Leisa A. Hammett

Nashville, A Community That Loves Food & A Cookbook That Eloquently Documents That Love

Have you heard? Nashville loves food! Nashville has become a town of foodies, among other things. Long before national media named us the "IT CITY,"—a moniker that makes us both puff with pride and tremble a little about what we may become after everyone moves here, as they are doing....Long before that, Baptists, who are headquartered here, were hauling greasy buckets of chicken to church pot lucks. But like the upshot of all upscale movements, the humble potluck has been transformed in the land of this It City, this town of foodies. 

Enter Nancy Vienneau, "recovered” caterer, noted food writer, and community food activist. Together with Nashville hat maker Gigi Gaskins, Vienneau founded The Third Thursday Community Potluck, now an eponymously named cookbook, ($24.99, June 2014, Thomas Nelson). At the behind-the-scenes potlucks, which inspired the cookbook, there are no rules: no assigned dishes, no RSVPs. Rather, a magical combination of devoted cooks and innovative dishes has made this a potluck like no other.

Even yours truly has a recipe in Vienneau's cookbook, ("Witchy Brew.") Within the pages of this truly beautiful hardcover, which bear delicious story and tantalizing photography, a fresh slant is cast upon potluck possibilities. 

Structured by the month, the Third Thursday Community Potluck Cookbook contains menus, stories and 150 seasonal Southern recipes, along with tips and tools for a successful gathering. Nature provides the ideal seasonal menu; Third Thursday Community Potluck Cookbook organizes those naturally occurring culinary themes into easy-to-execute monthly menus: July is for tomatoes, August for figs, December for gifts from the kitchen, January for staying warm. With recipes like Smoked Gouda Risotto with Spring Peas, Cider-Braised Pork with Pears, Crab Mac-and-Cheese, or Brown Butter Honey Cake, stirred appetites will ignite for honest and imaginative dishes worthy of sharing with neighbors and friends. 

Vienneau’s premise has always been simple: on the third Thursday of each month, bring a fresh seasonal dish for sharing. The results have been gloriously rich: new friends, engaging conversations, incredible food and camaraderie.  Create your own culinary community and experience the joy and spirit of a good ol’ fashioned potluck…extraordinarily reinvented. 

About Vienneau's "*food activism": the Nashville native began cooking professionally in 1980 as a caterer. These days she works in her community promoting local farmers, urban gardens, healthy affordable cooking, and food security. Most Fridays you’ll find her cooking at Second Harvest Food Bank. Her work appears in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Relish Magazine, Yoga Journal, Nashville Arts Magazine, her weekly restaurant column in The Tennessean, and her blog, Good Food Matters. 

Another friend-acquaintance from the blogosphere has a book just out. Ambitious engineer turned fitness and health coach, Dyan Damron's Don't Diet, Live It! is hot off the press as of yesterday. 

Feel the Heat

 

   

 

Lean into it. 

One of my former adopted mentors used to advise us to feel our physical pain. She was the leader of a group of women who all were experiencing symptoms of systemic yeast syndrome, which, back then, in the late 80s,  was a newly recognized health condition. We members would often get headaches as a reaction to foods that we ate, as sensitivities to environmental, chemical and food substances accompanied the syndrome.

Feel the pain, she told us of our frequent headaches. Lean into it. 

Summer heat is a bit of a pain to me--if I allow myself to slip into that categorization of it. Summer is my least favorite season, winter my fave. As I walked slowly down a sidewalk this morning, carrying none other than a hot cup of joe, I thought of the times in recent years I consciously chose to feel the heat of my least preferred  season. The many times I leaned into it. Have you ever tried that? It's an interesting experience. Instead of immediately fanning yourself, instead of cursing the temperature, feel the oven-like shock of a hot car. Feel stepping into the searing heat of a July sun. Suspend time for a second or two and feel it with every cell of your body. Let it permeate. It's intense. Yes. Try suspending judgement and instead just sensing it. 

Here in Nashville, we started out with a somewhat, mostly mild June. One of those lovely, rare cool-ish kind that seems to deliciously delay the heat of summer.

Those days are over. 

Each summer, nearly, I write a post here about embracing the heat and stopping our useless, toxic-energy  complaints. It's just weather. Embracing and accepting that which we cannot change is a transferable tactic not only to the blaze of summer sun, but also to so much that comes with the territory and the privilege of living life. And here's the thing, I'm afraid that more heat, and more dramatic weather, is a part of the life we've inflicted upon ourselves with our lack of environmentally conscious choices. All of us. 

There is so much we cannot change about life. Like summer heat. Kinda coulda-woulda-shoulda. But, we can choose to put away the drama of our self-inflicted angst and say: Yes. This. It's not my fave. Nothing I can do about it. I surrender. And then, something happens...Within all those experiences I label less than optimal, I find myself celebrating the little virtues that surround the season of heat, for example: a forced slower pace; the green panorama of earth; popsicles, pools and picnics. And while summer's heat, with it's stated virtues, is still not my preferred weather, I realize I'm the one who is making it up in my thoughts, choices, and life--to live in misery or joy. I can celebrate something, that on the flip side, I could also choose to bemoan and demonize.

Lean into it. 

My above iPhone photo of The Natchez Trace Parkway was an honored selection of Big Picture Classes. 

A Commencement Speech For Life; Take the Time to Listen

Wow. Cleaning out the garage, Saturday, provided an opportunity to relish in seldom listened to Saturday NPR programming. Bob Edwards did a round up of the best graduation speeches ever. You'll be glad you took the time to listen to this. Turn it on while cooking dinner, folding laundry. Make the time. It's not just for graduating students. From David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement.

 

If you liked this and you want to see it kept online, here's the scoop on doing that. If you are still reading and you didn't click on the arrow, above left, to listen to the video, here's a nugget from the speech via Wikipedia: 

In his Kenyon College commencement address, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warns against solipsism,^[29] invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism:^[30]

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

[...]“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”

― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Yummy. And here's another: "You are Not Special:" David McCullough, Wesley College, 2012.

On the home front, I've been having deja vu flashbacks as my daughter, about to turn 20 next month, graduated from high school this time last year.

The Gift of the Bluejay

He perched there. On my porch. Bulging-bellied lil' feller. His coif an iridescent blue. His body beneath his stunning wings, a downy warm, grey, winter white and dramatic strokes of tuxedo black. Mr. Bluejay. Why had he graced my breakfast window view?

Native Americans have assigned a symbology to the animal world. Certain ones symbolize wisdom: owls, turtles, snakes. Some: blessings. And that was the meaning I gave to this winged creature of pure innocence that soon flew northeast from my black iron porch railings.

Blessings. And, sentient being. One with me. And, oh, what my kind has done to his. Choked their lungs with chemicals that propel machines and humankind. He and his kind, just as valuable as mine. Interdependent. Sentinels of our own destruction. In many ways his kind wiser than mine. Living in the moment, this one present.

Image by: Jeff S. Photo/Art

G'bye 2013. Hello 2014. Some Thoughts & Lessons I'm Learning

Today, these last hours of the year, feels sacred to me. I'm savoring moments of quiet and still--part of Winter's gift. And, I'm also looking at the gifts brought this past year and how I can continue to grow into the next. Below, I'm sharing some lessons that I'm learning as 2013 evolves into the following year. Peace and Joy to you in 2014.

Some of the truths--truths to me--which I am continuing to learn:

Fear is synonymous with ego.

So is "futurizing."

When I fear something, when I fear anything, in "the future," when I obsess with the yet unborn tomorrows, the "what if's" or, "How in the hell am I going to get all that, and that AND that done?!") I am stepping into my ego.

To become a clear vessel, an instrument of the Divine Mystery, where my talents can be used for the highest best for myself and all those around me, it takes stepping out of time-centric, fear-based ego-self.

Stepping into the ego, will trip me up, stall me, every time.

So, Step One: SURRENDER....

I remember very clearly a message I received in 2007, a pivotal and very promising year in my life: "Be okay with the not knowing."

Few of us, on our own, can 100 percent predict the outcome of the very next moment. It takes surrendering the egoic fears that sometimes clench our guts and hearts and rob us from the visceral experience that we only have this present moment. From this moment, we can choose the next best step for our highest best and the highest best of all of those around us.

You see, in 2007, that year of such promise, my ego became entangled in the story that I chose to create and I failed to surrender and listen to my inner voice and made choices that would not serve me or those around me for the highest best. Today, I surrender to the lessons that "the west," the place of challenge, the cold north winds, just as indigenous people have known for centuries. The west, the bearer of "adversity"--in nature and in the rest of life--brings opportunities to learn.

Going forward, may I choose to surrender. To continue to become a clear vessel/channel for the energies to use what I have been given to create my highest best for myself and all those around me. And if this, too, is your truth, may these choices be so for you.

Namaste.

Photo: Grayton Beach, Fla., December 2013, ©LeisaHammett.com

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Friends. Here's wishing you time to reflect and ponder. To walk. To eat something that satisfies. Plenty of time to be quiet, contemplative. To read a good book. To hug a loved one. To be creative. To savor joy in stillness. I'll be unwrapping these gifts to myself all this week, with a bonus of going off the grid, or at least the world of social media. See you back here next week.

Thoughts on Gratitude

Day One. Day Two. Day...and so on. My Facebook feeds are peppered with friends "practicing gratitude," as they were last year. I'm intrigued by this public, intentional "practice" of gratitude during the launch of the winter season.

When Grace was very young, and before the word "autism" became a known reality in our lives, her father would care for her in the evenings after dinner and I'd retreat up into our bonus room with a good book and a journal. Two books that were seminal in my life, in many ways, during that time and that helped prepare a foundation of my life with autism were Dr. Christiane Northrup MD's classic Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing and Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. Both emphasized the importance of creating a daily gratitude routine. There were different ways suggested to incorporate gratitude and they morphed as my life changed throughout the years: writing five things down in my journal each night or each morning, or saying five things before I went to sleep or meditated or giving thanks throughout the day.

As the leaves are falling, the air crisping, during this time of year, I find myself giving thanks in the here and now more immediately and especially as I awaken. So, why is it that we dub November as the time to give thanks? And December, too? It's more than the fact of the pilgrims dined on supposed turkey with the Native Americans and that we exchange gifts in the aroma of a fur tree a month later. Despite a daily routine of giving thanks, I feel it more at the dawn of winter, too.

Two weeks ago, I looked out my bedroom window. The small Dogwood in my patio greeted my eyes with a wardrobe of red. I love that this species is the first, in my experience, to announce that Earth is dying for winter. A glance through the window today, I saw there are less leaves and beneath the dangle of the skinny tree's large, red earrings, her tender branches shown.

Tender. There's something tender and fragile about this season. For me, as we walk in the darkening days, it can't be ignored that we are a part of Mother. That just as the squirrels and other animals are scurrying and preparing for a long, cold winter (as this one is predicted to be,) we must find our own provisions to buckle in: coats, insulation, warm food--if we are so fortunate to have them. And that is part of the key, for me: to be a grateful steward of what I/we have been given.

My body reminds me that it is more fragile now, too, and I must take precautions against the threat of cold, better food, more vitamins and nutrients in my diet. So, when I awaken each morning, I'm reminded not to take for granted the light that is shortening. The heat that I could be without. The water that is necessary to live and entire villages have hideously inadequate supply. The fresh fruit I have for breakfast, that was such a delicacy during The Great Depression, when my mother was young, that pieces were given as gifts in Christmas stockings.

In his new book, Radical Spirituality for the 21st Century, by author Rev. Dr. David Kenneth Wheaton, Ph.D., pages 62-64, gratitude is defined as giving thanks outside of ourselves, something in the external world. Gratefulness, instead, is a constant internal state regardless of the quality of events, even adversity. 

What do you think?

August in Tennessee Means 'Maters: It's What's for Dinner!

While Georgia touts the peach, (and we native South Carolinians know who's really the peach state,) Tennessee is the queen of the tomato scene. Why, here in hip Nashville, you know, the "It City," according to way-too-many media outlets now, we even have a tomato festival every August. While Bradleys are said to be king, I go for the yummy yellow, purple, orange and rich red varieties of heirlooms. I'm craving "raw" these days. And Tennessee tomatoes fill the bill and my belly. I got these lookers from an Amish produce stand.

This is simple, folks. I add a piece of crisp whole wheat toast or some good whole grain crackers, some good "EVO," drizzled; sliced cukes; slivered red onion and some of 'dem good Tennessee 'maters. Tomatoes! It's what's for dinner. On my plate. In August. In Tennessee. Join me!

Let your imagination vary the ways you can mix up this concoction, add good feta, olives, peppercinis; make it Asian with soy sauce...the list goes on.

Here's some past August posts on "The Journey with Grace," here and here, praising this lovely fruit/vegetable. ("It's a uniter, not a divider-Bringing together fruits and vegetables." :) 

*EVO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)

Listen. To. This. Seriously! (Dustin Hoffman: "Tootsie was Not a Comedy.")

Dustin Hoffman, in the video below, tears up repeatedly when he realizes what it's like to be a woman. This is something that every man should watch. I hope everyone will. It's three minutes. Just do it. (I know the women folks will. ;)

 

The Root of Jealousy: A Lil' Personal Lesson

A good night's sleep, I had. It began on the sofa where I intentionally pulled a throw over myself and stretched out until midnight, when I then proceeded to my bed. A good night's sleep + a shower and the revelation came:

Jealousy stems from belief in scarcity.

I had examined, while the hot blades of water pelted my flesh, why, the afternoon before, I had responded the way I did to a friend. My small, inner voice of truth warned me not to. I wasn't offensive to her. But I knew I was coming from a place of ego. I was coming from a life-long history of learned competitiveness via my mother. I was coming from scarcity--that there was not enough to go around. AHA! Jealousy--a touch of, which is what I felt--comes from scarcity.

As I do so often these days, I turned to my teacher. I confessed my slip of ego. And here is what he said:

"If you know who you are, you have no need to communicate as you did. Jealousy comes from a weak esteem and a weak esteem comes from not owning and knowing the truth of who you are."

Sometimes I forget. I am learning to forget less. And, to remember more.

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Written in February, I unearthed this "emergency post" while I take the week off, mostly offline, this last precious (yes, it is, I got my attitude adjusted, sans alcohol,) week of full summer. Enjoy!