Because the day is cloudy, muggy and threatening to rain here in the city, I have opted for the quiet, semi-slothful day at home. (By “semi-slothful” I mean “putting up the cherry jam I made last weekend and maybe making a batch of hummus for the week ahead, but not much else.") Having thus given myself permission to goof off this weekend, I started going through the rest of my pictures from Arkansas and found one I’d forgotten I’d taken. This was taken at the parking lot at the Colony. The butterfly had been slowly opening and closing its wings in a regular breath-like rhythm. It was so still, and moved with such deliberate quiet movement, that I thought it was dying, but after I took the picture it flew away, not suddenly, as if it were afraid, but with the same thoughtful movement, as if it knew that the picture had been taken and it was free to go.
Your hummus sounds great; if you could make 25 gallons/week and never get sick of it, it must be good stuff. Mine—which isn’t really mine, but a recipe from Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook—is thicker, more like the consistency of fluffy mashed potatoes. You make it by toasting whole cumin, coriander and sesame seeds and grinding them; you then add them to a paste of minced garlic, salt, cayenne pepper, tahini, lemon juice and water. Zizz the chickpeas in a food processor, add the paste by tablespoons and zizz again, pour in a little of the cooking liquid from the chickpeas and keep zizzing until you have a smooth but fluffy mixture. You can add some olive oil at this point, but I usually wait until I serve the hummus and just drizzle the oil over the top. This is really good in a sandwich with whole-wheat pita and steamed broccoli, maybe a little chicken breast if you are hungry enough. Do send me an e if you’d like exact proportions of the ingredients.
According to the book “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” a test conducted in 1907 proved the human soul weighs three quarters of an ounce. A butterfly soul weighs much less than that, I’m sure.