Podcast Fever

Podcast Fever

by Lauren ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

You know how Serial was like the hugest deal ever last year? I totally stuck my head in the sand while friends – especially those who enjoy a good mystery like I do – lost their collective minds over it.

Podcasts just weren’t on my radar. It’s kind of funny, thinking back to all the driving between Dallas and Houston I did while we were dating and engaged, but I steadfastly stuck with my radio stations on those drives, or maybe Tim Keller’s marriage sermon series coming out of the puny little speakers on my iPhone 6 plus. (I understand that that sermon series, which is amazing and was so helpful to us in premarital discussions and how we decided to go about figuring out what Lauren and Steve look like married, is basically the same content 20+ years earlier as can be found in Keller’s far more recent book The Meaning of Marriage. I haven’t read it yet, but we have it and it’s just a matter of time, both because I love Keller and because I’ll take all the help I can get.)

2015 did, however, see me get really into the beautiful world of closed Facebook Groups; although I was only really involved in one (an NFP group, which, for this new FAM user, was mighty handy), it was SO helpful to be able to reach out and ask questions and get quick answers from people with more experience than me in reading charts and such.

Then a friend mentioned a group on Facebook, and I joined. Due to positive peer pressure (all the cool kids were doing it!) started listening to the Sorta Awesome podcast (which is what brought the group together, of course – it is the Sorta Awesome Hangout group). Y’all, I love it. It’s amazing. It’s giving me such a sense of freedom to listen to these women – Megan Tietz, her cohosts, and her special guests – share from their lives. I am trying really hard to figure out this housewife thing, and how to do it well with the health problems I have. It is so refreshing to learn how different women handle even the most mundane things like whether or not to have a cleaning routine. I am being inspired to try new routines and tactics; I am being challenged to think of things differently (like vacuuming your swept-up piles of dirt instead of busting out the ever-frustrating dustpan); and I am being given the freedom to create with my husband whatever works best for us. Tim Keller talked about that in his sermons, but I feel I am finally starting to figure out how to do it.

The group is amazing, too – where else can you get feedback from over forty women about the most appetizing ways to eat cottage cheese in less than 24 hours? It’s all women, but not at all prissy or frilly. People post about all kinds of things – books and getting your kid to stop picking her nose and everything between. I am so jazzed about it.

One of the presents my husband got me for Christmas is a fabulous bluetooth speaker. So it’s quite convenient that I’m now 1) cleaning a lot more and 2) thus have at least double the podcast listening time, right when I have a fabulous way to listen to it all over the apartment. I’ve hopped on the podcast bandwagon. I’ve downloaded a bunch of podcasts, and I’m about to jump into Serial head-first.

The era of the podcast has begun.

The Secret of Our Great Strength

The Secret of Our Great Strength

by Lauren ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Yes, that was a Samson reference. As you may know, the secret of Samson’s great strength was God. But it was signified by his long hair, which was part of his keeping the Nazirite vow – which, frankly, he didn’t keep very well except for the hair.

My husband has amazing hair. The best I’ve ever seen, although his sister’s is a close second. But the secret to our great strength isn’t his hair – it’s brining.

Y’all, we have fallen head over heels for brining; we use it most often on chicken. It’s a game changer.

A year ago, I barely knew what a brine was; now I can make one without a recipe. I’ve used a number of different kinds spices and herbs in brines, but I love the classic sea salt dissolved in warm water option. It keeps the chicken moist and tender through cooking. It brings out the flavor. And it’s such an easy thing to do. If you can put your chicken in a brine for at least 15 minutes, you are golden.

Want a primer?

The Tenth Day of Christmas

The Tenth Day of Christmas

by Lauren ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This morning, the song & hymn line-up at church* was chock full of songs I love. Because several of them aren’t commonly known, I thought I’d share three with you guys today.

The basic theme of all of the song we sang this morning is one I love and struggle with and am learning all over again: we are each of us too big a train wreck for us to fix, but God is in the business of turning train wrecks into trophies of grace. These are wonderful songs for people who have come to the end of themselves.

And of course, I’ve included commentary, because, hey, this is me we’re talking about.

Come to Jesus by Mindy Smith – I’ve been putting this on mixes for more than 10 years, because sometimes your soul needs a desperate lullaby to remind you to rest like a baby in the arms of Jesus.

Can’t Help Myself by Sandra McCracken – This song is from a few years ago – before the Psalms album came out (which, y’all, is so good you should go buy it right now) – but is a really cool precursor to that album, because it follows the pattern of so many Davidic psalms, where David voices his thoughts and feelings about life being hard and then responds to his own self by reminding himself of Who God is and what God says about him. My favorite part (besides the “I can’t help myself” stuff, which I think is really helpful to repeat over and over, especially if you happen to be a perfectionist like myself) is the last verse: “I trust the Lord, my soul and all that is in me; I trust the Light to show my darkest parts. I pray the Spirit will be strong and mighty – a fool would keep his secrets in his heart.” I mean, isn’t that so deadly to our inclination to hide what is sinful and broken in ourselves from God?

For All the Saints, Indelible Grace style – I absolutely love this song. We started singing it in RUF in college, and it’s one of those rich hymns that takes you all the way to glory. I really love the last verse, but there are LOTS of verses, so I don’t blame our Worship Arts dude for ending at verse 5 or 6 or whatever it is (well, I try not to), and he does it so well – with a huge drum buildup at the end of the previous verse that ushers in the breathtakingly beautiful scene the hymn-writer (William How) describes for us of Jesus coming back to earth and the saints rising, victorious in His righteousness, from the dead. It’s fantastic.

The hardest thing to believe – and the most important – when you’re just having a really hard time in the grittiness of life is that Jesus really does make all things new. I kind of want to spend this year living like a person who knows 1. she will be resurrected 2. to live forever 3. in her (glorified) body 4. enjoying and glorifying God forever 5. with the rest of God’s people and all His creation. I’m not into New Year’s Resolutions or choosing a word for the year or anything like that, but I think this is something I’m gonna see if I can focus on this year. It seems like the kind of thing I should know down to my bones, you know?

* So I just want you to marvel with me for a moment that somehow our brand new church plant, which today held it’s 20th ever service, wound up landing the url citychurch.org. I still can’t believe it. To quote the 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series,”I am all astonishment.”

 

The Ninth Day of Christmas (on Cooking!)

The Ninth Day of Christmas (on Cooking!)

by Lauren ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I am a terribly lucky girl. (Well, as lucky as a Presbyterian can be.) I’m sure in time I will blog about many of the reasons my husband is amazing and just the right man for me, but today I’m going to focus on one in particular: he likes to cook. And he’s really good at it.

Take for example, this. This is what my amazing husband made for our lunch today.

IMG_0246

Now, when I say he made this for our lunch, I mean he 1) made the pesto, 2) brined and pan-fried the chicken, 3) made the bread from scratch, 4) toasted the bread and put the sandwiches together.

Y’all. I took down and packed away all the Christmas decorations while he MADE BREAD FROM SCRATCH. I mean, I don’t even know. He’s unbelievable.

We enjoy cooking together, so, since we were spending Christmas Day alone with the dog, we agreed to cook something rather exotic. This turned out to be duck.

Neither of us had ever cooked a duck before, which was part of the adventure. And for all they say about how greasy duck is, ours wasn’t at all. It was delicious – simple and juicy and marvelous. We made it in one of my Christmas gifts – a cast iron skillet, which I’ll be reviewing sometime soon, as it very well should have been on our registry.

IMG_0886

My husband thought this would go well with green bean casserole and twice baked potatoes. So there were no complaints from me. We tag-teamed on the duck, and he made the rest of dinner on his own. (You see how outclassed I am on the whole cooking thing?)IMG_0888

Since I am in love with Trader Joe‘s wine, it’s no surprise that we drank this lovely, slightly fizzy white with our dinner.

IMG_0890

It was so good, y’all, and so fun to try something new. And since we had all day, there was no rush to our cooking. It was marvelous.

IMG_0898

I am so spoiled.

(P.S. Duck – at least of the Pekin variety, which is what we eat in the US – has a very thick layer of fat under its skin. And y’all, you stack that fat on your fork with a big chunk of meat underneath, and you put it in your mouth, and it’s like the heavens are opening. It’s SO GOOD.)

(P.P.S. I got more than a cup of duck fat, which apparently keeps a long time in the fridge, and more than 10 cups of duck stock out of the carcass.)

The Eighth Day of Christmas

The Eighth Day of Christmas

by Lauren ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I hope you all had at least as much fun ringing in the New Year as we did last night when we completely forgot to pay attention to the time because we were so caught up in our current favorite board game, Pandemic. I’d never played a collaborative game before we got this (twas on sale at Target), and WE LOVE IT.

We didn’t register for Pandemic, but we did register for Carcassonne, and we’re so glad we did. We thought it would be nice to have a game that’s easy to play with just two, and based on reviews, we thought Carcassonne was a good bet, given how much we both like Settlers of Catan. (Playing Settlers with two requires all this extra work and it’s, for all you Scott Westerfield/Uglies fans, “crazy-making.”) Carcassonne has about 40 bajillion expansions, and it wasn’t long before we dropped cash on this beauty because we were so enamored. Date nights at home sometimes look like dinner and strategy games, I’m not gonna lie. The married life is pretty glamorous, y’all.

 

One thing I want to do on this blog is honest reviews of wedding registry items – what we use, how we’re learning to use it, etc. So consider this the first installment. Two-player board games are totally worthy of the registry.