mountain masala

Lay Preacher Report released

The report of the national review of Lay Preachers in the Uniting Church is out now. You can download a copy here. I'm glad that bit of work is over for now!

sunday night pizzas

since i'm on a food roll, here's what we did sunday night...

prawns wrapped in proscuitto, baked cherry tomatoes, basil, gruyere cheese on a pesto base.

moroccan chicken, roasted capsicum, semi-dried figs, toasted almonds, mozarella, coriander. served with a dollop of yoghurt.

smoked bacon, chorizo, mushrooms, olives and (GASP) pineapple with parmesan.

seafood

i bought some cheap seafood on Sunday, and was going to make a Thai soup last night, but there was clearly a bit much and it needed to be eaten, so it ended up being a four course meal...

salad of yabby, roast capsicum and rocket with lemon and olive oil.

salt and pepper squid with rocket (again) and aioli.

honey-sesame-ginger salmon with burnt onion and a red pepper from the garden.

Tomato and Lemon Grass Prawn Soup

This comes from the excellent Spirit House Thai Cooking book.

Combine 4 stalks chopped lemon grass, 4 chopped tomatoes, 1/2 red onion - chopped, 1 tbsp grated ginger, 1/2 tbsp chopped garlic, 1 large red chilli - chopped,and 1 1/4 litres fish stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for 45 mins, then strain and return liquid to pot.

Add 2 tbsp fish sauce, 1 tbsp finely julienned ginger, 2 tsp sugar and reheat.

Add green prawns (the recipe actually uses snapper fillets) and heat until prawns are just cooked.

Serve in bowls topped with some finely chopped tomato, shredded kaffir lime leaves, chopped coriander and thai basil.

All in all pretty darn tasty!

powerhouse

i love the TiltShiftGen app for the iPhone. taken at the Powerhouse Museum today.

ATOM

There's some great stuff available in Australia for people who teach media-related stuff (I can't wait to getting back to teach it!).  ATOM = Australian Teachers of Media.  "Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) is an independent, non-profit, professional association promoting the study of media. The membership of ATOM primarily includes teachers and lecturers from across subject disciplines at all levels of education. The membership also includes media industry personnel, a range of media, education and government organisations and, increasingly, the general public interested in the media."

They produce a great magazine (Metro), study guides for films, access to free screenings of new movies for teachers, and more.

Today the announced study guides for iPad, presumably using the new iBook Author app. You can find out which films are available here. And the apps are free!

Worth checking out and joining their email list.

 

 

bluegrass at the spiegeltent

our first night at the Adelaide Fringe's Garden of Unearthly Delights last night, with two concerts at the wonderful Spiegeltent. lovely, lovely venue. magical. crap seats.

the amazing abigail washburn. i do love a lady who plays a banjo and sings. i have her first two albums. she majored in chinese language and was then going to study chinese law, but heard a recording of Doc Watson playing the banjo and changed her plans! her current musical collaborator is kai welch - he played guitar, keyboard and trumpet exceedingly well. abigail has worked with bela fleck and toured china at least twice, and some of her songs are quite wonderful bluegrass-chinese type songs (musically and lyrically). they were great together.

the highlight later in the night was Chris Hillman, formerly of The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Manassas, Desert Rose Band, and much more, amd Herb Pedersen (whose solo album I have on vinyl, and who has backed most of the people in the business). Chris played mandolin and Martin and Herb played Martin and pretty much second man (I wished he'd done some pickin'). It was just sublime. Chris would say "Herb sang a duet with Emmylou (Harris) on her first hit single" and then they'd play it. And then he'd say "Gram Parsons and I wrote this song together" and then they'd play it. Or "here's a song from when I was in Stephen Stills' Manassas". Of course they played Byrds songs too. some of their other originals, along with some trad folk.

Chris played nice mandolin. The audience was mainly balding and grey men...

I'm not really a country music guy. I love the Eagles but Gram Parsons is more of a cerebral exercise for me. I can analyse it but I don't get it.  Some of Emmylou's stuff I love and some is just country music....

its was an exceptional set, only spoiled by the guy behind me who tapped his foot on my chair out of time for the whole hour. I kept wanting to turn around, but apart from the fact that I never do that kind of thing, he was obviously enjoying it so much!

 

 

pumpkin gnocchi with bacon, sage and cheese sauce

i made my first pumpkin gnocchi last night and it was great!

yeah, the colours are a bit weird.... it's the funky effects on the phone camera...

Serves 4.

Gnocchi

500gms baked pumpkin, put through a potato ricer and then fried in 1 1/2 tbps butter briefly
3/4 cup "00" plain flour
yolk of one egg
a handful of grated parmesan cheese
black pepper

Sauce

Saute 1/2 chopped brown onion in a bit of butter or marg
Add 2/3 cup white wine and 10-15 black peppercorns
Simmer until quantity reduces by half, then strain and return liquid to pan
Add 1 300ml carton of cream, sage leaves and cheeses (I used parmesan, blue and gouda)

Cook bacon in a separate pan. Chop roughly. Add 3/4 of bacon to cream mixture and warm until cheese melts.

(The sauce really needed thickening with a bit of cornflour.)

Serve over cooked gnocchi, putting some of the reserved bacon and extra sage leaves on top. Sprinkle with some extra parmesan. Beautiful!

Interactive Easter

coming soon to a church near me...

 

 Download Interactive Easter Poster (A4 low-resolution) 900kb

Download Interactive Easter Poster (A4 high-resolution) 8 mb

berry pie

not being a baking kind of guy, its the first time I've made something like this...

Lay Preachers in the Uniting Church

well I've just finished the final draft of a report and discussion paper on lay leadership in worship and preaching in the Uniting Church. It's the result of a couple of years of work and a year of research involving presbyteries, lay leaders, ministers and church councils. we've had a small working group, and my main collaborator has been Lynne Taylor who has worked with us as a researcher and been excellent.

the report is 21 pages and 14000+ words (its very fine print!) and will hopefully be online next week, so then I can comment on it (although my role is not to make comment until the responses come back in).

it's mainly an interesting exercise in how you help an interconciliar church that thinks its is resource-poor attend to the fact that it is resource-rich in every sense, including people. but given the growing role of lay leadership in small, rural and isolated communities, it does seem trite to speak of 'resource-rich' when people feel they are struggling.

the big challenge this week has been to summarise what we think we've learned from the research, and then provide some statements to which people can react, prior to making concrete recommendations in a couple of months time.

i don't know whether I got the last bit right, but I went from writing "needs" and "should" statements to talking about what might "benefit" people, particularly lay leaders. it will be interesting to see if there's a way to agree on desired outcomes, and then help the church be creative in seeking them. far too easy instead to tell various sectors of the church what they "should" do. i now have to think about what/how/who this might involve, and whether indeed its possible to pull off that kind of different approach. there's no question that our discussion paper looks NOTHING like any UCA report that I've ever seen...

so my PhD thesis is only about 6 times as long as this? easy peasy. (I just wish these words had all been for my thesis...) at least now I can get back to it!