Slow cooking food

In Melbourne, the weather is closing in dark and cold and often rainy. It is the time to think of the sort of food that warms the cockles of one's heart. The slow cooking sort, substantial and comforting. This means the time time for our favourite autumn/winter meal, Lamb Shanks with Macaroni. These are the ingredients...

...and they are all Australian - the containers and packaging are marked "Product of Australia". Note the little Aussie flags on the Ardmona tins. The herbs, except for the garlic, are freshly picked from the garden - basil, sage, marjoram, oregano, rosemary. Miss Eagle leaves the shanks whole - to be picked up in the fingers and gnawed on, so large napkins are in order.

Here are the Lamb Shanks ready for the oven. Oh, and by the way, Miss Eagle has added some mushrooms that are not in the above photograph. The copper bottomed stainless steel casserole belonged to my aunt. I don't use the lid for this dish. The casserole is cooked very slowly: 200 degrees Celsius to start with until the liquid starts to simmer. Then turned back to 150 degrees Celsius and cooked ever so slowly until the meat is falling away from the bone. Some additional water is needed during the cooking because the macaroni takes up quite a bit. The only way this could be better would be if it was cooked in a slow-combustion stove.

Scrumptious, warming, and FootFoot and Trixie love to chew on the bones.

Pick your trunk

Over at The Nature of Robertson, Denis is talking about favourite tree trunks - and it is eucalypts he is talking about.

Miss Eagle thinks of the marvellous eucalypt trunks that she has loved. She thinks, first of all, of the huge salmon pink roseate trunks of the huge eucalypts in the Cardwell Ranges between Cardwell and Mount Garnet in North Queensland. Miss Eagle thinks they may be the most magnificent trees that she has ever seen. Then she thinks of the Snappy Gum which is ubiquitous in the Outback where Miss Eagle has spent a significant part of her life. God had His decorating angels at work in deciding how brilliantly that stark white trunk and the grey green leaves went with the red soils and sands and spinifex.

Spirit of Endurance1937 Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges, SA.

Gelatin silver photograph (Kodura Etching Brown)28.5 x 34.1 (NLA Accession # C27-1)nla.pic-an2384497

And then Miss Eagle thought of what may be Australia's most famous trunk, most famous individual tree. This is the Spirit of Endurance, a photograph by Harold Cazneaux who is an uncle of Australia's famous expeditioner and philanthropist, Dick Smith. The tree in the photograph is in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. Miss Eagle saw it about ten years ago. The Flinders Ranges is one of her favourite places. The tree is quite a few decades older than when it appeared in the photograph and thus has experienced even more of the vicissitudes of life. It does not look as splendid as it did then. It is a scarred tree which has survived fire. It is hardened by its experience and yet still generates life. It is an Australian parable, an Aussie metaphor.

With you, Denis

A good blogging friend, Denis Wilson, is facing a personal challenge at the moment. Mention of it is woven into his beautiful blog, The Nature of Robertson. Denis loves this planet, especially that part of it around his home at Robertson in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. At the moment, he is not at home. His challenge is happening in our national capital in a Canberra hospital. Please direct kind thoughts, positive energy, prayers and an angel or two to Denis. And, Denis, some flowers for you.

Autumn is a-comin' in....

Mountview Road, Upper Ferntree Gully

Love in Autumn

I sought among the drifting leaves,

The golden leaves that once were green,

To see if Love were hiding there

And peeping out between.

For thro' the silver showers of May

And thro' the summer's heavy heat,

In vain I sought his golden head

And light, fast-flying feet.

Perhaps when all the world is bare

And cruel winter holds the land,

The Love that finds no place to hide

Will run and catch my hand.

I shall not care to have him then,

I shall be bitter and a-cold --

It grows too late for frolicking

When all the world is old.

Then little hiding Love, come forth,

Come forth before the autumn goes,

And let us seek thro' ruined paths

The garden's last red rose.

Sarah Teasdale

Resurrexit! He is risen!

He is Risen by He Qi, China

Anyone who makes a person laugh
Opens heaven to him.
Anyone who is patient with another
Gives him future.
Anyone who accepts a person
As he himself is accepted by Christ
Loosens his tongue for life’s hymn of praise
Let us go out from our customs and our habits
And learn to hope from the Bible.
Let us go out
And cross the frontiers
So that we may infect life with hope.
Let us ignore the barriers,
And look only to the One who breaks them down.
He is risen.
Jesus is risen indeed.
Blessed be the Lord for ever and ever.

Jurgen Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless

Zhivago 2 - Mary Magdalene, a true apostle

Mary Magdalen by He Qi, China

Miss Eagle is always stunned at how people view Mary Magdalene - and the extremes of those views to the extent that one has to wonder if they are talking about the same person. What has always peeved Miss Eagle though is her own view that the capital 'C' church has been so easily dismissive of Mary. Mary was there with the twelve but is never considered an apostle.

Yet Mary, in womanly fashion, provided nurture and resources for the work of Jesus. She made so much so possible. But above all where Miss Eagle is peeved to the limit is that Mary Magdalene was the first bearer of the good news of the resurrection, yet for 2000 years the capital 'C' church - with only very recent exceptions - has forbidden women the preaching of the good news officially within the its services. For Miss Eagle, Mary Magdalene is a true Apostle. She resourced the ministry of Jesus. She was constant during his crucifixion and did not go to pieces or to flight like the majority of the male Apostles. She was there to discover the empty tomb. In fact, that's the thing. She was there. She was constant. She was there for the action and there to pick up the pieces. A truly female story. One that many men never get!

MARY MAGDALENE
II

Before the Festival comes the spring cleaning;
Away from the crowd,
With myrrh from a little pail
I wash your most pure feet.

I feel for the sandals and cannot find them.
I see nothing through my tears
And the strands of my hair
Cover my eyes like a veil.

I have planted your feet on the hem of my skirt, Jesus.
I have watered them with my tears, I have wound them round
With a string of beads from my neck,
I have cloaked them in my hair.

I see the future in detail
As though you had stopped it.
At this moment I am able to prophesy
With the foresight of a Sibyl.

To-morrow the veil of the temple will be torn,
We will huddle together in a little group, apart
And the earth will sway under our feet,
Perhaps out of pity for me.

The columns of the guards will re-form
And the horsemen will ride away.
Like a windspout in a storm, the cross above my head
Will strain towards the sky,

And I will fall at its feet,
Silent and dazed biting my lips.
Your arms will spread out to the ends of the cross
To embrace too many.

For whom in all the world
Is your embrace so wide,
For whom so much torment,
So much power?

In all the world
Are there so many souls?
So many lives?
So many villages, rivers and woods?

Those three days will pass
But they will push me down into such emptiness
That in the frightening interval
I shall grow up to the Resurrection.

From Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. The Harvill Press, London, 1996

Good Friday - a crucial meditation

...Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see – if only they would. See what was certainly the first sign any human anywhere had made: the vertical line; the horizontal one. Even as children, they drew it with their fingers in snow, sand or mud; they laid it down as sticks in dirt; arranged it from bones on frozen tundra and broad savannas; as pebbles on riverbanks; scratched it on cave walls and outcroppings from Nome to South Africa. Algonquin and Laplanders, Zulu and Druids – all had a finger memory of this original mark. The circle was not first, nor was the parallel or the triangle. It was this mark, this, that lay underneath every other. This mark, rendered in the placement of facial features. This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace. Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choicelessness. Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit, the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had “graduated”. But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well life was a whole other matter.

from

Paradise by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Alfred A Knopf, NY, 1998, pp 145-147

Zhivago 1 - Remembrance, bread, wine, friends.

At Jesus's last meal with His friends

he asked us to do what He did

and remember Him with bread, wine, and friends.

Miss Eagle fell in love with Boris Pasternak at the age of 17. She read his most famous work, Dr Zhivago - a wonderful novel whose prose reads like sheer poetry. This very Russian story covers the Russia of World War I and the Revolution. It is a novel of great spirituality reflecting the Orthodox beliefs that permeate, in spite of the efforts of Lenin and Stalin et alia, the world of eastern Europe. Tucked away in the back of the novel, under the title Zhivago's Poems, is a collection or cycle of 25 poems. Miss Eagle asks you to make yourself quiet and comfortable and take this poem from that cycle as a meditation for this day of remembrance, Holy Thursday.

GETHSEMANE
From Zhivago’s Poems

The turn of the road was lit
By the unconcerned shimmer of distant stars.
The road circled the Mount of Olives;
Beneath it flowed the Kedron.

The field tailed off
Into the Milky Way.
Grey-haired olive trees tried to walk the air
Into the distance.

Across the way was a vegetable garden.
Leaving his disciples outside the enclosure,
He said to them:
‘My soul is sorrowful unto death,
Stay here and watch with me.’

Unresisting he renounced
Like borrowed things
Omnipotence and the power to work miracles;
Now he was mortal like ourselves.

The night was a kingdom of annihilation,
Of non-being,
The whole world seemed uninhabited,
And only this garden
was a place for the living.

He gazed into the black abyss,
Empty, without beginning or end.
Sweating blood, he prayed to his Father
That this cup of death should pass him by.

Having tamed his agony with prayer
He went out through the garden gate.
There, overcome by drowsiness,
The disciples lay slumped in the grass.

He woke them: ‘God has granted you to live in my time,
And you loll about like this…
The hour of the Son of Man has
struck,
He will deliver himself into the
hands of sinners.’

Hardly had he spoken when from who knows where
A rabble of slaves and thieves appeared
With torches and knives
And in front of them Judas with his traitor’s kiss.

Peter resisted the murderers,
Struck off an ear with his sword.
‘Steel cannot decide a quarrel’, he heard:
‘Put back your sword in its scabbard.

‘Could not my Father send a host
Of winged legions to defend me?
Then no hair of my head would be touched,
The enemy would scatter and leave no trace.

‘But the book of life has reached the page
Which is the most precious of all holy things.
What has been written must be fulfilled.
Let it be so.
Amen.

‘You see, the passage of the centuries is like a parable
And catches fire on its way.
In the name of its terrible majesty
I shall go freely, through torment, down to the grave.

‘And on the third day I shall rise again.
Life rafts down a river, like a convoy of barges,
The centuries will float to me out of the darkness.
And I shall judge them.’

From Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. The Harvill Press, London, 1996

Maria George - 3

Sparkly and Sequinned Eggs

Maria George - 2

Framed Eggs in Maria George's Window

Maria George - 1

Maria George is nothing if not a Melbourne institution. From her premises in 179 Flinders Lane, she supplies sequins, beads, crystals, pearls and rhinestones. She will even teach you how to bead. Indulgence in all that is pretty. And her window for Easter is pretty too.

Seasons of the soul: Holy Week 2006

Miss Eagle marks the seasons, keeps the traditions, believes in the rituals. To-day marks the beginning of Holy Week for Christians in the western tradition. The eastern and western traditions of the Christian Church mark Easter differently on their calendars. Next year the two traditions will co-incide and share the same date for Easter, but in 2006 the west will mark Easter of April 16 and the east will celebrate on April 23.

Holy Week is the most sacred time in the Christian calendar. No, the most sacred time is not Christmas. Christmas might be the biggest time on the commercial and corporate calendar - but not on the Christian calendar. It is of great importance - but not as important as the things that are remembered this week.

To-day is known, generally, as Palm Sunday. While the whole of Lent is a period of reflection, reflection this week becomes more sombre as some very dramatic events are remembered: events with the capacity to change the lives and outlooks of human beings. Thursday is Holy or Maundy Thursday, Friday is Good Friday, Sunday is Easter Day.

In recent years, Palm Sunday has become a focus for public reflection on issues of peace and justice. In Melbourne, this public reflection will be held at the Melbourne Town Hall with a special guest, Jim Wallis, and Tim Costello.

To-day, palm fronds in one form or another will be handed out at Christian Churches. One old tradition is the weaving of palm leaf into crosses. For instructions on this ancient Christian craft, see here.

graffiti, e e cummings, kisses and wisdom

Graffiti in Hosier Lane, Melbourne

A Tailor of Gloucester mouse

Recently, Jane over at yarnstorm mentioned The Tailor of Gloucester. Miss Eagle thought it should be known that one of those nimble fingered mice lives at The Trad Pad. You see, Herself has a soft spot for the Beatrix Potter story. As a little girl doing speech classes, she had to learn The Tailor of Gloucester for an exam. So it has a special place in her heart and her home.

The Journey after Lapbanding - 6

Readers of The Trad Pad will know that back in December last year Miss Eagle had the gastric lapbanding operation. She is the third person in her extended family to have this operation done. Below is a comment by a member of her family, a young man in his twenties, who has had the operation too. Miss Eagle thought readers might find his remarks of interest and, perhaps, helpful.

The difference the band has made in my life is remarkable. The only downside is I now get gas, which is just a side effect of my digestion process being slowed down. If you ever get this problem, which I’m told is reasonably common, I suggest a product called Mintec. It's just peppermint oil in a capsule, but it's a bit of a miracle cure for me. The freedom to indulge my love of clothes and shop where I like has been wonderful, and the difference in my fitness is amazing. I'm training for a marathon at the moment, not something I would have ever even conceived of pre-band. I rarely get sick anymore, I had a minor cold early last year, but that's all, I used to get flux and chest infections at the drop of a hat.

It's not just that I eat less, I find myself mentally better equipped to make different food choices, I don't have the same appetite for heavy food that I used to, and enjoy fresh veges more than I ever thought I would.

The difference the band has made in my life is remarkable. The only downside is I now get gas, which is just a side effect of my digestion process being slowed down. If you ever get this problem, which I’m told is reasonably common, I suggest a product called Mintec. It's just peppermint oil in a capsule, but it's a bit of a miracle cure for me. The freedom to indulge my love of clothes and shop where I like has been wonderful, and the difference in my fitness is amazing. I'm training for a marathon at the moment, not something I would have ever even conceived of pre-band. I rarely get sick anymore. I had a minor cold early last year, but that's all. I used to get flux and chest infections at the drop of a hat.

It's not just that I eat less, I find myself mentally better equipped to make different food choices, I don't have the same appetite for heavy food that I used to, and enjoy fresh veges more than I ever thought I would.

Food has become something that on one hand I don't care about anymore and on the other care deeply about. I no longer care much about the fat content or how 'fattening' food is anymore, because I know it's not going to put on weight. On the other hand I have become quite passionate about the quality of my food, I have no issue if something is dripping in cream, just as long as it's high quality cream sourced from an ethical dairy. The guilt of eating something like that in the past meant that I couldn't care less what the quality of it was, just the quantity, now that the guilt and loss of control are gone, I can focus on really enjoying it. I no longer see food as good or bad, just high quality and low quality.

The Collecting Chemist of Elsternwick - 3

This sign in the collection of The Collecting Chemist of Elsternwick is deserving of its very own post. It is a bit special. It is special because:

• it is bilingual
• it is two sided.

The Collecting Chemist of Elsternwick - 2

The Collecting Chemist of Elsternwick not only collects signs. He collects Apothecary's Jars. These were very difficult to get good shots of because they are up high out of harm's way and are such magnificent sets so that they are sitting side by side on the high up shelves. Please take a trip to Glen Huntly Road and see for yourself, dear reader. You will be well rewarded.

The Collecting Chemist of Elsternwick -1

Geoff and Sue Szwarcbard's Guardian Pharmacy at 393 Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick has a treasure trove of items from chemist shops of yesteryear. Their chemist shop is quite ordinary. It looks like it could have been there a very long, long time but gets "modernised" every few decades or so. It is not large and spacious and bright like really modern pharmacies found in shopping malls. No this is a very traditional squeezed in chemist shop in a suburban shopping strip in the main street of Elsternwick. The first clue is the signs hanging in the doorway as one enters from the street.

The signs in the collection are metal - in some cases complete with rust.

The technique of delight: Timothy Spall

There are actors Miss Eagle lusts after - like Sean Connery. There are actors who cheer and enchant her - like Martin Clunes and Nigel Havers. There are the young and the beautiful who stun the ageing Miss Eagle - like Johnny Depp. And then there is the category of sheer delight: delight in his skill, delight in his characterization, delight in his diversity of roles and delight in such wonders being wrapped in an ordinary and seemingly unchangeable bloke. This is the beloved Timothy Spall. The pleasure he has given is beyond measure.

Miss Eagle is prompted to tell you about the wondrous Timothy in coming across this article this week.

Bank Place - where the corporate and legal world meet

At the financial end of town, between Collins Street and Little Collins Street, is Bank Place.