February 25, 2014

Local Ingredients

I have been cooking new things lately. From scratch. I’ve been an expert restaurant eater for years, partaking of the wild variety of cooked food available in my Los Angeles neighborhood. But my cooking has been boring, in part because I don’t know what to do with the things for sale in my neighborhood.

I am learning about legumes. Between the Bangladeshis, the Ethiopians, and the Koreans, there may not be a legume known to humankind that is not for sale within walking distance of my house or church. I recently used red lentils, garbanzo flour, and yellow split peas all in one meal. I turned a bag of dry mung beans into little savory pancakes.

I am learning about chilies. When I set about to make homemade enchilada sauce, I discovered that the tiny Latino market around the corner carries no less than thirteen different types of dried chile. And then there is Korean chili paste. On a recent trip to my local supermarket I happened to notice they carried only three cake mixes, tucked at one end of an entire aisle of chili paste.

Doing urban church these days is all about learning to work with local ingredients. The commercially available recipes for church success mostly come from places where the aisles have a lot more cake mixes than chili paste. Where no one will sell you a pound of pre-peeled garlic, because who is really going to use that much garlic in the space of a few days?

My little cooking successes have become small gifts of the Spirit, inspiring me to keep my eyes out for what is around, not just what isn’t. They inspire me to ask questions, rather than bring answers. I may not know when to use peeled mung beans, and when the whole ones will do. But clearly plenty of people around me know all about mung beans, and know exactly what to do with that much garlic. And the results are delicious.

What are your local ingredients? Where is the energy in your particular community, and how might your congregation become a part of that energy? Who knows more about what’s out there than you do? Are you in a rut, trying the same sorts of things again and again with similar results? Could it be because the formula you are following (or even the criteria you are using to measure success) were made for a different time or a different place or different people?