a familiar path

It’s not an impressive Bible, this blue one of mine. In 2008 I lost my grown up Bible and needed a new one before I set out across the world. It needed to be cheap and small, and I saw this TruGrip Bible on the shelves of Koorong bookstore in Blackburn. It was $10, and thankfully they had this blue one because neon pink, green or orange would have been too much for my pride.

We have seen many things together, this blue book and I. The faux-I-don’t-know-what cover is cracked and ink stained, and to be honest, there is a layer of dirt that covers the whole thing. It’s special dirt, the dust from the streets of Ethiopia and Sri Lanka, moisture from English rain and Ukrainian snow and wrinkles from its place in my handbag as I wandered continents and countries, testing myself and testing my faith.

It is probably time for a new one, but I cannot give this one up. It held my tears, my laughter, my questions. It holds too much of who I am to let go. It was the one I turned to when Husband and I first met, the one I turned to when I didn’t know where to go; its pages comforted, guided, restored and redeemed. There is no magic “book” of course, and it was not even the Bible, but it was always Jesus, the Word made flesh as He made His dwelling in me through the bruised pages of my little, blue Bible.

We parse it these days, Husband and I, looking for a lifeline, searching for hope, something upon which to base our faith, the substance of what we hope for, the evidence of what we do not see. We are daily, moment-by-moment sustained by the words of life that we find it it.

Do not fear.

I came that you may have life and have it to the full. 

Your prayers have been heard.

Without faith, it is impossible to please Me.

reaching

We are reaching for the future
We are reaching for the past
And no matter what we have, we reach for more.
We are desperate to discover what is just beyond our grasp
But maybe that’s what heaven is for.  

- Carolyn Arends, “Reaching”

My life has been full of many experiences, many places, many wonders, but there is one slice of life with which I am totally unfamiliar – disease and the specter of death. I have never watched anyone close to me suffer from illness and never walked the path of letting go of a loved one. I think about this now as Husband and I stumble through this bittersweet path with his family as we wait each day to find out what will happen.

I have no big thoughts, only small faith, but an overwhelming thankfulness for that faith. How does one survive without God? I do not know. His comfort in this time has been immense, expressed through Word, flesh, Small One and time.

I read the story about Christopher Hitchens’ death last month, and what stood out to me was a statement he made in a different interview. It was related to how his belief in God changed as a result of cancer. He said,  ”No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises.”

I may be reading too much into his four word last sentence, but to me it said that there was a flicker of something inside of him that was willing to be surprised, willing to believe that maybe there could be something more to reach for than just himself. When I read that story last month, I remember feeling a grief in my heart and wanting so badly to be able to look at him and say, “Why don’t you let Him surprise you? He will do it.”

There aren’t many words from me today, and probably not many words this week. These are the unexpected curveballs of life, unexpected to us, but known by the One who knows all things, and he who knows all of us is holding all of us as we go through this. So we do keep reaching for healing, reaching for each other, reaching for what we hope for and desire, but more than anything else we reach for Jesus. For he is always enough.

good morning chai

My morning drink of choice is a glass of water. In the winter months, it’s a glass of water. When I am feeling the need to be extra healthy, it’s a glass of water and a green smoothie. I also load up on orange juice – a pregnancy craving that remains to this day – and every now and then, apple juice. But hot drinks? Not really my thing.

When I’m a guest in a friend’s house, I normally ask for water or when it’s cold, a mug of hot water. That request always receives a puzzled look. Holding something warm in my hands is a lovely feeling, but most hot drinks don’t charm me. Coffee and I are only friends if there is chocolate in it or lots of flavourings, but that’s fancy and so far I haven’t been able to do it at home (and right now Small One needs decaf). I drink tea – herbal – only because I feel like I have to. (There are some exceptions – I love Moroccan mint tea, and would drink it every day, all the time if I had a mint plant, but I have killed every mint plant I have ever owned. Digression.)

Chai tea is the famous Indian hot street drink, and given my Sri Lankan origins one might think I knew something about it. I did not. My sister and her friends in university introduced it to me when they started making chai tea on the stove in the evenings. This wasn’t the chai latte, mind you, the one you can get at Starbucks with warm milk and shots of chai syrup. No, this was milk warmed on the stove with real tea and lots of fresh spicy spices. Melbourne was a great place for good quality chai teas and lattes if you skipped them at Gloria Jeans and other chain-type places.

But one day I was introduced to a homemade chai concentrate recipe on the Pioneer Woman’s website no less. I’m not sure what a frontier woman in Oklahoma has going on with chai tea, which is perhaps an indication of how the western world has colonized this drink, but maybe it wasn’t her recipe to begin with. I found it on the Tasty Kitchen portion of her blog. The recipe is easy enough, but you will need some speciality spices. Do not take short cuts on the cardamoms and star anise, the cardamoms especially. It’s the essential chai spice, I would say. In fact – and I say this with zero research – I think chai tea, the kind sold on the streets of India, is made with masala spice and cardamoms and lots of sugar. Lots of sugar.

I doubled the recipe, which made for several bottles worth of concentrate, and I have been enjoying a mug here and there in the mornings. I left a few bottles in the fridge while we were away for three weeks, and the flavour intensified with time.   My water is still my first love, but the wonder of a steaming, spicy mug in my hands has been a winter morning pleasure of the past few weeks.

• Amazing Spiced Chai Concentrate   I followed this recipe, but I added more of the ingredients I know I like, so more cardamoms, more star anise, more ginger. I went easy on the honey because I could always add honey straight into the mug. One word about quantities – the most important thing for a tasty mug is the proportion of milk to concentrate. You want a lot of concentrate, so put that in first and add the milk slowly, tasting frequently to make sure you get the strength you want. This is the one downside of the recipe – you don’t get many mugs of chai for the amount of ingredients you have to use to make the concentrate. Maybe that’s because I like a strong-tasting mug of chai, but I would still say it is worth making once, to get a taste for the experience and then you would be able to tweak it in the future.

screen time

“How do you watch TV?” our visiting friend asked us after his quick survey of our apartment. Husband and I laughed. The answer is simple: We don’t.

My family first bought a TV when I was in grade 10, and Husband lived for the two years before we met without a TV. In our pre-marriage conversations about our future married life, we both decided against buying one. Don’t give us any medals. We live in a foreign country where programming is in French, German or Italian unless we paid for cable, and as attractive as the idea of watching the latest American dramedy dubbed in French might be, I am more than happy to take a pass.

I felt good about our choice, and especially now that we have a child, I feel even better about it. I used to whittle away so many hours in front of the television when I was in university. TLC Trading Spaces marathons anyone? I can’t remember most of the ideas and lessons I received from television, even the good ones.

It has been a year-and-a-half now since I started living without a television, and while I still appreciate not having one, it has amazed me the way our Macbook replaced the TV in my life. Before Small One’s arrival, I am sure that on some days I could have spent up to eight hours a day on the internet. Facebook anyone? It got so bad that I eventually limited myself to a day a week on Facebook as a way to limit my intake. I didn’t feel the way the Internet ate my time and energy then because I could still find time to do things. I could make excuses that I was reading on the internet after all – not passively absorbing information. And it was good information. Cooking! Crafting! Personal Growth! Spiritual Growth!

After Small One’s birth, I tried to maintain the same level of internet consumption as before. It was impossible. What was worse is that he noticed, I would say fairly immediately, when I was not paying attention to him but paying attention to the laptop. There are two things in our flat that have his attention immediately – the Macbook and our cellphones. There is no need for us to snap, clap or speak to get his attention. It’s like Gollum with the ring, the precious. He can even hear the sound of my fingers on our cellphone keys (with the sound off), and his head is immediately perked up looking around for the object of his affection.

So yesterday morning I made a decision. All of my free time in the morning when Small One is sleeping, I am going to spend on the computer (it’s around three hours), and I am going to do whatever I want. But from his lunch time on, even during his afternoon nap, there will be no computer time anymore. I’ll check my email again in the evening, but that’s it. We’ll see how this experiment goes. I didn’t do it yesterday. I still went on the Internet in the late afternoon, but it wasn’t as much as before. I also used his afternoon nap to cook four dinners, and I made baby food and grown up applesauce in the evening. That is significantly more productive than I normally am on a given Wednesday.

It is also worth mentioning that I took a shower.

lovely legs

Is there anyone in the western world who didn’t make a food-related vow, goal or resolution this year? I doubt it. And while I could go off on a tangent here about first world problems and how gratuitous it is to talk every year about how much less we will eat while large chunks of the developing world are dying to be able to eat more, I will instead share with you my three food-related goals for 2012.

To meal plan in a way that makes my life easier. To eat and cook more vegetables. To spend less on food and to not waste the fresh food we have.

This week is the first attempt at a bit of a meal plan. I am a planner and like to have a sense of where I am going each week, but I am also not a planner and like to change my plans as I go along. So we were supposed to have a smoked-mackerel fried rice type thing for dinner on Monday night, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I needed inspiration and went to the Jamie Oliver website, which was featuring this recipe.

I love Jamie Oliver and have several of his cookbooks. His recipes are always winners in my book, but my one frequent complaint is that he is expensive to cook. Lots of ingredients. Lots of exotic ingredients. Not so easy on the pocketbook. But I had most of the ingredients for this one in my fridge, and when I went to Coop that afternoon, chicken legs were on display.

What’s that, you say? Why is it special that Coop was selling chicken legs? Well. Friends. At the risk of complaining more about Switzerland, I’ll just leave it at this – Monday was the first time where I’ve seen chicken legs for sale alone at my Coop. Normally you can get the leg and the thigh together, and you cannot get just the legs even from the butcher. I have tried.  It’s entirely possible that different grocery stores here do sell legs or that different Coops sell lone legs, but this was the first time I saw them at mine. Please pause for a moment of silence in honor of yet another first world problem.

(Husband chastised me the other day about my comments related to Switzerland. “No tasty cheese in Switzerland? Really?” he said. To which I replied, “I meant Tasty, with a capital T, cheese – it’s a kind of cheese in Australia!!!” Yesterday he said, “Are you sure the pumpkin was from Switzerland?” which is a fair point, and Husband, I will check today.)

Getting back to my point: The presence of chicken legs at my grocery store on Monday evening was a clear sign to me that this was the chicken dish on the menu for that evening. So much for my meal plan.

I assembled the roast while Small One played cheerfully in his exersaucer, and put it in the oven to bake for an hour-and-a-half. Husband and I both liked it, and I have leftovers to eat for lunch today. This recipe will go into my regular meal file because I know that I could make it with legs and thighs if I am unable to find lone legs.

• Tender and Crisp Chicken Legs with Sweet Tomatoes   I didn’t vary one bit from the recipe except I added more chicken legs. The chicken legs did not become nice and crispy as Jamie promised, and in the future I might turn the heat up a bit at the end to get the chicken to become a bit crispier or I might even brown it on a pan before putting it in the oven. But overall, it’s an easy chicken dish that is refreshing – because of the tomatoes – even though it is a warm roast.