chocolate lists nine criteria for the healthiest and best-tasting bars in the world, including:

  1. The first ingredient must be cocoa, cocoa mass, or chocolate liquor (not sugar or milk chocolate).  In other words, put down the Nestle’s Crunch; it’s not even close.
  2. Ingredients must include real cocoa butter instead of (cheaper) vegetable oils.  95% of America’s chocolate manufacturers just dropped out of the race.
  3. The cocoa must come from an “Equator country” like Ivory Coast, Ghana, or Peru.
  4. The bar should be labeled “Organic” and/or “Non-GMO”.
  5. Bonus points: should be fairly traded and ethically harvested.

As if the search isn’t already difficult, NOW you have to go with >85% cocoa content.  Not so hard to find actually, especially if you go online.  I purchased a bar from five different manufacturers meeting every one of the above criteria, including Green & Black’s from the UK, and Theo from Seattle.   All five bars fall between 85% and 90% cocoa content (and yes, 100% is an option).  All five use scary words like “strong”, “super black”, and “extreme” to describe their product.  Not gonna lie; I’m a little nervous to take a bite.

As bitter as these chocolates are sure to be, I still have to give them up for Lent.  Every one of them has “added sugar” (albeit way down on the ingredients list).  So let’s just agree – I’m not going to break my Lenten covenant on a food that doesn’t even taste sweet.  Think I’ll opt for a piece of fruit instead.  I just hope it doesn’t come from the Garden of Eden.

Some content sourced from the “Experience Life” / Life Time article, “How to Find the Healthiest Dark Chocolate”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #7

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

Last week

I worked outside of the box again this week. Bag #7 – of 21 bags of pieces – assembled a second layer on top of the section I can’t yet attach to the bigger section behind it.  From “Last week” to “This week”, you can see I worked almost entirely in black, which suggests I’m creating more of the outside of the piano.

Despite the majestic wash of Debussy’s “La Mer”, Bag #7 was completed in less than thirty minutes, with only one heart-pounding moment where I thought I’d left out pieces in the Bag #6 build.  Thank goodness I was wrong. Still on track.

This week

Running Build Time: 6.0 hours.  Musical accompaniment: Debussy’s La Mer and Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un Faune (try and say that ten times fast). Leftover pieces: One (clearly an extra, whew!)

Conductor’s Note: Today’s build wasn’t very exciting, so it helped to have Debussy booming in the background.  However, as I turned the page of Mr. Instruction Manual in anticipation of Bag #8, I saw pictures of… long, thin, reed-like pieces.  Holy buckets, Maestro, it’s time to make this piano a stringed instrument!

Forty Days and Forty Nights

Tuesday seems like weeks ago.  Some call it “Fat Tuesday” (esp. those pancake-bingers partying hard at Mardi Gras) but to me, it’s just the last day of my food free-for-all.  My wife and I decided to give up “flour” for Lent (more on that in a minute) so Tuesday night we overate at our favorite Mexican restaurant.  Chips and salsa (the chips a hybrid of corn and flour).  Enchiladas and tacos wrapped in big, fluffy flour tortillas.  Sopapillas fried from puffy flour tortillas, drenched in honey.  Big, frosty margaritas to wash it all down.  It was kind of a fiesta final before Lent.

Now it’s Ash Wednesday as I type and I’m already obsessing about my forbidden flour.  This morning’s breakfast was hardly a fiesta – coffee and a protein shake.  Not a tablespoon of flour to be found anywhere.  My upcoming fever dreams will be liberally dusted with flour.  I’ll have fantasies of consuming an entire bakery case (shelves and all), eating my way out of a gigantic loaf of bread, or parking my mouth below the pasta-maker while endlessly turning the crank.  I’m looking at all the snow outside my office window right now.  It looks exactly like white flour.  It probably IS white flour.  Hang on, I’ll be right back…

As of today, we’ve officially started the season of Lent again. The next forty-odd days and nights are gonna be the usual challenge. Did you know the Old English translation of “Lent” is “spring season”?  How that computes with all the flour I’m seeing outside my windows right now is beyond me.  More to today’s point, Ash Wednesday is the deadline to answer the question, “What am I giving up for the next seven weeks?”

Lent = “no mas”

Lent, as even non-Christians know, is the religious season of preparation leading up to Easter.  It’s the time to reflect inward, with more attention to prayer and the Good Book, less attention to “shortcomings” (sins, people), more charitable service to others, and finally, a cruel little something called “self-denial”.  Self-denial is anything you want it to be, but the idea is to subtract from your daily equation: something you don’t need but you’ll struggle to be without.  Consider seven popular choices for 2021:

  1. Chocolate.  Maybe this one’s popular because it’s the easy way out.  Chocolate’s often in my desserts, occasionally in my protein shakes, and every-now-and-then in my mid-afternoon pick-me-ups.  But I can certainly do without the sweet stuff for forty days.  C’mon, people used to give up food for Lent!  A little chocolate’s not really what the Big Guy had in mind.
  2. Meat.  Christians forego meat on Lenten Fridays anyway but some choose to give it up the whole way.  Not me.  If I’m giving up flour, I’ve got to have meat-and-potatoes to soften the blow of all my bread, pasta, and baked goods currently on hiatus.  For Pete’s sake, I can’t even have chicken noodle soup!  What was I thinking?
  3. Smoking or Drinking.  Maybe these are your vices but they’re not mine, so either would be a Lenten cop-out.  I enjoy the occasional glass of wine or a beer, sure, but putting them on the shelf for the next month or so? Hardly a stretch.
  4. Coffee.  Okay, we just shifted from first to fourth gear.  There is nothing – NOTHING – to fill the vast and infinite void left behind by my morning cup of joe.  I understand self-denial but don’t turn me into a raging lunatic.  Force me to give up coffee for Lent and I’ll have a newfound respect for the next option, which is…
  5. Sleeping In.  Normally this would be another cop-out for me because I’m one of those annoying morning people.  But deny me my coffee and I’ll gladly hibernate until early afternoon – every day until Easter.
  6. Social Media.  I dropped Facebook late last year.  I’m only on Instagram a couple of times a week.  I have no Twitter feed.  I get it – it’s 2021 – but this one’s a no-brainer for me.  I mean seriously, just give me a call.
  7. Speaking Poorly about Others.  I asked my sister-in-law what she was giving up for Lent and she said, “I’m going to be nice to others”.  That gave me a good laugh until I found this item on the list.  My sister-in-law has plenty of company.  So, consider: could YOU give up airing dirty laundry for forty days?

One more thing about Lent. Each of the liturgical seasons has a color, and Lent’s is purple.  You’ll see a lot of it in churches, cathedrals, and flower arrangements this month and next.  I like purple enough, but ask me to name purple items and all I come up with is eggplant (the nightmare vegetable of my youth), figs (the nightmare fruit of my youth), grapes (I prefer the green ones), cauliflower (yep, it comes in colors), and lavender and amethysts, both of which I have little use for.  Purple is about as smart a choice for Lent as giving up flour.

In conclusion, I could use your prayers as I endure my forty-day flour fast.  By late March my car tires will look like doughnuts and my paperback novel a nice, thick Pop-Tart.  Toss me a Frisbee and I’ll slather it in syrup and devour it like a pancake.  Put your pasta under lock and key.  Guard your pizza with your life.  I’m coming for your cupcakes.

Some content sourced from the Delish.com article, “7 Things To Give Up For Lent That Go Beyond Food”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.