Vicar's Kitchen: My Greek Kitchen

I love Greek food. The love affair started early with a trip to Athens when I was 18 where I stayed for six weeks. Given that my repertoire at that time cooking wise was chucking a Birds Eye Chicken Pie in the oven or pouring a sauce over pasta it was no small miracle that some of the local ladies managed to get me into the kitchen. Alcestis, a woman with a truly beautiful soul who rescued stray animals and fed stray English students, taught me how to make proper Tzatziki. Tip: lots and lots of garlic!

Where I long to dine!

Now that the weather is warming up nicely I find myself craving those Greek flavours and none more so than the trinity of Greek ingredients, Olive Oil, Garlic and Lemon. Put that on pretty much anything and you've got yourself a meal but I have recently managed to perfect lemon oven baked potatoes which, if you haven't tasted them, are like a mix between boiled and roasted potatoes and just sing of summer.I served this recently with a new slow cooker recipe I have discovered for Lamb Stifado. It was absolutely beautiful topped with a generous helping of feta.

One of my last Greek meals actually in Greece

So here are a few Greek favourites for a summer dinner, enjoy!

Alcestis' Tzatziki

Grate one cucumber into a sieve and give it a good squeeze to release some of the water. Into this add two crushed garlic cloves (this is for some seriously garlicky, i.e. proper, Tzatziki. Adjust as you prefer!) and about half a tub o Greek yogurt. Just add as much yoghurt as you like for you desired thickness. Leave the Tzatziki over night if possible for the garlic to really infuse.

Courgette Balls

I have been looking for a good recipe for these yummy morsels for an AGE and finally came across this one from Abel and Cole. The secret -  halloumi! They are delicious served warm with a dollop of Tzatziki.

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Slow Cooker Lamb Stifado (serves 2-3)

500g lamb shoulder in bite size pieces
1 tablespoon of flour
400g red onion
2 bay leaves
A sprig of rosemary
A Sprig of oregano
1 cinnamon stick
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 cloves
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon tomato puree
100ml red wine
200ml chicken stock
50g feta cheese, for sprinkling

- Coat the lamb in the flour and add to the slow cooker basin
- Peel and quarter the onions and add to the slow cooker with the herbs and spices
- Mix in a jug the vinegar, tomato puree, red wine and chicken stock and pour over the lamb and spices in the slow cooker
- Cook on Low for six hours. Serve sprinkled with feta.

Lemon Oven Baked Potatoes

400g large potatoes
2 tablespoons lemon juice
A pinch of dried oregano
1 garlic clove finely chopped
Salt and Pepper
2 tablespoons of olive oil

- Peel the potatoes and cut them into wedges (as an idea for a fist size baking potato I would get about 8 wedges from this).
- Place the wedges in an oven proof dish, add the lemon juice, garlic and dried oregano. Top with some salt and freshly ground pepper. Leave this for one hour.
- Add the olive oil and cover the dish with foil. Bake in the oven (at about 180 degrees C or Gas Mark 4) for an hour. Remove the foil and bake for another half an hour.

Have a fab time in your Greek kitchen!

Vicar's Sofa: A Little Kindness

'The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.'
Galatians 5: 22-23
 

It always surprises me how easy it is to miss the simple things. Sometimes I like to kid myself that my life is orientated around looking to the needs of others so I don't need to consciously remember to practice these extra little kindnesses. That is, of course, nonsense. Just because you do a job or have a role that is about serving others doesn't mean that you necessarily do it with the right heart. Kindness, generosity, gentleness and love are things that needed to be worked out and practised.

 

From http://kaylaaimee.com/

 

The list above is what the New Testament, and more specifically St Paul, describes as 'fruits of the spirit'. If you're not familiar with this kind of language then think 'a God infused life'. This is what it will look like when someone really is connected to God. I love this, that a life lived mindful of God is expected to result in this very practical list of attributes.

I wrote an article for the Big Bible project this week about the prophet Hosea and his insistence that religion without action is worse than pointless. That actions are how we really know what is in the heart, not words. Paul, here, takes a very similar line. You say you love God, then show me how you love those around you. You say you pray every day, well show me your kindness. You say you give to charity without fail, well let me see the generosity of your heart overflowing when I speak with you, walk with you and know you day by day.
 

This both encourages me and hugely challenges me. I constantly assess what I really believe based not on what I think I believe but on what I do and the picture that emerges is not always as I would like. Goodness me, I don't live up to this list! But it encourages me that this is what striving towards God looks like, this is what I will grow into more and more if I walk this path with integrity. That is exciting and, to me, infinitely worth doing.
 

So right now, taking one more tiny step along the road, I'm trying to do one consciously kind thing a day. Something that puts me out, something that I don't really want to do. Something that inconveniences me. As I'm practising this I have found it bringing me another one of the words on the list - joy. It is fun to meet the needs of others in unexpected ways and the more you do it the easier it comes. The more it pops into your mind to do these things.

So that is my mini, mid year resolution for now. How about you, are any of these characteristics on your wish list?

Vicar's Kitchen: Spring TIme Tea Party

If you are anything like me (and happen to be living in the UK!) then you will have spent the last few weeks basking in this glorious Spring sunshine we have been having. It has been gorgeous - all daffodils in bloom, green fields and frolicking lambs and in my house....cake!

I decided to host a tea party for some of my closest friends as a farewell to our house. We have just short of eight weeks no until we will be en route to the new place (that we don't actually have yet...not at all stressful!) so we have begun the sad task of getting ready to leave to this lovely village that has been home for the last few years.

It seemed like a fitting last gathering for my best friends at our little abode to have a tea party. As I am now officially on vacation after the busyness of Easter I had lots of time to bake and mess around with china. And as it is such a beautiful Springtime here I dug out my daffodil tea set. It's from the 1930s and is utterly swoony.

 

No tea party is complete with scones, of course with clotted cream and jam. I suppose you have to have sandwiches too and we did find them surprisingly effective as palate cleansers in between the many, many courses of cake!

 

I went slightly into chocolate overload with the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook (well worth getting by the way). Firstly I made Brooklyn Blackout Cake which is a chocolate sponge topped with chocolate custard. This involved thickening the chocolate sauce with cornflour. This initially brought back flashbacks of a Home Economic class at school where the cornflour formed solid lumps in the middle of my sauce. Bad times. Luckily I had a little more success this time!

Brooklyn Blackout Cake from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook


I also made these incredible triple layer brownies. Think brownie, topped with cheesecake, topped with raspberry cream. My cream was a little too thin so they look a bit of a mess but my goodness, they tasted like little slices of heaven.

And last but not least I made some Lemon and Raspberry Madelines from Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen. They are a light sponge with a raspberry centre with a lemon curd filling. You can get the recipe here.

The Madelines waiting to be baked

 

So all in all, a good afternoon seemed to be had by all. Including the dog who was utterly spent from all the attention!

 



 

Happy Spring to you all!

Vicar's Sofa: Whole Body Religion

If someone had said the phrase to me 'Whole Body Religion' a few years ago, firstly I would have been like 'Religion?! *shudder*' and secondly I would have been like 'Sounds like you've been to crazy town. Population – a bunch of religious nutcases'. I was very generous, you see.

Yet now I am writing this post on the back of a week of what I can really only describe as a 'whole body religious experience'. I don't know how else you would describe launching yourself onto the floor dressed in bright red robes with two likewise dressed companions in what my husband described as 'seamless ninja style'. But lest you think I really have become an inhabitant of crazy town, let me explain.
 

This week I've been celebrating Easter at the church where I have been on placement all year. For those not inducted into the weirdness of the Church of England, you get a whole range of different styles of service depending on where you go. This can be quite fun, one occasionally likes to indulge in a little church shopping, but can also be a tad confusing for the uninitiated like the poor American tourists I spoke through these peculiarities at the Cathedral a couple of weeks ago.
 

This particular church I've been at has more in common with a catholic church in its style and draws on services from way back yonder which can be a bit odd and hard to get your head round but can also can be pretty cool. There is a sense of continuity with it all and a sense of connectedness to the past which in our frantic age is actually really life affirming. You also smell really nice when you leave because they are crazy for the incense.
 

But what I have loved about this week so far has been the powerful effect of the services based not just on what someone has said but on what I have seen and felt. Whether that is the changing colours of the robes, or the altars being stripped of all their candles, or the church being plunged into darkness as thick as the night.

 

This is quite exciting really because it means it is open to anyone even if you have previously considered such things to be the reserve of the residents of crazy town. You may get a bit lost sometimes and perpetually worry that someone is going to tell you off for getting it wrong *ahem, my constant fear* but the pay off for diving in and really experiencing something new is vast.
 

Because what I have discovered about these strange old services is that they connect somehow to something deeply recognizable and ordinary. This I am putting down to the fact that it connects to human things by virtue of it connecting powerfully to your body. You feel the cold underneath your feet (or your whole body in my case!), you touch and you see and it somehow connects to who you are now, a living, breathing human being with all your weaknesses and triumphs. It's less 'pie in the sky when you die' and more 'gosh, this life I am living is terrifying and wonderful and overwhelming and more than I can handle, it's nice to take a minute, let it all sink in and consider it in a new way.'
 

So I don't know, perhaps I am still eligible to be a resident of crazy town after today but perhaps not. Perhaps it's all just a bit more ordinary that I first thought in the most wonderful way. Perhaps I might do a bit more of this 'Whole Body Religion' thing.

Vicar's Study - Unapologetic by Francis Spufford

'You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity. It is called Unapologetic because it isn't giving an 'apologia', the technical term for a defence of the ideas.

And also because I'm not sorry.'
 

 

In the last few weeks I have been volunteering at a cathedral. Every evening at about quarter to five the choir wander in, a rag tag bunch of boys clasping music sheets and jostling each other as they head to their stalls. A couple of minutes later and the cathedral is filled with sound. Voices blending together, soaring. It draws me into another world, to a sense of order and of beauty and of rightness. Just for a moment as I sit there and let the music flow over me I feel connecting to something bigger than myself. I feel at peace.
 

It is with this kind of experience that Francis Spufford opens his book Unapologetic. No one can know if God exists, he argues, it isn't something that can be answered definitively one way or another whether you are the Archbishop of Canterbury or Richard Dawkins. But this sense of something, this whisper into the silence, he argues, is a reasonable basis for belief in something greater. Emotions are our 'tools for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof of disproof'. This emotional experience of an 'otherness', an order, a peace in the world, is the basis of what he explores in his book.

He is certainly not hopping on the hippy train and as he would put it 'joining John and Yoko around the white piano' and proclaiming the whole world to be one big ball of love and peace, man, if you just connect on in to it. No, for me, he gets to the heart of the Christian message about the world that both presents humanity as irreplaceably wonderful and heartbreakingly broken.

This he calls HPtFtU, the 'Human Propensity to F*** Things Up'. We all have it and we all spend most of our time pretending that we don't. Trying to label someone else as the problem rather than recognize our own dark corners. Peace, he argues, is hard won not some default state of human nature. It is our potential not our possession.

He is refreshingly honest about the brokenness of the church (that HPtFtU again!), the brokenness of the world and the depth of human suffering. He doesn't shy away from asking how on earth this can be the case if at the centre of the universe is a God of love. He presents no platitudes, no explanations that perhaps seem ok on the surface but even a tiny amount of exploration suggests a God who stands up to no ones definition of good. Instead he turns to the Christian answer to suffering which isn't a proposition so much as a story..
 

'Imagine a man, then....Imagine a man in whom the overwhelming, all at once perspective of the God of everything is not a momentary glimpse from which he rebounds, reeling, but a continual presence which in him is somehow adapted to the scale of the human mind, so that for him, uniquely, the shining is not other but self.'
 

This story of one man, Yeshua (his Hebrew name. Yep, you guessed it, it's that Jesus guy again!), doesn't pat us on the back and say 'there there' or 'just pretend it's not happening' but takes us into the depths of our human experience. I am about the embark in church on eight days of remembering the last days of Jesus' life. We engage in what probably looks like a pretty depressing set of services remembering a particularly unpleasant death to mark that hope in the human situation can't come from burying our heads in the sand.
 

It is about recognizing that we can't escape the realities of life and death, that we can only pass through them. But more than that it is about saying that someone already has. And not just anyone but The One. That voice of beauty and love and wonder that speaks in those moments of transcending peace. This act, this taking on of all that is broken in the world and in our own hearts, is the death knell for suffering, the remedy for the HPtFtU, the outstretched hand of unconditional love.

And what does that mean when we emerge from all this on Easter Sunday? Francis puts it well,

 

'Don't be careful. Don't be surprised by any human cruelty. But don't be afraid. Far more can be mended than you know'.

 

This is an extraordinary book, do read it.

Vicar's Kitchen: The Tea-vangelist!

Yesterday, ironically over a cup of hot chocolate, I gave a particularly impassioned speech about tea. My husband, who was claiming to only like a cup of milky builders (sigh), responded to my ten minute diatribe with, 'My goodness, you should be a Tea-evangelist!'.

As Barney Stinston would say – Challenge Accepted! It's also about time I broached this subject given the title of this blog. I don't want you all hauling me up on trade descriptions!

Amen.

A few years ago I didn't even like tea. Looking back now on the dark time I'm not sure what I did for refreshment. I certainly didn't daily enter into a world of extraordinary flavours. I didn't have the option of deciding if I fancied a big caffeine kick or just a little caffeine nudge, as it were. I didn't have the opportunity to have Salted Caramel in my drink with NO ADDED CALORIES. It has been a revelation.

And now, dear reader, I share with you five of the best teas I have discovered on my adventures.

1. The Staunton Earl Grey - East India Trading Company

I discovered this tea while on a tea tasting at Christ Church College in Oxford with one of the East India Trading Company's tea tasters. Yes, people really get to do that for a living. This is a powerful brew containing the essential ingredient of a proper Earl Grey, neroli. In my opinion everything after you've had this is just a bad imitation. It is very fragrant and floral though so bear that in mind and brew gently!

2. Empress Grey - Marks and Spencers

This is my favourite every day tea. Where the Staunton is floral, this is full of citrus flavours. It has a light Chinese black tea as its base and is flavoured with orange and lemon peel. If you aren't a fan of the bitterness of strongly brewed black teas then this is quite different to that. It's also an absolute bargain at £1.49 for 50 tea bags!

3. Green Tea and Salted Caramel - Twinnings

This is a new one from Twinnings and it is AMAZING. Don't be put off by what sounds like a bit of a weird combination. The salted caramel adds a soft sweet note to the green tea that is just delicious.

Brew lightly with this and with all green teas giving them just a minute or so. I learned that from the East India Trading Company expert who informed us that we were all brewing our teas to death. In the case of Green Tea this is a bitter death indeed which often puts people off when they first try it. Brew less, no problem. Lovely tea goodness!

4. Cotswolds Fruits -  Huffkins Bakery

If you happen to live in the Oxfordshire area then get yourself down to Huffkins Bakery in Witney or Burford. If you happen to be here on holiday then stop by and buy all of their tea. You won't be sorry. This is a delicious fruity tea made up mostly of berries. It honestly tastes just like summer.

Lots of people have tried fruit teas and found the taste doesn't live up to the smell. That is often the case if you go for fruit teas that are more dust than fruit in the tea bag! Whole fruit pieces in this tea give a totally different and rich flavour.

If you aren't lucky enough to live near Huffkins then Tea Pigs Superfruit is similar and nearly as lovely.

5. Orange Rooibos - Trumpers Tea

I'm not a fan of pure Rooibos but I love it with added spice and I also love its wild cousin Honeybush Tea. This one is particularly lovely and is flavoured with African spices, orange peel and orange oil.

Rooibos is an African tea and it really does remind me of the feeling of the sun on my skin. It tastes like where it comes from, all sunshine and warmth. Loose flavoured Rooibos can be hard to come across but if you can't find this variety then Twinnings do a specialist loose version as do Whittards.


So there you are, the Tea-vangelist has spoken. Are you converted?!

Vicar's Sofa: Community, what does it mean to you?

It's all getting rather exciting in these parts as we start to prepare for a big move to my first Vicar-ing job. For the last few years, as regular readers will know, we have been living in the sort of semi-countryside. This has been lovely but a bit odd for this self confessed urbanite. From the start I have lamented the lack of light pollution (I like street lights, so sue me...!) and I deeply miss the ability to collapse into a coffee shop within walking distance from my house. Our next move is back to more urban surroundings and right into the heart of the town where we (the husband and I) will both be working as well as living.

It is pretty in the countryside, I grant you!

As well as worrying about the monumental amount of packing there is to do I have also been thinking excitedly about what life in this new little commuter town is going to be like. In many ways I already know it very well. I grew up about six miles away and I'm going right back into the golden world of my lovely friends and family. But in other ways it is completely new. A new bunch of people, a new town centre, a new lifestyle for us that will be very different from our little village with just a Co-op and a Post Office!

My first 'Googles' about the town (after the church, of course!) probably reveal quite a lot about my major concerns when moving to a new community. Search one – 'Haberdashery'. Et voilà! A lovely little family run business pops up in my search findings. That's all my free time sorted, then.

 

My next searches of 'Vegetables' and 'Second hand furniture' are possibly a bit random, I grant you, but there is nothing better than wandering down to a good market for your food. The desire for a second hand furniture shop comes from a complete inability to pay hundreds of pounds for something I can get for a fiver. Though, to be fair, this does have its drawbacks. My brother, based on past experience of visiting us, enquires about the stability of every piece of furniture before he sits in it!

 

Second hand furniture rules!

But all this local shopping and eating is, for me, a big part of what it means to be a community. It's about supporting the people working in your area because you are neighbours but also because you want them to still be there selling you all this brilliant stuff. Hooray for towns with farmers markets and second hand shops (which my new town has both of, score!) And a double hooray for the unexpected bonus of a French delicatessen! Be still my beating heart, we will have proper Brie!

Shopping locally also means getting to know the people who live beside you, a very pleasant side benefit to the acquisition of excellent French cheese and unloved armchairs. This has also been something the church has been very good at in my life allowing me to make friends with people from across the generations. It also allows my to indulge my fantasy of creating a life reminiscent of the Gilmore Girls in Starshollow. Everyone should have a Luke and a Taylor Dosie!

 

Forgetting that 'No man is an island' seems to be pretty common in our towns and cities but, based almost entirely on hunch, I feel like the tide is turning on that. We do want to belong where we live, even if we are only there for a short time. Since leaving university I haven't lived anywhere longer than three years and I'm unlikely to ever lay down permanent roots till I retire. But I still want to wave to people as I walk down the high street and make a new friend that lives just up the road.  

So what do you think? Are we having a community revolution? Does it matter to you? And what are your top tips for growing community where you are?