Ginger Biscuits – so easy!

This ancient recipe has been around since well before my kids were mixing up biscuits in the school holidays, turning the kitchen into a floury, sticky mess, but this is one of the recipes we used to make together.  They are perfect for the beginning baker, melt, mix and cook.  The measurements are in old measurements on my original recipe so I have changed them to metric measurements.  Eat lots of them with big mugs of milky tea!  Tip: Castor sugar will mix in better than ordinary sugar, but it doesn’t really matter much in the end.

Morning Tea on a rainy summer day

Melt together, mix, then cool a little:  125g butter, 1 tablespoon of golden syrup, 1 cup of sugar.

Add:  1 beaten egg, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 3 teaspoons of ground ginger, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, you can add some chopped chrystalised ginger if you like a stronger ginger taste.

Roll into balls, do not flatten.  Bake at 180 degrees for about 20 – 25 minutes until golden.

Walk Off The Earth – Somebody I used to know

This great Gotye song which has been on repeat around here has been given a new touch with five people and a guitar.  These guys are awesome, there are lots of great examples of their fabulousness on YouTube on their Channel.

Lime and White Chocolate Brownie

This recipe started life as my friend Carole’s chocolate brownie.  You might notice that the photo below of my version bears little resemblance to a chocolate brownie, I felt like a brownie, I only had white chocolate buttons and I happened to have a lime begging to be used, so voila Lime and white chocolate brownie was born.  It has a lovely soft centre and chewy edges. Yum!

This would make a great desert with yoghurt to cut through the sweetness or even some rhubarb.  We however ate it as the consolation prize for a very disappointing first course most of which ended up in the bin!  This saved the day!

Melt these together gently: 100g butter, 1/2 cup of white chocolate buttons.

Whisk in: 2 eggs, grated rind of a lime and it’s juice and 1 tsp of vanilla.

Stir in: 1 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup flour.

Pour into: a tin lined with baking paper.

Bake at: 180 degrees C for 25 minutes.

Ramblings on the iPad

I’ve had my iPad2 for a few months now and have deleted all my half written musings on it.  I’ve come to realise they were written far too soon after it’s acquisition.  Now, a couple of months on I have become a better iPad user and have learnt some tricks and found the pure joy that an iPad can bring.  I am that woman who will play Pyramid HD for days on end.  In fact I have even discovered the joy and pain when a game gives you ‘iPad finger’ from stabbing those little Egpytians to get them to move faster to build their pyramid in a bid to get a golden scarab, I know it’s sad but there it is!  iPad finger can occur when you are playing Find It games, time management games or enjoying the coolness of Zinio or Fliboard.  The reason I bought the iPad was for reading.  I wanted a piece of the reading action on an e-device which also did all kinds of other stuff.  I already had a dedicated e-reader (a Kobo) which I’d had great reading experiences on, but I wanted all the rest of the functionality, a laptop without having to drag a laptop around, to be able to read on the plane but also to search the web, answer my email, listen to my music and use to take notes in meetings.  The iPad does all that and plenty more.  So, here is what I think so far.

The Pros

It is lovely to hold, it isn’t uncomfortable to read on in bed at night.  Slightly more awkward than the Kobo just because it is bigger and heavier, but the reading experience itself is great.  I use the Kobo app or the Kindle app both are pretty much the same.  I can share my library with my partner, we can both read the same books and each buy books on my account (well, actually it is me buying the books on there but that’s fine.)  I like the night reading setting for when the light is out and you want to read in the dark.

Great for games.  In our place the games are all about finding stuff, building stuff, and Bejewelled and matching games of that type.  We are not hard core games.  But last week I clocked a solve the mystery game in two days, just because it was so easy to play it on the iPad wherever I was – on the couch, at the table, in bed.  Terrible.

Flipboard, this is just wonderful, tailored to your interests you get fed articles you are interested from all over the internet.  For me that is stuff on reading, libraries, books, education and publishing.  But you could be interested in anything from bumbebees to surfing and tailor it to your interests.  Zinio, Zite, Pulse, all these will be your news and magazine friends.

Games, try em, buy em and become an addict.  I’m hopeful this addiction problem will wear off but that is part of the reason that posts on this blog have been infrequent!  Majong Towers, Pyramid HD, anything from Big Fish Games,

There are so many great apps, tools and Bridget’s little helpers online, with new ones coming along every day that a girl could be forgiven for getting lost for long periods of time just in the App Store!

The speaker is decent.  Not awesome, but decent.  I use my iPad all the time at work to listen to TED talks while I’m covering books, to listen to conference presentations, podcasts (Nancy Pearl and BBC Books) and it works really well.

Cons

It is hard to share a book you’ve loved when you only have an electronic copy of it sitting on your Amazon or Kobo account.  We don’t have access to iBooks here in NZ!

It is not always 100% reliable at hooking up with the work wifi, not sure why but it doesn’t really matter because I am mostly using it offline at work, it is a slight pain though.

Um Um.  Trying to think of cons.  My fingers are too big to type on the tablet keyboard…. it isn’t much is it?

Therefore

There you go.  Some not very coherent musings and really just an advertisement for my lovely iPads cool factor.  It is the toy which is a tool but which still feels like a tool.  I belong to the iPad group at school, and remain unconvinced that learning happens any quicker, better or deeper with an iPad, but I do think that they are user friendly and a nice way to integrate really fast technology into school if you can afford to buy em and sort out the management of them in your school in a way that works for everyone.  As a personal tool they are just awesome and I’ve only just begun to dip my toe into these deep rippling waters!  What lies beneath?

How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Where to start.  Right, I bought it for the cover.  I just couldn’t help myself, there she was staring straight at me from the cover, a stroppy woman, I could tell, I knew I’d like her.  As I launched myself at this book, snorting with laughter by the end of page 1 or possibly 2, I knew I had spent my money wisely.  It is an account of the life so far of the very untraditionally raised Caitlin Moran, growing up in very un-wellheeled circumstances, in a council house in Wolverhampton in England, taking care of five younger siblings, running away from bullies, having nothing to wear – actually nothing, and maintaining a good sense of humour.

She headed out to work at the age of 15, and it’s been a whirlwind since then.  She worked in the coolest job someone like I could have imagined when I was a kid, working for a music magazine.  She had a miserable relationship with a bloke and came out the otherside thinking hard about her girly bits and how easily abused they are and became a kind of feminist.  But don’t read this book if you are looking for the new feminist treatise, read this book as a kind of British Tina Fey, witty, funny, and full of good ideas, with stuff to say on modern culture and our obsessions and written in a really accesible and amusing way.  This is basically a look back a her diary over the years, lots of juicy bits, and a bit of a fright from time to time.

She writes hilariously about getting her first period. Her need for a bra.  Her discovering that the love of her life was sitting right behind her every day at work.  She is also very very good on the culture of celebrity, I just adored her comments on Rhianna.  Her outing with Lady Gaga was hilarious.  Her comments on how we are simultaneously titivated by and yet horrified by the invasion into the personal lives of women celebrities, who have allowed us into their world but by doing that have made their lives miserable and us so judging of them I found resonated with me.

Other chapters deal with abortion, the terror of being a parent and marriage were great.  This is a laugh of a book, not all the way, but huge chunks of it.  I’m sorely tempted to buy a copy for each of my girls.  Read it for her interesting views on modern women, read it because it is a hell of a fun ride, and read it because Caitlin Moran has written a book for women right now.

But, there are the fashion rules – I loved her shoe advice.  What you need in your handbag, given I have finally purchased one.  On fashion, Leopardskin is a neutral, You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.  3.  Contrary to popular opinion a belt is often not a good friend to a lady … 4. Bright red is a neutral.  ….  There are more but these ones particularly work for me!  Thanks Caitlin, you’ve confirmed what I thought.

Want to read a great interview with her?  Diana Wichtel wrote this for the Listener.  And this one is Kim Hill talking to her on Radio New Zealand.

 

Ormie – a pig desperate for baking

I know just how this poor piggie feels. This is a very cool video.

 

Spicy Green Dipping Sauce

In the last two weeks I’ve made this 4 times!  It is that good!  It has been served with spring rolls, corn fritters, crayfish and as a salad dressing.  Zingy, tangy and so easy to whip up as long as you have some palm sugar and some fresh herbs I think everyone should have this in the fridge for all occasions.  I’ve taken to having it sitting in a bowl handy.  It goes really well with cucumbers, tomatoes and avocados too!

If there was ever an argument for getting yourself a very efficient, sharp microplane this is it.  Making it so much more efficient for grating the palm sugar.  If you didn’t have any palm sugar, which is in all the supermarkets I shop at, you could use brown sugar but properly brown sugar not the pale brownish sugar I see all the time.  Palm Sugar tastes like Russian Fudge, really, it does!  YUM.

40g of palm sugar, 2 tablespoons of lime juice (or lemon), 2 tablespoons of fish sauce, a spoon of out of the jar chilli, and some grated ginger (to taste) (out of the jar if you want), crushed garlic (out of the jar again or freshly mashed to a pulp with the side of a knife).  A handful of finely chopped coriander and an equal amount of finely chopped fresh mint.

Grate the palm sugar into the juice, then add the fish sauce and stir until the sugar is dissolved.  Add the rest of the ingredients. Set aside for a little while for the flavours to blend nicely.

Corn fritters anointed with Spicy Green Sauce

Hark A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

Oh what a treat, I’ve been perusing Kate Beaton’s website for ages.  Ages.  And as part of my mision to get more graphic novels etc. for the guys this year I could finally justify buying Hark A Vagrant – the book.  Oooo it is so awesome, hilarious, disrespectful funny.  Already it is being poured over by the boys hanging about between exams, I can tell when they have found it because of their snorting and giggling sounds!  Kate Beaton gives historical figures and literary greats a modern voice, she makes them speak as they would if they were alive today – and had slightly filthy mouths.  Love it!  (Below are the t-shirts available from the website)

This video is very interesting, see the description below.  Turn your sound up and put it on full screen.

This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

This video is designed to be viewed in a large format, so it’s best viewed in full-screen mode at 1080p.

White Cake

On Sunday I turned 50.  There, I wrote it.  Hard to believe I’m so extremely old, anyway when you are this old you can choose your own birthday cake.  I chose a White Cake.  I’ve made it before, for a friend’s birthday and I always remembered how gorgeous it was.  I had found the recipe in a Taste Magazine and then lost it.  Then, the other day hunting through some papers for something else I found it.  It has taken me an age to find it online anywhere now so I am posting it here in case I lose it again.  It is the most wondrous cake!

This cake is moist with the subtle flavour of almond and vanilla.  The chopped up almonds give it a bit of body and crunch which makes it really unusual.  It is a big celebration cake and while this recipe is for two cakes, you could make one big one.

The cake: 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar, 250g butter, 1tsp vanilla, 2 and 1/4 cups self-raising flour, 1tsp baking powder, 300ml milk, 1 cup finely chopped almonds (blanched), 6 egg whites beaten to stiff peaks

Cream the sugar, butter and vanilla.  Sift together the flour and baking powder, three times. Yes three times.  It is traditional and important.  Add the flour mixture to the creamed mixture alternatively with the milk and then stir in the almonds.  Gently fold in the egg whites.  Pour into two greased and floured cake tins, and bake at 190 degrees C for 30 minutes.  Insert a skewer into the cake to test whether it is cooked.

Icing:  60g butter, 250g cream cheese, 3 cups icing sugar, vanilla or lemon juice.  To make the icing, cream the butter and the cream cheese.  Add the icing sugar and vanilla or lemon juice to taste.

To assemble:  sandwich the 2 cakes together with some of the icing. Cover the top and sides with icing, smooth and chill.

From Taste magazine, August 2006

Tessa Aitchison – Artist

This is the website of my daughter, the artist Tessa Aitchison.  Her work is beautiful and minimalistic.  Shades of grey, subtle and moody.  Amazing that Tessa with the bright red hair, the black clothes and fabulous taste in shoes would be producing work which is white and shades of pale.  The work is beautiful and if you live in Wellington you should go to the Academy of Fine Arts Gallery on the waterfront and have a look at the Collideoscope Exhibition.  (These works are available for sale, contact her here!)

Best simple idea – and recycling too

This is just the most simple, and practical and why the heck didn’t I think of this idea I’ve seen in ages.  Those little bread holder things drive me crazy, all those plugs plugged into all those multiboards – oh yes I know the safety thing, don’t lecture me cos I know.  The fact of the matter is that there are four plugs plugged into the multibox behind my tv.  One for the tv, one for the dvd player, one for the stereo radio thing and one for the elderly video player which should go to the place that you send elderly video players, and would, only I don’t know where that is.  Anyway I pull out a plug and then wait to see which thing turns off, cos I can’t figure out which plug is which.  Those days are over.  I will now have to go and buy bread just for the taggs.  I’m very impressed with this idea.  It came to me via the Core Education Facebook page but they got it from here.

A love story starring my dead best friend by Emily Horner

First book of the school holidays and it was a great choice.  This is a great cross-over novel, meaning written with appeal to both teenage and adult readers.  Emily Horner has a great website with lots of good stuff about this book and a thoughtful blog as well.

Cass is desperately missing her friend Julia.  Julia was killed in a car crash and it has rocked all her friends and her boyfriend, but Cass and Julia had one of those friendships which was deep and complex.  A finish each others sentences kind of friendship.  Julia was obsessed with drama and was writing her masterpiece when she died, the friends decide that they should put on the show she wrote.  This creates lots of difficulties because it isn’t exactly  your standard school musical, the title is Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad which is enough to set alarm bells ringing with the school staff.

In the meantime Cass sets off on her bike, to complete the journey to California that she and Julia always planned to make, bringing Julia’s ashes with her in a tupperware container.  The bike trip is beautifully written.  The relationship she has along the way, the feelings this brings on and the mechanics of the relationship are written in a realistic way. Tentative and scary, but also with comfort. The lonliness of being on the road, the dangers from big trucks, people you meet and dealing with the memories of someone you love who has gone from your life, dealing with your emerging sexuality and also love, lots of love in many forms, all make for riveting reading.  This is a wise book.  I know my girls would have loved it when they were teenagers, but it is also a book I would give them now.  This book has lots of the feeling you get when you read John Green or David Levithan and I’m really looking forward to reading more by Emily Horner.

 

 

World economic collapse explained:

Everything you ever wondered about in terms of world debt and who owes what to whom is succulently explained in this sketch by John Clarke and Brian Dawe.  You can probably find the succinct answer to any other burning question on their other videos.  Everything from Immigration to the politics of the Rugby World Cup are here for your viewing pleasure or at least the Dawe and Clarke take on it.  Very entertaining.

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

I’m doing a crosspost here, this is also posted on the school blog.  This book is so aptly named.  It is a wondrously beautiful book.  It is big, it is beautifully designed and it contains a really well crafted story, both in words and in pictures.  Wonderstruck is one of those books which will appeal to lots of people for lots of different reasons.  If you read books for a great story this book has one.  If you love art, drawing and design, this book has loads to offer you.  If you think books are things to be treasured then Wonderstruck is certainly one which people will want to treasure.  It is a book to buy as a present, it is a book to own.  But first you might want to borrow it from the library.  The first book by Brian Selznick is a poor battered thing in our library because it has been so widely read over the years.  There is a blog post about it here.

Wonderstruck is two stories, one told in pictures and one told with words.  It is the story of a young girl living in New York who runs away from home, and it is also the story of a young boy 50 years later in a small lakeside town.  You know that somehow the two stories will connect and when they do it is a moment of wonder.

Below is a video of the author, walking around inside the incredibly detailed drawings from the book.  This author is truly one of the great authors for young people today and I hope lots of our students pick up the book and take it home and spend time in the world of Wonderstruck.

Mel Parsons

So yesterday I’m listening to National Radio pottering around pretending to do jobs around the house but not really making a firm commitment to anything.  I was feeling far too smug about having planted hedging all around the new vegetable patch and the clothesline paving.  I heard Mel Parsons being played, I hopped in my car went to what seems to be the only place in Dunedin where you can buy a cd that isn’t completely mainstream and I bought this.  It is great, boppy, countryish, she has a great voice and every song is a winner.  I feel like a winner for finding her.  Thanks RNZ

The hare with amber eyes by Edmund de Waal

I chose this book because of it’s fabulous cover, interesting title and because I was hearing things about it, kind of unspecified things, but good things.  So I grabbed it and started it immediately.  Not really realising it I had grabbed a book about something I was really interested in.  This is the story of a family via a set of Japanese netsuke which are small carved objects made of ivory, wood or stone.  They are intricate and clever, made to fit into your hand and as collectables.  I have one of these, a swan, which I bought in Hong Kong years ago, it is a little treasure.  So, this book is the story of a collection of netsuke, 264 of them, they have been passed down through a family and when Edmund inherits them from his fabulous uncle (the character in the book whom I loved the most) he begins to investigate the history of these particular treasures and in doing so the history of his family.

The wealth of these people whom Edmund is decended from was totally staggering.  They built up an empire in grain, trade, banking, and other business ventures which meant they were so incredibly wealthy as to be able to commission famous artists such as Renoir to paint for them, they had music composed for them, they hung out with writers of renown, they bought whole streets in the centre of Vienna, homes all over the world including Japan.  Gaspingly rich they were!  Gobsmackingly rich!  And then a fortune was lost, and then war put paid to the rest of it.  The family are Jewish and lose everything including many of themselves in the war.  Nothing left except an elderly lady who served as a servant to the family and stuck with them through thick and thin.

This is a big story, the loves and the losses are enough to make your head spin, but what Edmund de Waal does is to draw you carefully into the worlds of his ancestors.  I learnt a lot about society, about the mores and accesses of the people of his past and also a different insight into a family who were so damaged by war and tragedy.  It is a beautiful book, a careful and thoughtful read, not at all what I thought I was getting into when I started but a book which has stayed with me since I finished it.  It is lovely.

Alison Krauss and Union Station

So, this from my new discovery Vevo.  Oh Alison, you just keep feeding me videos, especially live videos which go so nicely with the CD I bought and love.  Want more Alison – of course you do, go here.

The Help by Katherine Stockett

I put off writing a book report on this book because so many people I know have read it, and those that haven’t are waiting in line to get hold of it.  I bought the book as a present for the beloved L when I was in Auckland at conference, which made her very happy, and low and behold when I got home from conference the bookclub book of the month was none other than The Help, so I had to beg the beloved L to loan – a little awkward!  Anyway she kindly allowed me to borrow her unread present within a couple of days of receiving it and I embarked into a journey into Southern Mississippi the year of my birth 1961 (so old!).

The help is set in a time not so very long ago when ordinary white American families employed a maid to do all the unpleasant jobs around the house, particularly the raising of their children, in order to free them up for the important business of shopping, playing cards with their friends and impressing the neighbours.  It is set in Jackson,  Mississippi and is told in the words of two of these maids mainly, but they speak for so many of these black women who cleaned, cared and catered.  It is a moving story, I became totally engrossed in the stories the maids told, collected by the unlucky in love and beginning journalist Skeeter Phelan, Skeeter who doesn’t fit into the social set she is born to, who is unreasonably tall and unfashionably willful and plain, but whose heartstrings are pulled by the stories of the maids.  She desperately wants to find out what happened to the maid who she loved, Constantine, who looked after her during her childhood and who has disappeared and about whom nobody will speak other than the sketchiest of details.  This quest sets her off on a journey to find out the truth, and in doing so she begins to collect the stories of the everyday lives of the maids who work for her friends.  In doing this we are all drawn into the stories of the lovely Abileen, and the feisty Minnie and the horrific stories they and other maids have to share.  The maids stories make it very difficult for her to be friends with her regular girlfriends who employ the maids and treat them so badly and her boyfriend, or even anybody from her regular social set.

There is much much more to the story but I would love you to head out and beg borrow or even steal a copy of the book and get reading it.  I’m off to see the movie on Tuesday night which is a little scary because perhaps it won’t live up to the book, but I am keen to get to it and soak up a little more of the Jackson, Mississippi atmosphere and to think about how far we have come since I was born.

Oaty Chocolate Chip biscuits

I make these a lot, I play with the recipe and add such morsels as dried apricots, raisins, dried apple, I sometimes put only white chocolate chips, sometimes a mix of white and dark chocolate chips.  These are old fashioned measurements you can probably figure out the metric measurements or just basically make them up as you go along.

I often make these to take somewhere as a plate and always double the recipe if I’m doing that.

1/2 a cup of butter, 1/2 a cup of castor sugar (ordinary is also fine), 1/2 a cup brown sugar, 1 egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla (I always use more), 1 cup plain flour, 1 cup rolled oats (be generous), 1/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 cup chocolate chips.  Optional is 1/2 to 1 cup rice bubbles – I like the crunch and the extra texture and nuts are good too.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla and beat well.  In a separate bowl mix together the flour, rolled oats, salt, baking powder, soda and chocolate chips.  Add these to the butter mixture.  Place in balls (wetish hands are best for rolling them cos they are mightily sticky) on a baking tray leaving plenty of room for spreading.  Bake at 180 degrees C for about 8 minutes or until golden and let them cool a little on the tray so that they aren’t so bendy.  Cool completely on a wire rack.

Eat rather a lot of them with a great coffee or a cup of gumboot tea.