My job in the local office of a business requires that I communicate with corporate headquarters on a regular basis. Believe it or not, I usually manage to play nicely with the other bureaucrats. But there are times…

Below is a slightly edited reconstruction of an email I got from one of my least favorite playmates in my bureaucratic sandbox.

TO: the chaplain
CC: the neighborhood horse’s ass’s boss; the boss of the neighborhood horse’s ass’s boss;
the corporate office department head; the chaplain’s boss; the chaplain’s boss’s boss
FROM: the neighborhood horse’s ass

RE: criminal background check for John Doe

Criminal background checks are not required for cooks. Unless you want to run a check on John Doe anyway.

The photos on the documents you faxed are illegible. Please scan and email them.

Thank you,
the neighborhood horse’s ass

Attachment: scanned copies of illegible faxed documents

It probably did not escape your notice that the neighborhood horse’s ass decided he had to copy nearly every bureaucrat in two states on this matter. My guess is that he was trying to impress them with how seriously he takes his job, how fearlessly he puts morons in their places and reminds them of procedural norms, and how moronic are the people he struggles with on a daily basis. Oh, yes. The horse’s ass is a smart cookie, alright. He dots his i’s and crosses his t’s without fail, and he always minds his p’s and q’s.

There’s just one small problem with his little missive.

He sent it to the wrong moron.

Upon checking the attached documents and ascertaining that

a) I had not hired John Doe to cook or perform any other tasks in my workplace,
b) I had never, to my knowledge, met John Doe, and
c) John Doe had been hired by the Virginia Beach office,

I responded to the horse’s ass. Naturally, since he had sent copies of his reprimand to a multitude, I hit the “reply to all” button and composed my response:

TO: the neighborhood horse’s ass
CC: the neighborhood horse’s ass’s boss; the boss of the neighborhood horse’s ass’s boss;
the corporate office department head; the chaplain’s boss; the chaplain’s boss’s boss
FROM: the chaplain

RE: criminal background check for John Doe

John Doe is not employed here. Try Virginia Beach.

Here’s his response:

TO: the chaplain
CC:
FROM: the neighborhood horse’s ass

RE: criminal background check for John Doe

Oops. My mistake. I sent that email to the wrong person.

Duh, ya think?

I’m sure you noticed that his response was not copied to anyone. When he was the big man showing up the little peon in a local office, he made sure to let everyone above him (and me) know it. When he got his ass handed to him on a golden platter, he did the right thing by apologizing. He also did the wrong thing by not stating his apology as publicly as he stated his reprimand. I shouldn’t have been surprised. What else should one expect from the neighborhood horse’s ass?

– the chaplain

A long time ago, I started what was supposed to be a recipe series. The reason I haven’t shared anything since my first entry is that I don’t usually measure ingredients when I cook – I just add stuff, taste it, add some more and so on. The reason I have this recipe to share is that I wanted to get a nutritional breakdown, calorie count, etc. In order to do that, I had to pay more attention to what I was adding and how much of it was going into the pot. Today’s recipe is Amatriciana Sauce W/ Chopped Veggies.

This is a variation on Italian amatriciana sauce – I substituted bacon for the pancetta and added some fresh veggies. Authentic amatriciana is pretty hot and is simpler than this as it leaves out the veggies and some of the non-pepper seasonings. Be forewarned – the recipe below is a bit hot. The seasonings can be varied according to taste, and 1/3 cup of wine can be substituted for some of the water (if you use cooking wine, omit the salt). Also, fresh Roma tomatoes could be chopped and substituted for the canned tomato sauce to cut down the sodium.

We’ll start with the ingredients:

Hunt’s Tomato Sauce – 1 15-oz. can
Hunt’s Tomato Paste – 1 8-oz. can
Onion – 1/2 cup, chopped
Celery – 1/2 cup, chopped
Garlic – 4 cloves, chopped
Carrots – 1/2 cup chopped
Water – 1 cup, or 2/3 cup water + 1/3 cup wine
Sugar – 2 tsp.
Bacon – 4 slices, chopped
Pepper – 1/2 tsp.
Salt – 1 tsp.
Red Pepper – 2 tsp. (may substitute Tony Chachere’s seasoning)
Oregano – 1 tsp.
Rosemary – 1 tbsp.
Thyme – 1 tsp.

Next, the procedure:

Add tomato sauce, paste, liquid and seasonings to crock pot and begin cooking on high.

Once the base sauce has started cooking, chop vegetables and bacon, and brown in saucepan until tender. Start with the bacon, then add veggies when fat has started melting. You may add one tablespoon of olive oil, if needed, to keep veggies from burning. When veggies and bacon are nicely browned add them to the sauce in the crock pot. Sauce may be cooked in crock pot 2-4 hours without burning.

Prepare pasta – rigatoni and rotini go nicely with this sauce. One minute before pasta has finished cooking, remove 1-2 tablespoons of pasta water and reserve. Drain pasta, then add pasta and reserved cooking water to sauce. Cook pasta for one more minute in the sauce, then serve.

Finally, nutritional data for those who are interested in such things:

Note: the nutritional calculation does not include the pasta.

Servings Per Recipe: 4 (calculated at 1 cup per serving – this is quite a lot, so you may want to decrease the amount according to your taste)

Amount Per Serving

Calories: 166.9
Total Fat: 4.2 g
Cholesterol: 5.4 mg
Sodium: 1,869.2 mg
Total Carbs: 30.0 g
Dietary Fiber: 6.9 g
Protein: 7.3 g

If you like Italian food, you may enjoy playing with this recipe and adapting it to your tastes and needs.

Happy cooking!

– the chaplain

Like many children, I thought church was extraordinarily boring. Unlike many children, I was compelled to be at church several times a week. That being the case, I couldn’t help absorbing the dogma that was reiterated in both church and home, ad nauseum. I was not raised in a complete bubble, but it was about as close as it could get short of being home-schooled. As an adult – even as a Salvation Army officer – I resolved never to let my life, or the lives of my children, become completely absorbed in evangelical Christian and – especially – Salvation Army bubbles. In hindsight, I think that resolution probably sealed my fate.

I was about 12 when I first learned that there were people who didn’t believe in god. Until then, I’d had no idea that no-god-belief was even an option. As far as I knew, everyone believed in god, and everyone I knew personally believed in god, or said they did. The medium through which I learned about atheism and agnosticism was a TV show called All in the Family and the first “out” nonbeliever I encountered, via the boob tube, was Mike Stivic, Archie Bunker’s agnostic son-in-law. All I figured out at that time was that agnostics professed not to know whether god existed, and atheists did not believe in god. I didn’t know of any way to find out more about nonbelief, so I just tucked those little bits of information into some corner of my mind. I didn’t love god. I didn’t want to “do god’s will.” And I certainly didn’t want to go to church as often as I did, but I wasn’t in a position to change that circumstance anytime soon. So, I got on with my life as best I could.

I was about 14 when we studied Greek mythology in 9th grade English class. I was greatly amused by those randy gods who couldn’t resist having sex with all those beautiful mortal women. One day, I had a weird thought: What’s the difference between those gods and dolls, and god and Mary? Wow! Stunning idea! An idea I quickly dismissed by rationalizing that god didn’t actually have sex with Mary, so it wasn’t the same thing at all.

So I went on living my life.

But…that Virgin Birth thing never really sat well with me; I had a feeling there was more to that story than I was being told. I believed in god, Jesus, the whole evangelical schtick as far as I knew it, but I still didn’t love god or Jesus, and I still didn’t want to “do god’s will.” I just labeled myself a rebel and got on with my life.

I was in my mid-teens when I “got my heart right with god,” and, after graduating from high school, I attended a Christian college. Needless to say, the indoctrination process there was thorough, and I graduated completely convinced that Christianity was the True Religion, and evangelicalism was the right way to do it.

Fast forward to my mid-thirties. I’m the oldest person in my graduate school History of Education class. I’m also the only former minister. One day, as we’re examining Martin Luther’s writings on education, a student asks: What’s he talking about when he keeps saying that the devil is tempting him? I wait for the prof to field the question, then jump in when he shrugs his shoulders. I explain that all indications were that Luther believed that Satan was a real being – a spirit being, but a real entity nonetheless – who worked evil in the world and in people’s lives. She looks astonished that any adult would believe such a thing. The prof looks abashed, but doesn’t say anything. I just shrug my shoulders and think, “Yeah, it does sound pretty silly, doesn’t it.” That was the day I stopped believing in Satan.

There were other signposts along my de-conversion trail – points at which I stopped, caught my breath, and wondered whether the path I was following led anywhere at all. I’ve written about some of them before but there’s more to tell. In good cliffhanger fashion, I’ll save those stories for another day.

– the chaplain