As college students, my friends and I used these pages (written for us by my friend’s mom) over and over and over in our weekly homeless outreach: thrifty recipes to feed a crowd. Those splatters and smudges represent countless hours with dear friends cooking and eating together, learning more there about society and humanity and Christ than almost anywhere else in my life.
But I saw something new and radically simple now when I took them out the other day—the way she transformed a recipe for six into enough for 100 or more. What a striking symbol of how love acts.
Love adds and expands, and love—in her words, like the tomato soup and water do in the beef vegetable soup—“stretches.”
Love finds a way to fill what is empty.
P.S. Flipping through my college journal, I'm so thankful for those years of ministry, and all the friends who taught me so much about real love: "Serving those with nothing offers us the chance to love a person unconditionally, to love a person only for her existence. This gift is rare and profoundly sanctifying. When we love this way, we understand more deeply how we are loved. Not for what we do, have, or look like, but just because we are. Just like them."
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P.P.S.: Tomatoes are probably the single most important ingredient in Louisiana cooking, apart from trinity. Summer is Creole tomato season—those adorably ugly, sunny-sweet jewels of June and July. We even have a festival devoted to Creole tomatoes. You aren't living unless you're biting into thick slabs of a BLT with red juice running down your chin. Of course, there's also tomato salad, tomato ragout, tomato casserole, tomato pie, and tomato pasta... actually, just get this tomato cookbook. You'll find tons of other delicious ways to use tomatoes (and definitive renditions of gumbo, shrimp Creole, etc) in this Louisiana classic. Or try this cookbook gifted to me by multiple older ladies when I got married.
And while we're here: one of my favorite things to read while I drink coffee is this ancient Creole cookbook that I inherited from my Granny. My 1954 copy is a reprint of recipes as they were originally published in 1901. The recipes are incredible: lots of booze (Eggs and Wine or Ratafia) and lots of weird (Pickled Tunny or Reed Bird Patties). But my favorite part is the lack of concrete directions, measurements, temperatures, specificity of ingredients or techniques. We moderns now use comically expensive meal kits with literally everything pre-done for us and call it “cooking.” These recipes be like: “A Recipe for Bécasse à ma Manière": You know what to do. Do it.” Amazing.
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