Soul Food

Warm Spring Asparagus Salad

Jo — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:38:09 +0000

After a lengthy blogging break, I realised I need to write again and a recipe that I prepared last night for dinner seemed an ideal entry back in to the blogging game. We’ve recently signed up for a veg box to be delivered fortnightly by Riverford and this week brought some delights including the first spring asparagus, some red-ripe tomatoes and big, beautiful portabello mushrooms. I’d been toying with the idea of asparagus with egg but wanted to use more of the vegetables I had at my disposal so I invented my idea of a fabulous warm salad. Here it is:

Ingredients:

a bunch of asparagus, washed and trimmed (cut off the woody part at the bottom of the stem)
a handful of new potatoes scrubbed clean and cut into bite size chunks
2 large portabello mushrooms, sliced
6 small ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 eggs
a packet of pancetta cubes (about 80g)
olive oil
salt and pepper
french vinaigrette
baguette
butter

Heat the oven at 200 degrees celsius and in a bowl , coat the potatoes in a spoonful of olive oil, then put in a roasting tin and transfer to oven. Let the potatoes roast for about 20-25 mins before adding the washed and trimmed asparagus to the roasting tin for a final 10 minutes. Meanwhile, in a non-stick pan, gently fry the pancetta cubes and mushroom slices until the bacon is crispy. To keep these warm whilst you prepare the eggs, tip them over the roasted potatoes and asaparagus in the roasting tin and keep in the oven. Heat some oil in the non-stick pan and fry the eggs until cooked to your preference. On two plates, assemble the salad with potatoes, asparagus, mushrooms, pancetta and tomato creating a bed for your fried eggs. Season with salt, pepper and pour over some vinaigrette to taste. Serve immediately with crusty buttered baguette.

Hope

Jo — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:43:52 +0000

How do we have hope when all around us seems so hopeless?

I am really wrestling with this sense of hopelessness. It’s mainly to do with my disappointment in myself and other Christians.

In knowing the power of Christ and his transforming grace, we naturally assume Christians will change to be more like the Lord they follow. We know we have been renewed. But what happens when we discover that Christians are the same as ‘everyone else’? Or we find we have not escaped the sins that bind us, we are those whose lives are scarred by sin and the transformation Christ has begun has stagnated. How can we tell the gospel to those who don’t know it when we find it hasn’t changed us at all?

I sound so fatalistic!

We are in the wilderness right now. It is easier to stumble and fall than to walk the narrow way. My guess is that holding faith and failure in tension is key. Let us acknowledge that human sinfulness will ever be present until the kingdom comes but let us believe too that God’s graceful redemption will overcome. We may not see it in our lifetime but faith in that redemption is truth and life to us. Hope comes from having the bigger picture, the wider perspective, the God-lense. No matter what, He is faithful and He calls us to remain steadfast in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

“Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Grilled peaches with vanilla ice cream

Jo — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:01:23 +0000

A simple summer dessert for hot days…. I’m reminiscing about the past weekend when the sun shone so brightly, we sat in the garden for all our meals and sunbathed. We ate these as we lit the chiminea and the sun set. On the Sunday we even went rowing on the river!

Grilled peaches with vanilla ice cream

4 peaches, sliced in half and de-stoned
low-fat margerine
4 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

Preheat the grill and place the peach halves onto a baking tray. Smear a knife-ful of margerine on the top of each peach, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and then pop under the grill for 8-10 minutes until the tops of the peaches are soft and caramelised. Serve with a lovely creamy vanilla ice cream such as Mackays or Haagen Daaz.

After the sun on Sunday, on Monday, you know it’s time to go back to work when the sea fog engulfs the horizon and it starts spitting! I do long for a proper summer here in Britain….

Looking for inspiration

Jo — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:41:29 +0000

I keep writing posts and then deleting them, too overwhelmed by what I could write about and the rubbish ramblings I perceive pouring out from me. And the longer I leave it, the more isolated what I had to say seems. Then I’m too late to write about one thing and my attention drifts to the next thing. I think its the artist at the drawing board syndrome – that whenever my fingers hit the keys I lose perspective…

So instead I’m going to write about what is encouraging and sustaining me right now. Books, blogs and places to retreat to! A lot of what inspires me at the moment is the theory and practice of living in community and living alternatively for God’s glory, as you will see.

The most recent book I devoured was ‘The Irresistable Revolution’ by Shane Claibourne. Shane comes from a community called the Simple Way in Philadelphia, a group who are exploring living out the Gospel in every arena of life. Read this book. In fact, here’s a chapter to get you hooked. He talks about resisting the culture that is so ingrained in us to look out for number one and to achieve status, financial security, comfort and teaches of a different way, that makes us turn to God and reach out to our neighbour in love and change the world. Jesus gave two simple commands – Love God and love your neighbour as yourself and Shane demonstrates in a powerful, compassionate way how we might fulfil those two commands. Whilst a student, he and his friends spent nights on the streets with the homeless and eventually moved into an abandoned church with a group of homeless families who were sheltering there because the local authorities would not find accommodation for them. When they were threatened with eviction, Shane and his friends stood by them and campaigned on their behalf and saw the families’ lives transform. From there, the idea of intentional community and supporting the marginalised and neglected blossomed into new communities being created. Shane also went to Iraq during the war, not as a soldier but as a human being, to stand in solidarity and pray with those who are suffering. You might think all these are very noble acts to do but it is evident in the book that the person most transformed by these encounters with God and his people, are not those Shane chose to serve but Shane himself. And isn’t that our goal? To have our minds renewed and our lives revolutionised to be more like Christ?

The Livelightly Tour is a blog I’ve been checking avidly recently. I started out reading Sara’s blog Walk Slowly Live Wildly and heard about the adventure they planned to convert an RV to use veggie oil and to travel trhoughout the states to promote compact, sustainable, environmentally friendly living. On the way, Sara experimented with a raw food diet and is now offering coaching to people for achieving a 100% raw food diet as well as her fabulous photography skills as a means of keeping them in pocket whilst they travel. Theirs is an inspiring story of trusting God for his provision and reaching out to people in love. It gives me itchy feet to read each post and see all the wonderful places they’re going to and people they meet.

Last month I also went away for a retreat, full of intrepedation. As an blatant extrovert, my preconceptions of the experience led me to believe I’d be made to sit and suffer in silence. So you can imagine my surprise when I rolled up Nether Springs, the Northumbria Community’s house, walked in to the kitchen and found Bekah at the big AGA stove who prepared me a cup of hot water, chatted to me about all manner of things and then showed me round the grounds and house. The weekend I spent there was the most relaxing time I’ve had in a long while, with space to pray, good food to eat and company to chat to if I so desired. The rhythm of the day was based on four set prayer times – morning, noon, evening and compline. You could do tasks around the house and garden, you could spend time in the tiny chapels or poustinia (a desert fathers-esque space with no windows or distractions – just you and God). I came with an agenda with God for him to sort out but he got straight to business with what he wanted to deal with in me. I painted pictures, I pruned a bush in the garden and I read some great books. I came away inspired, rested and eager to see God in all things. If you can get the opportunity to go on retreat, I can highly recommend it. It is rare to take time out of our routine or avoid distractions to seek God but the benefits are enormous. God longs for us to do this, Jesus did it too! I want to make going on retreat an annual priority.

I’m incubating ideas at the moment of how we live in community and how to achieve a daily rhythm of prayer and alternative ways of living…. I’ll keep you all posted.

Pork Meatball Curry

Jo — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:40:50 +0000

This is a pretty healthy, flavour packed dish that at first glance looks like a lot of work and ingredients but as long as you have a food processor, you’ll be fine! I often make up a batch and freeze half the meatballs and half the sauce to save for another day. I first saw it on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and it’s Bill Grainger’s recipe. I have adapted it slightly and I make it milder cos Dave doesn’t like spicy food so much.

For the meatballs:
500g Pork mince
1 tsp fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 red onion, halved
fresh coriander, chopped
1 egg
handful of breadcrumbs

For the sauce
1 tsp fresh ginger finely chopped
2-3 tsp of thai red curry paste
1 tin of half fat coconut milk
250ml-300ml chicken stock
4-6 tomatoes cut into chunks
fresh coriander, finely chopped to serve

Preheat your oven at 200 degrees celcius. Put the pork mince into your food processor with the onion, ginger, bread crumbs and coriander. Whiz these up until the onion is chopped finely and the meat seems to ‘merge’ with the other ingredients – this should only take a minute or two. Add the egg to bind the mixture then using your hands, form the mixture into meatballs. At this point I put half into a tupperware container to freeze. Place the meatballs on a greased baking tray and into the oven to bake for 15-20 mins until golden. Meanwhile, put the ginger and curry paste in a large frying pan and heat gently. Add the chopped tomatoes and then the coconut milk and chicken stock to reduce. When the meatballs are baked, add them to the sauce and leave them to simmer for 10-15 minutes. Serve the meatball curry with steamed basmati rice and sprinkle with the fresh coriander – delicious!

Walking with Jesus this week

Jo — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:28:31 +0000

I started to write this on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and the most dramatic week in the Christian calendar. That morning we went to St Nic’s with Dave’s family who were visiting and heard David Day speak about walking with Jesus to Golgotha. Due to the church’s commitment to preach the gospel of Matthew and be able to preach on the passage about the resurrection next sunday, instead of the usual Palm Sunday jubilation, our focus was shifted Matthew 27 and to the mockery of those who viewed Jesus on the cross. David spoke of two angers that compelled people to shout out against Christ then and today. It was eyeopening to see the anger in the characters of the bible transposed to modern culture and modern people. As church seems become more prominent in the media, the bile heaped upon it by secular society increases and as David outlined, there are reasons for the anger.

The first type of anger or revile for Christ he touched upon comes from a fear of what Jesus might do. People instinctively seem to know Jesus has the power to change lives; when we first meet with him, he asks us to give up our old life and many are filled with the worry of how awful new life with him might be. (Some of their fears are not unfounded seeing the way that we Christians can behave!) In Jerusalem, at the time of the Crucifixion, there were the natives of the occupied land who fought for freedom from the Roman oppressors and natives who rather enjoyed the prestige and relative comfort the association with Rome afforded them. In comparison to today,we live in a society that does not have God’s kingdom or it’s purposes at heart and there are those amongst us who want to change the world by faith and others who prefer to let things continue as they are and be content with the status quo. Jesus challenges the comfortable, those who are too close bedfellows with the ‘occupiers’. When Christ offers the opportunity to recieve a new life it can mean relinquishing some of what this world holds dear and what has become to us comforting habit - he calls us to give up the excess, riches, that which causes us to sin so might grow in righteousness and holiness. When we commit to that acrifice, we allow God to come closer to us than perhaps we’d like and that is what angers people – they feel threatened by the Omnipotent God. David spoke of the Alpha course and the residential weekend away that happens towards the end of the course where the Holy Spirit is discussed. Nicky Gumbel apparently says many people ‘storm out’ of the session because of the intense discomfort they experience as the Holy Spirit draws near to them and they encounter the living God. I can totally relate to that experience – my first encounter with the Holy Spirit was a battle with wanting to run away and stay put, with all the things I would have to sacrifice if I pursued this faith running through my mind. It was one of those life-altering moments that if I had run away from it, I would have always been haunted by the memory. People deride Jesus because they fear what true life might entail.

The second anger that causes mockery is the deep disappointment that people, whether believer or not, feel with God. Be it an unanswered prayers, despair as the world around seems to be decaying or deep suffering, God is not all humans want him to be. The mockery stems from real anger with God and people can rage against him. We think of major disasters that have occurred in the past 10 years even ; the Twin Towers, the Tsunami, Darfur, the war in Iraq – so many people ask if God is a loving god, why does He let this happen? God is there but he doesn’t do what we’d imagined he might do, we cannot comprehend his ways and it is just too hard to trust Him. Even Christians who have some experience and understanding of God cannot comprehend his great mystery. And so we too join in the mocking, the scorn….

“If he really is the Christ, why doesn’t he save himself?”

Today is Good Friday and we come to the foot of the cross to observe in silence what Christ experiences. We hear the anger, we see the suffering, we even experience our own human weakness as we are tempted to disown him.

It is Friday but Sunday is coming. Thank God!

The fabric of life

Jo — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:17:07 +0000

This week has been about trying to make sacred space in my routine. Space for stillness, silence, repose so I might tune in to the signal of the Creator. My spiritual director suggested an Ignatian exercise of reviewing the day, looking for a moment when I felt most alive and noticed God at work in my life. Then last Thursday at the spouses group, Wendy led us in a Labyrinth style meditation. With thoughtful reflections and proactive instruction, the purpose was for us to journey into the Labyrinth, shedding the stresses of the day and heading towards a meeting with the Holy One. From that encounter, we returned outwards to share what we had experienced with others. At the end of the mediation, the stillness of the air, the quietness of the room meant that sacred space had been found and experienced. I still need to cultivate this practice into my routine, especially at work. With the constant demands on us for our attention, the white noise, the visual bombardment, the constant murmuring of traffic, computers, voices, stopping still isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. I find it so hard to see God at work in my day to day life. Yet I have seen in the Bible, God mysteriously moving throughout the backdrop of history, knitting together his purpose and so I know he must be present at work in my life. I love the analogy of textiles, God the weaver and life the fabric. I occasionally knit and the thing I find most satisfying is the thought of what I could create – me mirroring the delight of my creator, perhaps? I found this poem that speaks of the precious golden thread that God weaves through our lives; I don’t know who wrote it.

“My life is but a weaving, between my God and me,
I do not choose the colours, He worketh steadily,
Oftimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper, and I the underside.
Not till the loom is silent, and shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why,
The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver’s hand,
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.”

Food we throw away…

Jo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:18:34 +0000

Have been reading this really great article at Delicious magazine on how much food we waste and how we can prevent this by better storage and using up odds and ends. I find shopping and cooking for just one or two often means that a load of food is wasted because you can’t always buy smaller quantities as the supermarkets sell everything packaged up. It may also be that I am so scatterbrained that I can’t organise myself and discipline what I buy and cook! Anyway this article inspired me and gave me ideas to prevent waste. Last night I put it in to practice, using up tomatoes and salad leaves with this Linguine with prawns, garlic and tomatoes recipe and I cheated too (all the rage now Delia’s relaunched it and Nigella has ‘express’-ed it)! Instead of roasting the tomatoes before making the pasta dish, the night before I used Nigella Lawson’s Moonblush Tomatoes trick – I got her latest cookbook for my birthday. Putting the oven on to heat up to it’s highest temperature, I then chopped some leftover Pomodorino tomatoes and put them in a small baking tin with a sprinkling of rock salt, sugar and dried thyme. I drizzled olive oil over the tomatoes, popped the dish in the oven, turned it off and went to bed. Voila! the next day when I came to make the prawn pasta, the tomatoes were perfectly cooked and ready to stir in to the steaming pasta. And as I fryed the prawns in a little oil and garlic, I added the tomatoes and some leftover rocket, watercress and spinach salad that wilted nicely in to the sauce. It’s a pretty low fat tasty dinner too.

In her book, Nigella then uses these tomatoes to make a goats cheese and mint salad which looks fabulous. I’ll be giving that a try soon!

Choice

Jo — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:00:58 +0000

I am returning to the blog after a couple of months absence. Looking back through the posts, I’m taken by how much I’ve written and the journey mapped out thus far. It is a pleasure to write if at times, I hold myself in sharp focus and don’t like what I’ve written!

I have plenty of recipes to blog and plenty of news to recount but for now I want to tell you about a new book I’ve started reading: “Utopian Dreams: A Search for a Better Life” by Tobias Jones and in a paragraph he talks about handling the myriad choices we have today and here’s a quote that reaally struck me.

“The trouble is we are in a conundrum. In the stark words of Peter Berger, we’re presented with ‘an unattractive choice between thugs [fundamentalists] and wimps [relativists].’ Obviously anyone who doesn’t want to make a choice is automatically in the second camp. We seem to come to a dead end in which most of us want to be neither thug nor wimp but can’t see the alternative.”

It struck me because it reminded me of Christian faith and some of the contentious issues facing the modern church. How do we stay true to faith but live alongside and reach out to our society, to our culture? We cannot be black and white with answers to such issues as God is multi-hued. Yet to be vague or undecided is deeply unsatisfying for those questions and does not meet the need of a people hungry for God. We cannot be content with either. We need to hold our opinions and our responses in tension. We live with crumbs of the little we know now and the great expansive mystery of God. It is so frustrating to be human! One day it will all be explained, why we wrestle with our faith, our culture and ourselves. We live in the world where God’s kingdom has come and that is still to come.

1 Corinthians 13 verse 12 ”For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”

The Cost of Sacrifice

Jo — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:50:52 +0000

Many times you hear sermons about making sacrifices for the sake of the gospel and perhaps you nobly think ‘yes, thats what I want to do’. Then there comes a day when you are asked to make that sacrifice. Unprepared for making that decision to follow the path Jesus is leading you on, you are even less prepared for the aftermath; counting the cost. The personal heartache, the loss of all that is left behind, missing family and friends or the familiarity and homeliness of community, bereft of the identity you have carved for yourself, the impact of surrendering your wishes and desires; all these leave large imprints on the landscape of who you are, like a meteor crashing into earth or a bullet piercing flesh. To compare these feelings to a wound is apt, the sensations are alien, raw, sore, painful.

Recalling a speech of Tony Blair’s after September 11 2001 in which he said ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux. They will settle.’, these words encapsulate what it is I believe we are going through right now. Having changed our home, our city, our church, our community for a new place, a new challenge, Dave and I are experiencing the discomfort of being unsettled and are wondering about the choices we have made and what we are doing. We know we are where God has called us and in these moments of indecision, we look for reassurance. The words of Psalm 91 in a sermon on Sunday (by a marvellous preacher, David Day) were the quiet calming we need, when scripture puts a lump in your throat or causes tears to form in your eyes because God has shown you he knows about your suffering, he knows where you are and he is with you.

Psalm 91

1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. ^[a]

2 I will say ^[b] of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”

3 Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence.

4 He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,

6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.

7 A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.

8 You will only observe with your eyes
and see the punishment of the wicked.

9 If you make the Most High your dwelling—
even the LORD, who is my refuge-

10 then no harm will befall you,
no disaster will come near your tent.

11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;

12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

13 You will tread upon the lion and the cobra;
you will trample the great lion and the serpent.

14 “Because he loves me,” says the LORD, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

15 He will call upon me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble,
I will deliver him and honor him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him
and show him my salvation.”

David Day said these words are worth memorising for the long dark nights. Maybe this isn’t a long dark night for us, we know of friends and loved ones in far worse circumstances; these words, though, are light and life, hope and comfort for the present time.