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Reading Catholic and catholic

Nancy Piccione

Father Leo’s Fusion Fajitas: Why I Am a Book Blogger and Not a Food Blogger Will be Evident Here

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All month long, I’ve been promising to myself make the fusion fajitas that Father Leo Patalinghug beat Food TV Chef Bobby Flay on the “Throwdown” show.  We have watched the episode plenty of times at our house, especially after Father Leo appeared at our parish in May.  What an exciting time we had meeting him in person.

The fusion fajitas appear in Father Leo’s new edition of Grace Before Meals, his cookbook that encourages families to eat and talk together.  Here’s my review from The Catholic Post of Father Leo’s book Grace Before Meals.
The fajitas are thinly sliced flank steak along with sautéed onions & peppers, and served with “Holy Guacamole” and “Screamin’ Sour Cream” dip, and tortillas.
But it’s been a busy month, and I kept making “the usuals.”  Finally, last week I bought the ingredients (many perishable) so I would be sure to make them.  Flank steak was the hardest to obtain; I finally had to settle for skirt steak from a local specialty grocery store, Lindy’s,  in a nearby town.  The helpful staff assured me it would substitute nicely.
So finally, last Wednesday I decided was “the day.”
I assembled the ingredients on the kitchen table.  I thought that would be easier than taking things out one by one, and also I am prone to sometimes famously forget a critical ingredient when I cook (oops!  That hummus doesn’t have any lemon juice! Not so great, trust me).
Next, I mixed up the marinade for the steak and poured it over the steak, reserving some of the marinade to cook the onions & peppers in.
My youngest helped “tenderize” the meat with a fork.  He is saying here, a direct and favorite quote from Father Leo from the “Throwdown” episode, “I don’t want to make it too holy–that’s God’s job.”
Now the steak gets to sit in the marinade while I make the rest of the items.  I was surprised at how much brown sugar (1 cup) was in the marinade, but I don’t often marinade so what would I know?

Next, onto the “Holy Guacamole.”  I started by juicing one lime:
Next, I chopped up two avocados (I’m not sure if I’m spelling the word right, but adding an “e” triggered spellcheck), and immediately poured the lime juice over them to prevent browning:
Next, finely chopped red onion:

Now, some parsley, cilantro and salt is added to the mix and it is all smashed together.
Now it’s time to make the Screaming Sour Cream:  basically sour cream mixed with hot sauce, garlic and a few other ingredients.  Here it is before mixing:
Now, the reason I am a book blogger and not a food blogger should be evident by the fact that I lost steam around here and needed to get “dinner on the table,” and so did not take photos of lighting the charcoal for the grill, grilling the steak and letting it rest, sautéing the vegetables (though the chopped ones are visible in the last photo), etc., etc.
But I did finish the fusion fajitas, and we did have them for dinner.  They were very yummy:

Not everyone tried all of the fajitas as prepared, as I might have predicted.  The skirt steak was a big hit, as were some of the other items.  I filled out the table with refried beans (popular at our house scooped up with tortilla chips), a couple of cheese quesadillas, and some tortilla chips.  Everyone ate well and we had a relatively placid dinner and fun talking about Father Leo.
What I have to confess here is that I ended up making the “fusion fajitas” was towards the end of a day I felt convinced I am a failure as a wife and mother.  Ever have a day like that?  Last Wednesday was one of those for me.  Everyone, just everyone, in our house, yelled and was in tears for goodly portions of that day.  The only reason my husband escaped this fate is he had the great good fortune to go to work, but since he still was available via phone and email he did learn about our exploits at various points.
It was one of those truly horrible days that instead of loving the lifestyle of educating our children at home and being with my children all.the.time, I start researching boarding schools in New Zealand.  That is my big, laughing joke when chatting about homeschooling, “Yes, I love it, except on days when I want to send my children to a boarding school in New Zealand!”   And yet, there are days when that is not a joke.
Anyway, I wish I could say that making the fusion fajitas and eating them together as a family made everything terrific for the ending of that day, but it didn’t exactly do that.
However, it did make it a little bit better.  I didn’t feel quite so much of a complete failure because I tried a new recipe, had fun taking photos of it (until I ran out of time and needed to get dinner finished), and had more of a fun story to tell my husband at the table than a re-hash of the horrible day.
Maybe that’s what family meals together are supposed to do:  make things a little better, make us connect just a little bit more so we don’t despair about the inevitable bad days and bickering that goes on in families.
I think I might try to try one new complete meal recipe, along the lines of Father Leo’s Fusion Fajitas, once a month or so.  But next time, I’m going to do it on a good day.
Do you have any full-meal recipes I should try?  Or, better yet, any good New Zealand boarding schools to recommend?

Are We Too Plugged In?

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I haven’t even finished this article from the New York Times about scientists who left their cellphones and Internet behind for a week, and I want to turn off everything and go off for a week into the wilderness.

I’ve thought a lot about the relationship we all have with being “plugged in” after I wrote about Nicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows” on what the Internet is doing to our brain.

I think rather than continue to do “research” on what’s best, I’m formulating an idea of a plan to have certain times that are Internet-free.  That already happens for me pretty naturally with taking care of a household and three busy children.  But I do find my checking e-mail or just clicking around on the Internet to be seeping into lots of time that could be spent more interestingly.  Do you have a time or day when you do not connect with the world in any way?  What do you do with that time?

Grace Before Meals: What are Your Food Rules?

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First of all,  Happy Feast of the Assumption!   What a great mid-summer feast.  I have very specific childhood memories of being on vacation with our family at Wildwood, NJ, and the priest blessing the ocean waves on this day.  I always want to be at the beach on this day, but it rarely happens.  Maybe next year?


This spring, as I was preparing to take on this role of book page editor and blogger for the Catholic Post, I had a number of discussions with my editor Tom Dermody, about future books to feature.


I had just finished Michael Pollan’s slim but very intriguing book, Food Rules, and I suggested this one as a possible one for a summer month.  Fortunately, Tom pointed out the challenge of a month-long discussion on this one book, and he’s right.   That’s why he’s the editor, and I’m the editee.  Thank you, Tom.

Food Rules is a compendium of different rules people shared with food writer Pollan about how they eat healthy.  Most of them are great basic advice for eating well, though some are very appealing to me personally. Sweets only on days that begin with an S? I don’t think so, Mr. Pollan!

But the book an interesting starting point for talking about food rules–we all have them, and defining them can be a fun exercise.

Here are some of my food rules:

Almost always, I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every single day, and I don’t mind a bit.   This one I learned from my Dad, who didn’t mind it, either.

This one, also from my Dad:  there is no such thing as too much fiber.

Coffee can make you feel better.  This one was from my Mom, and I only learned this later in life and not in time to thank her.

Dark chocolate makes you smarter (even on days that don’t start with an S).

I wish I had some good food rules for children, but for now I just keep putting out whatever good stuff I can and hope some of it sticks at some point, either literally or figuratively.

What are your top food rules?

Grace Before Meals: Family Meal Rules?

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Fr. Leo’s ministry Grace Before Meals is all about gathering families around the dinner table for good food and good conversation, in order to foster the great connections that the domestic Church that is the family.

But I had an interesting discussion some weeks back with a group of moms about if the “family dinner” was so important.  One mom argued that other mealtimes, like breakfast, could be a time to gather, and pegging it to dinner was too restrictive.   Another mom argued that perhaps even mealtime was not necessary for connection when there are other opportunities for connection as a family, and that “forcing” everyone to participate in family mealtimes could be counterproductive.   It made for an interesting conversation.

I do think there is something important about eating together that is unique in a family’s experience.    But I also know some people don’t have great memories of family mealtimes.  Also, there can be different seasons of life, such as busy sport or work schedules and young children just learning table manners, that can make family mealtimes a challenge at best.

As I wrote in my review of Fr. Leo’s book, our family’s mealtimes often break some of the common “rules” for dinner time.  I was partially joking, of course, because there are no rules in Canon Law for how mealtimes should look.

But we do try to make an effort to have family mealtimes and interesting conversations to go along with those, and I find that as our children get older both the discussions and the food get more interesting.  That keeps us committed to trying to make those times a priority, even as schedules get busier.

What are some of your family meal rules?  Any suggestions for

Grace Before Meals: Your Favorite Cookbook, Food Magazine, Blog or Recipe Website?

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Care to share your favorite website, cooking magazine, blog or cookbook to help you cook at home?

I tend to “google” a recipe if I’m looking for, say, a recipe for something in particular, like soba noodles in peanut sauce.

But the sites I tend to trust for accurate, turns out most of the time, recipes is Epicurious.   I enjoy getting recipes off of various people’s blogs, but I find the recipes frequently don’t come out as good as the photo!

Cookbooks?  I have two versions of the Joy of Cooking, one my mom got me when I lived in my first apartment in the 1980s.  When a new edition came out in 1997, she gave me that one as well; for some reason, even though I purge cookbooks from time to time, I still keep them both on the shelf.    They are both such a wealth of information about all kinds of cooking and food, and a good base to learn about basic techniques and cooking methods.  Armed with the information

I love cooking magazines, and I used to have a tradition a friend recommended of subscribing to one cooking magazine per year and then rotating; so I did “Cooking Light” one year, Cook’s Illustrated the next, and so on.  But though I love to page through them, I found that they piled up alarmingly, so  I don’t subscribe to any at the moment.   The one cooking magazine I did frequently try recipes from was Cook’s Illustrated, and they tended to be pretty great recipes.

What are your favorites?

Grace Before Meals Question: Favorite Faith-Based Food Traditions?

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One of the best things about Fr. Leo’s book Grace Before Meals is how it is divided by different seasons, from religious holidays (the Feast of the Sacred Heart) to sports team gatherings.  The recipes and “Let’s Talk.. Let’s Listen” portion of each relate to the  of each of these times through the year.  He suggests great ideas to help 


One recent one I can recall is from July 16– we try to have something with caramel on the feast of Our Lady of Carmel.  I know, it’s not “Our Lady of Caramel,” but it does help us to remember Our Lady that day in a “sweet” way.


Since we are Italian at our house, we’ve got lots of food-based traditions that relate to the liturgical year.  My husband makes his family’s Sicilian savoiardi (ladyfingers) recipe on St. Joseph’s Day, and we serve both fish and pizza on Christmas Eve.  (I’m not sure why the pizza, except that traditionally Christmas Eve was a day of abstinence from meat; both my family and my husband’s family had this tradition).


What are some of your favorite faith-based food traditions?