Tall Skinny Kiwi

A Slow and Kind Thanksgiving

We are walking over to a local farm today to pick up our turkey for tomorrow's Thanksgiving day celebrations. Once again I am happy to report that our celebration will be slow and kind, as well as compassionate, local and free. And it will be a day of good friends and thanksgiving for all God has done for us. Hope you have a great day also.

Related: Grace to Ewe: Our cruelty-free diet

thanksgiving

Slow Food Movement and Joshua Viertel

Josh Viertal is speaking here at The Feast and asking how many of us have "recently engaged in an agricultural act." All of us have, obviously.

Josh is President of Slow Food USA, a movement that I have always appreciated. He is talking about school lunches under the Time For Lunch campaign, diabetes, obesity, waste, and other food related issues that need to be addressed.

Previously on Tallskinnykiwi, I have suggested a slow Sunday and a cruelty-free Christmas. I also have some thoughts on what the Bible says about a cruelty-free diet

slow food

Making Pizzas and Starting Sustainable Churches

I made pizza again last night and they turned out great. Every Friday for the last 8 years, we have made pizza.

Guess what? Somebody took a video of me in New Mexico a few years ago making pizza at the Emergent Gathering. I only just found it. Thanks Randy for uploading.
The video is basically me and my wife Debbie (with the dreads) making pizza dough, showing how to make a sauce, teaching on the yeast of the Kingdom, the theory of bud emergence, and encouraging the starting of simple sustainable churches in people's homes. I think the idea of financially SUSTAINABLE churches should be back on the agenda in the midst of financial hardship. Emerging churches need to thrive in homes and not become too dependent on the restaurants and coffee shops for church events in case they exclude the poor and those with families who cant afford the menu.

We fed 100 people that day with very little cost, and lots of fun. It took about 5 ovens and we had to leave the dough on top of cars outside for the sun to rise it. You will also notice my mullet was only a month from perfection.

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Slow Sunday

Today is Slow Sunday in the UK, a day to celebrate slowness - slow food, slow pace, slow and enjoyable day. My family is cooking a slow stew with beef bones today but the fact is that we changed over to a slow food menu for Sunday a long time ago and have been sticking at it. Sunday is a Sabbath for us, not a day to get all stressed out in the kitchen and go Ramsay on everyone who slows down the process.

The Telegraph has a good article called "How To Go Slow" that I read on the train yesterday somewhere near Glasgow. I am taking a ferry home today from Aberdeen and it goes slower than anything so I think I am qualified to recommend this article. How to Go Slow also recommends other ways to slow your life down. Heres a couple of things from the article and a few I have discovered myself over the past few years to go slower:
- Baths instead of showers, and really early in the morning so I can stay longer.
- In 2005 I took off my watch and went without one for a year. I first did this as a result of advice from Robert Banks in a spirituality lecture at Fuller Seminary. Once I went almost 2 years without a watch.
- Photography with an old manual film camera. I have a medium format camera for black and while film and am building a dark room to develop my own photos. I am learning to sit and wait for nature to put on its show, to wait, as a Czech photographer once said, for the "music to play".
- Walk everywhere and shop local. We now can go for days without using the car.
- Bake bread for our homemade pizza every Friday. It takes a couple of hours to rise. Thats slow.
- Slower but better sex. Sorry. You didn't want to hear that.
- Travel less - not accept so many speaking invitations but be far more picky so i can stay at home more.
- Slow food and slow cooking on a sunday and more often during the week - pot roasts are great. A few days ago I cooked pork shanks in our wood stove for 4 hours.
- I have a vintage treadle printing press that does one page at a time and am about to make some books . . . very very very slowly.

Have a nice, slow Sunday.

Thought for the day - Jesus was not in a rush and refused the hectic schedule of his disciples who were hurrying things up to get the team to the Festival in time. "For you guys", Jesus responded, "The time is always right. But my time has not yet come". The disciples hurried on up to Jerusalem but Jesus arrived later on, in his own time, which just happened to be, as always, precisely the RIGHT time. Think slowly on that one.

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Willy Wonka Party

This is a record of our Willy Wonka birthday party last week and in particular, the media, food and games we created for it in the few hours before the party. Maybe it will be helpful to others doing the same thing.

Thats me on the left, dressed up as Willy Wonka. I welcomed people at the front door with a rolled out red carpet. This was the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory themed birthday party for our daughter Elizabeth, who turned 15. It was a great time and exceeded expectations. It was done on a budget and done quite well. So . . . I thought I would blog some of the links that were helpful, the games we invented, and, for non-geeks,  some of the hacks I used to get Willy Wonka media like fonts, .mp3 and video into our home. I use a Mac, btw and cant really recommend the best tools and programs to PC users.

Video
There are plenty of Willy Wonka video clips out there (youtube, etc) but importing and reusing can be a challenge. I download them with the Video Downloader 2.0 which is an add on to my Firefox browser. Then I open them up with MPEG Streamclip as a Quick Time movie, or, as DV footage for iMovie. If you can find some movies in .mov or .mpg format, (I search for them on Google) then you can download them directly as QT movies and use them as fodder for your video wallpaper. Some of my downloads needed editing to get the credits and words out of them which i did in Quicktime Pro (costs a little but its worth it). When you are all done, make sure the movie is in "loop" mode and play it on your TV or, if you have a projector, shoot it on the ceiling or a wall.

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Technorati Tags: willy wonka

Cruelty-Free Chicken Runs

Update: Tesco criticised for £2 chickens and rightly so.

Talk at the pub last night revolved around cruelty-free diets and the effect of the recent Chicken Run Series on Channel 4 by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I really liked what Hugh did and what he was trying to achieve in making his town completely free range. For those of you outside the country, Hugh set up his own intensive chicken farm alongside a free-range farm and compare the two. Really great and disturbing program!

We have 5 chickens in our back yard and let them run wherever they want. We handed over our original free-range chicken cooperative down the road to some other families and couples who wanted to give it a shot. There are 10 chickens in the cooperative.

Our chickens are really friendly and they like lots of cuddles.

A lot of the conversation comes down to money. Does the single housewife on social welfare buy two intensively farmed chickens for a fiver at the local supermarket or does she buy only one cruelty free chicken for a the same price, or a little more? You can have your say here.

Our policy for the last 2-3 years has been to completely avoid the cheap nasties and pay extra for the cruelty-free. But to pay twice as much for meat often means to eat half as much so we have added more vegetarian meals to our diet. We are also able to get two meals out of one chicken by keeping the bones and making a soup for another day. And they just taste better, as well as easing the conscience.

My post in 2006 called "Grace To Ewe: Our Cruelty-Free Diet" is, surprisingly, still the Number 2 pick at Buzzfeed for Cruelty free Carnivorism, the number one being Wolfgang Puck's new standards. My post, and in particular, something I wrote in 2005 called "The Skinny on Our Cruelty Free Diet" has some Biblical guidelines for carnivore diets so it good to see it getting read by a lot of people who don't often relate the Bible with their diet. Which reminds me, Hugh F-W's excellent book called The River Cottage Meat Book begins with some principles from the book of Genesis on the contract we have with our animals.

Technorati Tags: cruelty free, free range

My Christmas Gingerbread Waffles with Boysenberry Sauce.

I have been asked for the recipe for my Christmas gingerbread waffles. I have to admit that the first time I cooked them for my Christmas guests they were really boring and so I revamped them for Christmas eve with extra cherries and nutmeg and chunks of Chinese stem ginger and they came out far better, despite the cherries turning a little black. Heres how to make them.

The Mix:

Throw half a dozen eggs in a bowl with a little full cream milk and beat it. Throw a few tablespoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of baking powder and half a teaspoon of salt and keep mixing. Then tip a whole load of flour and beat it until it is really thick and gets a life of its own. Melt some butter - a few tablespoons will do - and pour it in. Now gradually add milk until it comes to a good thickness - dripping off the beaters in big heavy drops but not runny enough to pour from them. The mixture is much thicker than what you use for crepes. At this point, I put in lots of ginger powder, a generous sprinkle of nutmeg, chopped stem ginger (soaked in sugar syrup) and glazed cherries. Just mix it in gently or you will crush the cherries. And thats your waffle mixture. BTW - The Belgians use more eggs and sugar and less milk to make the famous waffles they sell on the streets.

Hope you have decent waffle maker like mine - a Krups FDD912 Expert Waffle Maker with Rotary System. It was the best one i could find in Belgium. The plastic knob on the top has broken off but it still works fine. The secret on these is to turn them upside down almost immediately after putting in your mixture and let them cook this way the whole time (4 minutes should do it).

The Sauce:

I made a fantastic Boysenberry syrup and I cheated by using JAM. I melted a tablespoon of butter, threw in 2 or 3 tablespoons of Walls Boysenberry jam from Oregon, a few grindings of nutmeg and a splash of Cointreau. The boysenberry is a fabulous American invention connected with Knots Berry Farm in California. Hey - I would use real berries if i could find them. But its winter so I use jam. And if i cant find boysenberries, I use raspberries which are a little more cliché but taste good with the Cointreau.

Related: Waffles for 30

Technorati Tags: cooking, waffles

Grace to Ewe: Our Cruelty-Free Diet

UPDATE: See the latest on our cruelty-free chicken co-operative and what we think of Hugh Fearning-Whittingstall's Chicken Run series right here.

Some of you are asking what i mean by "Cruelty-Free", as in our Cruelty-Free Christmas Feast that we enjoyed a few days ago. I didnt want to post on this right before you started to bake your huge turkey - bad timing - but maybe now is more appropriate.

This is a post i wrote in 2005 which didnt get ANY attention:
There's a lot of confusion about cruelty free diets, and most websites are not very helpful if you are not vegetarian or vegan. So | will briefly describe our understanding of a Biblical, ethical meat eating diet.

I told you at the beginning of the year about our commitment to a cruelty-free diet in a post called "Righteous Men and Meat", and that i had brought the subject up (perhaps unwisely) at a briefing for some Foundations who were asking about the Emerging Church. I also told you that last week I had a weak moment, a lapse of judgment, and am now back on track. But there is some confusion as to what it is we are doing. Maybe I am assuming that everyone knows more than they do. Here is the skinny on our cruelty free diet.

I believe God gave us care of the animals ("govern" is a better word than "dominion") and they, in return, give us food and clothing. We look after each other. It is a contract we have with the animals. under the eye of God. This is why Solomon can say "The righteous man cares for the needs of his animals" Proverbs 12:10

Our Cruelty-Free Christmas Feast

I am not a man given to boasting, but if i must boast, let me boast in the Lord's bountiful provision of game, seafood, grass fed beef, and the many culinary blessings of the Orkney Islands. Especially around Christmas time. We have been working on our Christmas feast since summer and are really excited about bringing out our best for our guests - six of whom are flying in from USA.
Here are some of the highlights:
Goose with rowan jelly made from rowan tree in our back yard, ducks from Orkney's St Ola Island, Orkney crabs [which nearly bit me yesterday with their huge claws, Orkney herring in a sweet marinade, venison sausages with chocolate sauce, London Broil from a cow down the road that had a bad leg. I bought the back quarter of it from the farmer. Poor old cow. But I dont think we will be feeling sorry for it as we eat my delicious beef and rosemary sausages [i really did make my own sausages on the MIGHTY Kenwood food processor and sausage making attachment, but thats another story]

ITS A CRUELTY-FREE CHRISTMAS!

All the meat was killed humanely and we know most of the farmers who killed our birds and beef. And I popped the crabs in the freezer to put them to sleep before boiling them - although i was tempted to taunt that big horrible one and get him back for scaring me!

Breakfasts will include gingerbread waffles and crepes.We have German stollen and pepper gingerbread. Friday night pizza will feature a special Christmas pizza - complete with ham, pineapple and cherries. Tonight we will have my beef and mushroom pie cooked in homebrewed stout.

What's to drink at the Jones Christmas Feast?
To accompany our white and red wines, and the mandatory Orkney Highland Park 12 year, I will be offering something closer to home this year. Our homebrewed stout and dark ale and .. . most importantly, our CelticMonk-inspired Heather Ale with heather that we picked in Stenness. I have also made a Christmas mead and a gooseberry wine from our gooseberry tree. It has been aging in my wine cellar for about 5 months. Oh . . and we have some bottles of German gluhwein [mulled wine] for the cold evenings.

And my Christmas Ale? Ahhhh . . just when i was on a roll you would have to ask that. Well, the truth is my glorious Christmas Ale, inspired by Trappist monks in Belguim, and brewed in late summer to give plenty of time for maturation, actually turned out to be total CRAP . . ghastly stuff!! . . if evaporated to half its size and is practically undrinkable. I think the temperature on the first fermentation was unstable and too low so it messed up the whole process. Oh well.

Anyway, I hope your Christmas is also filled with good friends and good food.

Related: Righteous men and eating meat

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New Scottish Beer: The Island Bere

Fabulous beer called "Island Bere" launched last night at the Stromness Hotel in Orkney. So good, in fact, that i had to go all the way home to get my wife. Lucky that we live only a few doors down.

This is Debbie and I congratulating Sonny Priest, the brewmaster from Valhalla Brewery in Shetland Islands. His "Island Bere" is a fantastic brew made from the ancient bere barley from Orkney - it taste like a cross between an IPA and an Irish Red. The bere barley has a high nitrogen content so the alcohol level is slighter lower than other beers but the hoppy flavour and reddish buttery taste more than make up for it. It is made with Cascade hops at the start and Fogels at the finish. The end result is stunning and a compliment to Orkney. It ranks up there with the great Scottish beers. Well done!

The idea of using the ancient Orkney bere stems from from Peter Martin (top photo - center back, with striped jumper), Senior Researcher at Orkney's Agronomy Institute. I asked him about the monastic beers in Orkney but neither of us are sure whether the monks would have used bere in the beer [no pun intended] but we both suspect they did, since it was the main barley back then. Thank God for the monks. "In fact, for nearly two centuries, monasteries across Scotland were almost solely responsible for the production of beer." Scottish Pubs
BTW - I am thinking of brewing a heather ale, a beer that has been traditionally brewed by Celtic monks, and before them, the Picts. Actually, there is evidence in the Scotish Islands of heather ale from 2000BC.

Some Scottish beers of note:
- Michael Jackson tells a good yarn about heather ale
- More recent history of Scottish ales and their unusual categories.
- Scottish beers are tasted and tested at the Opinionated Beer Page.The "Old Engine Oil Reserve" looks interesting and is aged in whiskey barrels.
- The Grozet, or beer made from gooseberries, was another beer made by monks in the 17th Century. Mike Miliard dates it back to the 1500's.
- There is a Kelpie seaweed ale that has a chocolate taste.
- The Orkney Brewery and Highland Brewing Co are the big ones in Orkney. The latter is preferred by locals.

And lest you assume that all Scots are beer connoisseurs, the favourite beer up here in Orkney is the horrible Tennents which doesnt even deserve a hyperlink.

Technorati Tags: beer, orkney, orkney folk festival