They were visiting me for the first time in this new city I called home, and I wanted to show them the newly-dedicated Cathedral of Christ the Light, which I’d been attending since its dedication Mass just two months before. That celebration swept me up: the hymns, the readings, the prayers were all given in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Tagalog. People wore big Sunday hats, kente cloth, silk Ao Dais, and Oakland A’s windbreakers. We passed the peace among us, pressing white hands to brown, smiles everywhere. It made the list of the most memorable and moving Masses I’ve ever attended.

I wanted to share this amazing place with my family.

We celebrated Thanksgiving Mass, and, at the end, greeted the couple behind us, an American woman married to a Nigerian man. My Dad and the man began reminiscing about Lagos, where my family lived for two years when I was in middle school, and talking about what has changed there since then. The man invited us to travel there with them. The woman invited me to join the choir. By the time we wrapped the conversation, it had been nearly 45 minutes. We all hugged as if we were old friends.

“I want to show you guys the healing garden,” I said then. “I haven’t been able to figure out where it is.”

The garden project attracted controversy during its planning stages. It was designed by a clergy abuse survivors’ group, hand-in-hand with the Oakland Diocese. It is tucked out of the way, in a place where survivors can come and meditate, cry, heal, but where they can do so out of sight of passersby on the main plaza, and without actually entering a church.

I can only imagine how reticent an abuse survivor might be to enter a church.

We found the garden on the cathedral grounds map and rounded the corner of the building. None of us spoke. None of us could have spoken had we wanted to. I made a sort of broken sound as I read one of the two plaques that read “This healing garden, planned by survivors, is dedicated to those innocents sexually abused by members of the clergy. We remember, and we affirm: never again.”

My father raised me as a Catholic, though my mother is a staunch Protestant who would not compromise her strong and fervent beliefs to join a church with which she could not agree 100 percent. My father, too, was raised as one of six children in a devoutly Catholic family, and my father’s youngest brother is one of the most gentle, most wonderful priests I have ever met. He has chosen to serve his entire career in upstate New York, and I can only hope the small parishes where he has devoted his life have any idea how lucky they are.

Uncle Steve, you see, is one of the very best of the good guys.

He is a priest who understands how love, humility and deep and abiding faith, combined with intelligent, proper discourse, can lead to a higher understanding of the broken and human Church. His diocese has sent him in to help heal parishes during terrible situations because he is both deeply spiritual and a thoughtful attendant to his flock, but also an incredible parish administrator. Like all his siblings, he is brilliant at what he does, and passionate.

It is because of him that, after I got divorced, I pursued and got an annulment. He presided over my wedding, so I wanted to close the books properly, in the eyes of the Church, on the failed relationship.

It is very much because of him that I continued to attend Mass regularly, even after many of my friends had abandoned organized religion. In fact, for the first year I was in Oakland, I not only sang in the Cathedral, but even cantored at the Masses. I credit his influence with keeping me on my knees even as the pastor of that parish preached before the 2008 elections about how we needed to vote with our “Catholic consciences” on issues like marriage equality and abortion rights (I did vote with my Catholic conscience, which, I must say, is identical to my Genie Gratto conscience. I voted for Barack Obama.).

But for a long time, my resolve to stay in the Church has slowly crumbled as my faith has grown. Along the way, I’ve hoped for an American split from Rome, thinking that might create a more liberal Church that is more friendly to the issues I care about. But honestly, based on the news exposed over the past decade and my personal connection to those stories, I don’t think the American Church has any idea, either, how to comport itself in a good, rather than a harmful way.

Still, I’ve managed to reconcile, for years, my pro-choice beliefs, my support for marriage equality, my assertion that there is zero reason that women should not be priests, with my ability to still attend Mass and be fulfilled by its ritual power.

Even less than a month ago, when I got some news mid-day that socked me in the gut so hard I could do nothing but shake and cry at my desk, my first instinct was to leave the office and go and sit in a pew of the Cathedral, tears rolling down my cheeks as two of the musicians practiced hymns for a later Mass. I lit a candle. I sent my prayers for peace in my heart up toward the soaring, light-filled rafters. It was more sanctuary to me than anything else I could think of.

But the news out of Rome only gets worse, not better. And on Wednesday, I read a piece in The Stranger in which Paul Constant demands his own excommunication:

“I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or the concealment of child rape.”

I am not ready to make Constant’s demand. I am a woman who always harbors hope for good, for better, for change. But I noted, this year, that I didn’t bother attending services for Ash Wednesday. That I ignored Easter. That I ate meat on every Friday in Lent. I noted, this year, that I’ve stopped singing at the Cathedral, that I don’t go to Mass anymore, and that even thinking about the current Pope spikes my blood pressure. And I agree with everything Constant says: I do not want to be associated with any organization that espouses those values.

I am not a survivor of clergy abuse. But this issue has touched my family and, therefore, me. The Church is broken, and as long as its current leadership is unwilling to deal with its past and present in an unequivocal way that heals that break rather than rends it further, I must turn away. I cannot condone this. I cannot continue explaining to people how I reconcile my personal position with the fact that, by giving my time, my voice, and my money to any agent of the Church of Rome, I am supporting something so deeply and systemically flawed as to perhaps be unfixable.

I hope. I pray. I want it to be different in my uncle’s lifetime. I want a whole, not broken, sanctuary, one in which healing gardens like the one here in Oakland are unneeded.

I remember, and I affirm: Never again.

• Eat at Bill’s? Not any longer
• Repot at your own risk
• A garden poem
• The nerd approach to garden location
• Normal becomes newsworthy

The plot he has his eye on is on a farm outside of the town where they live, and is not far from where he coaches a high school softball team.

“I’m not sure how I’ll fit the gardening tools in the car with all the softball equipment, but if I can figure that out, I’ll be able to garden and coach in the same trip,” he said.

“Growing vegetables,” I said, “while growing young minds.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

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Oh, I know. First-world problems, really. I MUST CLEAN. I MUST BUY CRAZY AMOUNTS OF LOCALLY-SOURCED FOOD. I MUST TEAR MY HAIR OUT AND RANT AND ROAR AND WHINE. So, enough already. Here’s the sunny side of the street.

For the second year in a row, my parents are celebrating with me at my Oakland apartment. And we’ll be joined by four of my friends with whom I cannot wait to share the day. It’s going to be a mesh of cultures and backgrounds and, you know what, people, that is exactly the way I like it.

I’m so grateful this year to be in California. Maybe more grateful than I was the first Thanksgiving here. It has become more of a home to me than I could have ever imagined, and the experiences I’ve had here are all of a kind that leave me breathless, sometimes speechless, and always wanting more. Finally, without compromise or concession, I’m living a life I’ve been in training for since I was born…I just didn’t know what I was practicing for.

I’m grateful to have my parents joining me for the holiday. My parents are amazing, and you would never guess how old they are because they defy age and gravity with aplomb, and we are a tight group of three, always have been. So I’m blessed to share my home with them, even though we’ll, no doubt, have a couple of sharp moments along the way. I love them fiercely, and I couldn’t be where I am, and celebrating this holiday, without them setting me on this path in the first place. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

And I’m grateful to all of you who are reading this. Whether you’ve been reading the blog since I started (and have stuck with it through this odd period of no garden, and therefore, not many tales of my inability to grow things), or you have come to it via Facebook or Twitter, or you just stumbled on it because you wanted a really good recipe for butternut squash, thank you for reading, thank you for following along, and, to many of you, thank you for the way you’ve become more than just other bloggers or readers out there. You’ve become my friends, and I appreciate all of you so much.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, all of you. And if you’re out of the country and not celebrating American-style, happy Thursday the 26th of November. May it treat you well, wherever you are.

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That night, he gushed about an apartment he’d found after a fellow student in his program had decided she didn’t want to live there anymore. He raved about its hardwood floors, its closet space, the amazing sunroom, the fabulous location.

“There’s only one problem,” he said. “It doesn’t have what I would call a real kitchen.”

I sat up straight on my couch in my apartment in Northern Virginia, looking around at the apartment I’d worked so hard to find and make my own. “What do you mean it doesn’t have a real kitchen?”

“Well, it kind of has a galley kitchen,” he said. “It has a stove, and a little bit of a counter, and a sink, and that’s pretty much it. Oh, and a refrigerator.”

“And you signed a lease?” I said. “For a year?”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s a great apartment.”

If he had looked to the east, he would have seen the mushroom cloud from my head exploding. “Do you have any idea what it means for me not to have a kitchen I can cook in?” I said. “Cooking is my therapy. I won’t be sane if I don’t have a kitchen.”

The story ended happily, at least for a time, though it required some more negotiating before he was able to go back, break the lease, and then seek out a new place, the place we ended up living in together, the apartment that spanned the bottom floor of a house and had a wonderful, giant farmhouse kitchen that fit all our friends and our music, and, after we split up, was where I worked and cooked and cried and strategized next steps and, finally, came back to life.

I am still friends with the man who took that lease off Steve’s hands, and the first time we went to a party at that same apartment, I walked in the kitchen, turned around and said to Steve, “Are you kidding me? Do you know me at all?” The kitchen was even smaller and more awkward than I’d imagined from the description. Between that and the winters, I would have never made it a single year in Iowa had we moved in there.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about those days anymore, but on some nights, nights like last night, when I stumbled home from work overwhelmed and head-spun and exhausted, when the processing in my mind was overtaking the carefully planned to-do list I’d set for myself, I remember what I said back in 2005. Cooking is my therapy.

And so I walked in the door, took stock of what I had and what I needed, ran to the market for local produce and milk, and came home to make my own versions of comfort food: rosemary-artichoke hummus, which ended up as dinner atop a zatar-crusted pita; soup made from homemade stock and laced with Parmaggiano-Reggiano rinds I’d been saving in the freezer for just such a purpose; and my first-ever pot pie.

As I stirred the sauce for the pot pie, the flour, butter, stock, milk and sage transforming into something thick and glossy over the many minutes, I thought about my grandmother and how she taught me to make roux and transform it into cream or cheese sauce. And I thought about my friend Erin, who gave me the flat-headed whisk I use to make such a sauce just before she moved to Sweden to live with the man she had loved for years. She married him after he proposed to her somewhere over the Atlantic halfway between Sweden and the United States.

And I thought about the Swanson pot pies my babysitter would heat up for me on nights when my parents would go out for dates when I was a kid, and the smell of my mother’s perfume as she put on her dress and makeup, and how she and my father would sneak into my room to kiss me goodnight when they got home. They never thought I woke up, but I always did, and I loved the ultimate safety of those shadowy hellos.

Cooking is my therapy, and my memory, and just one of the ways I express myself. And on nights like last night, it is what brings me back to what’s most important.

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But we were in the original, surrounded by pottery and paella pans and food that made me feel like we had walked back in time to the two and a half years when my parents and I lived just outside Madrid.

If you’re going to time travel, flipping back to the land of tapas and bullfights and staying up late and taking a siesta every day is not a bad way to do it.

We browsed, and as I was paying for my purchase, I looked over at the store’s front window. Although we’d been hiking around downtown Seattle in rainy, gray weather, there was enough light that some leggy seedlings tilted toward the glass from a flat of dirt plugs.

“What are you growing?” I asked the man ringing me up.

“Padrón peppers,” he said, naming the small green peppers that are sometimes hot, sometimes not. I like to think of eating them as playing a game of mouth roulette. “We always bring some in, but we like to grow some of them ourselves.”

I haven’t checked with the local outposts of this small chain to see if they grow their own padrón peppers there, but I will have to do so as pepper season approaches. Fried up in olive oil and salt, they’re fantastic with beer, which is helpful for cooling down the capsaicin when you lose the roulette game.

Or, as some might say, when you win.

Just a few more thoughts on the magic (Note: That’s seasonal magic…so you might have to wait a couple months…) that is the padrón pepper:

• Fresh Garbanzo Beans & Pimientos de Padrón at Becks & Posh
• Ham and Eggs with Padrón Peppers from The Independent
• Background information on Padrón Peppers from Local Harvest

• Fog advisory
• Oakland’s December decoration
• Go, garden, go!
• Help at the hardware store
• Like a prayer

My parents arrived Tuesday night to celebrate the holidays here, and we’ve been making our way around to various eating and drinking establishments that are favorites of mine: Shan Dong for dumplings, The Trappist for Belgian-style brews, Café Madrid for tortilla Español and a bocadillo, Hog Island Oysters for, well, you know, and Zinnia for some of Jackie Patterson’s killer cocktails and a pre-opera meal. I’m grateful they’re here so I can let them peek into the life I’m making for myself here.

Yesterday brought our third day of rain since I arrived in California, and while I grumbled about it at the time because it complicated our sightseeing plan, I’m grateful for it—all those farmers whose produce I like to eat love said rain and need said rain.

I’m off to hit the kitchen, but I invite you to join me today in thanksgiving for the people we love, the people we miss, and the people who have facilitated the celebration those of us in the U.S. are undertaking today.

Thanks to the hands that raised the turkeys (And, you know what? Thanks to the turkeys, too!). Thanks to the hands that grew the potatoes and the vegetables and the greens for salads. Thanks to those who baked the bread that will end up in the stuffing, made the wine, and grew the pumpkins.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

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I sent an email to my parents, who will be introducing themselves to my new California life, warning them of the impending non-traditional meal. “Since I’m doing the Peking duck, I’m likely to do some other twists on old favorites,” I said. “If there’s something you definitely want in its traditional format, let me know and I’ll be sure to include it in the grand scheme.”

The answer back from the Eastern Time Zone? The only request is no sweet potatoes with candied marshmallows on top. Well, OK, ‘cause I wasn’t planning on that particular dish, anyway.

But this past weekend, an experiment with the ice cream maker led me down a different path than I had planned. Armed with some Straus Family Creamery Maple Yogurt and some Straus Family Creamery milk, I decided to try a batch of maple frozen yogurt. And then, at the last minute, I decided I would throw in a touch of Macallan 12-year single malt Scotch, just for the heck of it. After all, everything’s better with a little single malt, right?

The combination, as it turned out, is amazing. Tart and tangy, with just enough sweetness to qualify as dessert, and a little kick at the end to remind you that this frozen yogurt is not for the kids’ table.

As a result, pie is back on the Thanksgiving menu: either pumpkin or pecan, either of which will go nicely with my new discovery.

Single-Malt Maple Frozen Yogurt

2 c. nonfat maple yogurt
1 c. whole milk
1/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp. single malt Scotch

1. Combine the yogurt, milk and sugar in a food processor until the sugar is dissolved (approximately 1 minute). You can also do this using a stand or hand mixer in a bowl, or, probably, in a blender.
2. Add mixture to freezer bowl of ice cream maker and freeze per manufacturer’s instructions (I froze it for approximately 25 minutes using my Cuisinart ice cream maker).
3. Add the Scotch to the mixture while the ice cream maker is running and freeze for an additional five minutes.
4. You can either serve this immediately or transfer it to a container and freeze it for an additional two hours before serving.

• Apple-plum crisp for one
• Brandied apple tart
• A new read on cereal
• Maple-Lime Glazed Sweet Corn
• Rustic sweet potato gnocchi

Hi, I’m Chase – welcome to my garden. This is the first vegetable garden I’ve had at home. At school I was a part of planting a community garden, but it is a flower garden.

My Mom and I built the raised bed together and then planted 4 varieties of tomatoes, summer squash, three kinds of peppers, zucchini, Japanese eggplant, basil and oregano.

I have really enjoyed watching the plants grow and bear fruit. At first it started out small, but it’s now out of control. It’s so out of control that we had to cut back all our plants, stake some of them, and we are constantly harvesting all of our vegetables.

I love the whole process. Next year I think we’ll plant less, or maybe we’ll add another bed.

• Photography shouldn’t distract from weeding
• Jet stars in our garden
• Where it’s at: June 10
• So a zucchini walks in to see a talent agent…
• Where it’s at: June 17

Chase gave me a tour of the garden before I headed out toward Salt Lake City, where I had a dinner planned with Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen, and I started shooting pictures almost as soon as I got out there. Chase put up with my paparazzi-esque behavior while he weeded the garden, but only did so for so long.

“Genie,” he said, looking up at me with a pointed look. “You really could stop taking those pictures and start helping me with the weeding.”

Well, I did help. A bit. And just recently, I asked my cousin if Chase might be interested in giving my readers an update on how the garden is doing, now that the summer season is in high gear and veggies are popping out all over. As it turned out, he was interested, so stay tuned – on Wednesday, I’ll be turning the floor over to Chase, who is more than just an excellent gardener – he’s a fantastic kid!

• Guest post: A garden out of control
• Open for business
• Witness to the population explosion
• Spacing out
• Nothing to it

Among the most interesting of these stops was a backstage tour of the Metropolitan Opera, where we stood on the stage, tromped around amidst giant set pieces, and peeked into the dressing rooms.

Let you think it was all papier mache and union guys shouting at each other in thick Brooklyn accents (and there was plenty of both of those), let me assure you that opera singers and their behind-the-scenes team think about more than just the next entrance cue. As our tour guide whisked us through the maze of passageways behind and under the stage, I caught a glimpse of an article tacked to one of the company bulletin boards: “Let Farmers Fill Your Fridge.”

Because the Met has strict rules about making sure you are stepping on the heels of your tour guide at all times, I wasn’t able to take the time to skim the article or figure out in what magazine it appeared. However, it made me grin to know that even opera folks in the middle of Manhattan are concerned about the origin of the food that graces their table.

• Tips on eating more cheaply in 2009
• They could have saved the aloe
• Farewell to the peeler man
• Garden, then save the planet
• Harvest preserved: The I.G. learns about root cellars