Spring Cleaning and Spring Roll Salad

This past Sunday to-do list included:

• paint living room/bathroom scratches
• bleach porch mold
• pack holiday items
• pick up art for bathroom
• realtor visit @ 2:30
• make soup (dinner Tues)
• make salad (dinner Sun)
• S. sauce (dinner Mon)

That was in addition to the usual do two loads of laundry, make breakfast and lunch for the kids, don't ignore the kids, check and respond to the deluge of email coming in from spring break returnees and faculty, and our optional-but-semi-dutiful attendance at church.  At several points during the day (one of which was when I discovered the ant egg nest in our rotten porch post), I thought, "what are we doing?  this is madness."

Though we keep the house pretty neat, I've never been overwhelmed by the prospect of spring cleaning before.  Our porch floor has to be painted, the posts replaced, rotten wood removed, I already mentioned that our tub and tile and bathroom window are rotten and need to be replaced, and paint could be applied in lots of places.  I could probably wash the curtains, but I won't, because some of them are "window treatments" and I haven't the foggiest idea where to start with those, and others are so faded that the only possible outcome is not a good scenario.

And there is so much to pack.

On Saturday, our town celebrated the 300th anniversary of our county with a parade and fireworks and birthday cake for 2000 people (donated by our local ShopRite, where it's like "Cheers," and everyone knows my name).  My son rode on the float commemorating the oldest house in town, a museum of which he's the youngest "member" (his own donation).  While eating cake, we met some friends who invited us for an impromptu dinner at one of the local restaurants, which was packed with people waiting for the fireworks to start.  And later, as I watched the peonies and chrysanthemums and willows explode from our bedroom window (because we can see our town fireworks from our house, just as we can walk to the parades downtown), I couldn't help but feel a pang of regret.  I love this community.  It's the first place I've ever felt like I belonged, like I was part of a neighborhood.  I know practically half of the people in town.  Maybe more.  Board of Ed members see me in the store or on the street and tell me they miss me .  People call me and ask me to serve on boards and borough committees.  We may not be in town much on the weekdays, but every other weekend in the summer there's a classic car show, and concerts, and an easy walk to our little library.  This is home.

Though I know that comparatively speaking, we take up more space than most other human beings, I also feel like it would be nice to live in a house that didn't require adults to duck in my son's bedroom.  There are things I will be able to do with my kids now that they'll be a shorter commute away from work.  The new house is beautiful, and everyone tells me (I hope I can believe them) that we shouldn't have a problem selling our current one, given its location and the fact that we've taken good care of it.  Still, uprooting hurts when you've sent your taproot deep.

Maybe that's why I've thrown myself into the preparation for moving with such zeal, to avoid thinking too much about the things we're leaving behind, to ignore that lump in my throat, as we step off again into the unknown.

What do your spring cleaning rituals look like?

Spring Roll Salad

2 t. fresh ginger, grated

2 cloves garlic, minced or grated

2 T. hoisin sauce

2 T. rice vinegar

1 T. honey

1 t. sesame oil

1 t. fish sauce

20-30 wonton wrappers, cut into triangles or circles

1/2 lb. boneless chicken or shrimp or tofu, cut into bite sized chunks

2 T. soy sauce

1 t. brown sugar

1 t. sesame oil

1 T. fresh lime juice

1 clove garlic, minced

1/3 cup creamy peanut butter 

1 package cooked vermicelli noodles, chopped

1 1/2 large avocados, thinly sliced

1 large carrot, julienned

1 red bell pepper, julienned

1 large head butter lettuce, chopped

4 green onions, sliced

1/4 c. each fresh basil, mint and cilantro - roughly chopped

4 stalks lemongrass, thinly sliced

2 T. toasted sesame seeds

1/4 c. roasted cashews 

Preheat the oven to 375, and prepare a baking sheet with parchment.

In a medium size bowl, whisk together the ginger, garlic, hoisin sauce, rice vinegar, honey, sesame oil and fish sauce. Place the wontons in a single layer on the baking sheet; brush with dressing, sprinkle with sesame seeds, and bake for 8-10 minutes until crisp and golden. Repeat with another batch if needed.

Whisk the peanut butter into the remaining dressing. Thin to your desired consistency with water 1 T. at a time (but not so thin, because it needs to stick to the noodles). Set aside until ready to serve.

In a medium size bowl whisk together the soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, lime juice, and garlic. Add the chicken/shrimp/tofu, and toss well. Heat a skillet over medium high heat and add the chicken/shrimp/tofu and all the liquids. Brown until cooked through and the sauce has reduced. Remove from the heat allow to cool.

In a large bowl combine the cooked chicken/shrimp/tofu, vermicelli, avocado, carrots, bell peppers, chopped lettuce, green onions, basil, mint and cilantro, lemongrass, sesame seeds and cashews. Lightly toss and add the dressing, toss again, divide the salad among bowls and serve with the chips.  Eat it before the noodles get soggy, and try not to lick the bowl.  Because it's possible to overdo spring cleaning.

Staging: Pumpkin Ginger Soup with Browned Butter

So we bought a house.

Yes, we already own a house, but this house is 20 minutes closer to work for me, which means that I can do more of the kid pickup and dropoff, and when S. is traveling, I will have 30 minutes more in the office before I start panicking that DYFS will come get my kids before I do.  It's big enough so that my son won't hit his head on the ceiling in the morning when he sits up in bed, and we could potentially have more than five people in our living room for book group.  I can bring kids back to campus for evening programs or dinners.  It's a win-win.

We've been looking passively for a while, and went to visit a house two weeks ago.  If you've ever been house-hunting, you know that it loses its luster pretty quickly, and remembering our experience last time, I said half-jokingly to S. as we were getting the kids back into the car, "ok, let's buy this one."  "OK," he agreed.  And somehow, two weeks later, we're out of attorney review.

Which means, of course, that we are also selling the house we live in now.

Putting aside for the moment all of the complicated things I've been feeling about leaving the place where we've made our home for nine years (because that deserves its own post), I've been thinking a lot about staging, especially as we went back yesterday for the home inspection, and I began to notice the nails on the walls where other things had hung, things that had been replaced by something more perfect, places where other furniture had been before, and had been moved to make space for ... space.  If you've ever bought or sold a house, you probably know something about how things works: staging makes a space feel like anyone could live in it, depersonalizing and getting rid of enough of the clutter and identity that a potential buyer could walk into the space and begin to imagine their things in it.  I wondered, as we walked around that house yesterday, eating the brownies that the owner had made for us, whether I'd been suckered in by the staging, the beautiful Pottery-Barn-like perfection of it all.

We don't have a very cluttered house, but when you live anywhere long enough with small children, you begin to accumulate things, careful as you might be to rid yourself periodically of items you no longer need.  And my seven year old has hoarding tendencies.  So over the past week, I've begun the process of cleaning, Freecycling, throwing away things we no longer need, trying to make our home feel as spacious as it did when we first moved in.  I can already appreciate how hard it's going to be to keep our house completely tidy until we sell it (CSA, if you're reading this: I've been awed the small miracle that you're managed to maintain in your house).

I'm no stranger to the concept of artful arrangement and minimalism.  There's a not-so-small obsessive compulsive part of me that demands feng shui, even in casually tossed together meals.  But as I take pictures from one wall and hang them on another, or hide them in a closet, or stash dishes away, or wonder where I can hide a piece of furniture for a few months, there's a wistfulness in the small loss from home to house.  I start to think about the things I should and shouldn't cook before someone comes to visit, knowing that our house has a way of retaining dinner in the air for a day or so.

We still have to tear apart our bathroom before we put this house on the market (hooray for leaky tile, not), though, and we don't close until July 1, so for the moment, I will continue to fill the air with spice and ginger and garlic and chocolate and maybe even bacon.  And I will try not to nag my children too much about imperfect cleanliness, putting my energies instead into feng shui for dinner.

How much staging would you have to do if you were going to move?  How much can you extract the "you" from your home?  Have you ever staged a house before?

Gingered Pumpkin Soup
Adapted from 101 cookbooks

One of the things I love about Heidi Swanson is her artful, but still casual, arrangement of food.  She tosses things together and makes them appear as if they've been that way always, casual but also beautiful.

2 T. unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large shallot, chopped
fine grain sea salt
1 1/2 lbs pumpkin puree
2 t. fresh ginger, grated
cooked brown/wild rice, warm

1/4 c. unsalted butter
4-inch sprig of rosemary
zest of one lemon
1 t. grated ginger
pinch of salt

other toppings: plain yogurt, toasted pepitas (we used tamari spiced ones)

In a large soup pot, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the onion, shallot, ginger, and a couple big pinches of salt. Cook until softened, about 5 minutes, then add the pumpkin and 6 cups of water (or less if you like a thicker soup). Bring just to a simmer until the flavors mingle, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and puree with a hand blender until smooth. If you like an even thinner soup, add more water, then stir in more salt to taste.

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, long enough to let the butter start to brown a bit. Remove from heat and immediately stir in rosemary, lemon zest, grated ginger, and salt. Stir well and let sit for 5 minutes or so. Strain the butter, and reserve the pulp to serve separately.

Serve soup with a big scoop of rice and with a spoonful of yogurt, some pepitas, a drizzle of lemon ginger rosemary butter.

Outtakes: Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

I threw my family's dinner away last night.

You think I'm kidding, but dear reader, I dumped the entire pot of pre-consumer Persian Yogurt Soup down the drain, and flipped on the garbage disposal, fully mindful of the starving children in (name your country of choice) and enjoying the satisfying roar as the yogurt and egg and and corn starch and split peas and dill and parsley and green onion and grated shallots and wild rice were churned into oblivion.

HA.

My family looked on in semi-shock, and then one of them may have inquired, meekly, "so ... what's for dinner?"

By then, it was 7pm.  I'd been cooking said yogurt soup since 5:15, when I began the delicate heating process.  If you know anything about cooking yogurt, you know that if you heat it too quickly, you're going to end up with a separated mess.  The converse (and heretofore unknown to me) rule, however, is that if you heat it too slowly, the split peas and rice will cook at the speed of glaciation.

The matter was made worse by the fact that I was making said soup despite the fact that S. doesn't much like yogurt (though he is OK with Indian dishes containing it, or tzatziki sauce that is full of salt and garlic).  And my son, seven year old that he is, pronounced it "disgusting" before it ever hit the stove.  Both kids were beginning to melt down, and it was already time for their baths.  Let's just say I didn't feel a lot of overwhelming support for continuing the project.

So I threw the canned chickpeas (originally destined for the soup) onto their plates, and nuked some leftover rice and frozen broccoli, and dared anyone to speak to me as I wiped the drops from the pot and started tomorrow night's dinner.

Let's just say it wasn't my finest hour.

Two weeks ago, I made the soup below, with black "forbidden" rice, which turned the soup purple.  Though it was somewhat unexpected, I thought the effect was pretty fantastic.  I wasn't there when the soup was brought to the table (I was running late from work that night), but I hear there was a minor revolt.  That time, at least the soup was edible and tasted fine; it was only the small matter of color that made it objectionable.

You can't hit a home run every time, I guess.  

The question is: when do you decide to muck around with your soup and try something different, when do you take out the little pieces that don't work, and at what point do you decide you've reached the point of no return, throw out the whole thing, and start over?

Keiko's post on D-Day today got me thinking about blogging.  Not that I haven't been thinking for a while.  But as I commented over there, I’ve been in a similar writing holding pattern since I started work again.  The things I used to write about are the backdrop for what I do now, which is a attempt to balance family with a very time intensive job I love. Sure, I think about other things, but I don't luxuriate in them, and I worry that no one will want to read about mundane life, that it’s not deep enough, that I’ll be writing for nothing, sounding like the bloggers I hate to read, whose blogs are shallow navel-gazing and reviews for fabulous products or Pinterest-like perfection . But maybe I need to rethink that hesitation, and just suck it up and write, without pictures if I need to, without deep things if I need to.  Fooling around the with the soup, rather than throwing it down the garbage disposal.  Because as Mel commented, blogging is about voice.  And we hope that it's the voice you come back to read, regardless of what we write about.

Have you ever thrown dinner (or something else you've worked on even harder) away completely?  What are your "outtakes"?

Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

2 T. butter, divided
1/2 c. finely chopped onion
1/2 c. finely chopped carrot
1/2 c. finely chopped celery
4 c. low-sodium chicken broth
3/4 c. wild rice, rinsed and drained
12 oz. boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 t. flour
2 c. half and half, light cream, or evaporated milk

Melt 1 T. butter in a large pot over medium heat.  Add onion, carrot, and celery, and saute for about 5 minutes, until the onion is translucent, and the carrots are tender.

Add the broth and rice, bring to a boil, and reduce heat to a simmer.  Cook 30 minutes, uncovered, but watch to make sure that your water doesn't all boil away; if it does, add a bit, 1/2 c. at a time.  Don't forget that you'll also be adding liquid later, so just leave yourself enough to cook the rice.

Add the chicken and simmer uncovered 20-25 minutes more until rice is tender.

Melt the remaining 1 T. butter in a small microwaveable bowl, and add the flour, stirring to make a paste.  Add the paste to the soup and stir, cooking until thick and bubbly, and then for another minute or two more.

Add the half and half.  Cook and stir over medium heat until warm, and season to taste.

Thaw

Thaw

Conditions are essential in this interstitial place:
a degree or two lower, and the melt becomes slick--
warmer, and the drip is a rushing brook.

We imagine it as linear, but the thaw hovers,
fractals, spirals,
teasing,
sculpting miniature caves
with stalactites and stalagmites
more surreal than the ones chipped from
our children's imaginations.

I am drawn to the variations in ice, to the delicate crust that
shatters at the slightest pressure,
to the thicker spots where bubbles
have been trapped mid-rise, offering
fantastic patterns and refractions in
translucence and transparency,
to the stained-glass crazes that must be mathematical.

My children test these surfaces with me,
slipping, breaking, cracking, smashing.

Underneath, the constant background sound of flow
is oddly comforting,
a pulse that we can only take
in the waiting rooms of spring.

Snow, the Village, and Black Eyed Pea and Rice Soup

I understand now why Eskimos have so many words for snow.*  Sure, I understood before, but that was purely academic.  Now, my understanding is visceral: I've shoveled at least five kinds of the stuff this winter.  Fast-falling medium weight snow that sticks to your eyelashes, making it impossible to see your shovel.  Snow so light and fluffy that it's like powdered sugar.  Heavy, wet snow that immediately bonds to whatever is beneath it, like crazy glue, making innocuous-looking death traps on our driveway.  Snow with a crust of ice which keeps re-crusting as it continues to fall.  Snow that falls sideways, in biting little knives that fly back at you just as you've tossed the last shovelful to the wind.

February and I haven't been on good terms for years; I lost my pregnancies in Februaries, my father died from complications of advanced stage cancer in February, my college RA died from brain cancer in February, and then there's this series of relentless storms that make me feel like the shortest month has been, by far, the cruelest.

The houses on our street are occupied by a diverse range of families, some young, some old.  We try to take care of each other, to the extent possible for both of us: we bring casseroles, we watch children, we play poker, we shovel in the winter.  One of our next door neighbors died this winter, leaving behind his ninety-some year old wife and sixty-some year old possibly autistic daughter.  He'd been a surrogate great-grandparent to our children, and a generous member of our community, and we were sad to say goodbye.  While we did our best to be good neighbors before, his passing made me more attentive to their needs, more aware that I need to be looking out for them.  Part of this involves snow.


A few years ago, my husband went in on a snowblower with this neighbor and another old farmer across the street; the deal was that they would maintain it (tinkerers that they were), we would house it in the barn, and we'd take turns using it (mostly with my husband at the helm) when the weather was bad.  Of course, that was all fine until the snowblower stopped working last year, and they didn't fix it, and we felt sort of like we ought to be shoveling them out, because really, it's not a good idea to let your ninety year old neighbors with heart conditions attempt to throw six inches of sleet over their shoulders.

Since then we've been shoveling them out, feeling more and less grumpy about it, depending on the quality of the snow.  Finally, after L. died, the second old farmer fixed the snowblower; it was sort of like an homage to his spirit, I guess.

But we've still been shoveling when the snowblower isn't warranted, or won't work well because of the snow conditions.  Once, I confess, I thought about my own mother, and people shoveling her snow, and feeling a little like I ought to work harder at moving her out of her house.  The word "burden" may have crossed my mind.  And it's gotten me thinking about the village.  We talk a lot about how it takes a village to raise children.  We're always grateful for the people who step in and help us take care of ours, and I hope that we return the favor.  We make meals for people who are sick or who have had new babies.  But it also takes a village to care for the elderly.  Sometimes people say: "why can't their families take care of them? why are they still living alone?"  It's a difficult negotiation to make.  And I'm not sure what to do with the fact that I feel a little differently about the village, depending on whom the village is caring for.

Who lives in your "village"?  And how many words do you know for "snow"?

*(Though not, according to this linguist, as many as people say; he demands that we cease exaggerating.)

Black Eyed Pea and Rice Soup
I make a lot of soup in the winter.  It feels like the right thing to be eating when you've come in from shoveling for the fifth time.

1/4 c. olive oil
2 leeks, chopped
1/2 c. carrots, chopped
1/2 c. celery, chopped
1 15 oz. can black eyed peas
7 c. broth
2/3 c. rice
salt and pepper to taste
1 bay leaf
6 T. lemon juice
pinch cumin
1/3 c. fresh parsley, minced

Heat the oil in a soup pot over medium heat.  Add the leeks, carrots, and celery and saute for 3-4 minutes, until they begin to soften.  Add the cumin and saute for a minute, until fragrant.

Add the peas, broth, rice, salt, pepper, and bay leaf and bring to a boil.   Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the pot, and simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

Add lemon juice and stir.  Sit, covered for 5 minutes, remove bay leaf and serve sprinkled with fresh parsley.

The Questionable Power of Anonymity

Late last week, the editors of Tenure, She Wrote posted an open letter to Nature editor Philip Campbell.  They were protesting the revelation of a female-scientist blogger's identity by one of Nature's senior editors, Henry Gee, who outed her in retaliation for her complaints over the years about his problematic behavior.

On the one hand, this feels very high school.  On the other, this is serious business.  As the TSW editors explain, women in academe have some good reasons for blogging anonymously: they risk retaliation by talking about institutional bias, by speaking out about bullying and sexism that is still pervasive--particularly in some fields--in what most people think are the most liberal institutions on the planet.  I have seen both the bullying and the retaliation; I've seen women destroyed by their unwillingness to stay silent.  To deny that sexism exists, and continues to be a problem, is naive at best; to not say anything is to be complicit in its perpetuation.

But this raises an important issue about the power to make change from an anonymous platform.  Writes one of the commenters,

'Dr. Isis' is a reprehensible coward. A public outing was well-deserved, given that “Dr. Isis” feels it’s fine to harass and bully others behind a cloak of anonymity, yet never had to deal with the acountability [sic] that comes with genuine identity.

Many of the critical comments were in the same vein: that someone who offers (sometimes harsh) criticism should not be allowed to do so without expecting to be the object of that criticism at some point, and that problems with institutions can't be addressed unless people are willing to stand up and be identified.

via flickr user exfordy through Creative Commons license

As someone who started blogging anonymously, for a variety of reasons, and who now writes under her own name, I can understand both sides of the argument.  I have friends in the ALI (Adoption Loss Infertility, for those of you not "in the know") blogging community who write under a pseudonym. Infertility is something that is difficult to talk about openly.  People--even our own family members--judge, pity, offer baseless advice.  They think that problems aren't real, or that they stand on higher moral ground.  They invade the bodies that can already hold us hostage.  These responses are devastating.  I wrote anonymously because it was no one's business but mine.  And yet, just as with so many other things, infertility and loss are things that we need to talk about, not just because we need to find people who can support us, but because more people need to understand the diaspora of experience, as it informs not only the way we care for one another, but also the decisions we make about everything from the rights of women over our own bodies to questions about health policy, insurance coverage, gay marriage, and more.  I also wrote under a pseudonym while I was experiencing sexism and bullying at my former place of employment; I had already understood that no one was going to offer support there, I was afraid of the reprisal for speaking out, and I didn't have anywhere else to go.  In both cases, I found that sharing my experience helped me and others to feel less alone.

But I also think that it's easier to criticize things and people and institutions when we hide behind anonymity or pseudonymity.  It's a lot more risky to stand up for our beliefs in a public space, and sign our names on open letters, to point our own flesh-and-blood fingers at the naked emperors that we know everyone sees.  And there's something about the risk that--to me--gives the critique more power.  We believe so strongly in what we say that we are willing to put our careers, or our reputations, on the line.  Perhaps some of us can take that risk more easily than others, and we act according to what we know we can lose.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether anonymous blogging creates more opportunities for or undercuts our attempts to create change.  Giving more people a platform to speak, leveling the playing field so that everyone who can post something on a free website can have a say, is an important step towards equality.  But how far can it go when the authors are still ghosts in the machine?

What do you think?

Asking For It: Stew with Chickpeas and Farro

I don't watch American Idol.  I think I've seen it a few times over the years it's been on TV, and while I found it oddly fascinating, in that train wreck sort of way, the setup was sometimes also a little too close to home.  As someone who spent a significant part of her formative years being taunted by people who had no business judging her, and as someone who lived in fear of the disapproval of people who did, I found the entire enterprise an unnecessary exercise in self-torture, on the one hand, and an undignified glamorization of bullying and bullies on the other.

I was, it seemed, in the minority.  People really loved American Idol.  Viewers fell for Simon, hook, line, and sinker, crowning him the King of Snark. Maybe those who auditioned were fully complicit in their humiliation, but most of them, I think, just wanted a chance to sing with someone listening.

There's been a lot of talk this week about the new kinder, gentler Idol.  The judges actually pay attention to the people auditioning, even if they're not very good.  They let the the most disastrous failures down gently.  They offer constructive criticism.  They joke with each other in ways that are friendly, not mean-spirited.  J-Lo, Keith Urban, and Harry Connick Jr. seem to actually like each other; it's like they're part of some collaborative project.

It's an interesting shift, ratings notwithstanding.  People agree that it was definitely time for something new, and that everyone tired of the catfights of last season.  But I wonder if something larger might be happening: now that bullying goes viral in a matter of minutes; now that people's careers, reputations, or entire lives, are destroyed in a series of 140-character tweets; now that everyone is an easy target, we're beginning to agree that maybe tearing people down isn't such a great idea, and more of us than we'd initially realized live in houses of glass.  We've watched people get shredded in the Twitterverse, and know that there but for the grace of the Internet we go, too.  And maybe we're beginning to re-think what social media is for.

I read this thoughtful piece on the NPR blog MonkeySee the other day about publishing and social media, and perhaps the shift we're seeing is the result of a lesson that social media makes more transparent.  Holmes suggests that social media is misread by journalists (and I'd argue, by lots of people):

"I wonder sometimes whether the self-disclosure and informality of Twitter leads journalists to conclude they have different obligations to those who write on Twitter than to those who write elsewhere, because once you step outside of traditional publishing, you're in a sort of free-for-all where whatever anybody says is your own fault, because you opened your mouth"

(Once you've agreed to audition for Idol, you've agreed to be terrorized by Simon Cowell.) Holmes argues that people who publish the personal on Twitter aren't asking for critique; rather, they're talking with people who have opted in to read:

"Twitter (like the Internet in general) is a "pull" medium, not a "push" medium; it is fed by specific and fluid choices, not longstanding trust in curation[.]"

I'm not sure that I agree entirely with her point that social media is unlike an op-ed.  In some ways, social media freed the op-ed: instead of relying on the Times to select them for publication, would-be opinionators were empowered to disseminate their ideas through blogs and microblogging platforms.  But where at one point the medium itself seemed to invite critique, even in the writing of things like memoir, I wonder, are we becoming a kinder, gentler social public?  And what does that awareness do, if anything, to the way we write and read each other's work?

What is it that we're asking for when we write (or sing) in public?

Chickpea and Farro Stew
Every time I put something new on the table, I feel a little like I'm sitting in front of American Idol judges.  My family can be pretty harsh critics.  Luckily, this was pretty well recieved, even by my daughter, who plays the role of Simon Cowell.

1 onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced (divided)
5 c. baby spinach, rinsed, pat dry
4 c. vegetable broth
2 15 oz. cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1/2 t. ground cumin
1/2 t. smoked paprika
15oz. fire roasted diced tomatoes
3 1/2 T. olive oil, divided
4 c. water
2 eggs
kosher salt
black pepper
1 c. farro
(fried egg, optional)

Add 1 T. olive oil to a large pot and heat on medium until oil is just shimmering.  Add half of the garlic and sauté a minute or two, until fragrant but not brown. Add the spinach and continue to saute until spinach is just wilted, 2-3 minutes. Set aside in a bowl; you'll add this back in later.

In the same pot, over medium heat, heat 2 T.olive oil over medium heat. When oil is shimmering, add diced onion and remaining garlic and saute 3-4 minutes, until the onion is just translucent. Add ground cumin and smoked paprika and stir until fragrant, 1-2 minutes. Add chickpeas and diced tomatoes and their juices, and continue to stir until the juices are mostly evaporated, 8-10 minutes.

Add vegetable broth and farro to pot and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, scraping up any browned bits from bottom. Reduce heat to medium and simmer, mashing chickpeas, until stew is thick and farro is no longer chewy, 15-20 minutes. Fold in spinach. Add water if it's too thick.

If your family likes them, serve with a fried egg on top.  I don't much like fried eggs, but I put a token piece on the picture, because the males in my family required it.