I was a better human, I floated on silver wings and saluted the sun. Never worried who called or texted first, Reached out to those who have forgotten me. My sorrow turned to joy, in a heart consumed by fire, And the fire lit and enlightened my soul. When I loved, the universe made sense, I knew my own spirit, and yours, I was one with humanity, its joy and pain. On the morning I stopped believing, My wings burned to ashes, my heart stopped expanding, settled back in my mortal chest. My pain constricted to the size of a single human, but so did my once boundless joy. Now I go to sleep with the small sorrows of living, And rise to diminished potential, once a carrier of light, now a fallen angel. And I still question, the half-remembered dream, where I danced with the spirits, and almost touched the divine When I was fully alive.
Author: marobbie
Love is…
In the previous post, I tried to discuss love, aided by the definition* given by M Scott Peck, in his important book The Road Less Travelled. Today I will expand a little bit on the definition with my own ideas on the subject, by way of introducing my own experience of love as an intense soul connection.
As wide and varied the concept of love is, I think the Greek philosophers gave a good approximation of its various types and degrees. According to them there are eight types of love. The three most well known ones are: Agape – Spiritual, unconditional love; Eros – Romantic love and Philia – affectionate love. And then there are five further types: Philautia – Self love; Storge – familial love; Pragma – enduring love; Ludus – playful love and Mania – obsessive love. On this spectrum of eight types, agape is the most noble and evolved type of love, while mania represents a regressive type of love, that turns it sometimes into a destructive force, both for the lover and the beloved.
If we try to apply these archetypes to human relationships, we can see that they are not discreet. Because romantic love can be playful and affectionate. In rare cases, it becomes the enduring love of couples who have loved each other since their high-school days. It can also show the dark side of mania. Similarly, familial love can be affectionate, unconditional, and even obsessive.
At first glance, self-love might look like an odd one out among all the types of love as an emotional bond between humans. But it forms the unseen foundation for all types of love. Loving and accepting one’s self is a pre-condition for experiencing a wholesome and evolved love. It did not escape my attention that the definition of love in The Road Less Travelled, included an element of self-love*. It is important to understand here that healthy self-love is quite the opposite of narcissism and arrogance. True love, by Dr Peck’s definition is a quest for spiritual growth and evolution. It is a journey that starts with accepting our faults and continues with embracing others with kindness and forgiveness. And it has no end destination, the ultimate goal is to continue growing and loving. There are many spiritual traditions that aspire to growth through unconditional love for all of creation. For the Sufis, for example, the ultimate goal is to be one with the universe and its creator. This is the ultimate evolution of love, to embrace the whole universe in the heart, and to experience what is felt as the creator’s ultimate love, the highest form of Agape.
There is no one definition for love, because the way we love is dependent on the stage of our spiritual evolution. Love, the way it is perceived and given, mirrors the awakening of the soul. I came to this conclusion after I was led on my own journey of love, which is still ongoing. Up until then, I was convinced that love was a proclivity of youth. Hormones, physical attraction, and an urge to procreate drove this emotion. I had a lot of sympathy for my younger (and sometimes older) girlfriends who suffered heartache. But I was smug and happy in the knowledge that the years of my angsty youth, and the ticking of my biological clock were long behind me. I didn’t see myself as an easy victim for Eros, and I didn’t believe that other kinds of love existed, but destiny had other plans.
Heartache was a territory I knew, and was not keen to visit again. My biggest heartbreak thus far had been my first boyfriend. I cried my heart out over him, but the young heart heals fast. It is easier to replace one lost love with another. The angst of youth, the neediness, the wish to be attractive and desired, are all faults of youth that invite fresh heartache, but they also keep young hearts moving from one relationship to the next, healing old wound by acquiring new ones. It is said that the young have elastic hearts, so falling in love and out of love is much easier on them.
Love is easy on many older people too, depending on how they perceive love. The less evolved spirit would mistake animal lust, attraction or infatuation for love. The more mature spirit would settle for affection and friendship. Some couples get lucky and evolve together from one stage of love to another, arriving together onto a mutual level that is satisfying for both of them, or achieving enduring love. This makes me think of love as a mountain. All people are capable of stepping onto its base, some get to the top half, and very few reach the summit. I think of Eros as the base, and the most accessible part of that is simple sexual attraction. The next level is Philia and the farther limit of that is enduring love. But the true triumph of the spirit is to reach the summit of agape.
Almost all works of psychology take a secular view of love. They recognise erotic love as fickle and temporary, and accept Philia and Pragma as the only types of true love. So Peck’s work of love could be understood as working to advance from one level of less enduring love (like Eros or Philia) to Pragma. This is a very “pragmatic” and secular view of love. I feel that the concept of Agape, on the other hand, was overtaken by its devotional and religious content. Sufi love and devotion are a form of Agape, so is altruism and the love for all humankind. But in some cases this “Higher Love” is also possible between mortals, and when it happens then it is an ultimate love that can encompass all other levels. To come back to my mountain analogy, those who scale the summit have previously reached the lower base camps. Similarly, when you love an individual on the highest level, you are also capable of feeling affection and erotic love towards them. The only difference is that these emotions are not central to your connection.
Soul connections are not recognized by psychology. They only come up in esoteric spiritual traditions, mystic fringe beliefs or pseudo sciences. I was myself an agnostic, or even an atheist when it came to my faith in love. I wrote a post about this some years ago. Ironically, it was written while I was experiencing the first stirrings of my soul connection. My rational self, and my ego, were trying to remind me of what was real on earth. I rejected love, all the secular or garden variety types of it. And I would have laughed at anyone who claimed that true love existed. I thought that people who spoke, wrote or sang about the love that stir the soul, then rocks it and purifies it from the inside out were either using extensive poetic license, or mind-altering drugs. That is, if they weren’t nutcases or outright liars trying to sweeten the bitter fruit of love for the unafflicted. From where I stood, the lower slopes of love mountain looked rocky, barren and uninteresting. And although the higher sections looked greener and more inviting, I was convinced that I was too old to care about reaching them. The summit was completely invisible to my eyes, and I did not believe it even existed. I was trained to believe only what I could perceive with my senses.
But I was about to be taught life’s greatest secret, about the essential things that can only be perceived through the heart.
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
Le Petit Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
The Little Prince – English Translation
* In the Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck defines love as “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”.
Loving the One You’re With, is it really the Road Less Travelled?
A few months ago I read, with great enjoyment, an old but still very relevant book, The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. The book is subtitled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, and it is definitely worth reading.
The author, is a psychologist by training and brings out several interesting ideas with examples about common types of neurosis and disorder in the human psyche. Yesterday I started reading the section on love, a main theme in his book as can be deduced from the subtitle. He defines love, as the ” the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth“. The author admits that his chosen definition might not be the only one, or even the correct one, but he is content with emphasising the choice and action elements of love. He refers several time to the “work of loving”.
The author also acknowledges that love is too big and too wide to limit to a single definition, so he tries to establish common grounds through a process of elimination. Because while philosophers and psychologist differed significantly on defining what love is, there is general agreement on what love is NOT. The books itself gives several examples on cases of dependency and self-sacrifice that are clearly not love. But the author also insists that love is NOT an emotion, it is action. He repeats several times that “love is as love does“. He also feels that the term “falling in love” denotes an emotion based on erotic attraction. It is nature’s way of tricking us into reproducing and preserving the human race. Once the honeymoon phase ends, he says, we slowly fall out of love and this is where the work of loving starts. What he calls real love, or true love, is rooted in the will, so choice and intellect play a huge role in it, unlike the falling in love, which is all emotions and seems mostly to be out of our choice or control.
Interestingly, he does not deny the potential and power of the emotion. He explains, that falling in love with another person destroys the boundaries of an individual’s ego. The lover becomes hugely invested in another person, and this destruction of the ego, feels exhilarating. When we fall in love we are reborn into the wonder of feeling unity with our beloveds. He compares this unity to the one we felt as newborns with our mothers and the whole universe. But the novelty of this feeling wears off, and we soon find out that our needs do not match those of our lover, and the ego boundaries rise again. For babies this is the moment of starting awareness and experience, and for a couple it is where falling in love ends and the work on loving starts. The journey of loving, as he sees it, is made of the effort of listening, giving attention and bracketing, the conscious act of putting oneself into the shoes of another, suspending judgement, and seeing the world through their eyes.
This rational view of love mirrored one I have believed in for the longest time. It is also rooted in the teachings of Christianity where the sanctity of marriage, and monogamy, need to be protected and preserved. It is also a simple practical tenet of life: If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. Or simply just love the one you are with and ignore all impulses of love that come your way, because they are an illusion anyway. True love is hard work and commitment to a common goal, to raising a family, to mutual spiritual growth. I agreed with this wholeheartedly until a few years ago, and I still agree now but with many reservations.
I have seen many working marriages, even good ones, that are based on types of partnership and reciprocity, on the work of loving, in the words of Dr. Peck. These marriages always have some rewards and fulfilment for one partner, or both, and they can be very solid, with each partner being courteous and attentive to the other. But while I once believed that attaining a good marriage through the work of loving is the only happiness possible, I now recognise that this type of love has its limitations.
There are times when two souls, despite all good intentions, can head towards two different paths of evolution. There are times, when one partner evolves, and another stays on the same path. No amount of loving work can fix this. The answer sometimes is to accept it, and continue to love, if not the husband (or partner), then the children (or the life/business/career/home) we created together. The mutual love for the children carries many marriages through. Countless women have settled for it in my culture. They married, they loved and adapted to their lot, their destiny, and that was their life. But sometimes there are other choices. The author himself admits, perhaps grudgingly given his Christian background, that he believes an “open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners”. So deep down it seems that his belief in the work on loving, in exclusive monogamy, is rather flawed.
The work of loving, and the will to love are powerful antidotes to human promiscuity and experimentation. It will certainly allow many couples to experience gentle loving, and sometimes very happy, relationships. It is a good rule, but it does not explain everything there is to love, even if it accounts for most shades of it. From my observation, I feel it is rather the road we are most likely to travel towards a rational and secular type of love. It accounts for the true love of friends, companions and for most lasting partnerships. The rarest type of love, however, is the one that stirs the soul. And the journey to this type of love is truly the one very rarely travelled. I will try to delve into this in my next posts.
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You can borrow a copy of the The Road Less Travelled from the Openlibrary, which is an excellent resource for reading out of print books.
To Be Loved Well… is all that matters
On the day he passed Grass smelled of sunshine, birds sang Wet cheeks touched his fur Hold him in you heart Don't cry, he was loved, lived well, and died in your arms A soul only needs To have love through this journey, be held when it ends.
Your First Ingredient: Love
The quotes that link cooking with love have always resonated with me. I believe that the work of preparing a meal required a certain amount of dedication and effort but mostly, love.
The cynics (mostly men) would point out that the best chefs are always men. The Jamie Olivers and Gorden Ramseys outnumber the likes of Julia Childs. It is not because men are better cooks, as some would want you to believe. Women were always traditionally duty-bound to cook, but only men who truly love cooking and are passionate about the culinary arts ever start into this profession. It is their passion and love that makes them successful and not their gender.
My mom’s history in the kitchen illustrates this perfectly. As a young bride of barely twenty, she had little experience with cooking, and she did not enjoy it. First she relied heavily on her big recipe book with cuttings from magazines and handwritten ingredients, with elaborate cooking methods that listed the simplest things like cooking rice. She did not have a great relationship with food. Even as a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two, she remained painfully thin. So it was no wonder that the meals we enjoyed at home remained wholesome but mediocre for a long time. My father relates stories of a few cooking disasters that illustrate my mom’s ignorance in the first years of their marriage. Men love to boast about these for some reason.
In contrast to her failure at traditional meals, my mother loved to cook western dishes. Our favourite family meal was roasted chicken in the oven. Mother always stuffed the belly cavity with an apple, and all of us fought over a piece of that apple, cooked soft to perfection and infused with chicken fat and spices. I remember how tasty it was, although I now cringe at the tremendous fatty content.
My mother also loves baking. She was always very good at it. The extended family was rarely invited to elaborate lunch spreads prepared by at our home, with some outside help. But they regularly shared tea and cake with us, she was easily the best among her sisters in law in making western pastries and cake. This is also part of love and tradition. My mother learned making cakes at the hands of my German grandma, and learned to love the art of baking. Amazingly her baking always turns out good, even when she experiments with it.
These days she reads a baking recipe, and changes it to make it simpler. She even modifies the amounts of leavening agents, by feel. And the results are always fine, sometimes even incredible. She meticulously records the successful ones to repeat them later, or refine them further.
This goes against traditional cooking principles. In my own experience with cooking, my ex husband once strictly warned me against modifying baking recipes. Cooking recipes can be modified, but baking, he said, is chemistry and one has to adhere to the ingredients, otherwise it will never turn out well. This is not true, or at least fearfully exaggerated. Every new baking recipe started out as an experiment, and if you experiment carefully based on experience and with the courage of love, then you can perhaps come up with something new or at least learn something important. In any case, your altitude, your oven, your pans and everything else you have in the kitchen is unique, and even a tested baking recipe could turn out wrong within the parameters of your kitchen.
The short gist of this long post, is to throw away your fear, and love what you are cooking. A meal prepared with love will always go down better than one made under the burden of duty and compulsion. Even when you prepare a meal just for yourself, try to enjoy it. Sometimes I feel like cooking a whole meal with salad and desert, and other times I do not feel like cooking at all. On those days, an avocado on toast with some pepper, or an open cheese sandwich is the best meal in the world.
Once I succumbed to the demands of my child and tried to make him a meal he asked for. It was late evening and I was tired. Despite all my efforts and good intention the result was dismal. The pasta sauce lacked taste, and some spices or ingredients were forgotten. The pasta was overcooked. I do not remember whether my child ate it, but the experience gave me pause. Even a simple pasta sauce can fail if you are not paying loving attention to it.
There is a saying in Arabic: What you put in the soup pot comes out in the ladle. And although this aphorism is meant to apply to life in general, it is quite true for cooking as well. o make sure that you put love and empathy, not judgement, in your pot. Because it will be in your next serving.
What A Gen-X Remembers
From a generational perspective, I have a bit of a strange family. My parents are older baby boomers, but I have a millennial brother. My child, on the other hand, is a post-millennial or generation Z. Therefore, most of the time I feel like a mediator of the generational and cultural gaps existing in my immediate family.
Even before I turned half-a-century, my child would always comment on how dull and boring my life must have been without the benefit of the internet. But contrary to his firmly-held belief, I feel privileged to have experienced both analogue and digital aspects to my life. I had a childhood where I played hopscotch, throwing pebbles and marbles. But I also played a version of pong, one of the first primitive video games on a black and white TV, and wrote simple BASIC code on an early programmable calculator.
My mother gets easily flustered by technology. She only reads physical books, and keeps all her phone numbers in a notebook. My brother, almost exclusively reads eBooks on his phone, and my child only reads Wikipedia articles and is more interested in YouTube and social media than he is in any kind of publication.
I might be the only one in this tight family group who is comfortable navigating between both mediums. For my cooking, I have handwritten recipes, magazine cutouts, and cookbooks (both printed and digital). However, I sometimes still do a quick search on my phone when I get an ingredient I have not worked with before. I do yoga classes online, but I still have my illustrated books. I make shopping lists on paper just like my mom, but I type the things I need to pack for a trip on my notes app. I journal both on paper and on an online multi-platform app.
I am far from being a digital native like my child. On many occasions, I have consulted that pre-teen on a hidden smartphone setting. And I am quick to cry for help when I suddenly see a split keyboard on my tablet, which I never intended to create, and do not know how to return to normal. I probably use about 20% of all the features on my phone camera, while my child knows most of them. But I am clearly more comfortable than my mother with the device. After all, I can do my own updates. New technology does not petrify me. I learn to handle it, albeit slowly. But I do not feel pressured to get the fastest phone, and I can manage for a day or so without internet connection. My child hasn’t learned this essential survival skill yet.
Digital did make my life easier on many counts. Given my poor sense of direction, I am grateful that I do not need to carry city maps in my car. When I drove in Cape Town, I never went anywhere without consulting my city map first. But even my diligent study did not help, and I often got lost. Then, I had to hunt for a safe place to stop and regroup, find myself on the map, and finally re-route the car back to my destination. My google maps helper does this for me seamlessly now. I do not miss the time I spent checking city map quadrants for an unknown street address. But I keep my city maps, just in case. I also have an Africa road atlas. I use it for my imaginary travels. Something about seeing the thin road lines and landmarks on paper and flipping through its pages, gives a more direct feel of the distance. I have a better perception of miles traced with a finger, or pages flipped than those just scrolled through.
Perhaps it is just me, or maybe it is something that I share with some of my contemporaries of Gen-X. Those of us who still hold on to some analogue and approximate perceptions of life, rather than the strict digital hyper-realism of technology. I am more content to look at my watch and register that it is a little after ten to seven, rather than find out that it is exactly 18:51:29.3. I am happy to live with the intangible less exacting, unless I am waiting for the precise time to say Happy New Year to my loved ones. And even this moment is never fixed since we might be in different time zones.
In trying to assimilate all new technology, I sometimes feel like a novice who had stepped outside of a heavy cultural tradition. I am pleased to have adopted a new easier way of life, yet still attached to some of my familiar symbols. Some aspects of technology, I have adopted wholeheartedly. But others I am still reluctant to embrace or accept fully. It is not entirely clear to me whether I have logical reasons for this, or whether I am only reacting to anecdotal observations mixed with sentimentality and superstition.
Technology has given us a lot, but I think we sacrificed small pieces of our imagination for all the things we received. Some of the magic has been lost. When we travel, my child looks at photos of the city we are visiting and checks out such details such as what the room looks like, and the view that we would see from our window. I am more happy to leave much of this as a surprise to experience on arrival. If I arrive there having seen everything, then what would be the point of taking the trip?
On the surface it seems as if the digital age has allowed for more freedom and democratised creativity. But true creative power has become more difficult to find within a crowded world, where each person is a content producer. Truth has also suffered, since everyone is now capable of expressing immutable beliefs, and getting likes for them. Fallacies sometimes get more support than the humble truth. So while it is easier than ever to find and produce stuff, it is more difficult to find quality and truth.
Collectively perhaps we now read more on the internet than we ever read in the past on paper. But in the past we had time to read longer books rather than bite-sized, and mostly irrelevant, status updates. I once read the entire Sunday newspaper, but now I rarely look at print media. I sometimes look at online headlines or read one or two stories from reputable news outlets, but I am reluctant to pay for a digital subscriptions when I know I will not have the time to take advantage of it. There is no such thing as buying a digital newspaper copy, when you feel like it. You are always pressured for a subscription deal.
We are bombarded with information, and have little time to digest and process. We are confused, and less likely to make a carefully reasoned decision on anything. The closest thing to online shopping I experienced while growing up was shopping by mail order. But instead of scrolling through endless suggestions of things that are not quite what we wanted, we only went through one big (but finite) mail-order catalogue. We studied it closely for weeks. We lived in the pictures and imagined what it would be like to own that dress, that toy or that kitchen device. The choices were many, even then, but the static catalogue was always there, and we could examine it for months if we needed. So we took our time, and consulted the colourful pages together as a family, or dreamed about the items individually. Now shopping is more complicated, with more variety, more decisions required, and more pressure to buy NOW. I am not sure this is all an improvement.
For my post-millennial child, this is just his old mother missing her childhood. The truth is more complicated than that. By being a generation X-er I straddle the digital fault line, and I can still remember what has gone missing. The new humans born today are unburdened by this memory, and will therefore proceed fearlessly wherever this digital age takes them. Sometimes I fear that this culture of technology will be detrimental to the way the human race will develop, that it will damage our aspiration to evolve in spirit. At other times I read some ancient text where a person who had died centuries ago, asks the same questions we are asking ourselves now. And I am then reassured of the essence of human spirit. Perhaps, the more we change, the more we will stay the same.
For more insight into the digital age, and how the internet changed the way we think, I recommend the following book: The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing The Way We Think, Read And Remember by Nicholas Carr.
Aftertaste
What’s left of that love,
are shadows in my coffee,
the stain holds my heart.
New Look !
I started working on a new blog recently with a friend of mine. I will share details about this joint project at a later date. But while working on this new project, choosing its theme and customising it, I realised that my loskop blog is starting to look a little dated.
The old theme was TwentyTen (that’s a decade old, yikes!). The sidebars still contained my dormant social media links, and the links to the blogs I follow are so old, I do not even know whether the blogs they point to still exist.
I had thought about updating it, passively, for some time, but the decision was made for me when I tried a theme and realised that I cannot go back to the old one. It was a scramble yesterday trying to re-instate things that are important and doing away with some of the dormant clutter. I hope the result was worth it.
I have also updated my static pages, which have gone through only one light tweak in ten years. It is scary to think that I have been writing here (on and off) for ten years. Some of my material predates even my WordPress presence, and was imported from other blogging platforms.
I keep the older stuff for sentimental reasons and to look at the evolution in my personality and writing. But if I had the time I should probably rethink the mess of categories and tags, and plunge into organising things some more. For now, however, I will try to organise as I go forward, while the back-stories remain available on the Archive Page, until I take a closer look at them and decide what to do.
Thank you for staying with me, and I hope you visit again for more thought-provoking posts
The Wrong Type of Available
Your online status Its 'Available' mocks me, to me? surely not. But I wouldn't care if I knew you were present for some who will cry. Those souls will not mind, if you leave all the deadlines behind, when you die.
Mashed Green Bananas and Other Comfort Foods
I have mentioned here before that I have very simple taste in food. My favourite dishes are the ones that are simple to prepare, use accessible ingredients, and are made with very little waste.
I was not this diligent half a year ago. My interest in vegetarian cooking was born during quarantine. I avoided the shops and supermarkets, so I made an arrangement with a local farm to deliver a weekly basket of vegetable produce, that set me off on a cooking marathon from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon. And I started using ingredients I did not know, and parts of vegetables that I usually discarded.
Last year I remember buying a bunch of unripe bananas, as I usually do, to ripen slowly over the week, but the bunch remained green for the whole week and was destined for the bin. Nowadays I get these green bunches that never ripen, and eat them.
The first recipe I tried with green bananas was a curry-type dish in coconut milk and peanut sauce. I used the recipe from Kaluhi’s kitchen, but I was first tempted to try it after watching her step-by-step video. I credit this lovely lady’s lively instruction with seducing me to the simple charm of African (and Kenyan) cooking. I now check her out regularly and consult my Kenyan friends on traditional dishes. I love the resourceful way Africans cook their food with little or no waste, and using available ingredients and tools. On another Kenyan channel I found a recipe for a divine- looking stove-top baked chocolate cake ! It was fascinating to watch, and I trust that it works, because of its simplicity.
I later discovered that green bananas can be prepared simply, as a mash. There are two ways of doing this. The first method involves peeling the bananas with a knife or potato peeler then boiling them in water. This might cook the bananas faster but one would need to be careful with the resulting sap that might coat and discolour the hands or clothes. I read advice to rub the hands in oil before peeling. The bananas also discolour very quickly and you have to drop them in water immediately after peeling to prevent them turning dark. The second method is to cut the ends of the bananas, make a side slit in them and boil them in their skin. Once done, you can peel them easily while they are still warm, and you save your hands from the sap. There might be a discolouring to the pot, but this is easily remedied by putting a little vinegar in the cooking water.
I tried both methods and I preferred cooking the bananas in their skin. The resulting cooked bananas are light in colour and can be mashed with butter, salt and milk. The texture might come out less creamy than mashing potatoes, but the taste is comparable, and they are very filling. My choice of comfort food.
In terms of nutritional content, it might also be the type of guilt-free comfort food. Green bananas are 70-80% starch, but the starch is resistant and does not get digested in the small intestines, so while tasty and filling it could aid in weight loss.
In addition to green bananas, I learned also to use up root vegetable tops. Beetroot, kohlrabi and radish are all delivered with their leaves. Some of these leaves are higher in nutritional content than the edible root. The trick though is to wash them well and cook them gently for a short time to preserve their nutrients, or even use them in salad if fresh and tender.
I have waxed lyrical before on my love for radish. Another humble veggie that I love is the leek. I love its silky taste and the way it softens into sweet perfection in a stew. I have taken to making it with roasted turnip and kohlrabi, another of my favourite comfort foods that I never tire of eating, either with couscous or with buckwheat.
So my adventure continues. Sometimes the results are stellar, successful and tasty, but I also fail a lot. Other times I feel that the effort is not worth the result. I have yet to discover a carrot greens recipe that warrants the long process of cutting, sorting and washing the feathery leaves. I have so far put them in soup, and made them into salsa. The stalks I have used for broth. But most of the time I wish that I had a big enough compost pile, or a grazing animal to use them up.
The Loskop Diaries 