grub club IV

This Sunday I made dinner for myself and seven friends. We ate outside on a covered patio until it got too cold, then we went indoors just before it started raining. Due to the nature of my dinner, I didn’t really get to eat with people, and people were left waiting on food. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t terrible. Going to try to avoid these kinds of meals in the future.

That being said… everyone liked it, and I thought it was a good spring meal. I wanted a lot of fresh ingredients, but the common thread ended up being birds eye chili, which is present in every course. Here’s what I made:

Stir-fried oyster mushrooms

These are really flavorful. I served them with a little bit of rice over arugula with an orange slice. I left it up to people what they chose to do with all those elements, but no one squeezed the orange onto the mushrooms like I expected. It’s a lot of flavors that I think are all interesting, but not everyone may agree.

12 c. very roughly chopped oyster mushrooms

12 small cloves garlic

1 birds eye chili

2 1/2 tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp black rice cooking wine

1/2 tbsp vegetarian fish sauce (optional)

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp loosely packed chopped cilantro

1 tbsp or so sesame seeds

Sautee the garlic and chili in the sesame oil. Depending on the heat of the chili, using just one with this quantity of mushrooms will result in only mild to medium spiciness. Sample the chili and make a judgment call on what spiciness you want. As the oil is infusing with the garlic and chili, rinse and chop the mushrooms. Deglaze the pan with the wine, fake fish sauce, and soy. Add the mushrooms and cook until the sauce reduces to a kind of syrupy texture. This took about 30 or 40 minutes for me, though if you want to speed this up, you could leave out the fish sauce and 1 tbsp of the wine. Oyster mushrooms are sturdy enough that they can handle this kind of cook time and not turn to mush. When the sauce has cooked down and the flavor is to your liking, mix in the cilantro and sesame seeds.

Bánh xèo

Bánh xèo is a kind of pancake or crepe made from rice flour and coconut milk and filled, typically with shrimp and pork. I made a vegetarian one filled with thai basil, cilantro, mint, carrot, daikon radish, and green onion, taken from the great cookbook Plenty. I don’t want to distribute their recipe; buy the book!

I will note that I wanted a thin pancake, but if I poured the batter too thin, it was too crispy and got ruined when I tried to flip it. I’m sure there’s an art to this sort of thing. Give it some practice.

Mango with chili-infused coconut sauce

You can now buy Philippine-style mangos in the US! This is good news. I risked despoiling the deliciousness of these mangos with my own invention, but I think it turned out well.

3.5 c. coconut milk (2 cans)

2 1/2 tbsp sugar

1 1/2 tbsp lime juice

10 birds eye chilis

pinch of salt

This is one of the first things that I started, so the chilis were infusing for a good four hours or so. Pour the milk, sugar, lime juice, and salt in a pot over low-medium heat. Bruise the chilis with the handle of a knife, or a mortar and pestle. I like to keep the chilis intact, just for presentation’s sake, so I am pretty gentle, but I try to just barely break the skin so the oils can seep out. I also like to press the chilis against the side of the pot as they’re cooking to squeeze the oil out. The result was very spicy, but I didn’t want the heat to be too mild once it was on the mango. No one complained.

Previously, I had made this with coconut cream and had the pot uncovered as the chilis infused, so I ended up with a thick cream. This time, I had the pot covered until I realized that the milk wasn’t reducing as quickly as I had hoped, so I uncovered it and turned the heat as high up as I was comfortable. Still, for 8 mango halves, I only used about a third of this, and it was not as thick as I would have liked.

UPDATE: I forgot I also made some iced rose almond milk tea. My quantities are not exact since I just winged it, but I boiled about 1 1/2 liters of water and put about half a cup of dried rose buds (from the local Asian market) in bags and teaballs. I probably could have just used cheesecloth to make it easier on myself. I used maybe 1/3 cup of honey, and let that steep for about 3 – 5 minutes, just until the rose flavor started to come out but not be too strong. Then I dropped in a tray of ice cubes and a pour of almond milk and stirred it and let it cool in the fridge. I didn’t want to serve it with ice in it. It turned out really good.

Political Expediency and Following the LDS Prophet

The topic of the fallibility of the President of the LDS Church, while ostensibly clear, becomes ambiguous in application. I posit that when it comes to the leadership’s views on politics, the membership, encouraged by the teachings of leaders, regards the President as infallible.

Charles W. Penrose of the First Presidency wrote in 1912: “No President of the Church has claimed infallibility1.” FAIR has an entry in their wiki2 roundly refuting the assertions of critics that Mormons treat the President of the Church as infallible. The Doctrine & Covenants makes explicit that “There is not any person belonging to the church who is exempt from this [disciplinary] council of the church3;” even the President can transgress. Neil L. Andersen taught in General Conference in 2012 that “The leaders of the Church are honest but imperfect men4.” Given all these pronouncements about the fallibility of the President, one might think that statements like “When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done5” would find no traction among the membership, or that discussions among the faithful would not be ended with an appeal to what the President thinks. But the notion persists among Mormons that the opinions of Church leaders are never to be questioned.

There are teachings that seem to challenge the official position regarding the President’s fallibility. In a popular anecdote, Marion G. Romney recounts that Heber J. Grant advised him: ”My boy, you always keep your eye on the President of the Church and if he ever tells you to do anything, and it is wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it… But you don’t need to worry. The Lord will never let his mouthpiece lead the people astray6.” There are a few peculiar things about Pres. Grant’s assertion. It not only appears to contradict the official position that the President can make mistakes but also implies that the Lord might infringe on the President’s agency; how exactly would the Lord keep the President from leading the people astray? Furthermore, if the second part of the statement is true then the first part is moot. It becomes even more puzzling why he included that moot hypothetical when considering the dubious ethics of the statement–why would the Lord bless someone for doing something that is wrong regardless of who said to do it?

The background of this anecdote is that President Grant had received criticism in 1936 for publishing a front-page editorial in the Deseret News accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt of “knowingly promoting unconstitutional laws and… advocating communism7.” His assertion that the membership of the Church should follow the President because the Lord would bless them if he were wrong, even though the Lord would never allow him to be wrong, was a defense of his assumed right to speak on political matters. The rhetorical lengths he went to are indicative of the primacy of compliance over personal understanding.

The other commonly cited defense of the absolute safety of following “The Prophet8” also comes out of another situation in which the leadership saw the membership’s obedience to be a temporal necessity. When Wilford Woodruff introduced the first Official Declaration, which ended (at least publicly and in this life) the practice of plural marriage, he prefaced the change with this assurance: “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty9.” Note the impending temporal consequences of refusing to end the practice, stated right in OD1: “If we had not stopped it, you would have had no use for … any of the men in this temple at Logan; for all ordinances would be stopped throughout the land of Zion. Confusion would reign throughout Israel, and many men would be made prisoners. This trouble would have come upon the whole Church, and we should have been compelled to stop the practice10.” Given the consequences of the saints’ failing to comply with the cessation of an accepted doctrine, Pres. Woodruff inscribed an appeal to the impossibility of his teaching something wrong.

As an apostle, Ezra Taft Benson, in a controversial devotional at BYU11 for which he later had to make an explanation to the seventies (and which was exhumed recently in a general conference talk), made the most explicit connection between the President’s right to speak on politics and his inability to err. In the “Fourteen Fundamentals of Following the Prophet” (again, would that all Jehovah’s people were prophets…), he reiterates the point several times: “The prophet can receive revelation on any matter, temporal or spiritual,” and “The prophet may advise on civic matters.” He quotes Harold B. Lee as saying “You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may conflict with your political views. It may contradict your social views… Your safety and ours depends upon whether or not we follow.” He criticizes the “so-called experts of political science [who] want the prophet to keep still on politics.” Most poignantly, he recounts Marion G. Romney’s story about a man who is upset about some of the things that Heber J. Grant had said in conference. After this man said that he had immigrated to the US because Wilford Woodruff had told him to come, Pres. Romney asks him if he believes Heber J. Grant is a prophet. “His answer, ‘I think he ought to keep his mouth shut about old-age assistance.’” Here is Benson’s sentence for such disagreement: “Now I tell you that a man in his position is on the way to apostasy. He is forfeiting his chances for eternal life. So is everyone who cannot follow the living prophet of God.” In this worldview, there is precious little room for error on the part of the members. The slightest disagreement with the brethren on a political matter is the path to apostasy.

President Benson was notable for being a vocal member of the rightwing John Birch Society and a virulent opponent of communism and everything perceived to be in league with communist revolutionaries–he claimed that the civil rights movement was being used as a “communist program for revolution12” and fretted in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover that the communists were using Dwight D. Eisenhower as a kind of useful idiot13. He was fond of intertwining contemporary politics and scriptural lessons, perhaps more so than any other president. Given his perspective that the threat of communism was an imminent and devious threat, I find it no coincidence that he has delivered the firmest defense of the safety of following the President’s political directives.

My personal experience with the rigidity of following the Prophet came most dishearteningly from my senior year at BYU when the university accepted Dick Cheney’s solicitation to speak at my graduation ceremony. While not every BYU student is so immature as to suppose that since the President of the Church sits on the board of the university that every decision down to the decaffeinated sodas in the cafeteria carries God’s divine seal of approval, those voices dominated the discussion about the appropriateness of having a war profiteer speak at a Church-owned university. I was sincerely baffled to hear my peers at a very selective, accredited university squelch all conversation about a topic because it was tangentially connected to a man who was above questioning, not to mention in a religion where inquiry and verification direct from God play such an integral role in the foundational narrative. To my mind, a correction from the administration was due in order to reinforce the value of educated, thoughtful discussion. None came.

Proposition 8 in California in 2008 became, church-wide, a line in the sand. Religious pressure to get on board, across the country, was intense. One’s feelings on gay marriage in California somehow became indicative of one’s commitment to the “Gospel.” I don’t recall, for example, Pres. Hinckley’s forbidding of gambling achieving the same “good Mormon” litmus test status.

Apologists point to the existence of the “honest but imperfect men” statements as though they negate the the other statements which assert the Lord’s unwillingness to let the Prophet err. They do not. The two conflicting ideas exist largely separate, compartmentalized by their different applications like a sword and a shield. When heterodox Mormons need to be put back in line, doubting the Prophet is the road to apostasy. When critics bring up the racist views of past leaders, the Prophet is fallible.

But there is a bleed between these points of view. The statements about the Prophet never leading the people astray, born out of political expediency, have, in the doctrinal arena, facilitated witch hunts, prompted purges, suppressed meaningful discourse and created a climate of stifling orthodoxy. My hope is that the bleed can go the other way, with the fungibility of the doctrine influencing the Church’s politics, back towards the sentiment of Joseph Smith: “I want the liberty of thinking and believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammelled. It does not prove a man is not a good man because he errs in doctrine14.”

 

1 Charles W. Penrose, "Peculiar Questions Briefly Answered," Improvement Era 15 no. 11 (September 1912) 
2 http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_doctrine/Prophets_are_not_infallible 
3 D&C 107:81 - 84 
4 "Trial of Your Faith," Ensign, November 2012 
5 Improvement Era, June 1945 
6 Conference Report, October 1960, p. 78 
7 D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years, p. 75 
8 Numbers 11:29: “Would that all Jehovah’s people were prophets” 
9 Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News,October 11, 1890, p. 2 
10 Cache Stake Conference, Logan, Utah, Sunday, November 1, 1891. Reported in Deseret Weekly, November 14, 1891 
11 Address given Tuesday, February 26, 1980 at Brigham Young University 
12 “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” September 29, 1967 
13 http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=11289154&itype=storyID 
14 History of the Church 5:340

People seem to struggle with what music they should put on when they’re with other people. I made an instructive Venn diagram to try to clear this up.

Spring Mix 2013

Spring Mix 2013

Here’s a mix to go along with your spring. My taste is usually much darker than this, fyi.

wintry feast

This Sunday was the third Grub Club. I wanted to do kind of a fall/winter meal, one with root vegetables and lentils and herbs and things. I’m not sure how wintry it was, but it turned out pretty well. I cooked for 12, and eerily had just the right amount of everything. The recipes follow:

Bourbon fried purple potatoes:

4 or 5 purple potatoes, sliced with a mandolin

1/2 c. or so walnut oil

salt

roughly chopped parsley

1/2 c. – 3/4 c. bourbon

Wash and slice potatoes while heating up cast iron skillet with 1 tsp or so of oil on medium high heat (but don’t scorch the oil). Put a layer of potatoes in the oil and turn over when they start to get brown and crispy. Sprinkle a pinch of salt and pour in a splash of bourbon (I was being conservative since I was near the end of my bottle). Stir potatoes, remove from heat, and stir in parsley. I think these are best when they’re fresh off the stove, ie before they sit out and get soggy, so I was serving people right off the stove, doing multiple batches until I used up all my potatoes.

Green tea red lentils:

4 c. red lentils

6 cloves garlic

1 1/2 tbsp loose green tea

1/2 tsp turmeric

1 1/2 c. cashew cream

salt

Wash lentils in pot and add 4 cups water (I was hoping to keep a little of the texture and not have the lentils turn to mush, but red lentils like to turn to mush. My thought was to use less water and steam for longer, which worked with a smaller batch, but this turned to mush. It looked like flavorless gruel, but ended up being flavorful gruel.) Add garlic cloves, turmeric, tea, and a pinch of salt and boil. You’re going to want to use some good tea. I got some loose gunpowder tea from an Asian market, and it was perfect. The tea flavor was mild, and it was basically all leaves and no stems. When the water boils down just below the level of the top of the lentils (think cooking rice), turn the heat to low and steam for 20 minutes (don’t remove that lid!). To make cashew cream: I soaked about 1/3 lb. of roasted unsalted cashews in a bowl with water about 1/2 inch over the nuts. After soaking for an hour, blend them all together. Stir that into the lentils. Season with salt and fresh ground pepper–I would start with about 1/2 tsp of salt or so and salt to taste. I used about 15 grinds of pepper, just enough to add a hint of pepper but not enough to make it spicy.

Stuffed red bell pepper:

12 red bell peppers

6 medium carrots

8 medium parsnips

2 inches fresh minced ginger

6 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 tsp cinnamon

salt

2 tbsp (or so) olive oil

Peel and slice carrots and parsnips into sticks (I filled my 4 quart saucepan to the brim with parsnips and carrots and had just a little left over). Boil parsnips with a pinch of salt for five minutes or so, then add carrots. While those are boiling, sautee the ginger and garlic in the oil. When the carrots are just tender (and the parsnips are soft; don’t want tough, rooty parsnips), drain them and stir fry in the oil, turning up the heat to medium high. Sprinkle in the cinnamon and salt to taste. I wanted just a hint of cinnamon flavor, just enough to bring out the sweetness in the vegetables. Slice the tops off the bell peppers, and stuff with the vegetables. Place in pan covered in tin foil. I baked these at 300 for about 20 minutes, but I would have liked them softer. Maybe next time I would broil for about 10 minutes or so. I removed the top foil for the last bit and changed the oven to broil to get them a little charred on top.

Serve these over the lentils and garnish with cilantro. Seriously, I wouldn’t skip the cilantro.

The caramelized fennel recipe I stole from Plenty, which is a fantastic cookbook from London’s Ottolenghi restaurant. I don’t want to reprint it here because I don’t know how recipe law works.

oyster mushrooms

I bought a carton of oyster mushrooms for a Souper Bowl that a friend organized last Sunday–I made Tom Kha Hed based on this recipe. I have made it a couple of times, once for a friend’s birthday. It got really good reviews at the birthday (I also made some spring rolls with sauteed shiitake, cashews, red bell pepper, and cilantro with a peanut sauce in a rice paper wrapper). I didn’t follow this recipe exactly–I used vegetable broth instead of chicken broth, and substituted the oyster mushrooms. I also didn’t reduce the broth as much as she recommends. For the birthday, I smashed up several chili peppers and ended up making the soup pretty spicy. I got timid this last time around and didn’t use as many peppers, and I wish it had been spicier. 

Anyway, I accidentally made something delicious tonight while trying to use up the rest of my mushrooms. I sauteed minced garlic and sliced chili peppers in sesame and canola oils. Then I turned the heat to high and threw in sliced carrot and mushrooms. Then I added a splash of vegetarian fish sauce and black rice wine and a little bit of soy sauce. At the end, I stirred in chopped cilantro. It was simple, just what I had on hand, but it was delicious. The mushrooms absorbed all of the flavor of the sauces and the heat from the pepper-infused oil. Going to make some similar stir-fries in the future.

review of Lame Ducks

Go here for a review in SLUG Magazine of Lame Ducks.