Giving to Church

I gave this short talk in church today, two days before the election for President, senate and other offices. It uses language heard in advertisements many times each day leading to the election in the “swing” state of Wisconsin. The primary message is not political. The congregation laughed and applauded.

I’m Kathy Whitt and I approve this message.

Is God more liberal than Nancy Pelosi?  You’re darn right!

It’s time to get out and vote (financially) for Jesus and for St. Dunstan’s.

Latest polls show that God is winning. The devil is not for you any more.

St. Dunstan’s supports one special interest – the church. Your donation to St. Dunstan’s helps with God’s way of delivering God’s love to you – via St. Dunstan’s.

You can support your church. Your money represents what you care about. Love for God means giving to God’s work.

Here is what I do. This is my way. I give by rule.

First, I make it a priority in how I use my income.  That means it isn’t about things like passing judgment on church activities I don’t like…such as sermons (which are all wonderful), the music (which is terrific), my amount of spare cash, or my feelings about anything. I take it off the top rather than giving from my surplus (if I ever have a surplus).

Second, I make my pledge a percentage of my income – the tithe principle. Biblically, the tithe is ten percent. I think the principle is to give whatever percentage is possible, depending on circumstances. Years ago Rick and I started with a small percentage and gradually increased over the years. We had five kids living at home. It was possible.

St. Dunstan’s needs your pledge. This church will not be outsourced to China. We have a lot of ways to bring us into God’s love here in Madison, and they require financial support.

The following theology is presented by the Episcopal Church.

Think about the offertory in the Eucharist. It’s in the Book of Common Prayer and the church tradition. In the offertory, our gifts to God are bread, wine and our money. The gospel says that Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke the bread and shared it with his disciples. This is the Eucharist.

It was taking bread then. It’s bread, wine and money now. We all are participating in this ongoing Eucharist with our gifts.

I’m asking you to give early and often. Make your pledge today. Fill out your pledge card today.

Another Apple Pancake

This is my world famous apple pancake. At least, if you are in my world, it is world famous. It is another way to use apples for breakfast or lunch. It is easy to make and very good. It requires a skillet that can be put into the oven.  I usually make half the recipe and use a 10-inch skillet. This is from A World of Breads, by Dolores Casella (David White Co., 1966).

German Apple Pancake (Apple Pfankuchen)

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon flour                    1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon baking powder                         ¼ cup lemon juice

¼ teaspoon salt                                           3 cups peeled and finely diced apple

6 large eggs, separated                                 ¼ cup butter

1 cup sugar                                                  1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon milk

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt. Beat the egg whites until foamy and gradually beat in ¾ cup of the sugar. Continue beating until the whites are stiff. Beat the egg yolks until thickened and beat in the milk and vanilla extract. Pour the lemon juice over the apples. Beat the milk mixture into the flour, beating until smooth. Then fold in the egg whites and the apples. Melt the butter in a 12- or 14-inch skillet. Pour the pancake mixture in and sprinkle it with the remaining sugar and the cinnamon. Bake about 15 minutes until it is set and lightly browned. Cut it into wedges and serve immediately.

German Apple Pancake

It’s apple season. We are finding good ripe Wisconsin apples at farmers’ markets, grocery stores, and growing in orchards or wherever apple cores may have landed and grown.

The most famous apple is in the Bible. Remember Adam and Eve? Just a bite of that apple brought about knowledge of good and evil along with eviction from the Garden of Eden, God’s first real estate relocation. Some other very famous apples are the result of Johnny Appleseed, who went through the USA at some time in American history. He was a salesman. He sold apples, or apple trees, to everyone who would buy. Sweet American lore.

We had what I called an apple core tree in our yard in Green Bay, and we enjoyed the apples. It seemed to produce no identifiable variety of apple, just the wild kind. In the parking lot at the library in Seymour where I worked, branches of the apple tree growing next door yielded plenty of apples for me to take home, with the blessing of Jim and Dan, who owned the tree. Today I brought home a bag of apples of a nondescript kind, from a couple of trees in a public space near my home in Madison. They are somewhat sour and very good. It’s my third harvest. Needless to say, apples like these require some work to remove suspicious black and brown spots, but it is worth the effort. No spray. Organically grown.

People who like apples have created many ways to eat them, including sauces and desserts. I made apple soup for my husband and me many years ago, and he refused to believe that apples could be made into soup. Such is life. Like many people, he believed that the natural habitat for apples is in a pie or some other dessert. Goodbye apple soup; hello apple dessert, or again, hello German apple pancake.

This recipe is adapted to serve one or two people, depending on appetites. It is a pancake that bakes in the oven until it puffs up. Once out of the oven it sinks quickly. It tastes very good, and probably isn’t very healthy even with apples in it. After all, it is made with flour, butter and sugar, which are not known to promote good health.  I adapted the recipe from Betty Crocker’s International Cookbook (General Mills, 1980). It is called Apfelpfannkuchen. It doesn’t make a lot of pancake and isn’t served with syrup.

German Apple Pancake

2 eggs

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/3 cup milk

¼ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup apple slices (or about 1 medium apple)

2 tablespoons sugar

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Peel, core and slice the apple(s). Find your round 9-inch cake pan and warm it up in the oven. In the small mixer bowl, beat eggs, flour, milk and salt at medium speed for one minute. Remove the cake pan from the oven and place 2 tablespoon margarine in it. Rotate the pan until the margarine is melted and coats the side of the pan. Place the apple slices in the pan. Pour the batter over the apples. Mix the sugar and cinnamon. Sprinkle it over the batter evenly. Bake the pancake uncovered about 25 minutes, until it is puffed and golden brown. Cut it in quarters and serve without syrup.

More Overused Words and Phrases

It’s time for an update on the year’s thesaurus-challenged words and expressions. Well, absolutely, there are plenty for everyone.  I am serving them up for you. If you don’t read my go-to list, I will be devastated. It’s a must-have.

1.       Good to go. I hear this on television, in stores and everywhere else. One would hope that people on television would be leaders in good usage, but they are just like everyone else. When something is finished for you, you are good to go. Even the highly educated Doctor Oz uses this expression.

2.       Absolutely. Why don’t people want to say “yes” when that is what they mean? On television interviews, I have heard people using “absolutely” instead of “yes” five times in one sentence. That’s not the only place.

3.       Go-to.  When something is good, it is a go-to thing. Woodman’s is the go-to place to buy food. Jesus is the go-to guy who will save your soul.  Go-to doesn’t seem to be restricted to a place. Sometimes go-to is related to must-have (see below).

4.       Way, shape or form. I hear it used with a negative thought. If we think something is incorrect or inappropriate, we reject it by saying we don’t agree with it in any way, shape or form. Come on, people. Think of another way to be emphatic.

5.       Devastated.  This word is used to express a spectrum of upset feelings. I am okay with people being devastated while in the middle of a hurricane or forest fire that takes away their homes, because destruction is part of devastation. However, other words exist to describe situations of destruction or heartbreak.  I don’t deny the emotion. I protest the one word used to describe them all.

6.       Back in the day. Many people use this word to describe the past. One of my daughters uses it.

7.       Must-have. Related to Go-to. Television commercials are especially guilty of using this expression. The must-have outfits and shoes are at the mall.

8.       Buzz and buzzword. Buzzwords are all around us, maybe even on this list. The buzz is like gossip, or things we don’t need to know about celebrities but are told anyway.

9.       Up.  This is a superfluous word. How many people are serving up dinner? Back in the day, dinner was served without “up.”  We hang up the phone when we disconnect. Not every use of “up” is suspect. It’s used when the sentence is complete without it, and it is superfluous.

10.   Some acronyms, especially LOL, WTF, FAQ. Nuff said.

What About Wheat?

Yikes! What are we doing to ourselves? We have heard a lot about high fructose corn syrup ruining our health, and about carbs giving us obesity. Now it’s wheat’s turn. I wasn’t thinking about wheat much, except as a high-carb food that I avoid, until I read this article, called “Banishing Wheat Belly: The Drawbacks of a Wheat-dominated Diet.”  http://www.naturalawakeningsmag.com/Natural-Awakenings/September-2012/Banishing-Wheat-Belly/

I found it in a little free publication called Natural Awakenings, at Willy Street Coop, home of many wonderful foods. The link is from the online version of Natural Awakenings.

Is eating wheat damaging us?  Is wheat a genetically engineered monstrosity? Americans really put away wheat products. We love our bread, cake, pie, cookies, pancakes, and foods with wheat lurking in them without our noticing. Is this article correct?

The article is very impressive.  It is a Q&A interview with Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee based preventive cardiologist.  He points out that wheat is high on the glycemic index, which is well known, and foods made from it raise blood sugar very high, higher even than table sugar. He said he asked his diabetic and pre-diabetic patients to remove all wheat from their diets, and on average they each lost about thirty pounds and had relief from arthritis and joint pains, acid reflux, migraine headaches, edema and irritable bowel syndrome, plus other conditions; some diabetics became non-diabetics and pre-diabetics became non-pre-diabetics. He says he feels better on this diet today at age 54 than he felt at age 30.

The doctor tells us what the problem is. He says that typically we (who are we?) consume twenty percent of our calories as wheat. He says that a wheat dominated diet compromises health in many people who are and are not afflicted with celiac disease.  Eating a lot of wheat exposes us to a starch known as amylopectin A, which converts more easily to blood sugar than most carbohydrates and causes blood sugar and insulin problems.  If that isn’t enough, he tells us that wheat has a gliadin protein which is an opiate that stimulates appetite and addictive eating behavior.  He also says that wheat has changed. In the 1970s, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota developed a hybridized strain of high-yielding dwarf wheat, which now comprises ninety-nine percent of all wheat grown worldwide; this gave us the  amylopectin A and gave us insulin problems to a great degree.  Older wheats are gone, and our health problems are here.

What are we to think of all this? Well, Dr. Davis has written a book and has a blog. The book is Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health. I didn’t try to find it, but I found his blog easily: WheatBellyBlog.com.  I found out that he practices medicine in Milwaukee. He has lots of information on his blog. It looks ok to me.

Then I looked to the other health gurus that I read. Lo and behold, Dr. Mark Hyman agrees with him in his recent book, The Blood Sugar Solution. He says that the gluten in wheat is a big problem for a lot of people, a lot of the American population, some of whom don’t know it is a problem. They eat wheat products and have various health problems, including obesity, pre-diabetes, asthma, joint pain and fatigue, and they treat them with drugs. Hyman says that our bread is a “Frankenfood” and a “super-starch.” (p. 107).

Dr. Neal Barnard has less to say.  In his recent book, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart, he favors a vegetarian diet including whole grains, but points out that some foods, including wheat, are triggers for joint pain; if they cause symptoms, don’t eat them.

Suzy Cohen, also known as Dear Pharmacist, has a book called Diabetes Without Drugs, in which she says that the gluten in wheat is tied to many disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, joint pain, muscle aches and fatigue.

Here’s another one. Dr. Joseph Mercola, on his widely read website, Mercola.com, gives information on celiac disease and gluten intolerance. He also says that today’s wheat is harmful and has more gluten due to hybridization. He talks about problems with wheat and other grains. Dr. Mercola would have us turn away from all of them.

Dr. Davis is not alone. My hastily gathered panel of medical experts (see above) says that removing wheat from the diet removes a list of health disorders from the person. They also say that people who tell their symptoms to many doctors are told to use drugs to treat the symptoms. It seems to me that healing the disorders the natural way is the way to do it.  I am not here to say that it is easy to give up those chocolate chip cookies when they sit on the plate and call to you.  What I am saying is that wheat has a dark side.  We can make decisions that will make us feel better without the cost and side effects of drugs.

Giving up wheat is hard. It’s everywhere and in almost everything. These medical people are real killjoys. Alas.