Hey Plain Jane

I may be the last person on planet Earth who is not yet switched on to muffins.  Although I’ve been known to quaff the odd Double Choc Mocha chip or Banana Maple Pecan number, I’ve never thought ‘oh yeah…muffins’ in the same way I might think ‘oh yeah…cheesecake’ or indeed ‘oh yeah…fudge’.  I’ve always been slightly of the opinion that one should hold off on the muffins entirely until a really good cupcake comes along. There seemed to me to be no sense in settling. I feel the same way about bagels when perfectly soft and flavorsome rye rolls exist. 

But I have changed. A bit.

I’ve come across Gloria Ambrosia’s The Complete Book of Muffins; a terrific little book that modestly sets out recipe after recipe of the most extravagant and superior muffin recipes I’ve ever read. There is not a single photograph in sight, and yet this book completely grabbed my sensory imagination. I suppose that is a mark of how good the flavour choices are. I note that Gloria Ambrosia (what a great name, incidentally) is among other things a practising Buddhist, and her bent is partly focusing on the nutritional value of her recipes. Muffins and nutrition; now there’s a thought combination not often spoken of.  Even in Australia muffins are more often associated with coffee, being decadent lumps of  mostly sugar-plumped treats.

The book has soooooo many good recipes. The flours chosen are often wholegrain or non-gluten, the sugar content is mostly delivered in fruit puree or concentrate (more fibre, vitamin and lower GI than plain sugar), and the emphasis is on the wholesomely adventurous, exploring all these very lovely new super-foods commonly available here. So far I’ve tried the “Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream-cheese Muffins”, the “Easy Living Southern Pecan Muffins”, the “Double Choc Chip Muffins”, which is made with whole wheat flours Jack never suspected were there and the “Thanks to the Tropical Sun Muffins”, which features fresh mango puree and chopped papaya. Lordie! I am stunned. And I’m dying to make the Chai Tea Spice Muffins and the Carribean Sweet Potato Gingerbread Muffins and the Spanakopita Muffins and the Almond Cardamom and Fig Muffins and the….sigh.

My Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream Cheese Muffins

It’s been a furious four months, up and down that highway to school and back twice a day. 46 kilometers all up for the two trips daily there and back. The road gets no easier. The drivers get no less tetchy and idiotic. I am no less aware of taking my life to the edge every time I drive it. In short I loathe the task. I find prayer helps.

Jack’s made heaps of new school buds, won an award for “being a good friend”, and he seems okay with the whole school gig. I, however, have learnt that a good teacher is a rare find, how hard it can be to keep the attention of a group of five year olds let alone teach them. 
Jack’s teacher is a wonderful woman; plain spoken, calm, decisive, warm but not effusive.  She is every bit the type of bookish and wise owl type one always hopes will teach your children. On occasion I have helped out in the class. They encourage parents to do this, perhaps to instill in us the true and correct understanding that teaching five year olds is a real art. My stints as volunteer teacher’s aide have been fraught events. Kids are great but on masse they form mini tsunamis.

Jack’s first day of big school. Which is not really big, you understand. It’s relative to the concept of Kindy/Day Care/Preschool.  John took the morning off work and came with us out to the school (a fair hike I need to remark). We were in plenty of time, there was no panic or stress.  Jack was fine. He was actually excited to go there. And I was surprised he announced it to be “awesome” in his summary comments at the end of the day. He looked very fine. Very grown up. The whole gush of emotion I had thought might come from me never came. The whole day was so relaxed and even keel one would hardly even guess that something so momentous had taken place in our family life. 

I picked him up at lunch time (a short day today, by way of introduction to the teachers and the general swing of things)

Not many people know this but “Prep” is a non-compulsory year of education. The way the government introduced it —just two years ago now— set it in the minds of most parents as a pre-requisite year. Nope. You could actually give the whole shamooz a miss if you were up for that extra year of heavy duty stay-at-home mum-drum or the alternative, heavy duty Day Care fees. Having said that not sending your child to Prep may put them at a disadvantage in year 1. And Prep is miles cheaper than Day Care fees, even at one of the city’s most expensive non-state schools.

I admit to it; the last week I have been dreading the end to Jack’s Day Care days and the beginning of his Primary School days. They call it Prep. I’ve never heard anyone call Prep anything else but ‘prep’, but it appears to be short for ‘prepartory’. The concept, hatched by our formidable education leaders, is that this is a year devoted to preparing young fertile minds for school life. It gets children out of the kindergarten phase and into a education mode…that’s the theory. So far, all I understand of prep is that Jack will be doing much the same sort of thing but in a school uniform.

So why am I dreading? Good question.
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Jack will begin prep school at the end of January, and hey, where did those five years go? Seriously.

But loooooooooook, his ickle black school shoes we bought today. So ickle. So shiny. Although I note with some grrrr that he has already managed to scuff both of them as he lollopped about the lounge room in them. He’s very excited. Gary, who visited this afternoon for a cup of tea, said “well aren’t they just the very bricks of love.” I thought it apt. There is so much love in our eyes as we gaze at their chunky, shiny goodness.

Whenever I’ve mentioned the shoes to anyone today they ask if he got the brand “Bata Scout”, which to many people around my age is the name of the coolest pair of school shoes imaginable. Bata Scouts looked like any normal black school shoes, but they had secret properties; the lion paw imprint it left on the ground for a start, and the most secret squirrel hidden compass nestled in the heel. They were de rigour and deliriously funky stuff. Oh course I had a pair, are you nuts? As poor as my parents were, they got me a pair of them. You can still buy them, but alas, without the miniature compass.

Okay, as I did promise myself, I’m nutting out the finer points of the resolution.

Seeing as I completed the rehearsal draft of Cake in the very early hours of this morning, and seeing as the dramaturg has already called to say it all looked fine, I felt at liberty to approach one of the resolutions with caution…..”be organised”. I cannot contemplate entering into this year with an urgent agenda to smarten up my organisational skills. With Jack starting at school, a school that is miles away from where we live, a school that starts at 8:30 every morning, sharpish, I cannot afford to have no routine and nothing sorted, and great piles of  project related things strewn about, and the fridge in an uproar, and meals planned hickity-pickity, and everyone eating dinner at 8, and me staying up til all hours, and sleeping in til 8am. What am I like?

So.

A routine. I will draw up a schedule of general daily events. A chart. For the wall or the fridge. 
I printed out a shopping list, even remembered to take it shopping. But I hadn’t done a plan of all the meals for the week, so still it all felt ad hoc. Even worse, the meal I had planned for tonight, Fried Ginger Fish with Mirin dipping sauce, was stymied when John announced he was “not in the mood for fish”, Never mind. The goal here is to develop a weekly menu planner, and a weekly shopping list to match it. There are bound to be stumbling blocks like men with contrary tastebuds!

Piggy bread 2

Originally uploaded by luckysundae

Oh, now please! This Piggy Bread is so impossibly cute. The woman in charge of this and other outrageous culinary fare, Lucky Sundae, should be given a medal for kitchen tolerance above and beyond the call of duty. She makes many of her creations (like the bento box one I looked at a few posts ago) for her children.

Just how appreciative her children are of her efforts remains moot. Some children do dig this sort of attention being lavished on their food. Others…meh. My own son falls in the ‘meh’ group more often than not.

In working on Cake, the latest play of mine, more recently I have been exploring what it is to want to give your children extremely beautiful memories of their mother’s food. It’s like a chronic deep-seated need in many women I know; the need to lavish. It’s really ridiculously primal. I’ve been know to hurriedly whip up an entire chocolate cake at 3pm, having it iced and waiting for Jack for his return from day care. He has a slice, then runs off, thanks Mum.

It’s not just food either. The urge runs to making clothes memories, toy memories, book memories, the lot. I’m making a quilt for Jack made up of fabric he chose. I’m hand sewing this quilt on time that I don’t have. We live in the tropics and we certainly do not require a quilt any more than one week a year or the odd sick day. But it is the thought, the look, the memory that I am chasing on his behalf. Madness.

But don’t get me wrong. It is a wonderful madness. It is a pleasing one to me. Perhaps 10% of what I do in this regard will seep through to his long-term memory. That 10%, how precious!

I think I do believe in race memory, whatever that may be. It is quite an intangible feeling of knowing you belong to some place, being pleasantly aware of the weight of your own ancestry, seeing unfamiliar things and having an emotional response to them that comes not from the head but from a place somewhere in the heart.

They say the heart has a brain. Scientists have discovered we do some of our thinking from a place inside our own hearts. There is evidence to show ‘brain-like’ activity occurring within the human heart, and most commonly thoughts to do with our emotional life. This is something we kind of know metaphorically, but this discovery means expressions like “thinking with your heart’ and “heart-felt” are based in fact.

When I go to Sherwood I am overcome with heart-felt memories of my race. These feelings are so easy to dismiss as fancy, but I do allow for the possibility that humans do not understand everything, and do allow for the notion that I am somehow emotionally linked to forests and especially the forests of England. It is only two generations ago my people lived there, as they had lived for thousands of years. We are all but vanished from that island now.

As we sat about Sherwood Forest and watched Harry and Jack play in the hollow log of a giant fallen Oak for well over an hour, as I took magic photos one after the other of these two boisterous and calamitous friends, it became so clear to me that a part of my being never left this island at all. In England I feel a constant sense of being drawn into the earth.

Continuum is beautiful. It is the meaning of having children. It is overwhelmingly truthful. Implanted within the idea of continuum is the utter and peaceful acceptance of life, death, joy and hardship. Continuum is almost “Zen”.

Another layer to this photo is that Jack and Harry are the sons of two friends, John (my husband) and Nick, who have been best friends since the age of three. Jack and Harry are both three in this photo, and they too have only just met. Like their fathers, they took to each other so well it was a pill to separate them at the end of the day. Nick’s mother commented to me that she was struck by the physical likeness between Harry and her son Nick when he was a boy, and Jack and John when he was a boy. So, John and I, and Nick and his partner Jo, had in effect re-created a strikingly similar image of the friendship between two boys forty years after it had first been seen.

Does it ever occur to you that your face is by no means unique? There are quite possibly relatives of yours walking the earth who you don’t know about who look spookily similar to you? They are part of your continuum and you don’t even know it. Even more intriguing for me is the absolute possibility that copies of your face have been seen on the earth quite a few times over the many centuries, as members of your continuum strutted and fretted their hours upon the stage, and then were heard no more.

Ellen and Jack, cousins in a cuddle. I took this photo beside the site of an ancient ring of stones near Ellen’s house in the far North of England. I just adore the shapes and the sensibility of this photo. I love Ellen’s hands, and the way she is staring so fondly at the camera lens. There is something magnificent about Jack and Ellen embracing in such a sacred place: a sense of continuity, of culture, of bloodline and love. 

Speaking of unfinished projects, this photo reminds me of a series of really lovely photos I’ve been threatening to have framed and hung in my house for over a year. Now it looks unlikely to happen until the new house is up.

And tomorrow is huge. I’m working.  I should go to bed, but sleeping in so boring when there is so much to think about, so much to do and see. I hate sleep. I have always hated sleep.

A couple of books came in the post for me yesterday; Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes, a wonderfully exotic cookbook to go with the author’s sojourn through the spicier locals of Europe, and the book seen above, an utterly delicious quilting book by two Australian women who own their own quilting business Material Obsession. I’ve already made one of their designs, a king single quilt called Annie’s Garden. I’m twitching to make this one of theirs:

known as Holiday Morning. Oh yes, just what I need! More projects! Please, more projects, because I’m so bereft of things to do here.

One day. I swear.

The linen stacked under the Material Obsession book is a small haul I took this morning at a thrift store in a country suburb, Freshwater. This particular store, which is tiny I will add, was having a linen bonanza sale. I was going to leave it until this afternoon because I am up to my tiny nostrils with a serious play writing commitment, but thank goodness I didn’t. I shot out there as soon as Jack was ensconced in his day care. The shop was chockas full of hunters, all rummaging madly. Alas, even at 10am, we were all a bit late. The store had sold out of most of its very beautiful old linen by 9 o’clock. I managed to scrimp a few tablecloths, a couple of embroidered tea towels and a doily or two. Oh..and a small crocheted lap rug:

When my mother comes to stay this Winter, I’m going to have to insist she teach me how to crochet. I adore this fuddy-duddy crocheted squares look. My mother is ace at it.

On top of the rug is a picture of the chocolate slice I made this afternoon for Jack’s Oyatsu. Oyatsu is a special Japanese word that means an after-school snack for children. I never fail to think Oyatsu instead of the phrase ‘afterschool snack’. Weird. Chocolate slice -this version of it anyhow- has special meaning for me historically; my sister Carmel and I always made it to cheer ourselves up on cold dull afternoons.

I popped into our local Asian food store this morning. It’s run by a Filipina woman, who informed me that tonight was the monthly Filipino get together, church service and feast in the city. I’ve known about this event for ages but have never been organised enough to make it. Long time ago now but I was invited to come to it by a Filipina baxter* who owns a bakery and restaurant in the middle of town. Her lovely name is Milla, and she bakes the most superb Pinoy doughnuts imaginable.

So tonight we fronted up to the Catholic church service at St.Joseph’s, a modest crowd of Filipinos, singing a combination of Tagalog and English hymns. As the only Anglo-Australians there were conspicuous as all get out. Jack was jumping for joy at it all at first. Surprise, surprise, Jack is a spiritual soul, and at the tender age of four comes out with statements and questions about God, heaven, hell, life and death that would make the hairs on the back of your neck rise up. He has taken to Bible stories, speaks often of God, and loves the Lord’s Prayer as I’ve been teaching him this week.

More than this enthusiasm for Biblical stories and prayer wordage, Jack is seriously and keenly a seeker of religious doctrine.  A couple of weeks ago, just as we were in a hurry out the door, running late for something, he asked  Mum? Who’s the devil? I told him I’d explain later, but he put his little foot down. No! I need to know now!!! he pressed with all the urgency of a boy headed for the seminary. A brief history of Beelzebub and his indecorous fall from Grace, ensued. Jack was slack-jawed with fascination.

Just where he’s come up with this soteriological gene, we are unsure. Well no, scratch that, I’m very sure he got it from me. I used to be the missionary.

But as the hymns and the prayers went on in this evening’s service, Jack got more than just fidgety. It was like he swallowed some worms or something. I’m sure my mum never let me get away with wiggling about the church pews. The second the service was finished Milla came over to us and invited us to stay for supper. She immediately fascinated Jack, revving him up about the noodles and the chicken she’d made, and how he would be eating like a prince. Jack thought this was all good. He ate several of Milla’s sumptuous Adobe chicken drumsticks, licking his chops and glowing with multiculturalism.  Jack never has seen fit to eat chicken drumsticks in his life. Suddenly it’s manna. He was so unusually excited at it all, and declared Milla was wonderful and that we should come back to this church again. Upon leaving he threw his arms around her waist and hugged so long I was obliged to prize him off.

In any case it was a fun introduction to the local Pinoy community. They were all so open and welcoming, just like every other Filipino crowd I’ve come across. We have been invited to the June 20 Philippine Independence Day celebration. Jack is beside himself. There may be more chicken.

* Not often I get to use this archaic word, baxter, meaning a female baker.