Parliamentary inquiry into assisted dying

A couple of days ago on Radio New Zealand National I heard this interview with Simon O'Connor.  He's chairing a Parliamentary Select Committee which is canvassing public attitudes on medically assisted dying in the event of a terminal illness or irreversible condition which makes life unbearable.

If you'd like your personal attitude to be included in the mix, you can make an online submission here.  Submissions are open until February 1st but, if you don't want to end up leaving it until it's too late, you might like to make a submission soon :-)  Also, they're hearing oral submissions as they go along, so if you want to make such a submission, you shouldn't have to wait too long for that after you put the written one in.

Fair trade jelly tip icecreams :-)

Back before we stopped eating regular chocolate, I was rather fond of jelly tip ice creams.  Recently, I've begun to wonder if I could make my own.  It turned out to be pretty easy - and very yummy :-)  The only difference is that you can't make them popsicle-shaped: a home freezer doesn't get cold enough to make the icecream sufficiently rigid to get it out of the moulds, so my jelly-tips are squat and fat.

Jelly (based on this, and other internet sites I've lost track of)

1T raspberry jelly crystals (1 box is 95-100mL)
1T + 1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup boiling water

Dissolve jelly crystals and sugar in boiling water.  Make sure everything's fully dissolved - may need to microwave it to achieve this.  Pour into four 100-150mL disposable paper cups and freeze at least 3 hours.

Adding icecream (based on this)

Slightly soften approx 1.5C vanilla icecream and spoon into cups.  Add posicle sticks, teaspoons or sticks from iceblock molds and freeze overnight.

Chocolate coating (based on this)

Melt together 90g dark chocolate (we used milk chocolate, but I think dark would be nicer) and 60g refined coconut oil and mix well.

Cut cups open to remove the ice creams and dip them in the melted coating.  The topping will freeze in a few seconds.  This gives quite a thin coating of chocolate so do at least two coats.

Note that this makes about twice as much coating as you need: this means you have more depth, which makes it easier to coat the ice cream.  Put the remaining coating in a glass jar and use like 'magic shell' ice cream topping (will need to remelt in the microwave first).

Anna and I enjoying our jelly tip ice creams in yesterday's glorious spring sunshine :-)

These worked really well.  The only thing I'd do differently next time is use dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate.

Martin suggested that, in the future, we could make jelly tip ice cream slices instead: a bit less fiddly and just as yummy :-)  Here's the recipe I'll use for my first go at that:

1. Mix 1 box raspberry jelly crystals with 1/2 cup sugar and 1 1/2 cups boiling water.  Pour into flat tray (around 20cm x 30cm) and freeze at least 3 hours.  Should give a layer of jelly about 7-8mm thick.
2. When set, soften 5-6 cups vanilla icecream and spread over jelly.  Freeze till firm (probably overnight).
3. Melt together 250g dark chocolate and 165g refined coconut oil.  Pour around 1/3 evenly over ice cream and wait until fully set.
4. Cut into bars, put on a tray chocolate-side down, spread remaining chocolate over exposed sides.

It'll make a lot of jelly tip slices, but would make a great party dessert!  Let me know if you try it :-)

Fair Trade White Chocolate - an update

Since my previous post on chocolate-making I've learned one important thing: whilst it's relatively easy to make nicely-flavoured white chocolate, nicely-textured white chocolate is much more complicated!

Commercial chocolate-making involves three further steps beyond a simple mixing of ingredients: refining, conching and tempering.  Since my previous post, I've been learning about the first of these.

'Refining' chocolate involves grinding the particles in the chocolate (including the fat globules) till they are so small that your tongue can't detect them.  Commercially, this is done using either roll refiners (forcing the chocolate up a series of stacked rollers not unlike the rollers in an old-fashioned wringer washing machine) or a ball mill.

On a domestic scale, the 'state of the art' solution is the Spectra 11 Melanger.  Investing in such an expensive piece of equipment seemed insane for my purposes, but it gave me a clue.  The Spectra 11 is a modified Indian wet grinder.  We already have an Indian wet grinder: a Sumeet.  It uses completely different technology, but is designed to do the same thing, so I thought I'd give it a go :-)

With a commercial refiner (or the Spectra 11), you typically leave the grinder to run for many hours - sometimes even days.  I didn't know how long I could leave the Sumeet running before it overheated but I knew that it had a reliable cut-out switch so I wasn't too worried.  I planted it in the sink (so it couldn't 'walk' anywhere), turned the tap away for safety, turned it on and quickly removed myself from the scene.  It's very loud!

After 30 minutes I noticed a slight change in the smell, even from two rooms away, so I quickly turned it off.  The chocolate appeared to have caramelised ever-so-slightly, but it was also much, much smoother.  Very promising :-)  I later ground it for two increments of 10 minutes, allowing it to cool significantly in between.  It was yet more smooth after this, but not by much.  In the future I intend to grind it in 10 minute increments and keep going until I decide it's good enough (or that I've had enough of the noise).

It seems that this grinder is much more vigorous than those normally used for chocolate.  This means it has more potential to burn the chocolate, but it seems it also means that it gets the job done much more quickly.

So, here's my recipe for 'refined' white chocolate.

Ingredients:

80g cocoa butter
80g milk powder
1/3 cup (80g) white sugar
seeds of 2/3 a vanilla bean (can probably use 1 1/3 tsp vanilla essence if you will later be adding liquid to the chocolate, e.g. if making ganache or mousse).


Mixing and refining:

1. Chop cocoa butter and melt in the microwave - takes 3-5 minutes.
2. Place Sumeet in the kitchen sink.  Fit one of the large jars with square blade.
3. Grind milk powder at least 20 seconds in Sumeet spice jar then transfer to large jar.
4. Grind sugar at least 20 seconds in Sumeet spice jar then transfer to large jar.
5. Pour cocoa butter into large jar.  Add vanilla.
6. Run on '1' for 10 minutes.
7. Leave to rest until close to room temperature again (approx 30 min.)
8. Run a further 10 minutes then rest again.  Continue until the chocolate is as smooth as you like it.  If you need to leave it for more than 30 minutes between grindings, transfer it to a shallow dish to cool.  When you return, break it into pieces, melt it in the microwave and continue.

Notes:

1. Running the Sumeet on 1 draws around 500W, so every 10 min. uses 0.083kWhr.  That's much less energy than it takes to boil the jug for a cup of tea and only costs us just over 2c.  It was making so much noise I figured it must be using heaps of electricity but it's not.
2. If you don't have access to a good grinder, use icing sugar for the sugar and full fat milk powder for the milk powder (both are 'softer').  Add the other ingredients to the cocoa butter very slowly, beating well as you go.  You will make a product that tastes good but it will have a somewhat gritty/dusty texture.
3. Other gadgets you can use to refine your chocolate are:
• other Indian wet grinders or mixers (another well-regarded brand that seems more widely available these days is Preethi, and I know people have had good success with the Premier Wonder Grinder);
• rock tumblers (e.g. Lortone Model 3A Tumbler).  Use with ceramic tumbling media.

Some people have also used juicers or food processors but they generally don't get things fine enough.


Next I need to learn to 'conch' the chocolate.  In milk and dark chocolate, this step eliminates some of the bitter flavours in the chocolate.  However, it's also the point at which you add an emulsifier, so it's still important for white chocolate.  Emulsifying the chocolate further improves the texture and also makes it easier to temper.

I'll be using soy lecithin, the emulsifier most commonly used in chocolate.  It comes in both powder and liquid forms.  I've decided to use liquid lecithin as I think that will mix in better, and I've decided to buy it in capsules (rather than as a bottle of oil) as I think that will probably keep better.  I'll initially add 1% soy lecithin (which means my one bottle of capsules would do 50 batches!) and generally follow this advice.

Splashes of colour :-)

It's bitterly cold in Auckland at the moment (it got down to 3 overnight last night) and, whilst today is brilliantly sunny, there've been a number of very grey days recently.

However, even on the greyest day, there are two splashes of colour in our garden that make me smile every day :-)

Firstly, the brilliant calendulas in the garden outside my bedroom window.  These were supposed to be a companion planting with our summer vegies, but they've waited until the last few weeks to flower.  There isn't much in the garden for them to attract beneficial insects to or lure bad insects from (I can't honestly remember which they were supposed to do), but their brilliant colour delights me!

The biggest calendula is a cascade of colour - the others just have one or two flowers each but even they stand out brilliantly on a grey day :-)

Secondly, our grapefruit has begun to fruit for the first time this year.  We've probably had about 10 grapefruit so far, and there's a few more to come.  They're yummy to eat, but also a delight to see, glowing brilliantly on their tree.

The tree was still in shadow when I took this picture, so you can't see them in their full glory, but hopefully this gives you some idea of how brilliantly yellow they are.

The cost of flying

Later this month, Martin's off to San Francisco for a work meeting.  This won't be featured in our calculations of our carbon footprints: if work incurs the financial cost of the trip, we figure they (and, ultimately, their customers) incur the carbon cost, too.

All the same, I was wondering what the carbon cost would be, so I plugged his flights into Atmosfair.  He'll be flying economy and one way he'll be on a 777-300ER and the other way on a 777-200ER.

I was genuinely shocked to find that the carbon emissions of these flights add up to a massive 8.8T of CO₂e!  That's the same as the carbon emissions from every aspect of both our lifestyles over an entire year!!!!

In the context of Martin's work, I don't think these emissions are unreasonable.  Hapara make software that's used by vast numbers of students.  Their business does seem to require a remarkable number of flights between their Auckland and San Francisco offices but, even if 100 such flights are made per year, that's less than 1kg CO₂e per student per year (assuming 1 million student users).  After all, over the course of a whole year that's the same as the emissions that same student would incur from a one-off 10km trip on the school bus.

However, this kind of trip is something plenty of people we know undertake for pleasure once every few years.  In that context, those emissions are astonishing: double everything else one of us incurs over the course of a whole year.

As an aside, Air New Zealand appears to use uncommonly greenhouse gas-intensive planes.  If Martin made the same trip using what an 'average' European airline would use for it (according to Atmosfair), the emissions would be only 5.4T CO₂e, not 8.8.  Similarly, for the trip to Timaru discussed earlier, he'd have been looking at emissions of around 500kg CO₂e, not the 680 it actually takes.

You could explain this for the long-haul flight by saying that maybe Atmosfair's data there isn't actually very good - after all, how many 12+ hour flights did they have in their European data set? - but after I saw it applied to the Timaru flights as well I've started to wonder if Air New Zealand is the problem.

Should our church pay staff at least the Living Wage?

Going through the budget prior to our church's recent AGM, I noticed that several of our staff didn't seem to have had a pay increase for some time.  As I was thinking about that, I also wondered whether they were receiving a 'living wage'.  After all, I know that churches sometimes skimp a bit on salaries so they can make more funds available to other aspects of their work and I didn't want us to be doing that.

I raised this with the elders and then ultimately Martin, on my behalf, raised it with the whole church at the AGM.  The church decided to appoint a working group to investigate this and bring a proposal to the church at next year's AGM.  To encourage the whole church engage in this discussion, I was asked to email the church with my thoughts on all this.  As this is something I've been thinking about a lot in recent years, I wanted to share it here, too.

Dear Church Family,

At the AGM, the church agreed to appoint a working group to look into our policies on staff salaries in relation to both the Living Wage and inflation-related increases. This was partly as a result of my raising these issues with the elders. In order to start a discussion on this within the church, here are my reasons for doing so.

The Church is the first-fruits of God's Kingdom. One day Jesus will reign here on Earth. Until that happens, I believe that one of our roles is to join with God in redeeming his world by creating 'islands' where things function somewhat like they will when Jesus rules in person. In Jesus' Kingdom, I believe that no one will be in material want: as we are told in Revelation, it's a world with no sickness or crying or pain. So, I don't think anyone employed by us should be in material want if we can avoid it, either.

Living Wage Movement Aotearoa New Zealand have calculated what it costs an 'average' household (2 parents, 2 kids) to live without material want in Auckland. For the family to be able to live in a house in the bottom quartile of the rental market and eat an adequate diet, and for the kids can go on school trips and buy simple presents so they can accept invites to birthday parties, while one adult works full-time and the other half-time, they calculated in 2013 that those adults need to be paid a minimum of $24.11 per hour. (You may also have heard the figure of $18.40 per hour - that's the 2013 national number.  It's higher in Auckland mostly because housing is so expensive here.)

I would like us to consider whether we should take this 'living wage' and treat it like the minimum wage: not that everyone should be paid the same, but that no one should be paid less than it. This isn't something we can impose on all of New Zealand, but it's something I'd like us to consider for the staff we employ ourselves: to think whether we need to take this step in order to communally live out what God's Kingdom may look like.

I would like us also to consider whether we need to have a policy on inflation-increasing wages. At the moment, inflation is running quite low (0.3% from June 2014 to June 2015). However, sometimes it's much higher than this.  If we don't increase peoples' wages when that happens, their effective income decreases over time as their expenses go up.  In order to keep our staff well-provided-for, I would like us to consider not only paying them a 'living wage' now, but also increasing (and decreasing?) those wages annually in line with inflation over the previous year. This would be independent of any actual pay rises we may wish to give them.

In this discussion, I'm primarily thinking of the staff we hire directly or contract regularly (i.e. the cleaner, office administrator, pastor and youth worker).  In the future, we may choose to widen the scope of our action to those whose services we contract for specific jobs (e.g. the people who repair our photocopier or make our billboards) or even to the people who produce the goods we consume (e.g. by purchasing fair trade tea and coffee).  But in the first instance, it made sense to me to consider the people over whose situations we have the most influence.

I understand that making these changes would cost us money that we currently don't have. However, there are many places in the Bible where God promises to honour those who give away more than they can afford in order to advance His Kingdom. Do we think paying our staff more would advance God's Kingdom? If so, are we willing to do so and rely on God to make up the shortfall somehow? To me, and maybe to you, such a change feels scary, but I think it is important to consider whether it is something God would like us to do.

Thank you for your consideration of these things.

In Christ,

--Heather :-)

So far it seems to have sparked a fair bit of interest (and more emails than I'd be able to deal with on an on-going basis!).  Some feedback has been negative, but that's only come from people who think I'm asking for everyone to be paid the same.  No one has yet objected on principle to the idea of choosing a salary floor higher than the legal minimum wage.

I don't know if I really want everyone to be paid at least the official living wage (after all, it's needs-based, and not everyone needs quite as much as it offers).  But I'm pleased that our church has now chosen to consider what we think is an appropriate remuneration policy, rather than simply following the market and the legal minima.

Climate change effects: vegan diet vs. flying

At a recent bike polo tournament, a vegan friend asked Martin if he was going to be going to the upcoming World Hardcourt Bike Polo Championship in Timaru.  Martin replied that he wasn't because he didn't want to incur the carbon impact of flying.*  His friend said he should go vegan, then he could fly with a clear conscience as the climate impact of a vegan diet is so much less than that of an omnivorous one.

*We did look into him going there via. train, ferry and bus, but it would take 2-3 days each way and we decided that wasn't a good use of his leave!

I thought that couldn't be right.  However, after crunching numbers, I found it to be much closer than we'd expected.

Firstly, I calculated the kg CO₂e from flying to Timaru using the atmosfair calculator.  This is the most sophisticated calculator I know: it allows you to choose which model of plane you are using for each leg of your journey, which can make a big difference to the amount of CO₂e emitted per person.

The Air New Zealand website informed me that, to fly to Timaru from Auckland, you take an Airbus A320 to Wellington then a Beech 1900D on to Timaru.  Unfortunately, the Beech 1900D isn't listed in the calculator, so I chose a BAE Jetstream 41 as the nearest equivalent.  Inputting those planes into the calculator gave a round trip CO₂e of 610kg.

Emissions from flying Auckland to Timaru return

How does this compare to the emissions Martin would save by going vegan?

The last time we audited the carbon emissions of our lifestyle (in 2012), we found that our diet is responsible for around 1020kg CO₂e each.  I've now divided that into the portions from vegan foods and non-vegan foods (here): I found that almost exactly half of those emissions are from to non-vegan foods.

Obviously, if we went vegan, the emissions from the vegan portion of our diet would go up: all the calories and nutrients we currently get from meat, milk and eggs would have to come from somewhere else.  However, seeing as most of our lunches and dinners are vegan (if you don't count the ubiquitous fish sauce!), a good first approximation might be that going vegan might reduce the carbon emissions of our diet from around 1000kg CO₂e to maybe something like 600kg CO₂e.

That 400kg CO₂e reduction wouldn't be enough to offset a flight to Timaru, but it was certainly more than I was expecting.

Still, if we were willing to go vegan in order to prevent those carbon emissions (something I don't want to do, but think may be at least worth considering in the light of these findings), I don't think it would be ethical to replace them with emissions elsewhere!  After all, currently Martin and I are each responsible for around 4.4T CO₂e per year - nearly four times what the planet could absorb, were everyone to live like us.  We need to be looking for ways to reduce this number, not redistribute its sources.