1. After a lazy morning of coffee and shooting the breeze, the Deke and I collected ourselves, staggered into the Sube, did some looking around at REI, and shopped for groceries at MOM's Organic Market. It was the Deke's maiden voyage up and down the wide aisles of this compact store, and it was fun sampling millet bread, trying out kalamata hummus -- which we both enjoyed so we bought a container of it -- and joking around with the enjoyable smarty pants millinieal guys who checked us out and bagged our purchases. It was a fun shopping spree.
2. If you read this blog much at all, you know that the Deke and I have way of doing things that works beautifully. The Deke goes to work. I cook. The Deke doesn't cook very often, but when she does, she kills it, absolutely socks it out of the park. Today, the Deke decided she wanted to make a minestrone soup for the Diazes and us. I witnessed two moments of ingenious creativity she dreamed up while we shopped at MOM's. First, the Deke said, "The recipe calls for carrots, but I'm going to use these purple sweet potatoes instead." Then she proclaimed she would use red kale, not spinach, in this soup. I could feel my adrenaline kick in. This soup was sounding exciting. The Deke put it together in the Diaz kitchen, combining chicken broth*, tomatoes, onions, garlic, purple sweet potatoes, red kale, kidney beans, black beans, red wine, penne (boiled separately), red pepper flakes, salt, oregano, and basil. For me, the sweet potatoes gave the soup an unusual and most satisfying depth. I loved the subtle sweetness and the sweet potatoes lent to the broth. Wow! This was my third straight great soup day -- and, ha!, I didn't make a single drop!
*Better than Bullion
3. Star Wars: A New Hope is the only movie of the first six that the Deke ever saw and it's been about 100 years since she did. So the Deke, the Diazes, and I piled into the Diaz t.v. room and watched it this evening, with the next two installments to come tomorrow. I don't remember the last time I saw A New Hope. It had been long enough ago that seeing it tonight felt fresh and, at the same time, particular scenes triggered memories of when I was first married nearly 40 years ago and saw this movie twice in Spokane out on East Sprague with Eileen, spontaneously cheering when the rebels blew up the Death Star and of driving from Boise to Stanley, Idaho in the summer ofAugust, 1992, listening to Joseph Campbell on cassette tapes, totally absorbed by his insights into Star Wars and the hero's journey. I also had the odd experience of suddenly seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi as Alec Guiness' fubsy character, Holland, from The Lavender Hill Mob, and was seized for a few minutes by the absurd thought that Han Solo was going to help Obi-Wan smuggle miniature gold Eiffel Towers to the rebels on Yavin IV, made from gold bars stolen from the Galactic Empire.
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