Hasty Pasta Sauce for Busy People

 

Yes, I was running short of time again, and hungry. So I raided the fridge to create a quick and easy pasta dish. Has this happened to you? These days, I meet lots of busy people who understand hunger and haste, so I am sharing the results of my fridge-raid with you. I enjoyed my meal. I hope you like it, too.

Warning: this recipe is for one person. Double the quantities for two; or increase as desired.

Spiralli or other short pasta, for one or as desired

6 cup mushrooms

¼ red capsicum

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ tablespoon butter

10 baby Roma or cherry tomatoes

3 heaped teaspoons tomato pesto

Basil to garnish, if desired 

Cook pasta following packet directions until al dente. Peel, trim and slice mushrooms. Finely slice capsicum.

In a small pan, heat oil and butter; add mushrooms and capsicum. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 4 or 5 minutes until mushrooms are just soft. Add whole tomatoes and tomato pesto; cook, stirring, for 2 or 3 minutes. Check taste; remove from heat. Presto, sauce is done.

Serve mixed through hot, cooked pasta, garnished with fresh basil leaves, if desired.

A Blue Dragon of happiness

Lindy Walsh’s face lights up when she talks about her involvement with Blue Dragon, a charity helping to change the lives of at-risk and under-privileged children in Vietnam. Blue Dragon was founded in 2003 by Lindy’s friend Michael Brosowski, AM, and because of this friendship, which began at university, she has long been a supporter of Blue Dragon.

In December last year, Lindy took on a much larger role with Blue Dragon as Strategic Partnerships Manager, liaising with sponsors and donors. It’s a role she is clearly enjoying and she is particularly happy about her recent trip to Vietnam where she met people she describes as ‘incredibly welcoming and friendly’. At right, we see Lindy with a Vietnamese woman who offered her hospitality and friendship.

Lindy is one of only a handful of Australians working for the Blue Dragon charity organisation and the only one based in Australia. Of the 68 staff members in Vietnam, nearly all are Vietnamese, and this gives Blue Dragon an enormous advantage in its ability to tailor and target its resources to match local conditions.

Take, for example, their Step Ahead program to care for street children in Hanoi. Members of Step Ahead’s Outreach Team led by Vi, a bright young man who was himself once a street child, go out nightly to talk to children on the street and see that they have somewhere to stay. They come to know children individually and are able to network to find out about new arrivals in the city. Lindy says, ‘They say they have about 48 hours to find (newly-arrived) children before gangs or pimps pick them up’. Vi is seen below with one of the children he is assisting. 

When contact is made with a with a newly arrived street child, the first aim of Step Ahead is to try to reunite the child with their family at home – usually in the country – and seek to overcome any problems there. Many children are running away from more than poverty, also from complex family situations like violence, family breakdown, disability and drug use.

In cases where going home is not possible, Blue Dragon looks for a way to provide short-term accommodation. Each child is assigned a social worker who will look after their interests, help them back into school – if they are of school age – or, if they are older, help them to acquire skills and a job. Solutions are tailored to the individual needs of the child, but many street children find jobs as motor bike mechanics, fixing mobile phones or in the hospitality industry. 

Some find jobs at Blue Dragon, where eight former Blue Dragon children work. Ten children are currently undertaking an introduction to social work course with the idea of pursuing it as a career in the future.

Another effective Blue Dragon initiative is the Safe and Sound anti-trafficking program, which began five or six years ago. Blue Dragon workers became aware that traffickers were targetting village people and farming families in rural Vietnam. These traffickers said that they could offer the children job training and skills in the city. To the county people it sounded like a good offer. But it was too good to be true.

Once in the city, these children were taken to work in slave-like conditions in factories where they were locked in, made to work 16 or 17 hours a day, with no down time, and forced to sleep in rough conditions, often on the floor. Thanks to the concerted efforts of charities, including Blue Dragon, these appalling work practices are, Lindy says, ‘almost eradicated’ and Vietnamese labour laws have been changed.

Blue Dragon has also worked to ‘fireproof’ rural villages and people at risk from traffickers. Lindy explains, ‘We took children back to the villages and people were very distressed that this had happened. And we took a local policeman to see conditions in these factories and he became a strong advocate’ for change. Word of the problem spread effectively because the Blue Dragon representatives co-operated with the village and district committees who knew people in the area and were able to spread the information. It was another case of local knowledge helping solve local problems.

Lindy says that Blue Dragon also works to assist girls and young women who are trafficked over the border into China, where they may be forced to choose between marriage to a Chinese man they don’t know or to work in a tea house. Once in China, these girls can’t speak the local dialect, often don’t know where they are, and have little chance of escape. 

Lindy explains that sometimes, however, they can gain access to a mobile phone. ‘Normally, they phone their mother,’ she says, ‘and the mother can get in touch with the Blue Dragon rescue team.’

The Stay in School program supports 1,000 children in rural areas. It provides rice for families, pays school fees and supplies a backpack and school uniforms. After a student graduates, sponsors and new initiatives can help them with further study or work opportunities.

Founder Michael Brosowski has now handed over his CEO duties to Julienne Carey who, like Michael, lives in Vietnam and so is closely involved with the day-to-day work there.

Lindy, who holds an academic position at Macquarie University in Sydney, remains here as the Australian face of Blue Dragon, keeping contact with a network of supporters and sponsors. She loved her recent trip to Vietnam, calling it ‘a very moving experience’ and devotes a substantial amount of time to Blue Dragon because she says, ‘It gives me a real sense of purpose’.

The Blue Dragon website: www.bluedragon.org, provides statistics, details and information about Blue Dragon, including how to become a sponsor.

Chicken and Chorizo Casserole

There’s a chill wind blowing around my place, so it’s perfect weather for making a casserole. This Chicken and Chorizo is one I made recently, and it’s easy – I’ve told you I’m lazy. It’s my own variation on a very popular theme, with a hint of cloves and orange peel. I do hope you enjoy it.  Serves 4.

2 tablespoons plain flour

1 teaspoon dried mixed herbs

1 teaspoon dried oregano

4 chicken thighs, halved

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 chorizo sausage, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped

3 Pontiac potatoes, peeled, chopped

1 ½ cups red wine

½ teaspoon sugar

Pinch salt

2 cups chicken stock

1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

6 cloves

1 long piece orange peel

1 dessertspoon tomato chutney 

Sprinkle flour and dried herbs on a dinner plate; coat chicken in flour and herb mix. Heat vegetable oil in a shallow pan, add chicken, brown on both sides; remove to casserole dish. Cook chorizo in remaining oil in pan; remove to casserole.

 

Add onion and garlic to remaining oil in pan, cook 2 minutes, stirring; add potato to pan, cook 2 minutes, stirring. Add ½ the wine to vegetables, stir to deglaze pan; remove contents of pan to casserole.

To casserole add remaining wine, sugar, salt, stock, peppercorns, cloves and peel. Bring to boiling point; cover and simmer gently about 1 hour or until chicken is tender and potatoes cooked. Stir occasionally so it does not stick. When cooked, add chutney and check seasoning.

Serve chicken heated, topped with fresh herbs if desired, accompanied by steamed rice and a green vegetable.

Prue Thomson: ‘You might as well do something worthwhile’

What an inspiring person I’ve just been talking to. Prue Thomson’s face lit up when she talked about the young people she has helped over a lifetime of caring for those with physical disabilities, and those at risk from abuse and neglect.

Prue is one of the loveliest people you could hope to meet, and my photo of her, left, sadly far from does her justice!

We were in my home, sharing cups of tea and Anzac biscuits, and Prue was telling me she felt humble because she was about to receive a Medal of the Order of Australia, an OAM. It’s a deserved reward and, since we spoke, she has received it – on Tuesday, 29^th April this year – from His Excellency General David Hurley, Governor of New South Wales. She was among the first awardees in this April-May Investiture period and invited her grand-daughters, ‘the love of my life’, to the  luncheon that followed the ceremony. 

The award came because, ‘I helped design a tilting platform to lift a wheelchair’ so that special-needs patients would be on a level with their dentist, who could conveniently work on their teeth. The design was developed in collaboration with John Otago of the Western Australian Cerebral Palsy Centre.   

Prue was Dental Assistant Manager at the Cerebral Palsy Alliance in Sydney for 39 years, until retiring recently. Right from the start she applied herself seriously to the clinical work, undertaking special training, studying radiography and designing specific programs to help her patients to care for their teeth and gums. The tilting platform Prue designed with John Otago was taken up for use in hospitals and its success put new demands on Prue who explains, ‘We had to do sterilisation and infection control’ in the hospitals. Prue is positive about all the challenges her work brought saying, ‘I enjoyed it, and I saw little children grow into these wonderful adults who never complain about their adversities.’

OAM recipients are not told who their nominators are, but Prue guessed that they were from among colleagues at another charitable organisation she serves with. This is Stepping Stone House, a charity offering a safe, stable home environment to ‘at risk’ teenagers and young people aged 14 to 24.

She has served at Stepping Stone House for many years, going these days in an after-work role, talking to the young people, offering friendship, support and interest: the sort of loving care they lacked in their own homes. ‘I go in the evenings,’ she says, ‘and we cook a lovely dinner. It’s about being interested in them. We go to their Christmas parties and their birthdays.’

She mentions the success story of an abused girl who, encouraged by the support at Stepping Stone House, returned to school after dropping out, received extra tuition, worked hard and later graduated from university.

Although Prue has retired as Dental Assistant Manager at the Cerebral Palsy Alliance, she still goes there as a volunteer helping young children exercise in the pool; without a dedicated volunteer they are not permitted in the water. Prue loves the involvement. ‘It’s being able to see them get so much pleasure in the pool,’ she says. ‘The joy on the child’s face and the improvement she (‘her’ child, Annabel) is making in kicking.’  Prue keeps in touch, too, with some former clients saying, ‘I still visit a few of them.’

Prue Thomson has had her own challenges. She was widowed while still a young mother, but there are no self-pitying words about her bereavement and grief. She simply tells me that she went back to work as a pre-school teacher. There are no moans about the hard work of caring for her children: James was then aged eight, Penny was six and Scott only four. For extended periods of time, Prue also took care of the two children of her sister, who died from cancer as a young mother. Fortunately, in-laws in the country were able to help take the children for some of the time during holidays.

Prue says she ‘adores children. I only have to see small children and I melt.’ However, with youngsters at work and at home, after a time Prue began looking for a change. New work came as an assistant to her dentist in Macquarie Street: her initial involvement in dentistry.

A while after, she saw an advertisement for Assistant Manager in the dental clinic of the cerebral palsy charity – then called the Spastic Centre. To take up the job Prue enrolled at a major TAFE (Technical and Further Education) centre in Sydney, did the necessary training and studied radiography, and worked first in the centre in suburban Mosman and later at the larger Cerebral Palsy Alliance premises at Allambie Heights in Sydney.

These fruitful associations were not Prue’s only charity work. For years she was involved with a reading, comprehension and numeracy program in Marrickville West, another Sydney suburb, helping young children get the strong start in learning that would equip them to do well in school.

She is still involved in this work, though she has now moved to North Sydney Demonstration School. And it is still rewarding. ‘I love to see the improvement they make and the enjoyment they get knowing they are improving at reading and numeracy. It’s the confidence they gain, and confidence is so important,’ she says.

When I ask about Prue’s own motivation and how she found the confidence to overcome challenges, she puts it down to faith. ‘Faith, and wanting to help those poor little kids,’ she says. When I say sincerely that I believe she must be a strong person to overcome her own difficulties and achieve so much, Prue immediately refers to her mother. ‘You only pass through this life once,’ her mother told her, ‘so you might as well do something worthwhile.’

Chocolates? Yum!

 

At Easter I overindulged a bit after my daughter-in-law Michelle bought me a box of Belle Fleur chocolates: beautiful to look at and simply delicious to eat. Despite the French name, these chocolates are local from Belle Fleur’s Darling Street, Rozelle shop in Sydney, near where Michelle works. When I contacted the company, they promptly told me their story and sent the appealing photos you see here.

In following up, I caught a glimpse of a growing boutique industry in specialty chocolate making here in Australia; a promising cocoa-growing industry in Mossman in north Queensland; and a move towards the production of high-quality cocoa beans on the islands of Vanuatu. Yes, fine chocolates are becoming a ‘home and local’ product.

Let me tell you the story of Belle Fleur. Claire ter Heerdt was prompt in getting back to me to say that Belle Fleur is a small family business, started in 1984 by her father, Jan ter Heerdt. Jan had moved from Belgium to Australia in the 1970s and begun working in the restaurant business. His father, Bernard, would come to Australia on visits and show Jan how to make Belgian-style handmade chocolates. Jan left the restaurant business and started Belle Fleur in 1984. Now Claire has trained under him and become a fourth-generation chocolatier. 

Belle Fleur uses locally sourced ingredients such as wattle seed, macadamias and blue gum honey with the chocolate imported from Belgium.

At Koko Black in Melbourne there is a similar story of expertise and adventure. It began with the dream of Shane Hills to become a pioneer chocolatier and he moved to Solingen in Germany to learn the art of making chocolate from beans. Shane continued his quest in Bruges, in Belgium, where he met skilled chocolatier Dries Cnockaert. Dries was interested enough in Shane’s ideas to come to Melbourne to help him create the start of Koko Black’s signature chocolates. Their first chocolate salon opened in 2003 and has grown into a Melbourne enterprise employing 350 people. Koko Black recently moved to Sydney, with one of their salons in the beautiful Strand Arcade in the city. 

From Koko Black it’s only a short stroll past the Strand boutiques to Haigh’s Chocolates, an Adelaide  specialty firm of chocolatiers whose story goes back 100 years to when Alfred E. Haigh established the business on 1^st May, 1915. Not just a South Australian institution, Haigh’s are today Australia’s oldest and best-established makers of specialty chocolates, producing over 250 varieties.

Haigh’s are committed to sustainable cocoa farming and have become involved in improving the quality of cocoa beans grown on the islands of Vanuatu, our Pacific neighbours. Cocoa has been grown in Vanuatu for many years and the raw beans generally sold on the Singapore market for mass-produced chocolate. Now, with recent Australian involvement, Vanuatu growers are being introduced to farming beans to meet the requirements of a high-quality specialty market.

In north Queensland, too, cocoa growing is now an increasing specialty. Local farmers such as the Puglisi family have invested in trees and found cocoa ‘surprisingly quite easy to grow’. At the Puglisi farm adjacent to the Daintree forest, wild pigs used to be a problem in the sugar cane. But apparently the pigs have no interest in cocoa trees. 

People in north Queensland do, however. The farmers, already sugar cane growers, have invested in cocoa trees as they see diversification as an investment in the future. There has been early development finance from the Federal, Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australian governments and, initially, from Cadbury Schweppes.

Today, local growers have joined into the cooperative Daintree Estates and produce their own single-origin, estate-origin cocoa and chocolate, from beans fermented and dried on one of the estates. The growers are committed to sustainable farming and use local sugar and dairy ingredients in their finished products. The investment is already providing a boost to local Mossman businesses and communities.  A chocolate, anyone?

 

The meaning of Easter

 

Easter is the most important occasion in the Christian year. On Good Friday we mark the death of Jesus on the cross, and on Sunday, Easter Day, we celebrate His resurrection, His triumph over death. These events are so extraordinary they are almost beyond our normal, human understanding of how things should be.

The apostle John wrote in the New Testament section of the Bible that, ‘God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that all who believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ 

John was a fisherman in Galilee whose life was completely transformed by his meeting and following Jesus. John became a foundation member of the early church and one of Christianity’s great teachers. Indeed John is among the world’s most successful, most-read authors – along with Paul and Peter, his fellow Christian leaders.  

The quote from John that I used is my favourite, an older translation into English from the Koine Greek that was extensively used in the time of Jesus, 2,000 years ago. There are other translations, all very similar and all with exactly the same meaning.

They tell us that God loves us human beings so much that he took the extraordinary step of sending Jesus, His Son, to live a human life to teach us how he wanted us to live, to show us how by His example, and finally to die for us. Jesus took the punishment for our wrong behaviour (all of it!) – wilful bad behaviour that separates us from God – so that we can be reconciled to God and become members of His family.

Eggs, rabbits and all that

 

Phew … I’ve just read my way through a plethora of online information about Easter eggs and bunnies. There’s certainly a lot of choice out there.  And it’s clear that we people have seen eggs as symbolising new life, fertility and re-birth for a long way back into our history.

I read that engraved, decorated ostrich eggs dating back 60,000 years have been found in Africa. I also read that for thousands of years, Iranians and other cultures have decorated eggs at Nowruz, the Iranian New Year that falls on the Spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. My favourite example of ‘significant’ eggs is their appearance in the magnificent Etruscan murals in Italy, a legacy of the Etruscan settlements there.

Rabbits have been much-loved too. The stories that they are prolific little breeders seem to be well supported by respectable online data. And because rabbits and hares have large families of young in the spring, they too have become for us symbols of spring, birth and fertility.

It appears to have been a universal trend. Evidently, in Aztec mythology a god referred to as Two Rabbits represented fertility, parties and drunkenness.

Where did the Easter bunny come from? Well it seems to have been, at first, an Easter hare, with written references dating back to 1682 in Georg Franck von Franckenau’s work De ovis paschalibus. The Easter hare, I read, originated among German Lutherans as a creature that played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient at the start of Eastertide. A canny device! The hare apparently brought presents to the good ones.

There are no Easter eggs or bunnies in the Bible. The New Testament section of the Bible –which tells us about the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus and the foundation of the Christian church – has nothing whatsoever about them.

Although Christians enjoy a ‘choccy’ Easter egg as much as anyone, it seems clear that Easter eggs and the Easter bunny really come from our human love of symbolism, charming ritual and enticing things to eat. We seem to have brought eggs and rabbits into the religious festivities just because we love them.

It also seems that in various ways, Church tradition has indulged us in this. I came across a prayer for the blessing of Easter eggs, and church traditions around beautifully coloured and decorated eggs. I can still remember enjoying an Easter breakfast at home with coloured boiled eggs – thanks to red food colouring – that were much more interesting to eat with toast fingers than plain old, straight-from-the-carton eggs. A bit of symbolism? We love it.

The name Easter. I found quite a bit about this, too, while I was looking up eggs and rabbits. It seems that in most of the non-English-speaking world, this major Christian feast is known by names derived from the Greek and Latin Pascha.  

The English word Easter came into use with, or maybe about, the time of the venerated Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede (673-735AD) in England. It appears to derive from the Teutonic goddess Eastra (this is a debated spelling) and from thence way back to Queen Ishtar or Semiramis in ancient Mesopotamia. Maybe the name Pascha has something going for it.