• 2 cups cooked quinoa
• about 4 cups chopped greens (Mustard, beet, kale, turnip or anything else you like. Works just as well with combinations.)
• 1 can black beans
• 1 medium yukon gold tomato sliced thinly
• 1 cup mushrooms (shitake, button, whatever)
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• a tablespoon or so of olive oil
• 2/3 cup vegetable broth
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/2 pound smoked gouda
• 1/2 pound extra sharp cheddar

Grease a 2 quart casserole & preheat oven to 350° F.

Saute onion in olive oil until they start to become translucent.  Add mushrooms and saute for another 3 or 4 minutes, then add greens and saute until they’re wilted.

Layer quinoa, greens mixture, potato, beans, greens mixture, quinoa
with cheese between each layer and on the top.

I use about 3/4 of the cheese the recipe calls for.

Heat the vegetable broth and mix in the cornstarch, then pour it over the casserole.

Bake for about 30 min. It’s done when the potatoes aren’t crunchy and the cheese is all melted.

I had this crazy thought that things would slow down a little after the conference.  I definitely wasn’t considering what missing a week of classes was going to do to my workload.  Oh well.

The conference was a good experience for me.  It was a smaller conference that brought together policy makers, social scientists, and ecologists to talk about water issues.  Based on the arguments conversations we had,  I can see why things take so long to change.  Most of the students, including myself, were very frustrated with the pace of the discussion.  We spent so long very carefully defining the problem (which we all knew and agreed on before we got there) instead of having real conversations about solutions.  For example, we talked a lot about how important it is to engage all stakeholders, or at least as many as you can.  I knew this before I got to the conference and so did everyone else.  I wanted to talk about why we fail at it so often, how to do it, and what to do when you can’t engage them.

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.  The same is true of atheism.  The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history.  The people who have been dubbed “atheists” over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine.  Is the “God” who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century-deists?  All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians, and Muslims at various points of their history.  … [These deities] are very different from one another.  Atheism has often been a transitional state: this Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence.  Is modern atheism a similar denial of a “God” which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?