by tashmcgill | Nov 30, 2008 | Uncategorized
The Whiskey Mac-Gill
1 part irish whiskey (Jamesons)
1 part green ginger wine (Stones)
Fresh squeezed lime or lemon juice (preference): 1 whole fruit = 4 serves.
Pour over a ‘cup’ of ice cubes, blend.
Serve over two slices of lemon or lime, top up with lemonade (sparkling or homemade).
Make it southern-style by adding fresh chopped mint to the blender, or muddling after.
Chicken
Legs, deboned, stuffed with pork, pistachios, plenty of italian flat-leaf parsley, plenty of thyme. Wrapped in streaky bacon, seasoned well, then poached for 20 – 25mins. Chill for 30 mins. Then pan fry til bacon crispy, slice and serve.
(Original stuffed chicken recipe from Gordon Ramsey, slightly modified).
I serve with:
wild mushroom & garlic risotto and fresh asparagus, blanched and peppered
or
spring vegetables (mushrooms, zucchini, asparagus & onion)in white wine pepper cream.
For a spicier, Oriental twist, use cashews, coriander and chillis in the stuffing, along with a little ginger. Then serve on simple asian noodles of choice with green beans, capsicum slivers and bamboo in salty sweet chilli sauce.
Lamb
Take individual lamb loin or a small roast, split through the middle and stuff with feta, plenty of basil and capers. Add a little pepper and olive oil. Tie with cotton string so that the meat closes well over the cheese. Season the outside of the lamb with olive oil, salt, pepper, just a little ground chilli powder and crushed garlic. Sear on each side (about 4 mins), seasoning each side. Then roast in the oven for approx 25mins. Always let the meat rest for a few minutes before slicing.
Serve with roasted vegetables – I chose red peppers, vine-ripened tomatoes, asparagus, zucchini and green beans.
*I think it’s really important to eat seasonally – so what’s locally available is always a good (and usually cheaper) way to go.
Roasted Vegetables
The key to success here is roasting to taste.. I like to put them in a high heat bake oven and then switch it to grill to crisp up when the texture is just right. I put the capsicum & tomatoes in at the beginning, well salted, with olive oil and pepper too. Then adding the zucchini, followed by the asparagus and green beans (which are blanched first). Just roll the additional vegetables in the oil you used for the capsicum and tomatoes, seasoning as you go. Perfecto. If you add the vegetables about the same time as the lamb – you’ll be perfect.
*I served the asparagus whole, the green beans in two-inch lengths. The capsicum in eighths, the zucchini in 1cm wide diagonal slices.
**Any variation of the following would also work well – whole field mushrooms, whole garlic cloves, eggplant slices, broccolini.
Roasted Vegetable Pasta
If you were roasting the above vegetables with garlic cloves and mushrooms – another great way to serve an easy and light summer lunch is cooking off some angelhair pasta or tagiatelli, then adding your bite-sized roasted vegetables with plenty of fresh basil, salt, pepper and garlic. Delicious.
Beer Bread
An easy and aromatic way to consume your favourite brews.
2 cups self raising flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon sugar
a drizzle of good quality olive oil
about 250ml of a good beer
Mix together until a good dough is formed – add more of whatever it needs – flour or beer, until you have a workable dough. Then form it into whatever shape loaf you prefer. You can use a tin but I prefer free form, sometimes braided etc. Bake for an hour at medium heat oven. When it’s crusty and hollow-sounding, you have a great loaf.
The consistency is a little different than normal bread – and you could make this loaf wholemeal easily. I prefer the darker ales for the aromatic content – I recently made it with a renaissance Porter ale. Delicious. Great to toast and serve with soul or another light meal.
Spanish Mushrooms & Chorizo
Inspired by one of my favourite bars, Mezze in Durham Lane, this is so simple, yet one of my favourite things on the menu. It’s perfect served with hummus on beer bread.
1 chorizo per serve (sliced diagonally, thinly)
150g mushrooms per person (button is fine, quartered)
fresh basil
fresh garlic, crushed or finely chopped
Saute off the garlic and chorizo until the chorizo is crispy. Then add the mushrooms and saute til they are crispy. Add a dash of wine (honestly, just a splash) then a dash of either sour cream or cream. The various flavours will mix together well – add the torn fresh basil and a touch of pepper to taste.
Serve as a tapa or main over toasted bread or fresh greens.
by tashmcgill | Oct 28, 2008 | Uncategorized
I was thinking in an email today, that I’ve been more lonely just recently, housesitting in a friends large home. When they are home and the kids are there, it’s full of life and goodness. When I am at home, in my little cottage, my loneliness doesn’t feel uncontrollable or out of sorts. But when I am alone, in their big home.. my loneliness is magnified in a strange way. As if the space housing my loneliness somehow allows it to echo more than it usually does. Maybe my love of my small house is partly because it deafens the silence of large, empty spaces.
Similarly, I have always loved the image of the prayer closet, because it seems that the smaller the room, the less distance your words have to travel to God. I am finding it hard to share communion with God at the moment, in large spaces.
Struggling To Pray Myself..
So typically – I’m running for shelter and companionship in the prayer room – first with the words of the others, the wise, the kindred, the dear… and with the flesh and blood love of dear friends.
“Prayer is in many ways the criterion of Christian life. Prayer requires that we stand in God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. This is difficult in a climate where the predominant counsel is ‘Do your best and God will do the rest.’ When life is divided into ‘our best’ and ‘God’s rest,’ we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our own resources are depleted. Then even the Lord has become the victim of our impatience. Discipleship does not mean to use God when we can no longer function ourselves. On the contrary, it means to recognize that we can do nothing at all, but that God can do everything through us. As disciples, we find not some but all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.”
–Henri Nouwen, Compassion
Prayers….
Snow can never emit flame.
Water can never issue fire.
A thorn bush can never produce a fig.
Just so, your heart can never be free
from oppressive thoughts, words, and actions
until it has purified itself internally.
Be eager to walk this path.
Watch your heart always.
Constantly say the prayer
“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
Be humble.
Set your soul in quietness.
The more the rain falls on the earth,
the softer it makes it;
similarly, Christ’s holy name
gladdens the earth of our heart
the more we call upon it.
— Hesychius of Sinai
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, What is hell?
I maintain that hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”
– Dostoyevsky
by tashmcgill | Oct 1, 2008 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas, Family, Health
Last weekend was the 31st anniversary of my grandmother’s death from breast cancer, a disease that she fought, along with hundreds and thousands of other women around the world. My sister is running here to raise money in Vancouver shortly. She ran first in Indiana with my Aunty Val who runs a breast clinic type scenario there. In just a couple of weeks I’m visiting a dear friend who has encountered the disease this year.
Growing up in a family of women, it’s hard not to associate our breasts with our feminine identity. I’m not one of those girls that gets indignant about propriety either. Just about any pair in the world has an uncanny ability to grab attention one way or another on any given day.
I’ve been thinking recently, watching a friends teenager growing with the signs of pregnancy, other young girls in the youth group growing into their adulthood and all that entails, how spiritual the connection between body and soul can really be.
Especially because of all that the breast represents; conflicting images of pleasure, life, beauty, sex, womanhood, strength, vulnerability, dependence, desire, nurture, sustenance. I think about how these things are both physical and spiritual. Partly they are physical and present by way of our own enacting or being, but they are also spiritual because of our character and intention behind these things.
Could it be that the spirit and nature of our divinely created womanhood finds genuine expression in our physicality – not just in the functionality but the presence? These parts of my body that interact with my conscious mind and feedback the condition of my own self? I am imagining, as with men also, our soul stretching out and filling all the physical property we pertain to it…
So when this intimate part of a physical/spiritually connected self is involved in any act – breastfeeding, sex, illness, even day to day posture and image.. surely that related to the Imageo Dei that we see within ourselves.
I am wondering, how to help with the healing of that image. How to help mould the spirit and soul to it’s new form. How bring purpose and space back to the functionality of the spiritual nature of nurture, sexuality etc. Not there is any healing in me beyond deep, soft words – but there is a walking I can do alongside, and a holding of hands.
I do this for my mother, my sisters, my grandmother, the many women of my family and for my friends. I wonder about my future – children to be feed and loved at my breast, a husband to be satisfied always. I think about life, bodies, spirit, soul .. and I find myself amazed at science and beauty. What is life that we fight for it, rage for it, cling to it… but the opportunity to love over and over?
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
— Dylan Thomas
