recipes

Quality prayer is a lot like quality french toast

One of the go-to breakfasts I cook for my daughter is french toast.* It’s easy to make, it can be prepared in advance so that it can be cooked quickly, and, when made with a quality whole-grain bread, it’s a relatively healthy breakfast, combining just enough protein, carbohydrates, and fat to get my daughter through the first part of her day. Also, she likes it so there is never any complaining or procrastinating first thing in the morning when it’s time to eat. 

This morning, as I was prepping the french toast so that I could cook it when she woke up, it occurred to me that, in some ways, french toast is a lot like prayer. I know that sounds silly, and maybe it is, but it made sense to me at 5:30am. So please bear with me. 

French toast, is something that, if you want a good result, cannot be rushed. While the actual cooking of the french toast is a rather quick endeavor, prepping the french toast itself takes time. If you don’t allow the bread enough time to soak, the custard mixture will merely coat the bread superficially, instead of penetrating to the center, and the end result will be dry and unpleasant. 

In the same way, prayer takes time. Our time with God cannot be rushed if we want a good result. If we do not allow ourselves sufficient time in prayer, the Holy Spirit may only enter us superficially, instead of penetrating to our hearts, and our prayer life will feel dry and unpleasant as a result. 

In order to make french toast, you have to plan ahead. You can’t simply throw together french toast at the time you want to cook it and expect it to turn out the way you want. Good french toast requires some, albeit not much, amount of planning. 

Prayer, too, requires planning. This doesn’t mean that our prayers can’t or shouldn’t be spontaneous. Spontaneous prayer is wonderful. Any time we pray it is a good thing. But it is also important that we plan out time to pray, that we set aside time for God, and that we set and keep a schedule for and with him. If we don’t make our time for prayer a priority, the world will always find a way to prioritize itself for us. 

Good french toast requires bread that has the right amount of porousness and integrity. The bread has to be porous enough that, when we put it in the with the wet ingredients, it absorbs as much of the custard as possible. But it also has to be firm enough that it doesn’t simply fall apart once it is saturated. 

Likewise, in order for us to have a fruitful prayer life, we must have the right amount of porousness and integrity. We must be open enough to let God into our hearts, as well as pliable enough for him to do his work in us and to change us into who he wants us to be. But we also need to be strong and upright enough to stand up for the values he instills in us, and to live in the way that he commands. 

Like french toast, prayer takes time, planning, openness, and integrity. Without these ingredients in place, we may end up with something that resembles prayer, but the quality of it may not be what we desire. With these ingredients in place, however, we have a good recipe for making ourselves available for God to do his work in us in a way that is pleasing for both us and him. 

*For anyone wondering, here is a recipe for french toast that I use often and my daughter seems to like it:

INGREDIENTS (serves 2-3 people)
– Four slices of quality semi-stale whole grain bread
-Two large or three medium eggs
-Almond milk (or whatever milk you prefer) in an amount equal to the amount of liquid eggs
-1tsp each cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom
-Olive oil
-Maple syrup (the real stuff)

PREPARATION
-The night before, mix the wet ingredients in a sealable container
-Add the bread
-Flip the bread around in the custard mixture until all slices of bread are coated on all sides (you may have to do this more than once)
-Seal the container and place it in the refrigerator overnight

COOKING
-Place a medium sized non-stick pan on the stove
-Turn on burner to medium-high
-Once the pan is hot, add just enough olive oil to coat the pan
-Add the custard-soaked toast to the pan
-Cook on both sides
-Serve with maple syrup
-Pray
-Enjoy

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Don’t yuck someone else’s yum

I once asked my wife how she learned to eat chicken feet, something I have never developed a taste for. She said, “When I was growing up, we had three generations living in our home and, in my country, the oldest people eat first and the youngest people eat last. If we had chicken for dinner, my grandmother took the pieces she wanted first, then my parents took the pieces they wanted, and the kids ate whatever was left. So we learned to eat every part of the chicken and, unlike here, we didn’t just buy chicken pieces. We bought and cooked the whole chicken. From the head to the feet with everything in between, nothing went to waste. I learned to eat everything because I had to. It’s all we had.” 

Hearing this was not only enlightening, but also humbling. It made me realize how easy I truly had it growing up. Not only did we generally get to eat food that we liked, albeit within reason, but we also had such an absurd surplus of food that we never really felt the burden of having to eat anything we didn’t like out of necessity or threat of going hungry. We could afford to be picky and, with junk foods, snack foods, and frozen foods abound, our cupboards reflected this fact. 

My wife, on the other hand, having grown up in post-genocide Cambodia, had way fewer options. Her family shopped, cooked, and ate, first and foremost, for survival. One chicken had to make multiple dishes, feed multiple generations, and had to last across multiple meals. They cooked and ate every part, perhaps grilling the legs and wings, making a stir-fry with the diced up breast meat, and making soup with the thighs, feet, neck, head, and the carcass. Even the organs and the blood were cooked and eaten. 

The more I thought about this, the more spoiled and insulated I began to feel. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or even shame, as I knew that I did not choose to grow up where I did, how I did, with the family I had, and the luxury to choose my food from day to day and meal to meal. We were each born into the worlds we were born into and we only knew what we knew. Rather, she helped me to understand just how little I knew about the world outside of my own culture and upbringing. 

Now, whenever I see someone eating something I don’t eat or wasn’t exposed to growing up, instead of judging or criticizing it, I take a moment to think about what my wife said when I asked her how she learned to eat chicken feet. Even though my mom encouraged us to try different things, I think about how there are entire cultures and customs that I simply don’t understand because of how I was brought up. But most of all, I am reminded, as my daughter says, “Not to ‘yuck’ someone else’s ‘yum,'” because you have no idea what life circumstances led them to develop the tastes and preferences they now have.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

French toast and self doubt

This morning, as I was making my daughter breakfast before seeing her off to school, I started to doubt myself as a parent. All of these questions and doubts started to creep in. 

Am I doing this right? What if I get it wrong? Is this food healthy enough for her? Is she getting enough protein so she will get stronger? Is she getting enough carbs for energy? Is she getting too many carbs for the amount of exercise she does? Is she getting too many calories? Or too few?

All of these thoughts were racing through my mind at 6:30am while I was making my daughter french toast and an omelette. The french toast was something my wife had prepped in the refrigerator from leftover bagels we picked up on a recent trip to New Jersey to visit family, and the omelette was just a plain egg omelette.

Then, the thought came to me, “Junk food was basically it’s own food group when you were a kid and you are worried about your daughter’s macronutrients. You are probably doing okay by her.” Standing there in the kitchen by myself, I audibly chuckled.

Life can be extremely serious at times, but there is no reason to make it unnecessarily serious when it need not be. French toast and an omelette is a pretty darn good breakfast. It’s tasty, relatively healthy, and it’s mostly real food.

Yes, macronutrients are important. Of course, whole foods are better than processed foods. But also, we do the best we can with what we have to work with. Life is hard enough without beating myself up unnecessarily for french toast and eggs. 

Chili humility

Recently, my wife took her parents to the Cambodian Buddhist Temple for a fundraiser. At the event, local Cambodian and Thai food vendors set up to raise money to donate to the temple through food sales. My wife came back with some of my favorite foods, including green papaya salad, chicken wings stuffed with Cambodian herbs, spices, and chopped peanuts, and fried bananas, which I really appreciated after a long day running and participating in a jiu-jitsu scrimmage for grapplers over forty. 

My mother-in-law brought home some produce, including a small, green bitter eggplant (turkey berry) that is used in a variety of Cambodian and Thai dishes, but she specifically uses it in one of my favorite Cambodian dishes, prahok ling. Prahok ling is essentially ground pork, fermented fish paste (prahok), herbs and spices (kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, turmeric, etc), bird’s eye chilis, and turkey berries all stir-fried together. 

The dish is served with jasmine rice, raw vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, and green beans, and lime wedges. The prahok ling is either eaten over the rice with the veggies as an accompaniment, or the veggies are used to scoop up the prahok ling and it is all eaten together. The lime is there in case someone wants to add some acid to the dish, which I always do because I like the salty, spicy, bitter, and sour combination. 

Before we started eating, my mother-in-law warned me that there were whole bird’s eye chilis in the dish. At first, I ate around them, but then I got brave and I took a bite with a piece of chili in it. It was delicious and not too spicy. I finished what I had with the remainder of the chili and I decided to have some more. 

This time, bravery turning into arrogance, I took a couple of chilis into my bowl. I chopped the chilis up with my spoon, mixed them around in the prahok ling, squeezed some lime on it, and started eating. After my first couple of bites, I realized that something was very different. These chilis were not like the last one. My mouth was on fire and I could feel my belly starting to get warm. 

I told wife that I think I made a mistake and everyone started laughing. They know, and I know but had forgotten in a state of prideful ignorance and hunger, that not all bird’s eye chilis are created equal. Even in the same batch, they can range from a pleasant, fruity heat to regretfully spicy. I had just eaten the spectrum and now I needed to reevaluate my situation. 

Humbled and happy to give everyone a reason to laugh, I began separating the chilis from the rest of my food and enjoyed the remainder of my meal. It was not only delicious, but it was also very nice to have a sit-down, home-cooked meal with my wife, daughter, and in-laws. These occasions used to be an everyday occurrence for us because we all lived together for many years, but now that we live apart, it is more rare, and so we appreciate it when it happens. A temporarily burnt mouth and bruised ego are a small price to pay for delicious food and good company.