"Cardiologist's Cadillac" baked potato soup

Les and I went down to the Lake of the Ozarks for a quick getaway Wednesday afternoon, coming back on Thursday afternoon, a trip made possible by Morgann herding the kids while we were gone. We had no agenda other than celebrating our tenth anniversary about a week late by returning to the locale we went on our honeymoon. The fall weather was beautiful, and at least some of the trees are starting to change.

We stayed at the Inn at Grand Glaize with a room overlooking the lake, including a little balcony with two chairs, which was great for reading the next morning. At the front desk's suggestion we went to dinner at JB Hook's, and had a beautiful view from our table and an excellent dinner. I had their baked potato soup to start, and it was incredible. So last night I thought I would try my hand at it - not a slavish devotion to trying to recreate the restaurant's version, but giving it my own go.

This is a relatively quick soup to make, and the result is tasty - after putting the first spoonful in her mouth Morgann declared, "You can make this again!" and Les concurred. One issue I often have when I try to make cream soups, especially potato soups, is I think they come out too watery at the end, or the potatoes are soggy. I was determined not to let that happen this time, and I succeeded. I think baking them instead of boiling them helps.

Cardiologist's Cadillac Baked Potato Soup
[So-named because if you eat a lot of this, you will be paying for your cardiologist's car.]

Ingredients

• 7-8 medium russet potatoes
• ½ yellow onion, diced fine
• 5-6 fresh brown (Crimini) mushrooms, diced
• 1 Tbs diced roasted garlic† (I cheated and used the kind in the jar)
• 5 thick bacon slices
• 1 stick of (real) butter
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1+ pint heavy cream
• ¾ can of chicken broth
• 1 Tbs chives
• 1 Tbs oregano
• 1 tsp dill weed (I would have used more but Les doesn't like it)
• salt (to taste - I probably used a tsp)
• coarse pepper (to taste - I probably used a Tbs)

Garnishes (optional)

One or more of the following:

• grated sharp cheddar cheese
• crumbled bacon bits
• chives
• toasted onion flakes
• toasted caraway or cumin seeds

Directions

Bake the potatoes. I cheated and "baked" them in the microwave in two batches - about 8 minutes on high for each batch. You want them easily pierced by a fork but not "gushy." Set aside. Cook the bacon slices until they are just crisp. Set aside. In heavy pot melt the butter over medium high heat. When it is hot add the onions. Cook until they start to brown. Add the mushrooms and cook about another minute. Turn down the heat to medium and add about ¼ can of broth to deglaze. When it is just about to simmer stir in the sour cream and stir around until it is melded into the broth. Then add the cream (I used a little over half a quart) and another ½ (or less) can of broth. Add the garlic and seasonings, stir and continue to slowly heat it on medium (don't bring it to a boil).

While the soup base is heating, dice a little over half of the potatoes in fairly big (¾") chunks, leaving the skins on. Take the remainder and mash it in a bowl (also with the skins on - I like potato skins). Chop/crumble the bacon in fairly big (½") pieces. When the soup base starts to simmer, let it bubble for about a minute to thicken. Then add the potato chunks and the bacon and stir, keeping the soup from simmering again. Taste and adjust seasonings. Slowly stir in the mashed potatoes a couple of spoonfuls at a time, letting them mix with the soup. Heat through well. When it is steaming and just ready to start simmering again, it is ready.

Serve with soft breadsticks brushed with olive oil and heated in the oven.

Yum!


† I cook with garlic, lots of it, in every meal. This was actually a "light" recipe in terms of the amount of garlic I used. As I always exclaim when adding heaping amounts of garlic to whatever I'm cooking, "The Lehmer household - vampire free since 1979!" No one ever asks me what happened in 1979. :o)

Acedia & me, a review (part 2)

This is the second post about the book Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris. You can read the first part here. This post is a continuation of selected quotes from the book.

"I find that depression generally has an identifiable and external cause that acedia lacks. I can look at my life and see where the trouble is coming from. But acedia arises out of nowhere, as it were, emerging from my inner depths without warning, and without any reason that I can determine. Also, I have found that depression is amenable to treatment in ways that acedia is not. Depression will disrupt my life so that I cannot fail to notice and take action, consulting a counselor or physician. Acedia is more subtle, and when it wells up in me, only the venerable practice of spiritual discernment is of much use." – pg. 147

"A crucial distinction between depression and acedia is that the former implies a certain level of anguish over one's condition, while in the latter it remains a matter of indifference. But it is an unearned indifference to the vagaries of experience and emotion, because one hasn't really endured them. Acedia will always take the path of least resistance and attempt to go around, rather than through, the demands that life makes of us." – pg. 150

"The question of whether despair is a sin, a sickness, or both has been answered in various ways. If the early monks and medieval theologians approached the subject with psychological subtlety, Martin Luther did not hesitate to exhort a melancholy friend to fight like hell. Given his history of debilitating despondency and notoriously combative temperament, it is no surprise to find Luther offering this bracing advice: 'You must be resolute, bid yourself defiance, and say to yourself wrathfully…'No matter how unwilling you are to live, you are going to live and like it!'" – pg. 165

"Although I was helped by a Jungian analyst when I was in my early twenties, and my husband and I benefited on several occasions from marriage counseling, I have found therapy to be of limited usefulness, constrained in ways that religion is not, because it consistently falls short of mystery, by which I mean a profound simplicity that allows for paradox and poetry. In therapy I am likely to be searching for explanations, causes, and definitions, information that will help me change my behavior in healthful ways. But wisdom is the goal of spiritual seeking, and it is religion's true home." – pgs. 169-70

"The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married. I hope that I will always have faith in the giddy wonders of romance, but in considering what makes a marriage endure, I am likely to employ such ascetic and unromantic terms as discipline, martyrdom, and obedience." – pg. 182

"I am consoled anew by my friend Evagrius, who notes that while young monks contend with lust, or the impulse to pull others toward them, the middle-aged have to fight the desire to push others away. As the young struggle with a raging appetite for more experience, their elders are tempted to grow angry and regretful over experience thwarted or denied." – pg. 200

"I recognize all of these stages in myself, and I know that there are some days when such unfocused anger makes me of little use to anyone. When I am in this state, the popular notion of fixing things by 'talking it out' is counterproductive. If I bristle with irritability, and if my anger is out of proportion to any cause, fear and despair are my real enemies, and talking will lead me to rant aimlessly or awaken a self-pity that sends the poison deeper within." – pgs. 202-3

"A prayer said after receiving communion, for example, is a bold plea to 'ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption.' If, an hour later, I am tempted to slough it all off in a mean or angry behavior, those words still reside in me, as a call to be more compassionate and kind. The point of the eucharist, after all, is not merely to change the bread and wine into Christ, but to change me as well." – pgs. 207-8

"In The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon cites a psychoanalyst who laments that 'psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless,' in that therapists 'who once neglected the physiological brain in favor of emotionality now neglect the emotional human mind in favor of brain chemistry.' Solomon regards both perspectives as essential, and one senses that, like Evagrius, he is speaking from experience. 'Psychoanalysis is good at explaining things,' he writes, 'but it is not an efficient way to change them…When I hear of psychoanalysis being used to ameliorate depression, I think of someone standing on a sandbar and firing a machine gun at the incoming tide.'" – pgs. 266-7

And finally, to wrap it up, an extended quote from near the end of the book:

"When Hazzaya was preparing to leave the monastery as a failed monk, he suddenly received what Deseille calls 'an interior inspiration that advised him to stay in his cell, and for each hour of the liturgical office, to recite only Psalm 117, the shortest of all the psalms, consisting of only two verses. This remedy,' Deseille writes, 'soon brought his trial to an end.'

On reading this I laughed out loud, and I suspect that many monks and nuns would do the same. What a lazy fellow, to content himself with so little: 'O praise the Lord, all you nations, / acclaim God, all you peoples! / Strong is God's love for us; / the Lord is faithful forever.' But in contending with acedia, one is wise to grasp any tool that works. Hazzaya's story reminds me of what the late poet William Stafford used to say about writer's block. He claimed never to have experienced it, because as soon as he felt it coming on, he lowered his standards.

Writing is like fishing, Stafford would say. A nibble will always come, but all too often we dismiss the little nudge as not worthy of the great works we vaingloriously imagine we will write. In a similar way we block our spiritual progress. The message of salvation that begins as a whisper is easily missed in the noise of passions such as envy, pride, anger, and acedia. Citing a Jesuit psychologist, Deseille comments that Hazzaya's struggle is a common passage in the life of the human spirit, when we must 'grasp in the darkness the divine help that cannot be felt' or clearly seen." – pgs. 282-3

Acedia & me, a review (part 1)

I recently finished reading Kathleen Norris's latest book, Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. An expansion of her earlier lecture-turned-essay, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" (I wrote about it here), it expands on the resistance, ennui and outright hostility we can feel toward our daily existence, thinking it anything but our "real life," when in fact it is our only life.

She works many threads into this book – the difference between acedia and depression, the meaning of love and marriage, especially in the face of hardship and loss, and ultimately why just living, day in and day out, is the ultimate battle, a fight worth fighting, and the fight God wants us to fight. For someone like me, who has experienced both depression and acedia (now I have the right term for it!), it was both illuminating and hopeful to recognize that not only does someone else understand, but in fact that acedia has a long history, and I am in good company.

If all of that seems like a "depressing" topic, in the hands of anyone else less insightful I think it would be, but Norris pulls it all apart with her clean intellect and then sews it up with her poet's appreciation for mystery, irony and ear for God in "the little things." She doesn't shrink from loss and pain, documenting her husband's long illness and death and the strains on their marriage. But even through that battle and it's aftermath she is looking for meaning, for sustenance, for hope. And she finds it, and leads you to believe that you can, too.

Recommended.

Following are various quotes from the book. I am going to split these up into two posts to not overwhelm (or bore) you.

[I found the following, excerpted from a longer quote with which she opens the book, to be a good illustration of "a case of the Mondays." Which is funny, since it was written over 1,600 years ago.]

The demon of acedia – also called the noonday demon – is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [or lunchtime], to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren appears from his cell].

- Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), The Praktikos

Now for the first group of excerpts from the book:

"I believe that such standard dictionary definitions of acedia as 'apathy,' 'boredom,' or 'torpor' do not begin to cover it, and while we may find it convenient to regard it as a more primitive word for what we now term depression, the truth is much more complex. Having experienced both conditions, I think it likely that much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress. The boundaries between depression and acedia are notoriously fluid; at the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest that while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer." – pg. 3

"At its Greek root the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet can't rouse yourself to give a damn." – pg. 3

"When I complained to a Benedictine friend that for me, acedia was no longer a noontime demon but seemed like a twenty-four-hour proposition, he replied, "Well, we are speaking of cosmic time. And it is always noon somewhere." – pg. 6

"We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience." – pg. 24

"Acedia is the place where we wait for Godot, and it is the state of waiting." – pgs. 46-7

"The early Christian monks staked their survival on their willingness to be as God had made them, creatures of the day-to-day. They regarded repetition as essential to their salvation, and valued perseverance in prayer and manual labor as the core of their spiritual discipline." – pg. 86

"For the early Christian abbas and ammas, both heaven and hell were to be found in present reality. While both were envisioned as an inheritance – one to be hoped for, the other avoided – neither existed apart from everyday experience. No doubt these monastics would have greeted Sartre's famous existentialist credo 'Hell – is other people' by saying, 'Yes, of course, and heaven as well.'" – pg. 111

"Many people who would not dream of relying on the understanding of literature or the sciences they acquired as children are content to leave their juvenile theological convictions largely unexamined. If they resented religion when they were young, as adults they are perplexed and dismayed by its stubborn persistence in the human race. But religions endure because they concern themselves with our deepest questions about good and evil, about the suffering that life brings to each of us, and about what it means to be fully human in the face of death." – pg. 114

"At bottom, to dismiss sin as negative is to demonstrate a failure of imagination. As the writer Garret Keizer asserts in Help: The Original Human Dilemma: 'Everyone believes in sin, the people who charge their peers with political incorrectness and the people who regard political correctness as the bogey of a little mind.' He adds, 'What everyone does not believe in, as nearly as I can tell, is forgiveness.'" – pg. 117

"When people pray over finding the color scheme, carpet, candles, images, and incense that will best enhance their spiritual life, they would do well to recall the literal meaning of the third commandment, against blasphemy. In Hebrew, it is an admonition against offering nothingness to God. As Graham Greene observes in the novel A Burnt-Out Case, '[People] have prayed in prisons…in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle-classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.'" – pg. 126

"The writer Wendell Berry laments the extent to which economics has been elevated to a position that God once held, as 'ultimate justifier.' We have come to 'treat economic laws of supply and demand' as though they were 'the laws of the universe.' If there is a religion that encompasses all the world, it is the pursuit of wealth. But Christians must recognize that in slothfully acquiescing to its petty gods, we deny Christ a place on earth even more effectively than do the loud atheists and antitheists of our time." – pg. 128

"Evagrius notes that the demon of acedia manipulates both our presumption and our despair, puffing us up with thoughts of the great accomplishments we will make and then crushing us when our efforts fall short of expectations." – pg. 138

"Self-consciousness feeds on sincerity, and both have attained cult status in America. In the current political climate, as if giving credence to Oscar Wilde's contention that sincerity is the worst vice of the fanatic, the sincere religious beliefs of a few have trumped even some basic tenets of science. But as Henri de Lubac reminds us, 'It is not sincerity, it is Truth which frees us, because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery. To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed.'" – pgs. 143-3