M

Mi'sen

Chicken Soup for the Vibe

For @kyosaku_jon: may this deeply satisfying and vibrant soup tickle you behind your left ear Preamble I know very little about Mexican food, whether that be the histories, techniques, regional styles and ingredients. What little I do know, is almost entirely from cooking dishes from Margarita Carrillo Arronte's Mexico. One of my favourite dishes I've learned by cooking from Mexico — and subsequently tweaked/bastardised a little — is pollo al limón from CDMX (chicken braised in lemon juice and...
Read post

Vegetable Magic - Ratatouille

The great John Thorne once described the courgette — or zucchini as he would call it — as 'a vegetable with the nutritious value, flavour, and texture of rained-on newspaper'. I'm forever indebted to a delightful fruit for introducing me to his work, but on ratatouille, John is wrong on more than one count, and it would be a crying shame to not suggest an alternative to myself, lest I be led astray by his hatred of courgette and hot ratatouille. It should be pointed out that I'm arguing with a c...
Read post

Potato Terrine

A few people requested the recipe for this terrine, so here it is: Ingredients: 2kg potatoes, preferably Maris Piper or a similar* variety (* I shouldn't need to say this, but please google for similar varieties. You may need an extra 500g if you're using a large mould) 250g unsalted butter Salt (a fine sea salt works well, I also use flake sea salt at the end which is optional) Thyme (If you want to make it look pretty at the end you can pick some fresh herbs which can stand up to the heat a...
Read post

Contemplative Fieldnotes - Prayer

For the past few weekends, I've been trying to write something about prayer as a category of ritual, partly as an exercise to see what I think about the topic, but also because it's an area of religious practice which gets a bad rap. Some of the reasons it gets a bad rap are pretty obvious and mostly dull; what prayer can do well is more interesting to me in practice, but it turns out that giving some theoretical explanation of that is really difficult when trying to communicate in the grey area...
Read post

Contemplative fieldnote: Purity Bubbles

Contemplative field notes: Purity Bubbles Roughly speaking, when bubbles burst, energy held up as tension and pressure differentials get released as a shock wave; pop! The same things happen in psycho-social bubbles. This could feel pleasant, like when a child realises they don't have to enjoy the same things as their peers. Collective delusions put a lot of stress on an individual, and in interesting ways. When a person at the centre of a religious community builds cohesive tension with sto...
Read post

Notes on Emotion

[NB: The following will be a messy set of notes, made with the intention of fleshing out a little bit of the general orientation towards emotions and the assumptions we have about them. This isn't intended as instruction. I'm writing them off the top of my head. I won't edit them beyond basic spell check. My intention isn't to go into detail about the various practical methods one might employ as a way of working with emotions in the style I'm talking about. I am not a teacher, and these teachi...
Read post