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.)

Suffragette

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On the way home in the train this week I noticed a poster advertising a local university. The headline caught my attention.

Brilliance has no sexual orientation. Opportunity doesn’t discriminate.

It probably made more of an impact on me than it otherwise might have because I’d just been to see Suffragette, so my mind was still full of the extraordinary accomplishments of the women it portrayed so vividly.

The combination of the film and the poster brought The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, to mind.  I read this book almost two decades ago and was powerfully affected by it. The story is set in a not-implausible near future dystopia in which a puritan theocracy holds sway. This scenario, in which women are stripped of all power, highlights the relative ease with which the rights and freedoms we tend to accept without thought can be taken from us.

These rights and freedoms, for which generations of women fought doggedly, now appear to have always-already existed. Most young women I speak to have little interest in how these rights and freedoms were won – and even seem to find it implausible that our society has ever been anything other than the way it is today. As for the possibility of those rights and freedoms being eroded or lost… that’s not a conversation they seem to want to have. Apparently it’s ‘so last century’.

Perhaps seeing Suffragette could shift that point of view, at least somewhat. The portrayal of the determination and spirit of ordinary women striving for a better world was both engrossing and humbling, and the absolute silence in the cinema when the film ended was very telling.

A few key points regarding women’s suffrage that have direct bearing on my past: In South Africa, the land of my birth, white women were awarded the vote in 1930. My mum would have been about 13 years old at the time.  It took a further 64 years before black women gained the same rights.  Here in Australia, my chosen home, women gained the right to vote at a national level in 1902. This excluded aboriginal women, who were allowed to vote from 1962 onwards – but were only were granted full citizenship in 1967.

This window into the past shows some interesting parallels – and it also shows how far my homelands, past and present, have come. Complacency is dangerous, however. I think it’s often all too easy to accept a way of life when it favours us, without giving thought to how that way of life might have come about – or whether we would have the strength of character to fight the good fight to gain it or to keep it.

It’s also appears disturbingly easy to not pay attention to shifts in our society until they coalesce and we are no longer heading where we thought we were. Around the world there is a perception that women’s rights are being gradually eroded or sidelined. Equal pay and non-discriminatory hiring practices continue to elude us, despite having the vote and notionally being equal under the law. But most disturbing are endemic sexual assault  and the never-ending arguments as to who has rights over women’s reproductive capacity.

Are we paying enough attention to these things?

To quote The Handmaid’s Tale: Ordinary… is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Is this what we want? For mysogyny to be ordinary?

The links between the history of women’s suffrage, a patriarchal system that is self-perpetuating, shifts in social attitudes, the ease with which freedoms are accepted and can therefore be eroded – along the possible attendant consequences – are clear. What all this tells me is that a poster advocating that opportunity doesn’t discriminate on the basis of gender or sexual orientation is, quite simply, misleading.

So take responsibility – and play a part, however small, when it comes to awareness of key issues in our society, paying particular attention to emancipation and to feminist solidarity.annie lennox feminism.

 

Let the good guys win

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I’ll start the New Year off with words that aren’t my own – although they resonate with me very strongly.

May I get what I want / Not what I deserve / May the coming year not throw a single curve / May I hurt nobody / May I tell no lies / If I can’t go on give me strength to try… / Bring the old year out / Bring the new year in / Bring us all good luck / Let the good guys win…

I heard this song for the first time in 2005, at Swancon XXX. It was performed by one of my all-time favourite authors, Charles de Lint, accompanied the equally lovely MaryAnn Harris. The song isn’t theirs either, but they sang it as though it was – with belief and feeling and gentleness.

I was immediately captivated – both by the informality of having Charles and MaryAnn performing for a room full of fans, and by the song lyrics themselves. So much so, that this is my see-in-the-New-Year-song of choice every year.

When you see something wrong / Try and make it right / Pull your shadowed world / Into the bright sunlight…/ Bring the old year out / Bring the new year in / Bring us all good luck / Let the good guys win…

… and that’s what I wish you all for 2016, … singing hey ya, hey ya, hey ya / hey ya, hey ya, hey ya…

 

Ageing disgracefully

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Some time ago I created a vision board to reflect my emerging two-to-five-year plan. The aim was for this to act as a visual reminder and an anchor. It included big picture items that take a bit of planning, such as a trip to overseas (Scandinavia, perhaps), finishing off our kitchen renovations and having an electric vehicle as our primary mode of transport. These are all still ticking along as background tasks, some more actively than others.

In terms of immediate personal plans, however, plausible outcomes seemed like the best working premise. So for this year I chose fairly simple goals – ones that I felt I could realistically conquer and that would leave future-me feeling the year had been a success.
personal goals 2015I aimed to increase my general fitness (somewhat-tick), establish a strong bond with our puppy (ohmygiddyaunt – so much tick!), get my memoir publication-ready (mostly-tick), blog regularly (tick) and spend more time doing things I enjoy (increasingly-tick). All in all, past-me made some sound choices and implemented most of them.

Looking back at the past year has made me think about past-me quite a lot and about some of the choices she made for me. I remember a young woman who used to say (rather flippantly) that she would age disgracefully, that she’d work at not growing up as she grew older (i.e. not get boring).

Now that past-me has turned into present-me, I conclude that this was a surprisingly good – and achievable – plan. Amongst other things, I’ve continued to wear jeans, sit on the floor, walk around barefoot, laugh out loud at things that amuse me and smile at strangers. All these things are intrinsic to who I am, although I gave them little thought until relatOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAively recently. Over time, however, I’ve realised that they make me actively happy.

When I think about future-me, I’d like her to be happy too – and to continue not feel constrained by social pressures to become a tidy and conventional old lady. I’d like people to say to her (as they do to me) that she seems younger than her chronological years – and I’d like it to be because, like me, she enjoys life.

Of course, ageing does come with a few limiting factors: get-up-and-go that has sometimes got-up-and-gone, a reduced inclination to be tolerant of rudeness and bad service, and an occasional tendency to be forgetful – these have certainly all become part of my landscape.

But past-me found some useful coping strategies along the way, some of them in The Sunscreen Song. Somewhat surprisingly, many of those tips feel as relevant now as they did then – although some resonate age disgracefullymore strongly than others, including:
* be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone
* the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.
* be nice to your siblings

But if I could add just one additional lyric for future-me, I think it would be:
Age disgracefully – it’s always more fun than you think.

 

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