Resilience and Gingerbread

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What builds resilience in individuals – and what diminishes the capacity for resilience? I’ve been thinking about this a bit over the last few weeks whilst trying to manage the turbulence that is life-with-puppies.

First of all, what is resilience? Well, it’s generally considered to be the capacity individuals have to cope with difficulties/stress, ranging from personal tragedy or trauma to issues at home/in the workplace, financial pressures or health problems. The more resilience you have, the better you are at rolling with the punches that life throws at you, dusting yourself off and carrying on.

Different people cope with similar situations very differently, and sometimes even those who appear quite resilient in one set of circumstances may be very vulnerable in others. However, experience and observation (very unscientific, I know, but there you go) has shown me that resilience is an attribute that can both be learned and expanded upon with use. The key seems to be to try to avoid being overly change-averse. Or, to put it another way, to focus on having a flexible outlook.

I’ve found that honing my capacity to manage change has in turn made me more able to notice and manage stress when it arises, to think positively and even to learn new skills. That, combined with support from loved ones and a good night’s sleep makes an enormous difference in coping with vagaries of life.

But building resilience takes work and, at times, it can seem insurmountably difficult to achieve. Indeed, after multiple dog dramas and two emergency vet runs in as many weeks, my personal resilience capacity sank to what felt like an all time low. It happens. But T and I managed to accommodate the dramas, move through the emotional responses and, if not bounce back, exactly, at least totter back from the outcomes.

And each time we manage to bounce back – no matter how slowly we do it – we’re better equipped to do so the next time something comes up. We’re building our resilience without even realising it. We certainly know where our local emergency vet practice is located now and that Thursday nights is their busiest time!

Today we rewarded ourselves for surviving another puppy-infested-drama-laden-week with… gingerbread. We all need to be looked after and sometimes self-nurturing is the most useful gift we can give ourselves. Today, that gift is gingerbread. Lots of tasty gingerbread. I feel significantly more resilient with every slice 🙂

Nik’s Gingerbread Recipe

I’ve made this gingerbread loaf countless times over the past 30+ years. It’s never failed to be soft, moist and absolutely delicious. It’s dead easy to make and freezes well – and if you slice it beforehand, you get to have a treat a day for as many days as there are slices. This recipe makes two medium sized loaves or one really big one. Plan accordingly 🙂

Set the oven to 180C (350F). Line two medium-sized loaf pans with foil; lightly coat the foil with oil/butter.

3 cups plain flour , 1-cup sugar (I prefer raw sugar, but use whatever sort you like), 3 teaspoons ginger, pinch of salt, 2 teaspoons mixed spice, 1 teaspoon baking power, 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda – mixed with 1/4 cup of water, 1-cup oil, 3 eggs. 1-cup golden syrup (or treacle, if you prefer – both work), 1-cup lukewarm water

Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl. Pour the mix into the prepared loaf pans. Bake for approximately 55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for about 10 minutes or so before turning out. Serve warm or cold – and with butter if you like it that way.

Note: if you bake this in one LARGE loaf pan (as I did today), then it’s a good idea to drop the temp to about 160-170 — it takes longer, but the top won’t get that interesting darker-than-dark shade and super-delicious crunchy bits 😛

Seven days in Perth

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As I worked through my exercise routine at the hydrotherapy pool yesterday, it occurred to me just how fortunate I am. This was probably spurred on by the presence of two young cerebral palsy patients, each with two carers assisting them in the pool. As I walked and cycled and did the rest of my exercises (unaided), I thought about how easy it is to whinge rather than to take stock of just how rich one’s life actually is. This then led me to consider when last I’d consciously enjoyed my week. The short answer was ‘this week’ – seven days of random things, excluding paid work. So here’s what I’ve been up to lately…

Weather guarding the fruit trees. This involved some compost, a lot of mulch and hard work. The first step was to lower the level of the garden bed in our mini orchard by about 15cm. Whilst that may not sound like much, I have many bags of sand that testify otherwise! There simply isn’t an easy way to get rid of sand when there isn’t ready access for a bobcat or other doggy-machine to do the work for you. It comes down to a shovel, determination and time. Once I’d finally reached the desired level (after mole cricket larvaemuch digging and bagging of sand), I decided it would be a good idea to add a little compost to enrich the area and to make up for having removed most of the topsoil.

This also sounds simpler than it actually was. It turned out that our compost bin was ‘enriched’ by a large number of creepy-looking mole cricket larvae. How the devil they got in there is a mystery, but I know exactly how they got out… I donned the gloves-of-protection, sifted through the compost – by hand – and removed them, one grub at a time. By the time I finished I was decidedly grossed out and very much in need of a shower to get rid of (mostly imaginary) bug residue. Himself very kindly took on the task of spreading the compost and then topping it with a thick layer of mulch. The trees look happy and we’re hoping they’ll have an easier time of it through the February heat.

Socialising. Finding time to spend with friends often falls foul of busy schedules. I’ve found that a way round this is to book what are, in effect, ‘play dates’. These can be lunch/dinner, a walk, coffee, a movie – any excuse to ensure that we can get together to catch up on nothing and everything rather than gradually losing contact. This week I went to a movie with friends, had people round to our place a few times and enjoyed a couple of hours catching up with a good friend over bagels, waffles and coffee. I did wonder whether being an informal DryAthlon participant this January would impact my social life – but it’s made no difference at all.

Harvest. In a moment of crazy late last year I planted out 12 basil seedlings. It was really for some fresh greenery in the garden at Xmas time, but I didn’t expect many of them to all survive the heat. They did. They all did. So this week was the first great basil harvest and pesto making adventure. The house smelled delicious and my freezer is now full of little boxes of pesto for later in the season when the plants have died back. I also took the time to strip our ruby blood plum tree – and to eat a goodly number of the plums. Not a huge harvest this year, so I won’t be making any plum jam – but I’m okay with that since we still have a LOT of various jams in stock from past harvests.

Convention wrap-up. As part of the organising committee for the 15th (very successful) GenghisCon, it was good to share the highlights with the rest of the crew at the final meeting this week. We also spent some time brainstorming as to how we can make the planning phase easier for the 2016/17 committee. Cunning plans are afoot.

Pet fud. A 6am run to the local meat markets on Saturday resulted in the purchase of 10 ox hearts, 2 ox livers and 18kg of beef mince. Later in the day the household vibrated to the sounds of the mixmaster with its mincer attachment going full tilt. Hearts are no problem – the flesh is very firm and easy to cut up and feed through the mincer. Livers, however, are slippery little devils and mince out to a meaty goo that’s seriously visually unappealing. (Just thought I’d share that visual image).

Our pet fud recipe is: 2 hearts, 1 liver, 10kg mince, 1.5kg sardines in oil – mix together (wear gloves!), then weigh out into 600g lots and freeze. Our pup currently gets 300g of this mix each day, along with her (soaked) biscuits and whatever veggies I have to hand. She’s loving it and the meat component costs us less than $2 a day. This time round we processed 105 meals, so it’ll be a while before we need to head back to the markets. Well worth the early morning and a couple of hours of production. Win.

(The rest of the meat was for DaughterDearest to turn into catfud – the process is essentially the same, but with the addition of various cat-specific dietary supplements.)

Veggies. A friend and I take it in turn to go to the wholesale veggie markets every 3 weeks or so. This wasn’t my week on, so I had the pleasure of having three boxes filled to overflowing delivered to the door. Our fridge is now pretty well stocked with delicious fruit and veg that will keep us going for the next couple of weeks. Happiness.

Having reviewed all that, it occurs to me that it’s often only by comparison (to the plight of others) that we appreciate the richness of our own lives, that we realise the value of our abilities and the strength of our relationships. Surely this isn’t best practise? Perhaps being more conscious of these things in the here-and-now, mindfully rather than habitually, could be a useful goal to strive towards this year.

 

Tomato passata flambé

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On job applications and personality tests, multi-tasking has generally come up as one of my key strengths. This is probably because my answers reflect that I’ve juggled family, multiple jobs, tasks, events, social commitments, study and community involvement reasonably efficiently over the years, managing to keep most of the balls in the air… at least most of the time.

So it came as something of a surprise to come home to a house redolent with the not-very-appetising aroma of burnt tomato after a recent evening out. It hit us as soon as we opened the front door – the cloying smell of what I instantly knew to be tomato passata gone horribly wrong.

Essentially, passata is just fresh tomato puree. All you need is an abundance of Roma tomatoes and an equal amount of enthusiasm. The first step is to wash and check the tomatoes, removing any dodgy bit, and then to blanch them in hot water to soften the skins. Since I generally look for shortcuts, I tend to leave out the blanching part and simply cut them in half before bunging them into my stockpot. On goes the lid, gas down as low as it’ll go and set the timer for about an hour.

Of course, if I had a lovely electric tomato press I probably wouldn’t cook the tomatoes. The great thing about a tomato press is that it’s quick. It also has two exit chutes: one for the chunky bits (skins and pips) and one for the tomato slush. This would mean I wouldn’t end up having to cook, reduce and sieve before preserving. Shani Gramham ran a passata-making session a couple of years ago at the Less-is-More Festival and demonstrated using a tomato press. I’ve lusted after one ever since.

Shani Graham passata demo 22Feb14

Anyhow, having reached my one-hour breakpoint, I usually remove the lid, give the tomato goop a quick stir and then reset the timer for a similar amount of time – but this time I leave the lid off in order to reduce the goop to a suitably passata-like consistency. Then it’s really rinse-and-repeat: I check the goop regularly, stir occasionally and enjoy the smell of slow cooking tomato whilst getting on with something else. This takes several hours, but I think it’s worth the wait.

At this point most people would immediately pour their passata into sterilised jars, seal them and then boil the jars in a canning pot to preserve the puree – or use a fowlers vacola to do the job, if they happen to have one.  I seldom make enough to make all that rigmarole worthwhile. Instead I squish the goop with a potato masher, not bothering  to sieve it, then pop it into half litre plastic containers. Once it’s cool, I put some in the fridge for immediate use and rest of the containers in the freezer. This is a very effective way to preserve the passata, assuming you have enough freezer space.

My last tomato cook-a-thon turned out slightly differently. When it got to the reduced enough stage, we went off to the movies instead of portioning the goop to into plastic containers. I reckoned it would be cool by the time we got home and I could just do it then…which is how the flambé part came about.

Note to self: muli-tasking fail; next time remember to check that you’ve TURNED THE STOVE OFF before rushing out the door!

(At least I managed to salvage the pot – thank goodness for good quality stainless steel and determination.)

Reverse Advent

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Did you know that at least 13.9% of Australians are living below the internationally accepted poverty line?

I didn’t.

Nor did I realise that, on any given night, 1 in 200 people in Australia are homeless and over two million people are dependent on food donations in order to survive.

That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of people with little or no food and very little hope.

Various relief agencies try to plug the gaps and provide help where they can. But, in order to do this, they need help from government, corporate sponsors – and from the community.

Providing some food for people in need is something practical and tangible that one can do to help. So this December I signed on to take part in a ‘reverse advent’ activity. It works on the simple premise of counting down to Xmas by giving rather than receiving. Participants set aside a box and then add a non-perishable foOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAod item to the box every day up to and including Xmas Eve.

Individuals or groups involved in the food drive were encouraged to source a local charitable organisation (homeless shelter, women’s refuge, etc.) that would be willing to receive their food donations. We would then each individually trot off and deliver the (filled) box to our chosen charity on Xmas Eve.

A brief hunt around on the Internet and a few phone calls made me realise that this wasn’t really a practical option. It turns out that most organisations need the food at least a week before Xmas. This allows time for sorting, assembling the care packages or hampers and getting them to those in need.

I acknowledge that there are those who believe that donating money to charities is more worthwhile than donating food – and I encourage those who wish to make donations to do so. However, I have some personal reservations about the overheads that many such organisations have in terms of premises, staffing and advertising. In some instances not much of my paltry donation actually appears to get to the people that I’m concerned about.

But a tin of soup (or whatever) is a tangible item, a consumable that I think someone will be able to put to good use – perhaps to feed one meal to one of those million hungry children in Australia. It also speaks directly to the notion that food is a central concern for all humans – but that not everyone gets to eat every day.

Given all of this, I decided that what I needed was to find was a ‘gatekeeper’ – an organisation that acts as a central repository for foofoodbankd donations. Food Bank WA  fits the bill perfectly. It’s a not-for-profit, non-denominational organisation that facilitates food distribution to the needy.  It has relatively few staff members, but a very large cohort of volunteers – which adds to my general feel-good vibe.

This week DaughterDearest and I took a drive out to the Food Bank to drop off our filled boxes – and it felt good to be part of a solution, however small a part it might be.

We were invited to have a look at the facility and I was amazed to find just how comprehensive a service it is. Food Bank not only receives food, often saving pallets of tinned food from going to landfill (!), and acts as a clearing house by supplying numerous charities with food packages for those in need – it also has a commercial kitchen.

This is where some of the volunteers process and cook excess fresh produce that’s donated by businesses. For example, tomatoes are turned into pasta sauce. The freshly cooked food is then snap frozen and organisations are notified that ready-to-eat meals are available for pick up. How good is that?

We came away feeling inspired. Indeed, sufficiently so that I’ve decided to run quarterly food drives next year.

So, for anyone who’s interested, all you’d need to do is buy one extra item each time you shop. Then drop it off in the donations crate at my place next time you visit – or let me know and I’ll swing past to pick things up. Your contributions can remain anonymous if you prefer, or I’ll acknowledge them when I make the deliveries.

If a few people join in and donate an item each month (or week) and to the collection, we should have a good-sized box to drop off Food Bank by the end of March 2016.

Just think about it. Warm and fuzzy feelings will abound,

food appeal poster

Tupper-rant

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Early this year I attended my first plastic-novelties party (as my family so charmingly calls them) in over a decade. At the time I was very interested to see how popular Tupperware still is – or is again. Whilst it certainly is both a reliable and attractive product, does that warrant the cost? Does Tupperware work hard enough to keep their market share?

Despite some ambivalence on these questions, I recently found myself inviting 20 or so friends over for a demonstration of the new summer range. We watched the young demonstrator prepare and bake a (delicious!) one-cup coconut and sultana slice, which cleverly showcased the new baking range and promoted it rather effectively. However, since I’d hosted the demo as a favour-for-a-friend, there was no pressure to purchase anything – and this may have added to the relaxed ambience. It turned into a pretty rowdy afternoon of chit-chit, tasty treats and amused reminiscing over past Tupper-experiences.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA few people had taken the opportunity to bring along damaged items for replacement, but found out that this is now all done independently by customers online. The process sounded pretty straight forward so, bright and early on Monday morning, I duly went online to arrange replacements lids for a couple of my storage containers. Both are fairly venerable and the lids have developed small cracks in the corners, an eventuality covered by the “famous lifetime guarantee”.

What actually transpired was an enormous amount of dissatisfaction, time-wasting and heightened levels of irritation. I ended up sufficiently irked to compose a letter about the new “improved” replacement policy on the lifetime guaranteed goods and to email it off – still in high dudgeon.

Screen Shot 2015-09-28

After four days of no response, I did indeed turn to social media. I tried commenting on Facebook and also adding comments where other people, similarly irritated and dissatisfied, have voiced their opinions. Still no response.

Screen Shot 2015-10-02

If anything, the company seems to be doing a great job of devaluing a brand that’s worked effectively for decades (despite increasing competition in the market place) and alienating long-term customers. This is, at best, shortsighted.

If you’re of a similar mind on this topic, you could trying adding your voice to those already out there by putting a message up on the visitor comments section Facebook page – and by scrolling down and LIKING the relevant comments from others.

It’s time for Tupperware to earn their market share, rather than assume it’s secure.