Three Beautiful Things 02-01-2025: Fixing Lamb Stuffed Bell Peppers, A Delicious Family Dinner, Gonzaga Symphony on Thursday

1. Last Sunday, Christy's plan (hope?) was to serve shepherd's pie at family dinner. Its featured meat is lamb. When she found ground lamb at one of the stores, she concluded it was too expensive and so she bought ground beef and we had cottage pie. 

Debbie bought a pound of ground lamb several months ago and I have repeatedly seen it in our freezer. Had I known Christy could have used it last week, I would have donated it to the family dinner fund (ha ha -- there isn't such a thing). 

Instead, I decided as tonight's host that I would make something with the lamb and decided Mediterranean stuffed bell peppers would be good. 

I thawed out the frozen lamb.

I chopped a white onion and minced four garlic cloves and cooked them for about five minutes. 

I added the lamb and cooked the aromatics and the lamb together until the lamb browned. 

I finished cooking a pot of basmati rice and soon I added ground cloves, cinnamon, and cumin along with two chopped tomatoes and tomato paste and golden raisins and toasted almond slivers to the lamb, onion, and garlic mixture. 

After the lamb cooked for about five more minutes, enhanced by the above ingredients, I added the rice to the stuffing. 

I cut the tops off the peppers and pulled out the seed and other stuff inside and then stuffed the peppers with the meat, aromatics, tomatoes, and other ingredients.

I placed the stuffed peppers in the bottom of the Dutch oven, poured water in the bottom, and put it in the oven, lid on, for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees. 

2. Christy brought a delicious Carpaccio for an appetizer and Carol made a Greek salad to go with the stuffed peppers. Our focus was Mediterranean and we succeeded through our shared effort to produce a very good meal. 

After tweeking our family schedule for the next couple of months a bit, we enjoyed talking about books and learned news about some people around the Silver Valley. I couldn't stop myself from saying a few things about last night's concert. Paul talked about plans for the fall production at the theater (I don't know if the fall play is public knowledge so, for now, I'll hold it in confidence). 

I hadn't made stuffed peppers before and was happy my idea to make them in a Mediterranean style worked out. I wanted classical music to play during our time together, but I didn't want to have on surging symphonies or blazing concert. 

Instead, I put on a playlist of Mozart's piano sonatas, and this music provided a tranquil and virtuosic backdrop for our time together this evening. 

3. At 10:00 this morning, Leonard Oakland hosted his two hour classical music program. At some point, he announced that the Gonzaga Symphony will be playing at the university on Thursday evening. The program will feature violinist Gil Shaham, unknown to me until Leonard's announcement about the concert, and now I know he his highly regarded and is a Grammy award winner. 

I'll be there Thursday as long as nothing comes up to prevent me from going. 

I'm especially stoked that Gil Shaham will be featured as the soloist for Brahm's Violin Concerto in D Major. The rest of the program looks great: Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Saint-Saens. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-31-2026: Soulful Soups and Spirits, Jess Walter on the Music of Language, A Concert of Contrasts

1. When I need to drive into downtown Spokane, I have a much easier and enjoyable time if I arrive while it's still light. I had a ticket to tonight's scintillating Spokane Symphony concert and I arrived in the vicinity of the Fox Theater well in advance of the concert -- in daylight. 

I easily found parking on Jefferson near the Railroad Alley and, as I expected, in order to pay for my parking, I needed to use my phone, follow online instructions, and type in credit card information. 

The late afternoon light helped me succeed. 

My spot was just a couple of blocks from the theater and just a block from Soulful Soups and Spirits where I would eat a light dinner. 

The last time I visited S. 111 Madison, I was with Patrick and Meagan and we enjoyed drinking cider together at what was then the One Tree Cider tasting room -- now relocated to its production warehouse just east of Division/Ruby at 125 E. Ermina. 

I very much enjoyed the bowl of tomato basil soup accompanied by a house salad I ordered. Unfortunately, I arrived between when Soulful Soup ran out of bread and when their next batch would be coming out of the oven and be cooled off enough to slice. 

No problem. 

I'll try their bread next time and I'll treat myself to a different soup and, over time, try as many of their soups as I can. 

2. Even though I went to the lecture on Thursday for this concert, I wanted to hear whatever the conductor had to say in his pre-concert lecture tonight. 

Spokane writer Jess Walter was going to be narrating the guide to the orchestra as the concert's finale and he and Conductor James Rowe had a fun and insightful conversation about the similarities between music and language, whether spoken or written. 

I've spent a bit of time on this blog writing some of my thoughts about the musical nature of language and the terrific comments Jess Walter made helped reassure me that my comments were at least in the ballpark! 

3. In his Great Course lectures, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, Professor Robert Greenberg frequently returns to the point that many, if not most, classical composers structure their work around contrasts, whether contrasts in tempo, feeling, key signature, instrumentation, or other elements of a musical piece. 

I thought tonight's program featured very enjoyable contrasts between the different compositions. 

William Walton's opening piece featured a full orchestra playing lush and full-throated reimaginings of melodies originally composed by J. S. Bach.

The Fox Theater then started to feel like a church or a cathedral as the Spokane Chorale sang the Thomas Tallis piece that became the foundation for two small orchestras, one in the balcony, as they played Ralph Vaughan Williams' deeply emotional and spiritual reworking of Tallis' melody into his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Without a break, the smaller orchestra moved right into Paul Hindemith's mournful Trauermusik, a composition Hindemith wrote in six hours the day after the death of King George V for the BBC Orchestra to play the next day to express the grief of the nation. The Spokane Chorale then immediately deepened the sense of us being in a house of worship by singing Bach's "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit" or "I humbly come to your throne,/O God! and humbly beg you:/Do not turn your gracious face away/from me the poor sinner."

When the chorale ended its performance, the house lights went out and I felt like I was in a Compline service. The hall was absolutely silent and we all entered into a meditative, even prayerful, state and after a bit it became appropriate to applaud this moving series of soulful compositions. 

Then another contrast took shape as the second half of the program was much lighter.

It opened with Grace Williams' Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes and the concert came to a fun and a stirring end as the orchestra played Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to Orchestra and we heard Jess Walter reading his reworking of the original narration, making it a Pacific Northwest guide. It was great fun as each section of the orchestra came to represent a different part of the northwest. 

If you'd like to hear this concert, it will be replayed on KSFC-FM radio next Saturday, Feb. 7 at noon. You can stream KSFC by going to spokanepublicradio.org and clicking on the All Streams box and picking SPR Classical.