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Adventures in Eating: Fasika (Ethiopian)

Last night I took my Adventures in Eating small group to an Ethiopian restaurant in St. Paul called Faskia. We had a great time, as we always do, and the food was excellent! Now understand that you'll generally hear me say that about the places I take this group.  That's because I do my best make sure that's the case first, and that's why I take the group there!  Basically, I eat there first. This I call research!!!

Ethiopian food, though exotic, is rather uncomplicated.  There is very little fat involved in cooking, meats are thoroughly trimmed and cleaned, and the ingredients are all fresh and natural, making Ethiopian food some of the most healthful in the world.   Dried spice combinations unique to Ethiopian cooking lend a rich, piquant taste to many dishes.

Most dishes begin with a bread, but not in loaf form.  It's a light, slightly spongy, pancake-like bread called injera.  Injera is the staple of the Ethiopian diet and is placed first on the plate to hold whatever comes after.  The dish may be chicken or lamb or beef or lentils, split peas, or other vegetables, simmered into a savory stew served over fresh injera.  More fresh injera is customarily served on the side. The injera is torn off in small pieces and used to grab bite sized portions of the food, no utensils needed.

In the reminder email I sent out to my group, I gave them the clue that there would be no silverware.  One couple in the group replied, "Yeah! Down with the silverware!"
I love it.

Fasika comes highly recommended and well reviewed for its authentic Ethiopian cuisine.  It was a hit with my group for a good reason...it was really good!  If you want to try it, I'd suggest going with a couple friends and sharing their ultimate combination platter.  There also make a really good cappuccino!

RECOMMENDED!
Fasika
510 Snelling Avenue North, Saint Paul, MN  55104
651-646-4747

My Great Intern

My intern, Aaron Freeman, is a big fan of my blog. In times when I'm not blogging frequently enough, he encourages me to blog. In fact, he has many times offered the suggestion that I could blog about how great my intern is. I've usually just laughed and told him I'd be glad to do that...as soon as I get a great intern!

Seriously, though, Aaron is doing a great job and is a huge help to me.  He has a great heart for ministry, and he's a learner.  He's our first married intern.  He and his wife, Nikki, have an adopted daughter and a son that they're in the process of adopting who is the birth brother of their daughter.  What they're doing is really beautiful.

If you ask Aaron how his internship is going, he'll tell you what a great opportunity it is and how much he is learning and growing from my great wisdom and from the rich experiences offered by our River Valley Church family.  At least that's what I've told him to say.  :-)  Seriously, again, he's working hard to learn and grow as he completes his schooling and prepares to dive into a life of ministry.  Aaron, you're gonna be a great pastor!  I'm proud of you and thankful for all you do for RVC and for me.  And I especially like that you always laugh at my jokes.  Truly you are a wise man.

EMBFP Purity Platoons

The Every Man's Battle for Purity (EMBFP) Boot Camp last week was great.  It was really cool getting together with a hundred guys at 6:00 a.m. in the morning.  Great stuff.  This also became known as Every Man's Battle for Sleep!

Stage 1 of EMBFP was the Battle event on Saturday, January 13.  Stage 2 was the Boot Camp last Monday through Friday mornings.  Now we go into stage 3, the Purity Platoons.  We have pretty much all hundred guys assigned to one of 8 Purity Platoons that meet at various times during the week.  Each platoon will meet together weekly for 16 weeks.

Adventures in Eating: Kimson Vietnamese Cuisine

Last Saturday night, for our first meeting of 2007, I took my Adventures in Eating small group to Kimson Vietnamese Cuisine in Bloomington.  It was a great time of good food and fun together.  Basically, we meet at church; I give everyone a brochure that has info about where we're eating and also includes discussion questions for group time in the cars on the way.  Once at the restaurant, we get the food ordered (sometimes family style, sometime individual), I share a devotional, and then we hang out, eat, and have fun.  I've gotten to get acquainted with some cool people in our church that I didn't know yet.  It's great.

I love the Vietnamese soup called phö.  It’s wonderful, and I had the chance to have it in Vietnam while on a missions trip in 2005.  I was originally introduced to phö by some Hmong friends of mine a few years ago, who took me to what it still the best place I know of for phö in the Twin Cities — that place is Saigon Restaurant on University Avenue in Saint Paul.  (Unfortunately, they close at 8:00 p.m. on Saturdays, or else we'd have gone there.)  Kimson, however, is my second favorite place for phö, and they have lots of other great dishes.  Kimson is an excellent Vietnamese restaurant that I very much recommend.  Try the Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk -- it's awesome!  The spicy chicken wings are great.  There's a stir-fried beef dish with fried potatoes that are like thick-cut potato chips -- it's really good.  There are many other really good things to eat at Kimson

RECOMMENDED!
Kimson Vietnamese Cuisine
8654 Lyndale Avenue South, Bloomington, MN 55420
952-885-0230

EMBFP Boot Camp and First Snow

This morning (between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m.), I was talking with one of the guys who was helping to get things ready for the Every Man's Battle for Purity (EMBFP) Boot Camp. We had gotten around 6 inches of snow overnight; lots of roads weren't even plowed yet; and this guy was here by 5:30 a.m. brewing coffee and getting things ready.  He said something that really stood out to me and that I really appreciated.  He said he thought it was really cool that it snowed for the first morning of the boot camp because we're here for purity and the bright white, fresh-fallen snow is such a great symbol of purity.  What a great attitude and great heart!  Many of us might have thought, "Well it figures it'd snow!" but he saw the beauty in it.  Way to go!  There is definitely some powerful beauty in a hundred guys getting together at 6:00 a.m. to focus on honoring their God, wives, and family with a sexually pure life.

Adventures in Eating Small Group

My Adventures in Eating small group is so much fun! There's nothing like getting together with a group of people with a common interest and enjoying it together while getting to know each other.

I'm a food guy, and in that vein the only thing better than eating great food is enjoying it with friends. And I absolutely love to introduce people to good cuisine, and to share that experience with them. It's great fun for me. If I cook something at home and my first thought is "Wow! This turned out good!" then my second thought is "Who can share this with?" My Adventures in Eating small group allows me use my passion for food for something much greater.

If you'd like to take a passion of yours and use it for ministry, helping you do that is a huge passion of mine, so let me know! "Be in a small group. Better yet, lead one!"

Every Man's Battle for Purity Event

We had about 150 men at the Every Man's Battle for Purity (EMBFP) event today, which was awesome. This was a great event for men, and the first stage in EMBFP's program to help guys live purely. Even though it's at 6:00 a.m., I'm really looking forward to stage 2, the "boot camp" Monday through Friday of this next week.

One of the great things about something like this is men standing together to help each other live Godly. There's power in that kind of support. And based on the registration forms, it look like we'll have 100 guys for the boot camp! So it's an early morning, but it's good to know we won't be alone!

"Backblog"

I'd like to invent a new term.  Yes, you heard it here first!  A new development in technical jargon!  I didn't want to just resume blogging today after not posting since November 20, 2006.  I wanted to give something more to those of you who've been lovingly hassling me...which I actually appreciate and enjoy.  (Just don't tell anyone, because if I wanted people to know, I wouldn't post it here.  :-|  Huh?)  So here's the payoff!  I shall backblog!!!

Just so you don't think I'm being arbitrary and just trying to cover my blogging lapse with a cloud of colorful smoke, let me offer some linguistic background (i.e., the cloud of colorful smoke).  The term blog was derived from web log, which became weblog, which became simply blog.  (Eventually all technical words will be totally combined and integrated until we have no need for spaces...except to arrange the text into pretty pictures.)  A backlog is "an accumulation, especially of unfinished work."  And SO...  Well, you get the picture.  So when you've developed a backblog, you have some backblogging to do.  And you go about this by creating the entries, and then setting the time stamp to the date when the blog was intended.  (Magically, it no longer appears that there was a lapse in the blog...though those who check regularly know better.)

I am certainly not the first to have developed a backblog.  Nor am I the first to engage in backblogging.  Nor, let me just be clear, is it illegal.  I did search dictionary.com and did not find an entry for these terms, so I may truly have invented them first.  So please begin using them whenever you can fit them into your everyday conversations.  You're in on the ground floor!

So, moving on with the tangible application of this innovative linguistic development (What a great time to be alive!)... You'll find that November 20 is no longer my last entry of 2006.  Magically, through the power of backblogging, there are now other entries!  How did you all miss them before???  I don't know!

Hangin' with Friends

After Christmas, I spent some time with my friends Al & Steph Kinnunen in Wisconsin.  I hadn't spent much time with them for a few months, and I was really missing them, so it was great to stay with them for a few days.

Al & Steph were a part of RVC before leaving to plant a church in Wisconsin, and Al was one of our original elders.  I've actually known Steph a little longer than Al, and even got to play a role in their early romance leading up to being a groomsman in their wedding.  Hanging with them and their 2-year-old daughter Alex is always a good time!  I'm so proud of them and their ministry, and I treasure their friendship.  The only downside is that Al mocks my efforts to eat healthy and makes me eat junk food!

You can check out Pastors Al & Steph Kinnunen and Evergreen Church (Stevens Point, Wisconsin) at ecsp.org.