Busy week!

This week I am doing all I can to help youngest son before he returns to university, washing, ironing, proof-reading, shopping, all sorts of things!  I am loving every minute, and we will all miss him when he goes back.

To relax, I have been watching more Heidi Baker videos on Youtube.  This morning I have been watching this one called Riches of the Poor.  God is doing amazing things in Mozambique.

I recently bought this book.................

and yesterday I attempted Mushroom Risottioni.  It tasted very nice, but maybe wasn't too healthy, as there was a lot of creme fraiche in it, but we all enjoyed it nonetheless.  If you want to see a picture of it and have the recipe, you can find it here.  You'll have to scroll down a bit.  I doubled the ingredients to make enough for four people, which meant wiping 1kg of mushrooms!

Ta-da!

After a little break I am back in blogging mode, it has been so wonderful to spend time with my family.  Youngest son has been home for the holidays, and daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter Poppy came and spent a whole weekend here at Granny's house, how nice was that!

Thank you for your patience while I've been away!

So what have I been up to then?

Well here are two cardigans that I have knitted for Poppy, sorry they seem to be the wrong way around!

And here I am, enjoying a lovely cuddle with Poppy!

And another thing I have been enjoying in my spare time is watching Heidi Baker on Youtube

Heidi baker is such an inspiration to me.  She is a Canadian woman, married with 2 grown up children, they have been missionaries for over 30 years, mainly in Mozambique.  They feed hundreds of thousands of homeless children every day and have planted thousands of churches.  They also have a heart for England, and Heidi and her husband both have PhD degrees from King's College London.  Go on Youtube or itunes and you will find a ton of Heidi Baker teaching.  I am currently reading one of her books, 

It tells a little about their journey, and it is so interesting I can hardly put it down.  Do go on Youtube or iTunes and be blessed!

This afternoon we have enjoyed a chicken dinner, and a little rest watching an old episode of The Waltons.

Enjoy your day.

Does anyone speak potato?

I consider myself a fairly good linguist, as I am a fairly fluent French speaker, but try as I might, I cannot speak potato.

In the interests of growing a few potatoes on the patio, I have been doing a little research.  Now, I'm not thinking  of self-sufficiency or anything like that, just a sack of home-grown charlotte potatoes would be great.

But I am bombarded with potato-language like 'earlies' and 'second earlies' and 'maincrop' and 'chitting'. Is there a translation manual I could buy?   Or could my lovely, knowledgeable readers help me out?  I don't know how early and maincrop relate to a normal non-gardening calendar.

I really don't intend for this blog to become a book blog.  I want it to reflect everything that interests me, books, knitting, christianity, home, garden, everything, I don't want to specialise.  However I have read a really good book this week...................

It's a story about the bad old days of psychiatric hospitals, Esme Lennox is incarcerated into an institution at the age of 16, basically for being a bit odd, for not wanting to get married, and for not wanting to cut her hair. She ends up staying there for 60 years.  The story starts with her release, and her first taste of freedom.

The ending was a bit predictable and disappointing all at the same time, but that didn't spoil the book.

I am now in the middle of a very intriguing book called The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall....

about a man who decides to break away from his past, in his sixties, and live in a caravan on a big traffic island.  I've got a feeling someone really did that once, and died a few years ago.  Maybe that was her inspiration.  So far it is really good.  And it is in English, not potato-ese!

Book Talk

I have been reading a brilliant little book over the past few days, it was an early Mother's Day gift from my beautiful and generous daughter (who knows what her Mum likes!)

It is called 'Stop What You're Doing and Read This!'

It contains ten essays by writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith etc. about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken for granted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on our time and attention - and we are encouraged to make books one of them.

Here is an extract from the essay by Jeanette Winterson, one of my all time favourite authors.  

"To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time.  I don't think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime.  The total time of a book is more like uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon seim upstream to get home.

We have lost all sense of home - whether it's the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.

How can a book get me home?  It reminds me of where home is, by which I mean I am remapped by the book.  My internal geography shifts, my values shift.  I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am."

I might quote a bit more from this book on another day, I love it so much.  It reminds me why I need to read, and what reading does for us, how it changes us.  

There is also a very enlightening essay by Jane Davis of The Reader Organisation.  She initiates projects to get people reading aloud together.  She says:

"Read a poem alone and you have your own experience and imagination to touch the poem into life.  Read it with six others and you have six lives and six imaginations with which to inhabit this flexible human-shaped space."

I could go on and on, so I will restrain myself now and say buy the book, or better still, hope a loved one will treat you to it!

Braised Chicken Chasseur

I had a new recipe book of slow-cooking recipes from youngest son for Christmas, so I've been trying out some of the recipes.

The other day I tried Braised chicken chasseur.

It is supposed to take 1 3/4 hours and serves four, but I like to use my slow cooker and let it simmer for a looooong time, and I always cook up a double amount to save time on another day.

The ingredients stated in the book are:-

4 chicken legs (I used 8 chicken breasts)

2 tbsp olive oil

2 onions thickly sliced

250g/9 oz mushrooms

1 tbsp tomato puree

300 ml/half pint white wine

400g can chicken connsomme, or stock (I used good old oxo cubes)

3-4 fresh tomatoes, quartered

This Tesco market value vegetable stir fry is one of my kitchen allies.  It's fairly cheap, and I use it in heaps of things, sometimes I even use it in a stir-fry!  On their own, I don't find frozen veg to be great, but the secret is to combine them with fresh veggies, and then you really cannot tell the difference between the fresh and the frozen veg.

First I browned the chicken and popped it in the slow cooker.

Next I browned the onions, along with the mushrooms and some dried apricots and sultanas I happened to have in the cupboard.  I usually start off with a recipe as a guide, then I add whatever I fancy to make a concoction.  I also added carrots because I had a few that needed to be used up.

Then it was all popped into the big 6.5 ltr slow cooker.  Can you see his little brother alongside?  He only cost £9 from Tesco's a few months ago, and it is so handy for smaller meals, soups, sides or desserts.

And here is the finished result, with the fresh tomatoes added a few minutes before serving.  It was delicious!

And here are some of my recipe books, I love to flick through them and plan meals, although I often make meals up as I go along too, especially at the end of the week, when I have an odd assortment of foodstuffs to use up!

Books!

I just thought I'd tell you about some of the wonderful books I've been buying and reading lately.  Many years ago, when I was working in Africa, a colleague gave me a slow cooker book.  I have used this book many times over the past twenty years.  About a year ago, I lent it to a friend, who promptly lost it!  I forgave her, because she is a good friend, but I missed my book.  Imagine my joy a week ago when it turned up at a local charity shop for 30p!

I am so happy to have it back, in fact I think this one is in slightly better condition than the one I lost!

I also bought two books for 99p at another good charity shop.

"Wait for Me" is a wonderful autobiography written by Deborah Duchess of Devonshire, in her own words.  She is the youngest, and only surviving member of the Mitford sisters, and this autobiography gives a marvellous glimpse into her character and her life.

The other book, which I am currently reading, is "Just a Little Run Around the World" by Rosie Swale Pope. Her husband sadly died of prostate cancer about nine years ago, and in order to highlight the importance of early diagnosis, Rosie decided to literally run around the world, sleeping at night in a tiny bivouac at well-below freezing temperatures.

She is a remarkable lady, very inspiring.  She set off, running around the world, from her home in Tenby, on 2nd October, 2003, her 57th birthday.  She ran for four and a half years, non-stop, around the world by herself.  I am really enjoying reading this.

On my reserve pile I have The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell, which is a biography of the Mitford family. I don't know if I will like this as much as "Wait For Me", as it is not in their own words, but I'm looking forward to reading it.

I haven't watched much TV over Christmas, I have an extremely low boredom threshold when it comes to TV!  But I have spent some happy times curled up with these books.

Reading Miss Read

I have been re-reading this lovely book this week, A Country Christmas, by Miss Read, which always makes me feel all warm inside at any time of the year.

Here are a few words from the introduction:

     "Winter may not be everyone's favourite season, but of all the year's festivals Christmas takes pride of place, and has lost none of its magic.....partly because we hark back to the excitements of childhood Christmases but also because we look forward to renewing friendships and to taking part in the foremost of the church's festivals.

     But the fact that Christmas Day falls in the dreariest time of the year also highlights its impact.  We are usually in the grip of the winter's cold, early darkness, frost and snow, and all the ills that they bring.  Doubly precious therefore are our domestic comforts - a blazing fire, sustaining food, the comfort of friends and, at the end of the day, a warm bed.

(Google images)

     Outside, the winter landscape has a beauty of its own: bare branches against a clear sky, brilliant stars on a frosty night and perhaps a swathe of untouched snow.  

But these beauties are best when seen from the comfort of one's home, with a good fire crackling and the smell of crumpets toasting for tea.

(Google images)

     That is the charm of the winter season, the contrast between the cold and the warmth, the light and the dark.  I hope that you will enjoy Christmas and the wintertime in the book before you.      Miss Read, 1991. 

Doesn't that make you feel all warm and cosy inside?!

Enjoy these wintery days, with their own special beauty.

Indoor Barbecue

Here at Letters From Home, we are not really into barbecues.  In our part of the world, it is rarely warm enough to actually eat outdoors, at least that's how we feel.  So this weekend I have discovered I can do barbecue food, kind of, in my trusty slow cooker.

  

It was so delicious, I want to get it all down here before I forget what I did!  

Firstly, I browned some veggies, 2 onions, a sliced red pepper, 2 sliced courgettes, some sweetcorn.  I put all the browned veggies into the slow cooker, then I browned 8 sliced of pork fillet.

This meal was to serve 4 people, but I usually cook a double amount and chill or freeze half of it for another day.  I love the fact that I only have to cook about 4 times a week!

I placed the pork on top of the veggies.  I find that slow cooked meals always work best when the veg is at the bottom, otherwise the meal cooks well but the veg can be a little undercooked.

Then I heated about half a jar of barbecue sauce in my pan, along with a can of chopped tomatoes and a can of vegetable soup (Sainsburys cheapest, about 17p a can, probably not very nice taken as soup, but fine in the slow cooker.

I then tipped this sauce mix into the slow cooker, and switched the cooker onto High for about an hour, the length of time it took me to get ready to go out to lovely Stratford upon Avon for a shopping trip.

Then just before leaving the house, I switched it to Low.

About 5-6 hours later, i.e. the time it took us to go to Stratford, buy a new dress at Laura Ashley, some new shoes, have a coffee at Cafe Nero, just next door to Shakespeare's birthplace, etc. etc, I arived home and boiled up some rice and peas and served this with our "Barbecued Pork".  

I had never cooked meat in barbecue sauce before, I just used Sainsburys own brand of sauce, and it tasted absolutely delicious.  

That was yesterday.  Today, we came home from church and ate the rest of the barbecue pork sauce with pasta, which was nice and quick and just as delicious.  You could serve this with salad and crusty bread, maybe with a little crème fraiche on top.  With a little imagination you could do all sorts of things, maybe some tortilla chips alongside would be nice.

Here is the dress I bought from Laura Ashley.  There was a 25% discount on all clothes, so it was a bit of a bargain, although as I usually buy a lot of my clothes from charity shops it still seemed quite expensive, but it's beautiful and comfortable, and I'm sure I will wear it a lot, so well worth it.

 

We are all on tenterhooks here at "Letters", as we are expecting the birth of our first grandchild any time in the next week or so.  You can imagine how excited we all are.  This baby will create two new parents, four new grandparents, and three aunties and two uncles!  I'll let you know when we have some news.

I am currently reading The Book of Margery Kempe, the oldest known biography written in the English language.  I hadn't chosen it, it is a set text for my son's English Literature degree for this year, so I am reading it before he returns to university, and I am enjoying it immensely.  She was a Medieval Mystic, who had an extraordinary life.

I'll try not to leave it so long before my next post, although the new term starts at the University next week, so that means I will be back at work, but I am looking forward to meeting new people and taking on new challenges.

Enjoy your weekend!

London riots and other musings

Please join with me in praying for London and other cities that have been affected this week by the riots.  I have family living in London, so I am praying for their protection, and for all those that have already been really badly affected.  Our God is a God of peace, not of disorder.  Lets pray that peace will prevail.

Yesterday, youngest son and I went here.

This is a wonderful 'book farm' in the village of Astley, in Warwickshire.  They have a cafe, which sells delicious cakes, served with cream, strawberries and blueberries on the side, and very reasonably priced.  They have a 'ten bob barn', where they sell many books for 50p.  I bought this book

It is called 'The Pleasure of Reading', edited by Antonia Fraser.  I already have a copy, and it is one of my favourite books ever, but this one is for my son to take to Uni with him.

I have read some brilliant books this summer.  As well as Influential Women by Wendy Virgo, which I have already written about, I have read Family Life by Elisabeth Luard

'Room' by Emma Donaghue, which is an incredible book, dealing with a potentially depressing subject in a life-affirming way,

and Once Upon Another Time by Jessica Douglas-Home.

This is an amazing book that I found in an Oxfam shop in Whitby while on holiday.  It describes the author's secret life behind the Iron Curtain in the last years of Communism, when she carried books, materials and hope to dissident communities.  It is fascinating to read how the cultural life of the dissidents was kept alive, despite many privations.  I have read similar books about people smuggling Bibles into these same countries during that period, but this is a different angle, and shows how important it was for people to keep reading, learning, exchanging ideas, and listening to their music.  

For me, I love to read your blogs, to learn, to be inspired and entertained.  Have a great day, and keep writing!

(Terry and Wendy Virgo)

I am currently reading 'Influential Women'  by Wendy Virgo, which is a really good read.

And I am delighted to discover that Wendy now has her own blog called The Wendy House.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

I know it's been a while since I signed in, but I am enjoying reading all your posts!

This weekend we are having some new friends over for Sunday lunch.  They have been working as missionaries in Cambodia for the past seven years, so it will be lovely to get to know them better, and hear about their work, and their hopes for the future.

Hope you all have a good weekend, whatever you find yourselves doing.

Everything stops for tea!

For the umpteenth time, I find myself re-reading "Gossip from Thrush Green" by one of my favourite writers, Miss Read.  Here are the first few paragraphs of the book..........

In far too many places in England today, the agreeable habit of taking afternoon tea has vanished.

'Such a shocking waste of time', says one.

'Much too fattening a meal with all that dreadful starch', says another.

'Quite unnecessary, if one has had lunch or proposes to eat in the evening,' says a third.

All very true, no doubt, but what a lot of innocent pleasure these strong minded people are missing!  The very ritual of tea-making, warming the pot, making sure that the water is just boiling, inhaling the fragrant steam, arranging the tea-cosy to fit snugly around the precious container, all the preliminaries lead up to the exquisite pleasure of sipping the brew from thin porcelain, and helping oneself to hot buttered scones and strawberry jam, a slice of featherlight sponge cake or home-made shortbread.

Taking tea is a highly civilised pastime, and fortunately is still in favour at Thrush Green, where it has been brought to a fine art.  It is common practice in that pleasant village to invite friends to tea rather than lunch or dinner.....people can set off from their homes in the light, and return before dark, except for the really miserable weeks of mid-winter when one would probably prefer to stay at home anyway.

Big sigh.........don't you just love those Miss Read books!  I'd love to move to Thrush Green, but apparently it's not real!  We can all dream though, can't we.

My favourite tipple is Redbush Tea, because it is naturally caffeine-free, and has less than half the tannin of black tea, and, what is more important, I love the taste of Redbush, although I love Earl Grey too, especially when it comes from Bettys.  I have already told you about their wonderful tea-rooms here.

I also enjoy making cakes, and my most basic, simple cake recipe, which I bake most weeks is an old recipe passed on to me by by mother-in-law, many, many years ago.  I double up this recipe for an 8" round cake tin, and I usually make 2 cakes at a time, so I quadruple everything!

8oz self-raising flour

quarter teaspoon of salt

4oz margarine

4oz sugar - I always just use granulated, or brown

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of milk

6oz mixed dried fruit

1.  Place flour and salt in a bowl, rub in the margarine.

2.  Add the sugar and the fruit.  Beat together the eggs and the milk.

3.  Mix all together to make a soft consistency.

4.  Place mixture in a greased tin.

5.  Bake in a moderate oven (Gas mark 4) for 1 1/4 hours.

If I want to make a more moist version, I add an extra few ounces of margarine or butter.

I do all sorts of variations of this.  For a yummy chocolate chip cake, I add a few ounces of cocoa powder to the flour, and buy 3 bars of cheap supermarket chocolate, and roughly chop them up and add to the mixture instead of the fruit.

To decorate this for a birthday party, I can't be bothered with icing, so I cover the cake with melted white chocolate, and before it sets I cover it all in dolly mixtures and smarties, adored by adults and children alike in this house!

Enjoy your tea-time!  We really do need these special oases in our lives.