Hugh Hollowell

On Branding

People who know me well know how much I love Jacques Pepin. If you do not know, he is a classically trained French chef, who began his apprenticeship in France at the age of 13, who worked in Paris and the was personal chef to three French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Eventually, he would move to the US in 1959, would work at La Pavilion in New York City, and was offered the job as chef to John F. Kennedy when he was President.

Pepin turned him down, and instead went to work designing menus for Howard Johnson’s. which was then the largest chain of sitdown restaurants in the country. Imagine turning down the opportunity to be the White House Chef to work at Applebee’s, say.

When asked in an interview why he turned it down, he said, “Be chef to a President? I had already done that. I wanted to do something new.”

I’ve always admired him for that. To not take himself so seriously. To be willing to put aside the accolades and to be so self-confident that the prestige doesn’t matter to you. To be content to have “done that” and to try something new, something that isn’t what people expect from you.

I have blogged, off and on, for 19 years, for myself and for organizations and companies I ran. Then since 2007 I have been active on Social Media, for the last 5 years or so most heavily on Facebook. And all of those forms of online expression benefit you most when you “brand” yourself. When I started blogging, I ran a small bookstore, and so I wrote mostly about that, and so I was branded as a “bookseller”.

When I moved to North Carolina to start a homeless ministry, I wrote about issues of homelessness and faith and issues like LGBT rights and racism that intersect with homelessness, and became branded as that guy. The last 3-4 years I did that work I had begun to be sought after as a trainer and speaker on those issues, and was pastoring a weekly worshipping community made up of people experiencing homelessness, and someone called me the “pastor of last resort” and I got branded as that.

But even normal people get branded these days. I have a friend that curses like a sailor in person, but she won’t use swear words on Facebook.

“People wouldn’t expect me to do that there”, she told me.

In other words, it would be off-brand.

An early influence on my understanding of ministry was a white Mississippi Baptist preacher named Will Campbell. He was one of those larger than life characters that thrive in the Deep South, a Baptist preacher who smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and cursed a blue streak. But he also did some of the most important behind the scenes work in the Civil Rights movement, and wrote a book that called out the mainline white church back in the early 1960’s.

In an article about Will in Rolling Stone back in 1990, there is this paragraph:

He does not like to be called the Reverend Campbell because “it sounds condescending and a bit imperialistic. Some people call me a counselor,” Campbell says, “but it’s such an arrogant concept—like I can do something better for you than you can do for yourself. I’m not a reverend, and I’m not a counselor. I’m just a preacher.” Even the word ministry gives him trouble. “I don’t really have a ministry,” he insists. “I have a life.”

Over the last month, I have blogged every day, without a theme. Some days I talked about my struggles with ADHD, and other days I shared a childhood memory or talked about Southern food traditions or shared something that happened to me that day or wrote something somebody found inspirational or just told a funny story.

If I were smart, I would only write 3 times a week about, say, Southern food, and have beautiful images and printable recipes and put together a collection and then a cookbook and start a podcast where I interview other white dudes (because aren’t most podcasts basically white dudes interviewing other white dudes?) about food, and before you know it, I would be a “brand”.

I watched a YouTube video the other day where some influencer was tending to his backyard chickens, and his 10-year-old daughter was with him, and he put the camera in her face and she knew exactly how to mug for the camera. She was being trained to be a brand at 10 years old.

But in a world where everyone is trying to put a label on you and put you in a box, to refuse to stay in their box is a political action. I keep a file open on my computer, and most days I jot things in it. Like a running journal. On January 1 of 2021, I wrote:

I wrote exactly 2 things on my blog last year. Just 2. Part of that is Facebook cannibalized my blog, part of it is that the newsletters took another part of it, but mostly it was that I was unsure what to write about. Branding and all. So to hell with branding. I will write about walks, and spoons, and woodworking, and gardening, and depression, and food, and sermons and all of it. I don’t have a ministry – I have a life, as Will C said. Publish and be damned.

It took me a while to get there, but this blog is the result of that entry. This blog is intentionally unbrandable, because it is not a brand – it is my life. I am funny, and angry, and sentimental, and Southern, and opinionated about cornbread and beans and a sucker for Christmas and cynical of all of it. This blog is about all of those things, because it is the story of one guy who is trying to live a good life.

To paraphrase Will Campbell, I don’t have a brand. I have a life.

A Bowl Full of Luck

Saturday is New Years Day, which means it is time for my people to eat black eyed peas and collards. For luck, you know. And growing up in and shaped by the hills of North Mississippi, and loved and fed by people who were children of the Depression and grandchildren of Reconstruction, we ate simple food, and the food of our celebrations was also simple, although given a bit more time and intention.

Now, all food is regional and cultural. And I know up North it’s corned beef and cabbage, and in the Low Country of the East Coast they eat Hopping John, but this is what my people eat for luck. That we live in a historically and persistently economically depressed area that has been perennially unlucky is not lost on me, but what are you going to do?

SoI don’t know that eating black eyed peas is actually lucky. But I do know that I love them, and will make any excuse to eat them. And besides – if we engage in pleasure when times are hard, isn’t that a sort of making your own luck? While my parents were not big eaters of greens, the old people who cared for me were, and so eating greens reminds me of happy times and the purest love I have ever known, so I make a spot for them, too.

If we want to keep traditions alive, we have to make room for them. And any tradition that involves sitting down to a meal, made with care and love, that marks the entry point into a new time of with hope and intention is a thing worth preserving.

So on New Years, we eat Black Eyed Peas and Collards.

Black eyed peas aren’t peas. They’re beans, and they have to be cooked like beans. In fact, you can cook them just like pintos and have a fully acceptable dish. But you can elevate it a bit, too. And since this is New Years after all, I tend to fancy it up. The collards are an accommodation because I’m the only person in my house that likes them, and so cooking up a large pot doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now, doing it this way makes enough for 12 polite folks or eight hungry ones. But it halves perfectly if don’t have a lot of people to feed.

What you need:

To do this traditionally, you need the ham bone leftover from your Christmas ham with about two pounds of meat. If you didn’t save leftovers and the bones from your Christmas ham, you can (and should) buy in two pounds of smoked ham hock, or if you find yourself in a part of the world where you can’t easily buy ham hock, dice up a couple of pounds of bacon.

Two pounds of dried black eyed peas. The thing about black eyed peas is, they’re beans. So you should soak them, but you don’t have to. They don’t need a lot of soaking, and some folk don’t soak black eyed peas at all. But I generally soak mine for a couple of hours. Just spread them out on a cookie sheet, sort through them for dirt and debris, then put them in a stockpot with enough cold water to cover them by about two inches.

Salt. People get fancy with their salt these days, but I use kosher salt to cook with and iodized salt for the table. You do you – salt is salt, and best done to taste anyway.

A large onion, as big as your fist.

Cloves. You only need a couple, so see if you can borrow some from a neighbor, but if not, buy the smallest container you can. You want whole cloves here, and you might have bought some for the Christmas ham.

A bay leaf. I feel like this can be left out, but I love this dish so much I’m afraid to try subtracting things.

Ground black pepper. Just like you have in the pepper shaker.

Allspice. This is something I picked up a few years ago and I love the depth it adds to the dish. I doubt my ancestors would have tried this, but I recommend it.

Vegetable oil

Four nice sized garlic cloves. Honestly, the four is a guesstimate. I mean, I would use at least four, but sometimes the spirit catches me and I might go as high as six or seven. I do love some garlic.

Crushed red pepper

Two bunches of collard greens. My people would just say “a mess of collards”, but I’m assuming you are going to the store, and they will look at you funny if you ask for that. The stores tend to sell them in 1 pound bunches, and you need about two pounds of greens. Also, if you are two good to eat collard greens, get over yourself. Kale and Collards are practically siblings and are both just unheaded cabbage. If you can’t get collards, you can use kale for this, because they are so similar. But collards is traditional, and if you are too snooty to eat them and end up unlucky this year because you did it wrong, don’t come crying to me.

What you do

Drain your peas and put them back in the stockpot. Dice up your meat (including the skin and fat) into pieces about an inch or two in size, and add them and the bone to the pot. If you are using the bone (and you should) don’t worry about cleaning it off – the meat will fall off it as it cooks. Some folk are panicking over the mention of ham skin here, but trust me on this – it will melt and meld into something approaching heaven before we are done. Put in enough cold water to cover the beans about two inches and set the heat as high as it will go.

While you are waiting for it to boil, peel your onion and stick 2 cloves in it. Cloves are pointy, and you can just push them into the onion like thumbtacks. You will remove the onion later, and this makes it easier, but I have also just tossed the cloves in the pot and sliced the onion fine and left it in and that works too. It’s largely a matter of opinion, and this way involves less chopping and tears. Add the onion, ½ a teaspoon of allspice, ½ a teaspoon of the black pepper, the bayleaf, and a teaspoon of salt to the water and bring it to a boil. We will probably be adding more salt later, but depending on what meat you used, it may already be salty, and too much salt will ruin a dish.

After it comes to a boil, turn your heat down and let it simmer. Stir them every 10 or 15 minutes, just as you pass through the kitchen, and check your water levels at the same time. The water will cook away, so keep adding water to always keep at least an inch of water over the peas.

Cooking times will vary depending on how fresh the peas are, and how your stove cooks, but after about an hour and a half, start checking to see if the peas are tender. They generally take me about two hours to be right. They are done when a pea will mash evenly between your fingers. If nobody’s looking, you can taste it – they shouldn’t be crunchy, but firm. Nobody wants mushy peas. The broth will be rich and dark, and should be tasted at this point for salt – I often put about another two teaspoons in here, but go by taste, adding a bit and stirring a bit and tasting as you go.

Remove the bone and the onion, if you left it whole, and discard after picking the bone clean.

About an hour and a half into the beans cooking, it’s time to make the collards. Rinse them off, and cut out the big pieces of stem and discard. Take the leaves and roll them like cigars and then slice into one-inch-wide strips. Shake the water off them, but don’t dry them in a salad spinner or anything – they need some moisture to cook. Peel and mince your garlic now as well.

In a big (at least 10 inch, but 12 is better) skillet, add your vegetable oil and coat the bottom of the skillet with it, turning the skillet one way and another. Then put it over high heat and watch the oil – when it turns wavy it’s time to cook.

Add your garlic and a ½ teaspoon of crushed red pepper to the oil and sauté it around, letting it sizzle – but don’t let it brown. After 30 seconds or so, when it smells amazing, add in the collard greens and stir them around in the oil, so they get coated. I sprinkle about a ¼ teaspoon of salt on them now, and then add a cup of water, stirring the greens around in it. This will begin to wilt the greens, which is what we are going for. Turn the heat down to medium and then put a lid on the skillet, leaving it slightly cracked so steam can escape. Let it cook for about 20 minutes, softening the greens, but not disintegrating them.

To plate it up, I put the black eyed peas and meat in a bowl with lots of broth, and then scatter the greens over the top, but this is controversial. Some folks prefer them served on a plate, drained, with the collards to the side. Either way, I would serve some cornbread, usually made in muffins because we are celebrating, alongside this, with some pepper sauce on the table.

I’m wishing you lots of luck and joy and wonderful meals this coming year, friends.

Happy New Year!

When To Buy Cheap Tools

As someone who likes to make things, I read a lot of websites, forums, and Facebook pages that relate to making things. And a really common question that comes up in those places revolves around buying tools.

Can someone recommend a good table saw?

Which brand of chisels should I buy?

Is the Harbor Freight lathe any good?

When this happens, you will get a lot of answers, but not a lot of help, especially if you have an ADHD brain like mine. Instead, people will berate you for trying to save money, or for not buying the absolute top of the line thing.

“Buy once, cry once,” they will say.

I think this is bullshit, actually. But often well intentioned bullshit. This happens because people forget what it feels like to be a beginner. So they make recommendations based on what they, with lots of experience, would do, not what you, with none, should do.

When you are just beginning a hobby, you don’t know enough to make smart choices. Woodworking is, for example, a huge category that encompasses cabinet making, turning, jointing, carpentry, carving, whittling, and box making, among others. And all of those categories have sub categories: Turning has spindle turning and bowl turning and chuck turning and faceplate turning and… well, you get the point.

And they all require different tools, and often the work area you would need for them is all different.

This is worse for ADHD brains, because we will fall into rabbit holes of hyper-focus, where we want to know everything about a thing. And the temptation to buy the things you are learning about can be overwhelming. But if your focus changes, you are out a lot of money.

As an example: I got into wood working thinking I wanted to make furniture – but found out along the way that I suck at making square things, but I love carving. So I don’t need a table saw, ever, but a band saw is really important. Were I a cabinet maker, those priorities would be reversed. So, it’s a good thing I bought a used, sorta crappy table saw, used, for like $50, instead of a new, top of the line SawStop saw for $3500.

On the other hand, I own some carving chisels that are $75 apiece. A furniture maker would never need these. He will be fine with some $10 a piece Buck Brothers chisels from Home Depot (which, by the way, are actually really nice chisels for the price). Lathe’s are pretty inexpensive, but the accessories can break you.

The idea is to lay out as little cash as possible until you decide what part of this hobby you want to pursue, or even if you do, in fact, want to pursue it.

I have a long list of forsaken hobbies.

I flirted with wanting to learn to play the ukulele. But I know me, so I bought the $30 ukulele, which was good, as it has been sitting in the corner for the last 5 years, untouched. I have a really nice high end point and shoot camera sitting in a bag on my bookshelf. I went through a bookbinding phase. The list goes on.

My strategy is to buy the cheapest thing I can get away with in the beginning, to see if this will stick. A good idea is to search Google for “Best budget X”, where X is the thing you need. Best budget harmonica. Best budget wood burning kit. Best budget table saw. Another strategy is to see if you can borrow the thing from someone else, to see if you like it.

A surprising number of times, the “Best budget X” is all you need. The Harbor Freight thickness planer gets amazing reviews – much better than pricy planers costing twice as much. The Casio Duro watch is less than $40, but tons of professional divers wear them (as does, weirdly enough, Bill Gates). The Morakniv Companion is an outstanding sheath knife for under $20.

And even if it isn’t, as you use the free or cheap thing, you will learn if you like doing this activity, you will learn what options your thing lacks, and whether it would be worth it to upgrade or not. And then, you can upgrade smart.

Or, maybe you decide that what you really want to do is basket weaving.

On Goals

It’s a strange time of year.

Not a bad time, just… strange. It’s a sort of liminal space, where pretty much everyone that can be is done with 2021, and yet 2022 hasn’t started yet.

I try to hold this week as free of commitments as I can, so I can do reflecting on the year that was, and set some intentions for the year to come. But one thing I don’t do is set goals – for New Year’s, or ever.

There are several reasons for this. One is that I spent some time working in a toxic sales environment, and goals were super manipulative ways to get us to produce more. And I hate being manipulated. So when I finally quit that job, I decided I could quit goals, too.

But they weren’t hard to give up, because the reality is, my brain doesn’t work that way. As someone with ADHD, I have an interest-based nervous system. If I’m not interested in the project, no amount of external goals will get me there. And if I am interested, then you can’t make me ignore it. This is both my superpower and my kryptonite – I am not externally motivated.

Goals prey on your dissatisfaction. But I’m not dissatisfied.

Don’t get me wrong – I have things I would like to do. For example, I want to go to both Europe, and Puerto Rico. But if I end up not being able to do that, I will be OK. I work hard to make sure we have enough income to maintain our quality of life, but I am old enough to know that if I made 50% more, I would not be 50% more happy than I am now. Our car is 10 years old, and it makes me just as happy as the 3-month old car I rented a few weeks ago to go on a road trip.

In 2022, I want to be a good husband, want to learn skills I do not currently have, want to have enough income to maintain our quality of life, want to meet interesting people, want to make the world better than I found it. I don’t know what any of that will look like. In fact, there are dozens of ways any of that could look that I would be happy with. But that’s what I want.

A concrete example: Right now, we are looking into renovating our kitchen in the next 18 months or so – like, a down to the studs, new appliances, new cabinets, new floor renovation. I’m interested in it, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it can happen. I read articles, watch videos, research appliances, make lists and budgets, and try to figure out ways to make more money to pay for it all. So I guess you could say that is a goal. But I would never say, “By April 15^th of 2023, we will renovate our kitchen.” It will happen when it happens, which is fine, because I enjoy this process. And should our priorities change, and we decide to keep the existing kitchen, that’s fine too. And in the meantime, I’m learning things I did not know, doing work I enjoy, and keeping busy with something that interests me.

As I look back over a career of counseling people who were dissatisfied with their life, their dissatisfaction could often be traced back to their having picked a goal they wanted to accomplish, rather than asking if the work was worth doing.

In the last chapter of The Great Gatsby, Nick says that Gatsby paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. For Gatsby, success could only look one way. The big house, the public acclaim, and crucially, the girl. If any of that did not happen (and, it didn’t), then he processed that as failure. Never mind the fact that he was rich, was acclaimed, was living in a literal mansion and had rose from nothing to prominence. Because he didn’t meet his goal, he wasn’t, to his mind, a success.

So, goals. I don’t set them. Instead, I commit to pay attention, to find out what I’m interested in, and do more of that. I try new things. I give myself permission to fail. And above all, I ask myself if this work is worth doing.

Because for most of us, life isn’t victory or defeat, but the slog of the daily routine. Most of life is process. And if you hate the process, if you don’t think the work is valuable in and of itself, then no amount of success will make up for it.

Leaving Exile

A few days ago, I was talking on the phone to someone who had moved to a new city, after living a long time in the old one.

“It feels different, somehow, living here. Like, I know I intend to stay here. I want to invest here. I want to own a home here, and maybe raise a family here. [The last place] wasn’t like that at all. It was just a place to live because work had moved me there.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“Ahhh?”

“Yes. You just described the difference between being an exile and being an immigrant.”

I went on to explain that when you are in exile, you leave one place for another, but there is always the hope you will be able to return. Your heart, if you will, belongs someplace else. Immigrants, however, plan on building a life in, and committing to, the new place. There is, if nothing else, a hope that the new place will be where they will write the rest of their story.

It’s like the difference between renting a home and owning one. The owned home will always be cared for more by its occupant than the rented one because they have committed to it for the long haul. They are not just sleeping in a home but investing in it, caring for it with the hope that it will take care of them, too. The renter does the minimum because it does not make sense to invest in a place you will not be staying or profiting from long-term.

I know this because it was my story, too. When I moved to North Carolina 15 years ago, there was never any intention that I would be gone forever. I knew that one day, I would be back. And 12 years later, I was. While in Raleigh, I was in exile.

It doesn’t mean I didn’t invest in Raleigh – I did. I did good work there, helped a lot of people there, and made good friends – lifelong friends – there. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart was in Mississippi, a place that has nurtured and held my people for 200 years. In the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah, the people in exile are told by God that even though they find themselves far from their homeland, they should plant gardens, build houses, and to work for the good of the land in which they find themselves, because whatever hope they have of prospering will come from that place prospering.

That was my experience in Raleigh. I worked hard there. I built things there. They prospered. I prospered. But it wasn’t home.

You can argue that it’s semantics, but I think it’s more like a mindset, or a framing story.

Because life is different when you intend to stay.

The First Tree

It was a cold day, as I remember it. We had more of those then, and they came earlier in the year, too. You could see your breath that day, and I pretended I was smoking a cigarette, holding a stick between my fingers the way my Aunt Louise did. Well, I did that up until momma caught me doing it, and then I had to hurry up and get in the truck after hearing a sermon about the evils of smoking.

We lived on 30 something acres in the hills of North Mississippi, and had carved a few acres out for the house and yard, and the rest was fenced off scrub oaks and pines and cedar that we let a cousin lease and he ran a few cows on it. When Daddy put the chainsaw in the back of the truck, I knew we were up to something good. Then he put the old single barrel shotgun that had been his daddy’s behind the seat and we set off.

The truck was an old Ford dad had bought from work when they finally decided it was too ragged out to make sense to keep fixing it. It was red, like all their service trucks were, and had a vinyl bench seat with cracks in the vinyl that hurt your legs if you were wearing shorts, and if you were wearing jeans, like I was on this particular day, then bits of the yellow foam that was beginning to deteriorate would stick to your pants.

We drove up the path, along the massive ravine that ran down the middle of our property that had more than one junked car pushed off into it, past thickets filled with elm seedlings and blackberry canes and sedge grass. Our property was on the southern side of a massive hill, and our house was about midways up it. This day we were headed uphill, to the area at the edge of our property, next to the old cemetery where generations of Black folks were buried, and whose origin story nobody ever told me.

Because that is where the cedar trees were.

Later, when I was studying such things, I would be fascinated to learn that they weren’t cedars at all, but Juniperus virginiana, also known as the Eastern Redcedar. Several years ago, after having learned this, I told Dad they were Junipers and not cedars, and he said, “Not here they aren’t. Here, we call them cedar trees.”

I guess that settles it then.

We were out on this cold Saturday afternoon hunting for our Christmas tree. We understood that there were people that lived in cities that bought trees out of a parking lot, and we also knew some rich people that had artificial trees. But being neither of those, and having 30-odd acres full of cedar trees, this is what people like us did.

Up by the cemetery was a huge field, perhaps 5 acres wide, of nothing but sedge and cedars. And daddy stopped the truck, told momma to look for a tree she liked, and he took the shotgun and my hand and we headed into the woods.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” I asked.

“Hunting”, he said.

This excited me to no end. All the old men I knew hunted, even though Dad did not.

“Are we hunting quail”, I asked?

“No, son. We’re hunting mistletoe.”

Mistletoe is a semi-parasitical plant that grows in deciduous hardwoods, like pecans, hickories, and oaks. And in the wintertime, after the leaves have fallen, you can see it in the treetops. You can, if you are a bit crazy, climb up in the tree and cut it down, to hang in your Christmas decorations.

Or you can be like Dad and just shoot it out of the tree with birdshot.

When we got back, me holding the mistletoe (after a warning to not eat the berries) and Dad holding the shotgun, Mom was standing beside a tree about six feet tall.

“Is that our tree?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Mom said.

As we rode back down the hill to the house, Mom was holding the mistletoe in her lap and me, I was on my knees looking through the rear glass at the tree I had “helped” cut down, holding on to the back of the seat and swaying as the old truck jostled.

I couldn’t wait for Christmas to arrive.

I still can’t.

Southern AF Cornbread

There are people out there making cornbread for the holidays with sugar and flour. One woman even said on Facebook that she uses Jiffy Cornbread mix to make cornbread dressing.

Some folks just want to watch the world burn.

It’s easy to be critical of other people’s food choices, but I find it helpful to remember that not everyone grew up with the advantages I have, and just don’t know any other way. In light of this, and wanting to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, I have decided to share my Southern AF cornbread recipe that uses neither flour nor sugar with the world. And if it matters to you, It’s gluten free,

This is everyday cornbread. This is why I keep a jug of buttermilk in the fridge. (If you don’t have any other use for buttermilk, you can buy powdered buttermilk in the baking aisle of your store, which keeps forever).

I will be the first to say there are other recipes out there – especially hot water cornbread made when money is tight and buttermilk is a stretch, but I don’t particularly enjoy it, so we will talk of it another day. This is the perfect thing to serve with pinto beans. In fact, growing up beans and cornbread were practically one word.

What you need:

1 cup cornmeal. (Now, white is traditional down here, but yellow is easier to get, and I can’t tell a taste difference. I can tell you that you can fancy this up with using stone ground meal here, but it’s real good if you use generic yellow meal from the grocery store, too.)

1 tsp baking powder. (Some people put more to make it rise more, but I like a denser bread.)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk (If you don’t have any buttermilk, you can make do by adding two tablespoons of lemon juice to a cup of milk and letting it sit out about 15 minutes. You just need an acid to react to the baking powder.)

1 large egg

2 TBS butter, margarine, or bacon drippings (Honestly, they all work about the same. Follow your budget here. We tend to use butter, because we don’t keep margarine in the house.)

1 8 to 10-inch well-seasoned cast iron skillet (I mean, if you are not at a place in your life where someone loves you enough to have given you a cast iron skillet and taught you how to care for it, you could use a cake pan, but it will crust up better in a cast iron skillet.)

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 450.

Put butter in the skillet, put skillet in the oven.

Then mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Add egg and buttermilk to the dry stuff, and mix until the batter just has an even consistency. Don’t overmix this – it isn’t cake. Use a spoon, not a blender.

Remove skillet (be careful, it’s hot!), swirl the melted butter all over the skillet, then pour the melted butter into the batter.

Pour batter into the skillet, and jiggle it to evenly distribute the batter.

Put it in the oven and feel morally superior.

It will be done when golden brown on top, the sides are coming away from the side of the skillet, and a knife blade comes out dry from the center.

An 8-inch skillet takes about 20 minutes, a 10 inch one about 17.

We just cut it into wedges and serve it from the skillet – when we were growing up, momma would invert it on a plate and serve it upside down, which bothered me in ways I cannot fully describe. But you do you.

Further notes:

This is a basic, make 30 minutes before supper, all purpose cornbread. This is also good dressing cornbread, if you are making chicken and dressing, but you will want to make it the day before so it can dry out for that. I have, on occasion, added two tablespoons of sugar to this and made muffins with it to save my marriage. Other ways to fancy it up involve adding a half cup of shredded cheese, a handful of frozen corn kernels, or a small can of green chiles. But don’t go too close to the sun here: This is working people’s food.

A Poor Man’s Feast

Last week, my local grocery store had their hams on sale for Christmas, so I bought a small butt ham that weighed about five pounds. I roasted the ham, which was amazing, but I will tell you how I did that another day. The point is, after slicing the ham for sandwiches and breakfast meat and dinner, I was left with a nice bone and some scraps of ham meat, fat, and skin. But not a lot, because I love some damn ham. Because I know somebody is going to ask, I weighed it, and had about half a pound of loose meat left, plus whatever I couldn’t get off the bone. I stuck it all in the fridge.

A few days later, it was cold outside, and I didn’t have a lot of work commitments, and felt like it would be a perfect day for a pot of beans and cornbread. I took a pound of pinto beans and poured them out on a cookie sheet, looking for rocks and dirt. You just pour them out and sort of pick through them with your fingers, shifting them around until you make sure they are clean. Then put them in a large pot and put cold water in the pot until you have about two inches of water over the top of the beans. They need to soak in the water a few hours, and it works better if you stir the soaking beans every once in a while, to make sure water and oxygen gets everywhere.

Now, you don’t have to do this – the soaking I mean. But they taste better if you do. The fresher your beans, the less essential the soaking is, but dried beans look the same whether six months or six years old, and so I always soak them. But don’t soak them overnight, like some folks do, or they will break down too much. Four hours is plenty, two is sufficient, and in a pinch, again, none is probably acceptable.

When they are done soaking, pour the water off the beans, and then put more cold water in the bean pot, again about two inches over the beans. Don’t drown the beans – this isn’t soup, and it isn’t mush, this is beans. Put your ham bone and ham scraps, including the skin and fat, in the pot too, and don’t worry too much if the water doesn’t cover every little bit of the bone. Turn the heat to high.

As an aside – some folk are going to panic about the mention of ham skin going in this. Just cut it into small pieces and go with it. Most of the fat and collagen is going to dissolve and turn into flavor.

While you are waiting for the water to boil, get the rest of your ingredients ready. You need a small onion, maybe the size of a door knob. I like a sweet yellow onion for this, but I imagine any onion is better than no onion. Peel it and cut it into long strips from pole to pole. Peel a large clove of garlic. Put the onions and the clove of garlic (whole) in the water with the beans, and add ½ a tablespoon of salt and ½ a tablespoon of sugar.

I admit the sugar and garlic are controversial choices, and ones I did not grow up with, but choices that dramatically elevate the dish. Also, the beans will probably need another ½ tablespoon of salt later in the cooking, but a lot depends on how salty the ham was, and you won’t know for a while. As my momma is fond of saying, it’s easier to add it than to take it out.

After your beans get to a rolling boil, you want to back off to a medium or low – whatever it takes to do a slow boil, just a bit more than a simmer. You want this to go on, with your pot covered, for about an hour, but stir the beans every 10-15 minutes. If you are doing other things, just do it as you pass through the kitchen – no need to set a timer or anything.

After your hour passes, turn it lower to a simmer and stir every so often. You will also need to check to make sure you don’t boil all your liquid away. I end up keeping a glass of water on the counter by the stove when I’m making beans, and I add a bit from time to time, always making sure to not drown them. Again, this isn’t soup. You want to keep an inch, no more than two, of water over the top of the beans.

Two hours in, check for salt, and most likely, add another half tablespoon. This is one of the danger points – too much salt makes them not fit to eat. By now, the broth is brown and has a filmy appearance to it as the meat and marrow dissolves into the bean juice and makes something amazing.

I don’t know how long this dish takes to make – there are a lot of variables. Fresher beans cook faster than older beans, and temperature settings like High and Medium are subjective. And I haven’t ever cooked on your stove. But between two and a half and three hours, take a couple of beans out and mash them between your fingers. If the bean splits in two, keep cooking. But a perfect bean will be slightly firm, and yet mash evenly between your fingers. Think of the difference between a raw potato and a baked potato. We are going for a baked potato here. If nobody is looking, you can eat a few and see how they taste. The meat will, by this time, have fallen off the bone and left it clean.

When you plate it up, make sure you put some meat pieces in each serving. The meat is very much part of this dish, as is the cornbread that traditionally is served with it. I like it in a bowl with lots of broth to sop up with my cornbread, but some folk like it on a plate. Either way, I am fond of putting some pickled green tomato relish (we call this relish chow-chow, but I understand people from north of here put cabbage in their chow-chow, and I don’t know how to feel about that.) on it, but my Dad always put pepper sauce on his. I knew one guy in the Marines that put ketchup on his beans – I never did trust that guy. Let your conscience be your guide.

You should, I am convinced, always have some dried beans in your pantry. Beans are cheap – a pound of pintos is roughly a dollar, give or take, and will feed six people. Four if they are hungry. They keep for ages. They are a wonderful source of protein. And they taste amazing.

You were probably with me up until that last sentence. But they do – correctly seasoned, like these are, beans are a miracle food that have kept many a poor person nourished and fed and happy. They are, done right, a poor man’s feast.

State Your Needs

While in Raleigh last week, a friend asked me to join Marco Polo, so we could send each other video messages. And because this friend is important to me, I did.

And since then, she has sent me three messages, and I had sent her one that basically said, “I am trying this thing out”. So this morning she sent me a message that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I read all your blog posts, and I do that because you are important to me and that is how you prefer to share what’s going on. This is how I prefer to share what’s going on with me, and I hope that matters to you.”

Typing it out, that sounds harsh. But it’s true. This matters to her – to me, not so much. But it’s how she feels loved, and she matters to me, so I will do it, and find ways to make it a habit.

This is the same friend that revolutionized my life one day years ago, when I was complaining about a work relationship that wasn’t working out, and she told me that it was my fault my needs were not being met, because I wasn’t communicating them to the other person – I just sort of expected them to understand what I needed from them.

“State your needs, Hugh!”.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I often find it really hard. And that is what my friend was doing this morning – stating her needs. The honesty was refreshing. I have come to love it when people tell me how to love them, even if I sometimes struggle to do it myself.

Ever since Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages came into prominence years ago, the idea of love languages has been in the popular vernacular. The idea behind the book is that different people have different ways that they feel love and express love, and if you don’t understand that, then your partner may not feel loved, despite your trying really hard.

Chapman’s model is primarily based in romantic love, and has five “languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. So, if you show love by physical touch, and your partner feels loved by acts of service, she is pissed you don’t do anything around the house but want to cuddle all the time. Meanwhile, you are feeling like she is nagging you and distant.

I want to say up front that Chapman comes from an Evangelical Christian background, and while he is a pretty easy read, you should probably know that if you engage his work. But this isn’t really about his book, but rather the concept behind it: That different people feel and show love in different ways.

I believe this to be true, and would extend the concept beyond romantic love. Today, in response to one of my Facebook posts, a friend said that cooking for people was her love language. It’s one of mine, too. I feel loved when people read and engage things I write, or when someone really listens to me and I feel like they are paying attention to me. I show love by giving you books, cooking you a meal, and fixing your dishwasher.

I have another friend who loves to send text messages. I really don’t. But because he is important to me, we text regularly. And he is far away, and so I can’t fix his dishwasher. But even if I can’t show him love in a way that moves me right now, I can do things in a way that move him.

So I don’t know what your love language is, but I know you have one. Maybe it’s, “Share TikTok videos” or “Make me spaghetti”. Or maybe it’s “Help me do chores” or “Listen to me nonjudgmentally when I’m down”.

I know this all may seem somewhat self-evident, but as a pastor, I cannot tell you how many relationships I have seen fall apart because the people involved don’t know how to love each other. Let the people you are in relationship with know how to love you.

And state your needs.

Solstice

It was cold.

The sort of damp cold you only get in the American South – the sort that penetrates your defenses and goes down deep into your joints, and hurts.

The small crowd was a ragtag bunch – men who had no homes to go to, social workers, shelter employees, pastors and church volunteers, and some people who had lost people they loved that year. And most of us were in more than one category.

And we held candles, and we stood in silence as someone called off a list of names – names of people we all knew, and missed, and loved.

It was the annual memorial I went to every winter solstice when I lived in NC, a night where we honored the memories of those who had died while experiencing homelessness; done each year on the longest night, a night when one who was sleeping outside had to endure the most darkness, and had to wait the longest before the hope and safety that comes with the dawn.

For most of my career, winter meant death. Every year, I would bury people I knew and cared about who had died outside, alone, in the cold. But now I do different work, and while it doesn’t stop, it does slow up in the dead of winter, and there isn’t the frantic rush, the life and death struggle to get the blankets in time, the urgency to have hot coffee when you open the doors, the critical work of begging for dollars to buy hand warmers and sleeping bags to keep people alive.

So now, the days are short and the nights are cold and I sometimes feel stressed because my body knows I should be busy, my adrenaline surges because of the weather reports, my nervous system is geared up. Cold weather and short days are a legit anxiety trigger for me.

And then last year I spent the whole winter in a deep depression. And as I have come, slowly, out of it, I am trying to reboot myself, to feel things but also to look at what lies beneath he feelings, and to learn how to embrace the seasonality of it all.

This year I have sort of looked forward to winter, and have, more than any other year, tried to build a plan for it. I have a workshop now, a place I can go and do creative things in comfort, even when it is dark and damp outside. And my garden and yard got away from me this past year because of the depression, and so I look forward to the weeds dying and giving me a fresh start in a few months. And having a strong routine in place and a gym membership, where I can move my body independent of the weather has been crucial, too.

But mostly, I’m trying to live into this time of darkness being not a symbol of death but a symbol of dormancy, a time to rest and build up our inner resources, to embrace and own the hard work of survival we did this year, and to dream of the longer, brighter days to come.

Happy solstice, friends. It only gets brighter from here.