Humor

John Rivera Sedlar is one of the best cooks I know. And that’s partly because you can never guess where his head is going next. The one thing you can be sure of is that the result will be something beautiful. And there’s a good chance it will make you think.

The latest example? Starting Friday night his Rivera restaurant will be featuring a special menu featuring what he’s calling the Pope on a Plate. It’s a custom plate decorated with photographs of recently elected Pope Francis, the Spanish-speaking first pope from the New World.

It’s just one part of a special menu Sedlar is offering celebrating the Argentine roots of the man who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Sedlar says the menu is also a tribute to Archbishop Jose Gomez, who in 2011 became the first Latino in 115 years to head the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

“There’s so much religion in the Latin kitchen, we’re very religious people, and so I wanted to honor that,” says Sedlar.

… The Pope Francis menu features dishes Sedlar says are based on traditional Argentine cuisine. There’s an appetizer of crab chorizo with Patagonian rose wine sauce, entrees of empanadas of pulled beef with habanero chimichurri or chicken milanesa with citrus-arugula chimichurri, and the featured Pope on a Plate dessert, a Plaza de la República gelato sundae with ice creams in the colors of the Argentine flag.

The dishes are available ala carte, or as a $45 three-course tasting menu. Rivera sommelier Mark Mendoza has put together wine pairings featuring Argentine wines for an extra $30.

“Actually we’ve just modernized the dishes,” Sedlar says. “We used the best Jidori chicken we could get for the milanesa and we’re using extraordinary citrus, everything from pink and yellow grapefruit to fingerlimes from Australia. We’re using Cielo Verde rooftop greens [from his garden atop Petty Cash restaurant] instead of regular lettuce.

“I think we’re refining these dishes rather than reinventing. That’s very unusual for me; usually I have to put a twist in there. But this is a very reverent menu.”

Russ Parsons at the L.A. Times

Ah a reverent menu. Maybe the Pope has a devotion to the dessert fathers which he reads on Sundae. Not sure the Pope would be thrilled about this offering at an upscale restaurant for foodies in downtown L.A.

This is not the first time Sedlar has incorporated Roman Catholic iconography in his food. In 1993, when he was at Bikini restaurant in Santa Monica, he designed a special Our Lady of Guadalupe plate to go with Day of the Dead tamales.

This created a bit of controversy, at least at first. “We do not believe that the fact that you placed a tamale on [Our Lady of Guadalupe’s] chest is going to bring you any blessings,” was one of the milder comments.

“It was slightly controversial,” Sedlar admits. “We had a lot of Catholic parishioners call us and ask us why we had decided to do that. But once we explained we had done it entirely out of respect, we’d done it to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the patron saint of the Catholic Church in Mexico, they understood.”

Well the last is not exactly correct since many who had complained about this were not mollified by this explanation.

For example Rev. Gregory Coiro the archdiocese’s public affairs office wrote to Sedlar expressing his concerns regarding the Our Lady of Guadalupe plate. Coiro makes the comparison of using the plates to walking into a restaurant and finding that your napkin is an American flag. “True, it’s a piece of cloth,” he says, “but its a piece of cloth that carries a powerful symbolic value. I was trying to bring it to the attention of the restaurant that this was a misuse of a religious symbol.”

Still I kind of like the Pope dessert plate.

I’ve been a fan of the B-Movie Catechism for years enjoying his quirky sense of humor and rubber monster suit catechesis. I have also been in awe of his fairly-recent cartoon series “Pulp Catholicism” which continues to crack me up.  Case in point.

God’s angry man, His crotchety scholar
Was Saint Jerome,
The great name-caller
Who cared not a dime
For the laws of Libel
And in his spare time
Translated the Bible.
Quick to disparage
All joys but learning
Jerome thought marriage
Better than burning;
But didn’t like woman’s
Painted cheeks;
Didn’t like Romans,
Didn’t like Greeks,
Hated Pagans
For their Pagan ways,
Yet doted on Cicero all of his days.

A born reformer, cross and gifted,
He scolded mankind
Sterner than Swift did;
Worked to save
The world from the heathen;
Fled to a cave
For peace to breathe in,
Promptly wherewith
For miles around
He filled the air with
Fury and sound.
In a mighty prose
For Almighty ends,
He thrust at his foes,
Quarreled with his friends,
And served his Master,
Though with complaint.
He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint.

But he swelled men’s minds
With a Christian leaven.
It takes all kinds
To make a heaven.

From “Times Three” by Phyllis McGinley

You know you really do want to get into better shape, but really how can you stay motivated? Each Lent you promise to pray more and even if your goal is not “prayer warrior”, you would at least like to get to “prayer tenderfoot.” Yet each year your prayer life gets more flabby and you dispair of ever getting spiritually fit. The yo-yo spiritual life of temporary loss of prayer sloth only to gain it all back later.

You want to be a saint, if only you could stay motivated.

That’s why we created the Prayerbit family of products. By tracking your spiritual life we help you to stay motivated by being able to see your progress and to avoid back sliding.

This Prayerbit wireless tracker, shown in its recharger, helps you to keep track of your daily prayer life. Simply slip it on your clothing and you are all set to pump up your prayer life.

Each day the Prayerbit assigns a cumulative total of the day’s prayer activity using the standard ACTS model to help analyse possible imbalances.

A – Adoration.. (Worshipping God)
C – Contrition.. (Sorrow for sins)
T – Thanksgiving.. (Thanksgiving to God)
S – Supplication.. (Asking For Our Needs And The Needs Of Others)

• When praying the Rosary the Prayerbit captures the sound of you fingers slipping from bead to bead. You can also buy our wireless Prayerbit Rosary to make sure you capture every decade! The Prayerbit can also catch each instance of the Jesus prayer.
• The Prayerbit catches any ejaculatory prayers made throughout the day. The Prayerbit is smart enough to discern a short prayer of this type and profane uses of holy names. In fact the Prayerbit will also record such occurrences and subtract from your Prayerbit total.
• Connect the Prayerbit to your Kindle or other ebook device and it can discern the amount of or lack of spiritual reading.
• Using social networking your Prayerbit can automatically Tweet your daily prayer totals or update your status on Facebook. Logging your totals can help to keep you motivated and to encourage others to get spiritually fit also. As you advance in prayer no doubt you will want to enable “humility mode” to only post results when you start to slip.

The Prayerbit is also Holy Water proof, so don’t worry about using this sacramental liberally.

While the Prayerbit is amazing technology, it can not detect everything.

That is why we created the Prayerbit family of mobile apps.

• Location awareness allows the Prayerbit mobile app to know whether you are at Mass, adoration chapel, praying outside an abortion clinic, etc.
• Quickly enter information such as level of sacrificial giving, fasting, and acts of charity towards others.
• Log use of a novena or pray one of our built in novenas for automatic tracking.
• Users using app versions of the Liturgy of the Hours can opt for automatic tracking or enter in manually use of the four volume set or the Little Office of Our Lady.
• Bloggers can provide an RSS feed of their blog for monitoring. Warning: Your Prayerbit daily total could take a hit for rash judgments and other uncharitable acts.
• Spouse audit mode allows your spouse to score actually progress and allows a more objective measure of actually progress in the spiritual life. Those with spiritual directors can share their Prayerbit results and find where they need tweaking in getting spiritually fit.
• View statistics and reports regarding your progress.

While the Prayerbit can’t guarantee progress in the spiritual life, when used prudentially and in keeping with the sacramental life of the Church it can do wonders.

“There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.” Leon Bloy