Mark Bittman’s latest cookbook is really good because it cares more about helping you cook your own food than it does about showing off the author’s technical arsenal. The book is not meant for food critics or chefs, and it deliberately thumbs its nose at tenets of gastronomical gospel like mise en place. Here’s how one reviewer describes that move:

Bittman argues that mise en place, the time-honored approach of prepping ingredients ahead of time, is an obsolete concept in the contemporary, time-depleted kitchen. He believes those idle minutes waiting for water to boil, ovens to heat or vegetables to cook can better be spent chopping onions, grating cheese or mincing garlic. As such, “Fast” features recipes that ask people to prep as they cook, providing tight windows to complete the tasks. Aside from certain master recipes, such as those for stocks and beans, every dish here is engineered to take 45 minutes or less.

I love this book. It has prompted a couple of thoughts:

1. Before you can do something fast, you have to do it well. This is the fifth version of How To Cook Everything, and the first to focus on speed. There’s a bunch of basic teaching stuff at the beginning that aims to share the fundamentals of knife work and the like with the beginner. But beginners will still struggle, because if you don’t know how to chop an onion slowly, there’s no shortcut to doing it quickly (this is another version of the Godly Play idiom, “Know the rules well enough to break them effectively”).

2. Focus on outputs. Bittman has become concerned in his columns about the connection between obesity in America and the declining rates at which people cook their own food. So he’s trying to help more people cook at home. You don’t need sexy food pics to do that, so there aren’t any. You also don’t need a lot of “shoulds,” since the should he cares most about is already accomplished when you fire up the burner. Instead, the instructions are an innovative layering of cooking and food prep that is finished before you know it.

One more thing: I’ve had beans and toast from this book for lunch two days in a row. My mouth is happy.

I was trying to buy a sandwich and soda on a recent flight, but the flight attendant wouldn’t let me. He gave me the food, but he refused to let me pay.

“Can I have a receipt?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “because there isn’t going to be a charge.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s too expensive. Have you seen these prices?”

My excitement about getting something for nothing evaporated into shame in an instant, as he clearly thought that no responsible person would pay $9 for a buffalo chicken wrap.

Then he added, “Besides, we used to give you this stuff for free.”

He did something generous, even dangerous to his livelyhood for me. And his generosity left me embarrassed and furtively typing a blog post about it on my phone.

The World Series starts tonight and I’ll be cheering on my Kansas City Royals. Their matchup with the San Francisco Giants has illuminated valuable personal connections and presented an opportunity to enrich relationships.

My pastor friend Jim is a Giants fan and goes to Spring Training in Arizona every year. Last year he sent me a souvenir cup, and this year he sent me a Royals Spring Training T-Shirt.

For Jim, I give thanks.

Barely minutes after the Giants won the National League pennant and guaranteed the Kansas City/San Francisco series, my friend Deborah called me and the three best Royals fans I know out and proposed a friendly wager: the fans of the losing side will make a contribution to the mission budget of the winning side’s presbytery.

For Deborah, I give thanks.

And then came the 2014 World Series Guidebook from my friend Theresa. It’s all tongue and all cheek and all good friendly fun. It features a picture of the Royals’ mascot, Slugger, saying, “I wish I can hit at least one pitch,” as well as a word search game that includes the word “glumrocky.”

For Theresa, I give thanks.

Sports are not as important as our culture makes them out to be. But they give opportunities like this to connect and to make someone’s day.

Go Royals!

Your attention is a valuable contribution wherever you can spend it. Even in settings where our usefulness is in question, where we feel like the dummy in the room and doubt our right even to be present, we can still pay close attention-and that’s not nothing.

it’s called “paying” attention for a reason. Because it’s costs you one of the most valuable things you have to give. The attention you pay to people and projects infuses them with intention, and, what’s more, we all know the indignity of not being paid attention to. We can choose to dignify ourselves and our encounters with our focused attention.

Of course, that means making a determination about things that aren’t worth our attention. This post is being composed on an airplane with seat-back screens flashing all around. You’re more worth my attention than them.

One of the benefits of doing consistent work and sharing it with the world is that people will use it, even if you think they won’t.

This sermon is a dud. This blog post is empty. That newsletter article won’t be read. But who knows? If we put it out there, people can do with it what they want: tape it to their desk; send it to their brother. But only if we make it.

The same is true of churches. There is so much wrong with so much of what we have a thought to do. But our calling and God’s grace compel us to do the work anyway and let our communities put it to use.

It’s not ultimately our work.

I serve on a presbytery committee that is looking for ways to share work and resources with other nearby presbyteries and finding it very difficult to get anything going (for the uninitiated, a presbytery is a regional grouping of Presbyterian congregations).

It’s not going to work. It shouldn’t work.

It would be different if there were a person, if there was a group of people, that wanted to work in something together. That’s how real partnership works: between motivated people.

But the pursuit of partnership as a practical idea, say for the purpose of consolidating diminishing resources and cutting costs, won’t work. And that’s good, because when it does work it’s imposed on people who don’t really want it and can’t really own it.

What work do we want to do, and who do we want for our partners?

“Daddy I just saw a lizard!” said my daughter the other day from her perch on the living room couch.

“A lizard?” I asked. We live in Southern California, and there are little lizards all over the place. But we’ve never had one in our house before. Yet she insisted she saw one and that it had crawled beneath the cabinet. That cabinet is bolted to the wall. I made a mental note and left it alone.

Then yesterday morning, preparing to leave for the day, I saw the lizard at the base of the staircase, just as she’d described. I made a move toward it, and it scurried underneath the couch. There was no time to pursue it. We left it to the mercy of the cats, and I spent the morning Googling “lizard infestation” and asking peoples’ advice. I’m reasonably certain that it came in through our fireplace and that it’s not alone. My wife calmly projected, “There’s probably a nest in there.” A nest of lizards in my house. Awesome.

Yet the advice I’m getting is to leave the lizards be. They’re harmless. They’re actually helpful, as they will consume lots and lots of bugs. Two cats are something of an insurance policy against the population getting out of control, so leave the lizards alone.

GRATUITOUS METAPHOR WARNING

What are the lizards in our lives and communities? What happenings or people scurry into our routines to unsettle us and spook us and maybe even cause our hair to stand on end but that are actually harmless? Are we battling creatures that will actually promote health and balance if we can only get comfortable with their presence in our otherwise orderly house? What looks like an infestation but might actually be pest control?

What are are lizards? And do we have cats?

“[God] saw the misery of Israel in Egypt, and that led to his determination to save them. He saw Moses approach the burning bush, and he saw the blood on the doorposts on the Passover night. Seeing is part of the gracious, saving acts of God . . . Seeing already involves a decision. The decision corresponds to justice.” (Donald Gowan,”Theology in Exodus”)

“Happy are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times.” (Psalm 106)

If we would be just, as God is just, then we cannot separate what we’ve seen from what we do. The act of seeing must also be the act of deciding–deciding to intervene, deciding to give, deciding to stop. That terrible tension we experience when we’ve seen something wrong that somebody other than us should fix must be overcome, so that we are the ones who fix, because we are the ones who see.

Of course, pretending we don’t see is a failing all its own.

With God, “Seeing already involves a decision.”

May it be so with us.

A couple of weeks ago a complete stranger called the church “Just to talk.” Yesterday he called again.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. 

John Calvin

That online quiz promising to reveal Which City You Should Actually Live In or Which Game of Thrones Character You Are promises to show you something about yourself, and I can only posit from the ubiquity of those quizzes that folks are hungry for some knowledge of themselves. Real hungry.

Calvin held that self-knowledge is one part of “true and solid ‘Wisdom,'” the other part being God-knowledge. But he believed those two kinds of knowledge to be “Connected together by many ties” and that it is not easy to determine “Which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”

So does knowing What Type of Shark You Are reveal something about God? Or is it the other way ’round?