Category Archives: food

October 17, 2012 · 11:39 pm

Blogging is the New Black

I’m part of the class of 2012. Five months of writing and blogging, and someone called me a seasoned blogger. That surprised me, as I still think of myself as a beginner, but since the posts have now racked up to fifty plus, I suppose I am seasoned.

I still look with awe at archives that have the magic number 11 on them, and am even more impressed with archives that go back years. What commitment, what hard work, what character and persistence!

The longer I blog, the deeper my understanding of this extraordinary phenomena becomes. It’s a new world which is developing, and establishing its own conventions and customs inside WordPress’s intelligent frame work. Bloggers find their own communities of like minds, and at the same time we stray across the boundaries to visit other small villages in the blogosphere.

I now know who to go to for hilarious blogs, and sardonic wit and humour, who will soothe my soul with the sweetness of animal life and farmy rituals, who’ll give me the inside running on events that are shaking the world today, and who’ll remind me of historic events, past and recent, that I’d almost forgotten. I know where to go to find out about fashion, and there’s that refuge for dreamers, the blogs with beautiful interiors, and the glorious recipes for foodies like me. There’s music and art, history and travel.

I know who to go to for photos of beauty and extraordinary depth and soul, and likewise for poetry which plunges deep and stirs the heart. There are the moving stories of lives overcoming incredible odds, and the accounts from others of making a difference in various parts of the planet. I live vicariously in France, in Spain, in Cornwall and Hampshire, in Colorado and Florida, Hawaii and Mexico, Canada and Nova Scotia, Melbourne and New York.

This is the magic world that only those with the courage to enter it discover, unknowing of the challenges of time and commitment. In Joseph Campbell’s lingo, we are the heroes on the hero’s journey creating a new world, and we have no idea where this new concept of planetary connection and friendship is taking us.

Will we one day be able to look back and see that we were the pioneers for the new consciousness; the global village where we all care about each other, and know that when we pollute or exploit our corner of the globe, it will impact on everyone else, and our planet too. Will we be the first hundred monkeys to wash our potatoes?    (Everyone knows the hundred monkey story, don’t they, when a few monkeys start washing the sand off their potatoes, and when it reaches a hundred monkeys, suddenly everyone does?)

When I look back at my first posts, I can see how much blogging has helped me to improve my writing. This is mainly because the blogging world offers encouragement and acceptance. A study in Vienna in the thirties in which groups of children were either encouraged all the time, criticised all the time, or received the normal see-saw of encouragement and criticism that most people get, produced interesting results.

The work of the criticised group deteriorated and fell behind the level they had previously reached, they had become so discouraged. The half and half group made normal progress. The group who only received encouragement streaked ahead, enjoyed their work, and produced great results.

So the unstinting encouragement that we bloggers receive from each other has a powerful outcome. It gives us the confidence to write from our hearts directly and honestly without fearing we will be put down, criticised or rejected. I know that I’m writing much more spontaneously now because I have the confidence given to me by other bloggers.

‘Likes’ and ‘comments’ are the joy of a blogger’s life, especially when it’s the sort of remark or comment that pushes the blog a bit further. Writing is only the one half of blogging – the response, the understanding and the interpretation – completes the act of creation, rounds out the concepts, and the writer and the reader are a symbiotic partnership in a way that readers of a newspaper or even a book never experience.

And unlike a newspaper, our blogs stick around, people go on reading them when we’ve moved onto the next posts, while the joke in newspapers is that today’s  story will be wrapping the rubbish tomorrow. So blogs are a halfway house between the longevity of a book and the ephemeral life of a newspaper.

Bloggers enter the lives of their fellows with courtesy and sensitivity. There’s such good manners and kindness in all the comments I read – witty, pithy, but never any word that steps over the line. Rather, there’s a concern for the well-being of each other, and support for those who are facing challenges, however the challenges may come. So we are reaching deeper levels of respect and compassion, sensitivity and insight into other cultures and communities. I’m sure we all had these qualities already, but blogging seems to exercise them daily.

So I’m a blogger, and I feel a bit like a bodger. In another post I mentioned bodging… a bodger was a craftsman who carved the legs of chairs in the woods in England, a hundred years ago and more. He worked alone in the beechwood, perfecting his skills, and that’s how it feels for me, sitting in my remote little fishing village in the Antipodes, finding the right words to express as accurately and truly and beautifully as I can, what I want to say.

I feel I’m a bodger too, a craftsman working alone. But I don’t feel alone- for the craft of blogging reaches out into the lives of all those other kindred spirits and great hearts around our beautiful planet. Namaste – I honour you all.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Friends are dropping in mid-morning on their way north for the holiday weekend, so it’ll be hot scones and strawberry jam to have with their coffee. For four of us I use eight oz self raising flour and about three oz of butter rubbed in like pastry. Beat an egg into a few tablesps of milk, plus a pinch of salt, and use this to make the dough. If you need more milk, just add a little as you need it. Don’t bother to roll it out, just quickly drop the dough on the bread board, and with as little handling as possible shape it into a flattish round or square about an inch and a half thick.

I then simply cut it into squares, instead of bothering with a pastry cutter. Put the little blobs of scone mix onto a buttered floured baking tray, cover and leave in the fridge for half an hour. Just before the guests are due, I pop them in a hot oven, and they cook in about fifteen minutes. I take them out when they still have very little colour, because they are so light at that stage.

Eaten hot with butter, strawberry jam and whipped cream, they always disappear in double quick time. If there should happen to be any left over, I slice them in half and fry them with bacon for the old chap’s breakfast. You can add sugar, cheese, sultanas, herbs, whatever you fancy. But I don’t feel you can improve on the classic scone.

Food for Thought

Suddenly from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery.

It takes more than a moment to fully realise this is Earth … home.

Edgar Mitchell from ‘The Home Planet’,  Astronaut, born 1930

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October 10, 2012 · 2:41 am

Nothing Is Trivial

It’s ten thirty in the morning, and already I feel as though I’ve lived through several days. I awoke to my usual pattern, get up and put the kettle on to take a tray of tea back to bed. While the kettle’s boiling, I pull back the curtains and check the stats and read any messages. Then back to bed with the tea tray, followed by meditation, and getting myself going.

Before breakfast I looked at the e-mails, and answered a query to the printer about the cover of a new book. Packed up some other books to send to a library supplier, and calculated that I had to get some more muesli for the old chap’s breakfast, and some undercoat to start the process of painting the new table and chairs – every-one is appalled by this vandalism – but I always have white rooms, and there’s no way I’m going to live with an expanse of heavy dark wood.

It got so late that I decided to skip breakfast, and go straight into the next door big village to get all the posting parcels and shopping done first thing, and then leave the day free for checking proofs, getting on with the washing, reading and commenting on blogs, and planning some stories for a magazine deadline.

At the big village, I bought my groceries, and checked up on Prasad, the Indian genius who’s transformed the tatty old shop into a spick and span grocery. He’s leaving, and all my friends have charged me with the office of finding out where he’s going … he’s given some of us nick names, and mine is ‘Girl”. Off to the hardware store for the paint, and a discussion about cockerels, as one of the genus was stretching its lungs somewhere nearby. We discussed the cockerel in town which has taken up residence with the vet, and sits on his veranda nestled up to his cats when it’s not strutting around the court rooms next door.

On to the lovely coffee place, where I enjoyed a good flat white with chocolate sprinkled on it, and a piece of iced lemon yogurt cake with cream, and raspberry coulis (oh dear). I sat in the window by the river, and watched the village cat peering into the ornamental runnels of water stocked with goldfish which edge the market square. My amusement turned to horror as the little black rascal leaned over and fished out a struggling orange body. I FELT the crunch of the sharp teeth piercing through the scales of the wriggling, doomed goldfish, then the cat ran off with it between her jaws.

When the girl delivered my coffee I mentioned to her the cat’s shameless bite and run, and she told me her mother had eight cats and a goldfish pond. “She put one in the water, and they gave up hunting the fish then,” she laughed. She then began to list the dogs they owned, starting with a pit bull. “Oh, the darling thing”, I exclaimed, to which she replied, “Oh, I expected quite a different response from you – everyone shudders when I say pit bull”. We discussed the sad fate of pit bulls owned by people who brutalise them, and the goodness which is the birthright of all creatures until man degrades them.

Feeling refreshed, I sailed off to the village bookshop presided over by a green eyed black haired goddess. “I’ve come to make a complaint,” I smiled.  She beamed back: “Go ahead – make my day”!  “You’re not feeding the cat,” I accused her. “She’s just murdered a goldfish.”

The goddess laughed, “I’ve just given her breakfast,” she replied. The cat technically lives in the pub across the road, but has taken up with everyone else in the market place. Sometimes when I’m in the cinema I see her prowling across the back of the seats, and one day at the opera, the chap next door to me put his sweater under his seat. I had to warn him to leave it there for the rest of the film, because the cat was nestled on it.

The green eyed goddess said she’d been at the cinema the night before, and the cat had found her and jumped up on her lap, and spent the whole film stretched out across her legs purring. “It was just like being at home with my cat on my lap”, she laughed. Before getting back in the car, I dropped in on the florist to order a big bunch of gypsophila when it comes into season, and she had also watched the violence in the market square. “What with the cat and the grey heron, there’s going to be no goldfish left”, she exclaimed feelingly. “I saw it happen. She didn’t even eat it. She just dropped it – it’s dead”, she assured me seeing the horror on my face. I drove home rather later than I’d planned, but feeling that the waters of life had been flowing strongly.

The great philosopher Martin Buber wrote that everything in our lives has a hidden significance. “ The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farm-work, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true fulfilled existence….the highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give our due…”

Yes, it felt like that as I drove home, and now I feel too, that the waters of life flow not just through our individual lives but through our internet connections as well, and through all the little encounters we have with other souls and other lives around the world. And they certainly feel like genuine relationships in our little blogging village. This Must make a difference to the planet.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Though it’s supposed to be spring, it’s still cold, so I rustled up a quick soup for lunch. Broccoli soup is one of my favourite soups, and I love it hot and I love it cold. Chop an onion and a generous sized head of broccoli into small pieces, and sauté the harder green stems to start with. As they soften, add the rest of the green head, keeping some sprigs aside. Chop in a potato and then add enough chicken stock, about three to four cupfuls. If I haven’t any stock, the good old bouillon cube has to do.

Simmer till everything is soft. Put some milk in the blender, and then add the broccoli mixture, until it’s all liquidised. At this stage add the bright green broccoli  sprigs and liquidise them- they give some bright greenness to the soup. Re-heat long enough to cook the added broccoli fragments. Add grated nutmeg to taste, and salt and black pepper. Serve immediately, or let it cool and put in the fridge to chill. When the soup is iced, you may need to add stronger flavourings – more nutmeg, salt and pepper… needless to say I often add a dollop of cream to either version. This amount serves two people heartily, or four daintily.

Food for Thought

To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-wracking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.                                                                                                                              Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated  without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.                                                                                                                                                                      E.F. Schumacher discussing Buddhist economics in ‘Small is Beautiful’.

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October 6, 2012 · 11:14 pm

Writing for Survival

I fancied being a poet when I was eight, but unfortunately my uncle came home to my grandmother’s house, from prisoner of war camp. He didn’t know anything about children, but thought he did about poetry. So he drummed into me rhyme and rhythm and metre and blank verse and I quickly realised that if this was how you had to write poetry, I wasn’t poet material.

He was also the unfeeling brute who, when he found me streaming with tears over one of my grandmother’s Victorian children’s books about a child dying of starvation in the East End, called ‘Froggie’s Little Brother’,  said, “well, don’t read it”. (‘Froggie’s Little Brother’ is a hilarious classic for anyone who wants to study minor Victorian horror stories.) But I digress, as they say in Victorian prose!

My writing life didn’t actually begin until I was fourteen, and was obliged to enter a writing competition at school, part of the annual arts festival. I also went into for clay modelling and made a bust of my father, which looked so like Field Marshal Montgomery that I entered it as Monty. But obviously the judges didn’t think so, for Monty was unplaced.

My short story was a different matter. I had an idea, but was terrified people would laugh at me, so I made a bargain with God that if I wrote the story which was about a fictional incident in His Son’s childhood, He must guarantee that I win. God obviously agreed, and kept his side of the bargain, and success was very sweet.

My writing career then went into a period of latency, ‘ my wilderness years’ I suppose you could call them, and it wasn’t until I was 24 and a young captain at the War Office that my talents flourished again! I was part of a team of six lecturers sent out to talk to schools about the army, and we roamed far and wide across the British Isles with a driver who was also a film projectionist.

After each talk we had to write an account of what the head master was like, what the school was like, how receptive the audience and so on, as a guide for the next lecturer in a couple of years. I found my predecessor’s notes so scrappy as to be useless, so conscientiously wrote a full, honest and un- expurgated account of every school and their sometimes objectionable head-masters or bossy head mistresses for my successor.

Shortly before leaving the army to get married, one Friday afternoon as I left a school outside Gloucester, I found to my dismay my colonel from the War Office waiting by my car. I couldn’t get my uniform hat on because I’d had my hair done in a huge bouffant style in order to go to a hunt ball that night, so I was carrying it. I expected trouble: a, because I wasn’t wearing my hat and therefore was improperly dressed, and b, because he was there!

It turned out that he wanted my reports. I immediately went into collapse, and wondered why – I thought I was up to date – what was the problem that he’d come all this way from London to collect them. “Oh,” he said nonchalantly, “they go all round the office – they’re damn funny – the general always reads ‘em, worth a guinea a minute he says, and he wants some more!” I thankfully handed over another batch, completely mystified as to why my serious reports should be so entertaining. He didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing my hat!

Shortly after this I embarked on a life of penury and drudgery, and discovered quite soon that I was going to have to make some money in order to feed the two children who had arrived so promptly. Realising that I’d better get organised before I was really destitute, I scanned the local South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s main English newspaper. The only things they didn’t have on the women’s pages were recipes, so I cheekily offered them a cookery column. I knew nothing about food, but I liked eating, and they didn’t ask for my credentials.

Writing a cookery column seemed the height of literary achievement to me. Six weeks later, the next literary peak I scaled was to become a temporary feature writer. I became a permanent one, and then eventually Woman’s Editor. But I had never learned to write, and apart from discovering that you had to start with an arresting first paragraph in order to grab your readers, I knew nothing about journalism or writing.

I just had to bluff, and from reading the good women’s pages in the English newspapers, I learned that there was a style of writing for feature pages which was different to writing on news pages. I found it quite hard to write a straight news story because my “voice” or writing style would break through the boring facts, so I always ended up being a columnist and features writer. But none of this taught me anything about writing. I had to work that out for myself.

The one thing I did learn about writing back then, was that it was no good calling on a “muse”. Newspapers aren’t interested in the dramas and vagaries of “muses”. They just want working journalists who can stick to a deadline and just do it. It was wonderful training. I had to write, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, through chronic fatigue syndrome and divorce, children’s chickenpox and school holidays. And so to this day, thanks to this training, I have never had “writers block”.  More’s the pity some might say!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

There was a piece of fresh salmon in the fridge left over from the previous night. It was too big for one, but not enough for two. So I made one of my favourite recipes, quick, simple, and good enough to serve to friends. This time it was just us.                                     Simply melt a generous knob of butter in a pan – I use a frying pan, and add to it a good cupful of cream, and half a cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese. Stir till the cheese is melted. Then just add the chopped up salmon pieces, lots of chopped parsley, salt and freshly ground black pepper, and serve on some pasta, with more Parmesan if wanted. I used tagliatelle .

Food for Thought

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.                        By Don Miguel Ruiz. The First Agreement from his book ‘The Four Agreements’.

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Filed under army, cookery/recipes, food, great days, humour, philosophy, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life

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September 24, 2012 · 1:06 am

Happy Accidents and Meaningful Coincidences

That’s a longer way of saying serendipity and synchronicity – both events being a part of this weekend.

It started rather well, in a delicious new restaurant on Auckland Harbour’s edge, at a birthday party for a very old friend. Gathered together for her seventieth birthday were old school friends, bridesmaids, long-standing friends like me, and of course family and children and grandchildren gathered in from around the globe.

I sat with two other old friends, by the windows which flowed straight out onto the concourse where people dis-embarked from the ferries from the islands and from the harbour crossings, so that we felt part of the stream of this life too.

As I was telling the girls (a euphemism) about an amazing story of a springer spaniel who roamed Dartmoor with a bottle of milk in his mouth to feed the various orphaned lambs, another ferry docked. Pictures of this mothering spaniel showed her as a brown and white one. And as I described her, a couple walked past from the ferry, being towed along by a brown and white springer spaniel, a breed rarely seen here!

Well, one synchronicity down! The friend I was talking to always says you’re on track when synchronicities happen in your life, so I felt a great sense of well-being at this little flag from the universe, telling me, I assumed, that I’d got it all together for the moment, at any rate…

Serendipity, the happy accident next day wasn’t quite an accident, but an unexpected joy. My busy busy daughter rang to say they were coming up to do some housekeeping on their holiday house next door, and they’d come and have dinner with us. I had no fatted calf to kill, but a deep frozen organic corn fed chicken to defrost seemed a good substitute.

More serendipity, she came over and spent the afternoon with me too. Our conversations are a series of interruptions: “did you see ‘ – yes, but what did you think he? – well, he should have – yes, but when he – I suppose so, but she shouldn’t have- well, wouldn’t you – true. What about? Yes, I thought so too -you should have heard – really, did he refuse – no, when he offered – he didn’t! I thought – I know, so did I….”

Neither my husband, or her husband, have any idea what we’re talking about, but we know exactly. The only confusion was at the dinner table when she referred to “her ex,” and I thought she meant the long ago ex-husband of a friend, whereas she was referring to a recent ex-boyfriend. That snafoo ironed out, we were off again.

Apart from nattering, we played around on Trademe, and I ended up thinking it would be worthwhile getting rid of my ancient and uncomfortable ladder back dining chairs, and exchanging them for some comfortable modern ladder back chairs. That decided, we began to mull over the attractive dining table that came with them, and with a bit of prodding from her like: “well, I’d want my room to work, rather than look charming”, I decided to sell the elegant round table in the window, move my present dining table there to use as a desk, and paint the incoming dining table white to match everything else.

We clicked the Buy Now button, and now I’m shuddering at the huge upheaval of moving every stick of furniture and every piece of china, heaps of books, side tables with books and lamps and knick-knacks piled on them, a heavy antique bench and all the chairs, in order to get one table out, and another in!

My husband emerged from his study to find us up to our ears in re-organisation. Refreshed and invigorated! My daughter went off next door to tidy up for dinner, while I basted the chicken and made the cream, garlic and mushroom sauce instead of gravy. Dinner was good, chicken perfectly cooked, the stuffing divine, and minted new potatoes, the first spring asparagus, paired with roasted pumpkin and parsnips, meant that I had two very satisfied men at the table.

Come the pudding, my daughter had said she’d do it, so she arrived with the first strawberries of the season, whipped cream, sweet grapes, and a moist lemon cake from our favourite bakery – the only cake, we both agree, that we’d ever buy.

And then occurred one of those moments that I treasure – complicit laughter with my daughter. The old chap complimented her on the lemon cake, asking if she’d made it, and jokingly she replied yes, thinking he’d know she hadn’t. But his response showed us he believed her. Eugenie and I then went into over-drive at his expense.

We gave them clues, but they didn’t catch on. I said conversationally to her that I always found that the base of cardboard and silver paper made a difference to the texture when baking, to which she added her own refinement, while we laughed ourselves silly, developing the theme to heights of ridiculous nonsense , and the hapless men had no idea what was so funny. Trivial, silly, but oh the joy of laughing with the ones you love.

Serendipity indeed, and I still feel warm with it a day later as I tell you this. So a happy week to you all, too. Musical tables begins three days from now, when the carrier has fitted them into his schedule. Think of me with compassion.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The stuffing for the chicken is easy but delicious, quite unlike those awful packets and the sort in basted chickens from the supermarket. It doesn’t go into a hard ball, but is moist and melting.

It must be good quality bread. I always use stale sour dough bread, but a friend made a lovely stuffing once with very grainy whole meal bread and apricots. But I love the classic sage and onion.

So grate two to three cups of stale sour dough into a bowl. Chop very finely and fry a large onion.  Chop half a dozen mushrooms finely, and add to the  onion when it’s nearly cooked, plus a big knob of butter. Meanwhile chop a handful of fresh sage leaves and plenty of fresh parsley. I also add a generous sprinkling of dried sage, to give it a bit of extra kick. Add salt and pepper and enough cold water to make it moist enough to push inside the chicken cavity. And that’s it.

Food for Thought

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.

Ken Keyes Jr  1921 – 1995  Personal growth author and lecturer

 

 

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Filed under animals/pets, cookery/recipes, family, food, great days, humour, life/style, love, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life

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September 19, 2012 · 12:40 am

Bloggers Addictions

I’m going through what can only be called a life crisis. Looking at my stats this morning I saw in that funny place called search engines, two separate entries, one saying ‘Valerie Davies died abroad’, and the other ‘Valerie Davies dies abroad’.

I tried to click on it to find out more about my death, feeling somewhat as Mark Twain must have done when he said that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.

But it won’t let me click, so perhaps – since I feel very much alive – I’m in that place called limbo, where I gather, we spend some time reviewing our lives and our mistakes and our decisions.

This feels quite a familiar place to me, having spent or wasted quite a chunk of my life reviewing my decisions, and regretting my mistakes, and now I’m doing it in Bloggerland.

It’s four months since in blissful ignorance, I posted the first blog. If I’d read any blogs first, I might have started differently, but since I knew no better, when my friendly printer said he’d got my blog ready, and now all I had to do was to write, I believed him. Four months later, having worked my way through the most obvious Blogger Complexes, I’m now swimming in deeper waters.

Yes, there is that Bloggers Delight, when a reader writes a comment that blows your socks off with its intelligence, perception, kindness or goodness. There is also the Bloggers Delight of discovering a blog that sings to you, so you click the follow button without more ado. This can happen with both photos and the written word.

Then there are the Bloggers Friendships, when a select group of like minds read your blogs regularly, and leave comments that range from encouraging to loving – a unique form of friendship, in which goodness and mercy float across the aether, blessing him that gives and him that takes.

Bloggers Dilemma is the apparent randomness of whether a post is successful or not. The blogger writes a post, anticipating a nice spike in the stats, wall to wall ‘likes’ or a rash of interested comments, only to find a flat plateau, and few ‘likes’, and nothing much in comments. This leads to Bloggers Heart-searching: was it too long? Was it too short? Why didn’t they like it? Am I writing too often? Am I writing enough? Longer or shorter gaps? Should I take it off now, or leave it a little longer?

In its most extreme form, this Bloggers Angst is likely to deteriorate into Bloggers Breast-beating:  am I a bore? Do I kid myself in thinking that what I have to say is interesting? Am I old hat? Am I irrelevant? Was it a mistake? Should I stop blogging and get myself a life again?

Looking on the bright side of things is Bloggers Fancy, the logical conclusion of that wonderful hobby of Blog Hopping. Browsing through a blog and its comments, the wit, intelligence or humanity of a comment invites you to trace that blogger, and having found her and read her stuff, finding another like minded comment, jumping to that blog, scattering ‘likes’ and ‘follow’ with gay abandon. Which means that when one of these bloggees asks how you found him or her, you have no idea by what zig-zag path you got to them.

Bloggers Fancy can thus trigger a certain amount of over-indulgence, which begins to add up to Bloggers Burden. This is when the blogger opens her e-mails and finds dozens and dozens of tantalising titles, subjects and topics, all must- reads, all demanding her attention, and too little time on her hands.

Suddenly meals arrive late, ironing piles up, business gets pushed aside, weeding is forgotten, books are unread, nights get later. This is the stage when blogging slides from a Bloggers Hobby to a Bloggers Complex, before flowering into a full blown Bloggers Addiction.

And this is when we become defensive about the amount of time we spend on the computer. We hastily switch off when partners come into the room, pretending we’ve just been reading a book, or checking something. We find ourselves making meals a little more ordinary, no time to spend slaving over a hot stove any more, whipping up some fresh mayonnaise or concocting a tasty rice dish.

Pasta becomes popular, as it’s quicker to cook than potatoes when we’ve forgotten the time. Saucepans get burned as we slip away to the computer to catch up on just a few more blogs, while the eggs boil, or the soup heats up, or the potatoes cook. Sometime later the soup is stuck to the bottom of the pan, the boiled eggs are hard as cannonballs and about to explode in an empty smoking saucepan, and the potatoes are an un-mashable soggy disintegrating pulp.

This is the dark side of blogging! There are also Bloggers Challenges. I inadvertently stumbled into an impassioned defence of guns between a macho group of far right extremists, who all agreed that Jefferson had said they could all carry guns and defend themselves, rather than that he meant they could carry guns to defend their homeland. The Challenge was to move on before becoming either depressed or dismayed by an alien culture. There are, I discover, plenty of alien cultures in Bloggerland.

But the Challenge is a necessary stage of the Bloggers Rite of Passage, when we discover that though we all share the same planet, we actually live in different worlds. Bloggers Challenge then, is to find our own world. And the funny thing is, since birds of a feather actually do flock together, we do all find our own community of kindred souls. Not quite heaven on earth, but better than limbo. And it’s called Bloggers Blessing.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

While still plying my husband with steak and the like, I’ve given up eating meat myself in the hope of easing my arthritic hands, having tried everything else, like giving up sugar and giving up carbohydrates. Still eschewing the sugar, and hoping that the meatless regime will help. So this is one of the delicious non-meat dishes I’m enjoying.

It’s an Indonesian dish called Sambel Goreng Telor, which means eggs in coconut milk, and though it may not sound very promising, it’s actually delicious (and cheap).

This recipe is for four eggs. I use two, but still make the same amount of sauce. While the eggs are hard boiling,( and no clandestine checking of blogs) finely slice an onion, a large clove of garlic, a tomato and a red pepper. Fry the onion and when it’s beginning to soften, add the garlic, tomato, pepper, some salt and some sugar to taste, and continue to cook. Lastly add half a cup (I use a bit more) of coconut milk, and finish cooking. Slice the eggs in half and pour the sauce over. Serve with rice.

This recipe was adapted for westerners. I think that the original recipe would have used palm sugar rather than sugar – it also specified a tablespoon of sugar – this seemed a lot to me, and I used less.

Food for Thought

I love the juxtaposition of serious and ridiculous, so this parody of Kipling by Catholic priest and English writer Ronald Knox 1888 – 1957 just fits the bill:

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart,

And we are left with large supplies

Of cold blancmange and rhubarb tart

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September 15, 2012 · 3:30 am

Life’s Like That

My life, like many, is not so much a drama as a tale of tiny things. But in the end they add up to a life. This is the tale of a few days of this week.

Tuesday          When I walked through the cemetery to the marble bench to sit in the sun, the grass seemed to be sprinkled with flowers like pink confetti. They were bright pink with yellow centres, the size of primroses, but only growing half an inch from the ground. I sat on the warm bench and looked over the turquoise harbour.

A monarch butterfly floated across and came to rest on the purply-blue flower of a creeper in the tangle of shrubs leading down to the water. I watched the orange and black wings spreading over the amethyst flower, and watched it lift off again, and swoop and flutter in a wide circle before coming back to the same flower. It then drifted to another flower head, before settling on the grass, presumably to digest its meal.

When it rose again in the air, it dropped down to a shrub where another monarch was already feasting. The two rose in the air, fluttering and dodging around each other, until my butterfly was driven away, and did a wide arc halfway round the cemetery, before coming back and settling on another bush.

I drifted back home, missing Cara the cat, and realising that when she had stopped coming with me but sat by the gate, and then, didn’t even cross the road, but sat by our path, waiting for me to return, she wasn’t being cussed – she was obviously too weak or weary in those last months to come springing across the grass with me, her tail held high, and perfectly straight.

Wednesday          Went for a walk to get away from the problems besetting me in the house. I passed a monarch butterfly fluttering on the pavement. It’s wings were almost completely chewed away, presumably while still in the chrysalis by a voracious praying mantis, but its head and body were intact. It lay there, fluttering the fragments of its ragged wings. I put it in the grass, and went for an illegal wander round Liz and Richard’s empty beautiful garden looking over the harbour.

On my way back I looked, and the butterfly was still struggling. I nerved myself to carry it to the pavement so I could stamp on it and put it out of its misery. I laid it down, and it spread its pathetic little rags in the sun, and I had the sense that it was enjoying the sunshine. I just couldn’t bring myself to stamp the life and the consciousness out of it. So I carried it gently back to the grass, and laid it in the sun.

The colours today are like summer, aquamarine sea, and snowy white foam as the waves dash onto the rocks below. The sun shines, and a bitter wind blows. It seems to have been cold for weeks, so we’re chomping through the walls of logs piled up in the garage.

It was hard to go out tonight, but I’m glad I did. Our monthly meeting when people talk about their life. Journeys, we call them. A woman who lives nearby told us how she had dissolved her three generation family business in fashion, and looked for somewhere in the world to serve. She ended up teaching in a Thai monastery, where her experiences there and at various healing sanctuaries were life- changing. She was glowing.

Thursday          Another bitterly cold day with the sun shining brightly. But the oak tree is shimmering with its new spring green, the crab apple has pink buds peeping out, and nasturtium and arctotis are beginning to spring up in their lovely untidy sprawl through the other greenery. A clutch of tuis are sucking the honey in the golden kowhai trees across the road. They are all covered thickly in their hanging yellow flowers along the roadside, and always seem like the heralds of spring.

Yesterday I got my sweet cleaning lady to help me rip down the white sheets which serve as a canopy on the veranda in summer. Have n’t had the strength in my arthritic hands to do it myself. I’ll wash them and use them to cover things in the garage – not sure what, but there’s bound to be something that will benefit. She told me the four ducklings she’d rescued sit cuddled up to each other at night and cheep for ages. “ I’d love to know what they’re saying to each other”….

Before going to Tai Chi, I rang Friend to thank her for lunch on Sunday, and found her devastated. They’d taken Smudge the cat to the vet because he’s dribbling blood and saliva. He has cancer of the jaw, and they’ve brought him home to try to eke out a few more weeks with him….

Tai Chi was freezing in the scouts hall. Coldest night for a long time. I noticed how pinched all our frozen old faces were by the end – and even the few young ones!

Friday           I rang Friend, she was struggling to get the cushion covers off the sofa, where Smudge had taken refuge from the icy night. They were covered in blood and saliva, so I promised to get my sheets from the veranda washed and dried by tonight so that she can drape them over the two sofas. Then took her for a consolatory coffee at the Market, where we gorged ourselves on good coffee and delicious lemon cake well blanketed in whipped cream… so much for diabetes and arthritis!

As I was writing this, I heard the noise of many children all chattering at once.  Got up to look out of the window to see why, and saw two little girls making their way down the steps. I got to the door as they did, and was assailed by both of them talking at once as loud as they could. They were collecting for an animal charity, and the commotion was simply two seven year olds talking at once, and neither listening to the other. I emptied my purse of change and they went on their way well pleased.

So this is life, what happens between getting up to make a cup of tea to take back to bed in the morning, checking the e-mails and reading blogs, keeping the fire piled high with dry logs, and going back to that warm bed at night, with the electric blanket on high, a tray of tea for last thing, and a good book!

This is the raw material, and whether we make a silk purse out of it, or see it as a sow’s ear, it’s up to us. It can be satisfying or it can be boring, but the choice is ours. But as I go through my gratitude list at night before slipping into sleep, there seems much to thank the God of Small Things for.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Friends dropped in for glass of wine, and apart from a tin of olives stuffed with anchovies, which is a waste of good olives and anchovies to me, I had nothing for the wine to soak into. (I’ve taken to heart the advice to always have a few bites of something first, so the sugar in the wine doesn’t go straight into the blood stream. I also find the wine tastes much nicer if it isn’t sipped on an empty stomach). A dash to the village shop, and I came home with a little pack of the cheapest blue vein cheese, and a carton of cream cheese. Mixed together they make a lovely spread on little chunks of crusty roll, or any good water biscuit. It was enough.

Food for Thought

We thank God then, for the pleasures, joys and triumphs of marriage; for the cups of tea we bring each other, and the seedlings in the garden frame; for the domestic drama of meetings and partings, sickness and recovery; for the grace of occasional extravagance, flowers on birthdays and unexpected presents; for talk at evenings of events of the day…

From Christian Faith and Practise in the Experience of the Society of Friends.

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September 10, 2012 · 11:39 pm

When Elephants Wept and Gorillas danced

Kiwis are not just New Zealanders. They are the a rare and unique breed of bird. And a few weeks ago after heavy rain in the South Island, a kiwi’s nest was threatened by floods pouring through its enclosure. The male and female kiwi had been conscientiously nursing their egg, a precious one, since they are an endangered species.

As the water began surge through, threatening to wash their nest and egg away, the male kiwi sprang into action. He seized twigs and grass and any materials he could find to stuff under the nest to raise it above water level. Outside, conservation staff began digging drainage too.

What this told me is that that kiwi father understood the principles of engineering.  Knowing that by levering his nest up with whatever he could find, he could try to save his offspring. He did.

The week before, I had seen some amazing pictures in an English newspaper. Two gorillas who had been born in a zoo and had grown up together, were parted, when the elder was sent to another zoo for a breeding programme. After three years, coming to the conclusion that the giant black gorilla was infertile, the zoo decided to send him back to join his brother, who during this time had been shuttled off to another zoo.

The pictures were of their re-union. Recognising each other straight away, they ran to each other, making sounds, hugging each other, rolling on the ground together in ecstasy, and dancing with joy.

What this told me is that separating animals and shunting them around to zoos and breeding programmes is as cruel as it was to break up slave families and sell mothers away from their children, and split up fathers and brothers in the days before Abolition. I read many years ago of a woman who decided to make feta cheese, and began breeding a small flock of sheep. As each generation was born, mothers, grannies, great grannies and children all remained in their family groups, and when she banged on the pail each day to gather them in for milking, they came in their family groups.

And yet we take lambs and calves from their mothers all the time, and foals from their mothers to race them as yearlings before their bones have matured, which is why so many young racehorses come to grief. Horses are not fully grown for six to seven years. Treating animals with no regard to their rights is called speciesism, a term coined by Australian philosopher and animal campaigner Peter Singer. He likens it to sexism, and racism.

In March this year, legendary conservationist Lawrence Anthony died in Africa. He was known as ‘The Elephant Whisperer’. He had learned to calm and heal traumatized elephants who were sent to Thula Thula where he lived. The first herd arrived enraged from the death of a mother and her calf. The fifteen year old son of the dead mother charged him and his rangers, trumpeting his rage, his mother and baby sister having been shot in front of his eyes; a heartbreakingly brave teenager, defending his herd.

The traumatised elephants were herded into an enclosure to keep them safe until they were calm enough to move out into the reserve. The huge matriarch gathered her clan, and charged the electric fence, getting an 8,000-volt. She stepped back, and with the family in tow strode round the entire perimeter, checking for vibrations from the electric current. That night, the herd somehow found the generator, trampled it, pulled out the concrete embedded posts like matchsticks, and headed out, in danger from waiting poachers with guns at the ready.

Recaptured, Anthony knew it was only a matter of time before they escaped again. He talked to Nana the huge matriarch, telling her they would be killed if they broke out again. He feared he would be killed too, if he didn’t make a connection with them before they charged him. Momentarily he did feel a spark of connection with Nana, and then decided that the only way he could help them was to live with them and get to know them. And this was the start of many troubled elephants being brought to him for healing.

When Anthony died, there were two elephant herds in the reserve. They hadn’t visited Anthony’s house for eighteen months. But when he died in March, both herds made their way to his house. It would have taken them about twelve hours to make the journey, one herd arriving the day after, and the second a day later. The two herds hung around the house for two days, grieving, and then made their way back into the bush.

Feminist and Fulbright scholar Rabbi Leila Gal Berner is reported as saying… ‘If ever there were a time, when we can truly sense the wondrous ‘interconnectedness of all beings’ it is when we reflect on the elephants of Thula. A man’s heart stops, and hundreds of elephant’s hearts are grieving. This man’s oh-so abundantly loving heart offered healing to these elephants, and now, they came to pay loving homage to their friend.’

Some years ago another herd of elephants descended on a herd of antelopes who’d been penned up preparatory to being transplanted to another part of Africa. The rangers saw this herd of elephants bearing down on them and thought they’d come to kill the antelopes. What they did was trample down the enclosure so that the antelopes could escape.

I find all these stories of animals unbearably moving, because they all illustrate intelligence, emotional depths, and extra consciousnesses that man doesn’t possess. We say we are superior because we can reason – didn’t the kiwi reason – because we are self conscious – has that been a blessing or a curse – because we can use tools – but many animals can, as research is now showing us – because we have souls- why are we so sure that animals don’t?

Maybe American writer Henry Beston, who wrote the classic ‘The Outermost House’, put it best when he wrote: ‘We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate in having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they live finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.’

It seems to me that it’s man who has the splendour of the earth, and animals who have the travail. Maybe, as more and more of us care about them, that will change.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The old chap’s 83rd birthday, and some of the family for lunch to celebrate. I made it an easy one, roast chicken breasts for them, stuffed with sausage meat and sage, and wrapped in bacon – all free range and organic. The usual, a big dish for people to help themselves – roasted parsnips, onions, potatoes boiled in their skins, and then slightly crushed with plenty of butter, spring carrots and Brussels sprouts, plus the famous mushrooms in cream, parsley and garlic instead of gravy. Pudding was easy, using the same oven, and on another shelf, I baked some apples, cored and stuffed with spoonfuls of Christmas mincemeat, placed in a dish with cream and whisky poured over. This juice is heavenly. Serve the apples with crème fraiche or ice cream and a little shortbread biscuit. It was good with coffee served at the same time.

 

Food for Thought

A friend sent me this poem, and I offer it to all my fellow bloggers:

“..a poet/writer is someone

Who can pour light into a spoon

And then raise it

To nourish your parched holy mouth’

Hafez  1315 -1390   Renowned Persian lyric poet

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September 7, 2012 · 11:31 pm

Travels in Foodie Heaven

Food was not a topic of much joy in my war-time childhood. Green ration books for us children, cream ones for adults. If you went shopping without them, it was a waste of time, and you had to get a bus back home to pick them up and start all over again, standing at the back of the queue at every shop.

The biggest foodie thrill I can remember back then was the one orange a year, stuffed in the bottom of my Christmas stocking. Things looked up slightly on my tenth birthday, the first I had ever spent with my father. (I was ten months old when he went to war in 1939, returning for two weeks leave in 1945, before finally coming home in 1947. But we only saw him for a month before he was posted to Belsen).We qualified for an army quarter by the time my birthday arrived, and joined him. To my parents’ horror it was the former home of the Beast of Belsen, the sadistic commandant of the concentration camp.

Knowing nothing of this, I concentrated on my birthday. My new parents took me for a treat to the Officers Club. The palace of the Princes of Hanover now served as the Officers Mess, where we children were allowed for the children’s Christmas party; it was held in the marbled, mirrored, chandeliered ballroom, with satin and gilt chairs to fall over during musical chairs. And the Prince’s hunting lodge deep in pine forests running with deer and wild boar, was now the Club.

The speciality of the German couple who ran it was their sugary doughnuts with butter cream and jam inside (Had the Hanoverian princelings also enjoyed these goodies before us?) I had never tasted anything like them -the nearest thing to heaven in my gastronomically deprived childhood. This may have been the moment when I became a foodie.

The next high point in my foodie career was staying in Vienne in central France a few years later. We were still on rationing in England at the time, and the rich French provincial food was a shock to my spartan system. But here I discovered real French bread. It was brought up from the village to the chateau by one of the maids every day, fresh and warm for breakfast. And in the afternoon a fresh supply was delivered to the kitchen by a boy on a bike. We children would gather illegally in the kitchen and annoy the maids by tearing into the warm bread and eating it with delectable runny confiture dripping onto the floor.

Malaya was another foodie milestone. We lived in a hotel on the edge of the sea in Penang for over a year, and ate in a dining room reminiscent of the forecourt of St Pauls Cathedral. Great pillars stretched the length of the ballroom. We walked this length between palms and pillars three times a day for every meal, and subsided at the end of it in the dining area, still pillared and palmed. We ate the same meals every week, in the same order and my favourite day was Friday when we had nasi goring, the only nod in the direction of the local cuisine.

I’ve tried to get Malayan friends to replicate it, I’ve tried myself, but nothing has ever had the same texture, tastes, variety and delicacy. I can copy most of the culinary joys of the past, but that one has proved impossible – it’s just a fragrant regretted memory.

In Majorca, when few people had even heard of it, at a little fishing village called Cala Ratjada, we stayed in the first hotel to be built there,( there are now over fifty) which they were just finishing, and the water for the shower came speeding through the bidet, and the hand basin only had water in short bursts. But down by the sea was a fish restaurant, and there I tasted two foodie classics, a genuine paella, and a lobster salad which is still fresh in my memory. I was beginning to sensitise my taste buds.

France a year later, this time a hamlet somewhere between San Tropez and Le Lavandou, where every meal eaten under the vine covered terrace was like ambrosia – never a dud. My lasting memories of this bliss were the fresh croissants for breakfast with unsalted butter and delicious homemade apricot jam, and aoli.  Eating aoli was like discovering the secret of culinary life- the simplicity of it, the exquisiteness of it, the white china, the perfect egg, the salad and the aoli. I decided there and then that I’d learn to make it when I had my own kitchen. (Living in an officers mess didn’t give me much scope for cooking experiments at the time.)

Later, driving back from Bonn with a girlfriend, we stopped at Aix (shades of “How they brought the good news from Aix to Ghent!”) for a coffee. We ordered rum babas and though it was fifty years ago, I can still remember the shocked delight at the taste of the rum and the cream and the yeasty cake. They were a benchmark for all rum babas eaten since, and none of them have measured up to the rum babas of Aix. We sat by a river in the sun, with dappled leaves reflected in the water, tall, grey eighteenth century buildings lining the other side of the road.

The next foodie revelation was staying with an old school friend in Winchester, who had become a talented cook in one year of marriage. We started the meal with shrimps in mayonnaise in half a pear, a very 50’s thingie and followed this with roast duck and orange. By the time we got to the crème brulee poor Brenda had fled the room to cope with not morning sickness, but evening sickness.

Her husband and I somewhat unconcernedly tackled the heavenly crème brulee she had left behind. I’d never tasted it before, cream not having been freely available in my past, so this was another taste bud sensation. To this day I can’t go past crème brulee however much I may have eaten beforehand.

Hong Kong? Oh yes, lots of lovely Chinese dishes, but what I remember from those days was the bombe Alaska at a place called Jimmy’s Kitchen. A girl friend and I would skip out from the office at lunchtime and order a bombe Alaska each. Fortified by this self-indulgent mix of sponge and fruit and ice-cream, brandy and meringue, we would totter reluctantly back to our desks to resume writing our boring little stories about fashion parades and new cosmetics for the woman’s pages.

So now, after a lifetime of enjoying food, here in New Zealand, land of milk and manukau honey, what gluttonous delights light my fire? Well, there are two things I cannot live without these days. One is a nice cup of tea. And the other is a nice cup of coffee!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

When the crusty Duke of Wellington came back from his campaigns in foreign parts, legend has it that all he wanted was a slice of hot buttered toast. What he was talking about was comfort food, and it’s different for each of us. Mine is cornflakes if I’m on my uppers, or creamy mashed potatoes, or scrambled egg. My husband believes that scrambled egg is the apex of my culinary skills, but others have been known to recoil in horror clutching their hearts, when they discover how many eggs and how much butter and cream have gone into them!

For your run of the mill ordinary breakfast scrambled egg, I use a generous sized walnut of butter, and about two tablespoons of milk. I melt them, and then break the eggs in and stir to mix. The trick is to have the buttered toast ready, and then stir the scrambled egg in the pan very gently so it forms large curds. Cook it very slowly, if it’s cooked too fast, it becomes stringy, tough and watery. As soon as the curds are almost cooked, I tip it onto the waiting toast, as it still goes on setting while it’s hot. For softer, creamier scrambled eggs, add more butter and use cream – delectable.

Food for Thought

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

From a speech in Washington in 1953, by President Dwight. D. Eisenhower 1890 -1969

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September 5, 2012 · 3:01 am

Living her Dreams While She Danced With Death

Soraya was not her real name, but it’s close to it. She was as beautiful as Persian Queen Soraya, and also had some of the fine-boned quality of that Queen’s successor, Farah Diba . Strikingly beautiful however you looked at her.

She came from one of those Asian countries like Uzbekistan. Her husband came here alone to set up a new life for his wife and daughter, and went back after 18 months to fetch them.  Two weeks after returning, he left them. She lived with their daughter in a tiny student type flat, and mother and daughter shared a mattress on the floor of the bedroom.

She crossed my path when she met someone close to me, through the internet. The friendship didn’t last long, as he found her rigid Muslim beliefs hard to stomach.  But a few weeks later I had a shattered phone call saying she’d rung to tell him she had breast cancer. He couldn’t cope, so I told him I’d see to it.

I rang her to say I would help her, and then spent a day on the phone ringing every sort of agency to try to get advice, support and friendship for her. She was always outside the area, or didn’t qualify. Finally I found a church group, who also felt the situation wasn’t something they couldn’t assist with, but I hung in, until I got them to agree that they would become responsible for getting her little girl to kindy, so that Soraya didn’t have the long journey to and fro on public transport twice a day.

I lived too far out of town to be able to do anything practical, but I went to see her. Her situation was shocking. She had just started chemo, and had spent the night vomiting, with the little girl crying in fright beside her. The second time I was there, an elderly lady arrived from kindy with the daughter. She was the person I’d spoken to on the phone, but was too distracted to take in my presence.

The next step was my daughter. Eugenie is the most capable person I’ve come across, simultaneously starting the international Arts Festival in this city, which she now chairs, being on the City Council, first woman on countless committees and boards, as well as editing and writing parenting magazines and being president of kindergarten organisations and a dozen other pies, bringing up her children and supporting family in countless ways. She’s also kind and intuitive.

I arranged to bring Soraya to meet her for lunch in a restaurant in the park. We sat in the sunshine with my daughter who, to my amazement, was wearing a long chestnut wig instead of her own dark hair. All became clear when she began talking to Soraya about chemotherapy, and how it’s okay to wear a wig, and still look beautiful.

Eugenie then took charge of the situation. She badgered the welfare authorities until they found a charming little two story cottage for Soraya in a nice area near a good school, and arranged all sorts of subsidies to help with transport and all the extra expenses outside her hospital treatment. (Thank heavens for free medical care)

She texted the mothers at her son’s school, and gathered together furniture for the house, while an interior decorator mother lent her van to move the stuff. One morning some of the fourteen year olds in my grandson’s class came to transport Soraya and her things from the squalid flat to her new home. I taxied her and her little girl, and did homely things like providing curtains, bedding and fridge. We made a pretty girly bedroom for the little daughter.

Eugenie took Soraya to hospital for her operations, wept with her, hugged her, and set about finding people to support her. The lady from the church kept in touch, and the church rallied round and came to visit and help where they could. Soraya was very dubious about getting close to Christians, and I would endlessly tell her that the test of being with people was how loving they were, not what name they gave to the Creator, whether it was Allah, Jehovah, God or Great Spirit. Their kindness eventually wore down her doubts.

It was election time, and they took her to a meeting of candidates. There, among the other men who swooned when they saw this exotic beauty in the little church hall, was a rich lawyer, well known for his good deeds, who made a bee-line for her. He courted Soraya, and wanted to marry her, but she was so brave that she refused because she didn’t love him. He never gave up, and was always there for her for the next five years. She made friends and did the things she had only dreamed of doing back in her poverty- stricken country. She even shopped till she dropped, found another house she preferred, and lived her life every minute of every day in between the debilitating spells in hospital.

When we moved to this place, I was too far away to stay connected, but kept in touch occasionally, especially when she was in hospital. Finally she did fall in love, and moved into a luxurious house, which gave her enormous pleasure. But the lawyer was still part of her life, and a few weeks before the end he took her to a grand party at Parliament House in Wellington. They ended up going to lots more grand parties, because someone else fell madly in love with her, and invited them to everything that was going. Soraya was in seventh heaven. In spite of all the pain and misery, she felt she was living a glamorous fairy- tale life. From a standing start she’d created this for herself in just a few years. In the photographs she blazed with happiness and joie de vivre.

Back home, she was on the last leg of her long journey. When she died, and Eugenie and all my family went to her funeral, held in the church which had taken her in, we found it was full. Her first husband was there with their daughter, and in one of the mysteries of life, told us how Soraya had been his best friend. His second wife was still in hospital having given birth in the same hospital as Soraya, on the same day that she had  died.

One by one each person told the story of their time with Soraya, and the elderly lady told hers, how this persistent social worker had rung her, and because she wouldn’t give up, finally she’d agreed to involve her church group. Afterwards I told her that I was the persistent person, not a social worker. The pastor was there, and was fascinated at having found the missing link.

I said to him sadly, that I always felt that I never did enough for her. You and everyone else, he replied. Everyone gave what they could, and then when they faltered, the next person was there in line for her;  each person told him they felt guilty that they hadn’t given enough, and yet what they had to give was perfect, and the timing was right for them and Soraya. He gave me peace of mind, as I’m sure he gave others.

Soraya was, and is, a reminder of the inscrutable mystery of every person’s life and how we can never know the meaning of another’s journey.  She was so vulnerable and frightened one moment, and in the next, so determined to wring the last ounce of joy out of life. She was infuriating, obstinate and single minded, and generous, gay and gorgeous. She faced her devastating challenges with courage and unquenchable spirit.  What magnificence.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

When I made the pear and almond tart the other day, I was disappointed with it. But the pastry, with no rubbing or rolling was all that I’d hoped for. This time I’m going to make it and use it for a tarte au citron, for my husband’s birthday lunch. This is the easy- peasy pastry recipe.

The trick is the melted butter. You need 125 grammes of the butter, and when melted and cooled, pour it into a bowl with 100 grammes of sugar,  two tablespoons of ground almonds, a pinch of salt, a few drops of almond essence and a few drops of vanilla essence or half a teaspoons of vanilla sugar. Stir to combine, then mix in 180 grammes of self raising  flour. Press out into a nine or ten inch tart dish which has been buttered and lined with baking paper, or buttered and floured. You don’t need to prick it or weight it. Bake at 180 degrees for about ten minutes, or until the dough is just slightly puffy and a very pale brown. Take it out and fill with your chosen filling, and bake as directed. Make sure there are no holes or cracks, or the filling will run out!

Food for Thought

I celebrate myself…

I am larger, better than I thought.

I did not know I held so much goodness.

Walt Whitman. 1819 – 1892   Controversial American poet, who served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

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September 2, 2012 · 12:46 am

Whales, Wine and Women

The plum tree outside the kitchen window is smothered in tiny pink blossoms. Yesterday bees were snuffling in it, scattering petals like pale confetti all over the steps and courtyard. Two monarch butterflies chased each other through the blossom, and a couple of tuis, ruffling their white neck ties, sucked the honey and plunged around from bird bath to plum tree, chasing each other in their  spring  mating games.

Today the tree is empty, but the wind has blown the blossom over the garden, so it looks like snowflakes, and the tree is like a lace veil hanging in front of the window. In spite of the cloudy skies, there is a sort of glow in the garden from the scattered petals and the light filtering through this tree. A couple of greenery yallery silver-eyes tweeting to each other are the only birds left, for a storm blew in over-night, and there is nothing now but the sound of the wind in the trees, and the roar of the breakers crashing onto the rocks in our little bay below. The water pours over the rocks like spilled milk, the bay is boiling with white foam, and the rain falls steadily. The spring flowers are beginning to push their way up, a few camellias, lots of cyclamen, some marguerite daisies, and a few roses on the scented Jean Ducher, which escaped the heavy pruning they had a few weeks ago.

Yesterday I picked two long pink sprays of cymbidium orchids, and two more heavily flowered gold and red orchids from the garden, and stood them in two separate tall glass vases. First I had to shake lots of tiny wood cockroaches out of the flowers, and catch the ones that made it inside, in my glass spider catcher to take them outside again. (The spider catcher is actually a clear glass vase with a stiff cardboard birthday card to slide underneath)

But best of all is the news which has sped round the village that some Southern  Right whales have been seen. They’ve been making their way up the coast, and were seen in the bay further south, and are now heading up towards the bay north of us – a mother, nudging her calf along on the journey. They swim very slowly, their top speed being about nine kilometres an hour, but with a calf, this mother would probably have been a lot slower. They tend to keep close to the coast, on their way from the Antarctic to the warmer feeding and breeding grounds around the Pacific, but tend to stay further south from us, so they’ve been watched with love all their way up the coast.

There are more Southern Right whales left than other species, and they can grow up to 59 feet long, and weigh 90 tons. Not much is known about them, but a North Atlantic whale was seen and recognised from her distinctive markings in 1935, 1959, 1980, 1985, 1992, and lastly in 1995 with a bad head wound, probably from a ship – which means that she was at least 70 years old at last sighting. I have a friend who as a little girl used to holiday in the bay next to ours. Her father was teaching her to row. She awoke one morning and looking out of the window, saw the bay was full of basking whales. She grabbed some clothes, ran down to the beach and jumped in the rowing boat. She rowed out to the whales and sat among them rocking in the water, until her father appeared and called her back in. I envy her that memory.

Whalers used to go for these slow moving creatures, who swam so close in, as they were easy to catch. At Lord Howe Island, where the whales had been travelling to breed for millions of years, they finally stopped coming after they’d been so savagely hunted in the 19th century. It makes me sad to think of it.

So this great Southern Right is a treasured visitor. I stand outside the french doors in the blustery wind, savouring the roar of the sea below, and wondering what other creatures of the deep are moving around there on the floor of the ocean, unbeknown to us. We haven’t seen our little pod of dolphins for a while, but popping in on a friend who lives overlooking another harbour, she told me she’d spent the whole morning watching them leaping and playing down below. So good news, they’re still around.

But the sad news for me – and our local wood pigeons – is that our loquat tree which grows beside our veranda, seems to have some sort of blight and the fruit haven’t set this year. I normally lie in bed and watch the huge wood pigeons- three times the size of the English wood pigeon – lumber in at the angle of a jumbo jet and sit chomping through the golden fruit, while the tree shakes with their exertions. The whole fruit slides lumpily down their bronze green throats and then sinks into their swelling white breasts. The Maoris, and then the settlers, used to eat them and catch them in thousands, but like the Southern Right whales, they too nearly became extinct, and are now protected. So no fruit for the pigeons this year. I try not to worry about what they will find instead.

But as I write this and the rain falls gently, and a blackbird bursts into song, I suddenly think to myself why do I worry?

I remember the exquisite words of the wonderful Indian mystic Kabir:

What kind of God would He be

If He did not hear the

Bangles ring on

An ant’s wrist

As they move the earth

In their sweet dance?

And what kind of God would He be

If a leaf’s prayer was not as precious to Creation

As the prayer His own son sang…    (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Omar Khayyam sang of a jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and Thou.  Well, I didn’t have Thou, but I had Friend at the end of a busy week, and I suggested the wine, the bread and some imported French camembert cheese (try not to feel guilty about the food miles) just for us girls (a metaphor). So out with the best crystal glasses, a good bottle of pinot gris, cheese at the perfect stage of melt and the warm bread, and we were laughing – the best fare of all.

Sometimes we threadbare gourmets just have to give it all away and put our feet up with nothing but the best.

Food for Thought

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realise that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.  Ronald Reagan at a conference in Los Angeles in March 1977.

He also said: You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans.      Very true if you know what you’re looking for!

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