A delicious discovery

Many years ago I learnt to make quince pâté/paste: a delicious concoction that you can serve on crackers with cheese or simply nibble on on its own.  Then a year or two ago I purchased guava paste - the same general idea, but made from tropical guavas.  Right now we're in the middle of a major guava glut so I decided to have a go at making guava paste with our own strawberry guavas.  The result was delicious.  We've simply been cutting it into cubes, rolling it them in caster sugar and eating them like jubes although think it'd be nice on crackers with cheese as well.

Should you like to have a go at making your own guava 'jubes', it's very simple.

1. Simmer guavas until soft with a small quantity of water (just enough to stop them burning - we used about 1/3 cup water to 2 litres guavas).
2. Pass through a mouli to remove all the seeds (you could force them through a regular seive if you didn't have a mouli, but it'd be a bit of a pain).
3. Put the pureed guavas in a wide pan with an equal volume of sugar (we used our big preserving pan and the high sides were great as they meant that the splatters were contained as the paste was cooked down).  You only want about 2-3cm of puree/sugar mix in the bottom of the pan.
4. Bring to the boil and cook, stirring constantly, until the mix has reduced to about half the volume and you can draw a wooden spoon right across the pan before the trace fully closes up.
5. Pour into non-stick containers to about 1cm depth and leave to cool (which will take hours - it holds its heat amazingly).

Store between layers of baking paper in air tight containers.  Should easily keep more than a year.  Yum!

TED talk on energy

A few weeks back Martin and I watched this TED talk entitled 'People, Power and Area'.  It's by one of my heroes - British physicist David Mackay who not only wrote the program I use to type using only a mouse but also wrote the wonderfully informative book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.  I appreciated his clear explanation of why we can't just switch to renewable energy and otherwise carry on living 'business as usual'.  I was also stunned to learn that the UK and Saudi Arabia both had the same amount of fossil fuels under their soils (one in coal, the other in oil) before extraction started.  I hope to be able to direct people to this talk in future as a good, clear explanation of where the world is at in terms of energy availability.  To be honest, I do find a clear explanation of where we're at kind of scary, and it drove me to pray - thanking God that He is in control and pleading for his mercy in this dire situation.

Over the last couple of months I've been working on my latest piece of writing for ANZMES, New Zealand's national support organization for people with CFS.  Martin's now put it up on our website and you can read it here.

Living the Proverbs

In our Bible reading Martin and I are currently going through the book of Proverbs.  It's a bitty collection of sayings but, when you put them together, the overall message seems to be that the wise person lives a faithful, disciplined and humble life, caring for other people and not seeking either riches or honour.

At the same time, through the season of Lent I'd been doing a daily reflection/self-examination* that includes praying through the list of the 'fruit' that God grows in the lives of those who follow Jesus:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23, NIV.

Suddenly, something dawned on me. These character traits that God grows in his followers are exactly the kind of character traits you need in order to live the kind of life described in Proverbs.  In other words, God himself actually gives us what we need to live the kind of life he requires of us!  I found that really exciting and encouraging :-)

---

*In case anyone's interested, my Lent reflection was based on two of the exercises from this study from Lyfe in the UK. Most days I spent about 15 minutes going through the following:

Spend some time with God each day, ask him to purify your heart and mind through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Be willing to surrender to God.

You may want to ask him questions such as:
- What words have I used that have hurt others?
- What actions or activities have I engaged in that are unhelpful or block my relationship with you?
- What ‘fruits’ needs to grow in me: characteristics such as love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?

Holiness grows out of prayers like these.

Looking to tomorrow, take time to consider who or where God might want you to serve.  What opportunities might arise where you can resist being the first, best or most important person?  Are there situations at home, work or in everyday life where you can serve others tomorrow?  Are there times where you can allow others to be first?  Pray for the grace to be able to lay aside pride and take the place of a servant.

 I found it a really helpful and productive process.

Medical Aid Abroad

The charity that my mum volunteers at, Medical Aid Abroad, was featured on National Radio today :-)  You can download the audio here.  My mum is the manager at MAA and her name is Tony.

A pincushion filled with sand

A while back I came across the idea of an emery pincushion: a pincushion filled with a fine abrasive powder that sharpens your pins and needles when they're poked into it.  Sometimes you find emery pincushions 'as is', but more commonly they're tiny pincushions stitched onto a bigger pincushion: the small emery one for actual sharpening and the larger one for storage.  Emery is both heavy and expensive so you don't want to use more of it than you have to.

I hate waste and I do a lot of handsewing, so I liked the idea of not having to throw out a needle every time it went blunt.  Unfortunately I couldn't find a source for tiny quantities of emery but I did, eventually, find an excellent alternative.

It turns out that any very fine, very hard powder will do the trick.  Sand grains are not only very hard, they're also very easy for most Kiwis to come by :-)  Also easy for many Kiwis to come by is muslin, which can be used as a very fine-meshed seive.  Bingo!  So I took some well rinsed and dried beach sand, poured it onto a piece of muslin and squeezed it a bit until a half-teaspoonful or so had passed through.

To make my pincushion I then sewed the sand into a double-walled fabric pouch and sewed that into the centre of an ordinary pincushion.  In the year or so that I've been using it I haven't had to throw out any blunt needles :-)

My original pincushion, with sand in the brown bit in the middle. I do like wrist pincushions!

A sand pincushion I made for a friend - the sand pouch is under the centre of the red fabric.

Masculinity - Two Links

I ran into an interesting post from Mark Sayers today, when I failed my lenten challenge to forego my news feed.

Sayers describes the historical choice of evangelicals to promote a gentler masculinity, and the context which prompted it, to argue that rather than simply looking back to some hardened 'machismo' we should again seek to recentre from biblical principles.

This historical perspective has never featured in the many articles I have encountered on how the church suppresses my manhood, and I found many points still resonated. The world is not so rough and tumble as it was, thank God, but power and dominance are still key temptations men face. The Invitation is still daunting:

In coming to Christ, hardened men were forced to leave their pride at the foot of the Cross. They were invited to follow a Messiah who shunned all of the world’s ideas of honour, who could have struck back with the force of an army of angels, but who chose to die a death that was shameful in the eyes of the world but that brought eternal glory.

---

I wonder if I Sayers has read this resource, subtitled "A Church Manual on Men as Partners: Promoting Positive Masculinities". I haven't read it yet, but am intrigued that two major organisations (World Council of Churches and World Communion of Reformed Churches) have set out to build new understandings of masculinity.

---

As I may have said elsewhere, I personally think that the big noise about men in church is misguided.^* I am therefore very pleased to see other voices which seem to build positively but still critically on our history, rather than optimistically reaching for a golden former age.

*David Murrow's recent comment that the church's 'core product' has changed from salvation to relationships may explain why he says that men lack 'risk, challenge and adventure'. Not only is he confusing Sunday services with the Church, but he has lost the whole Change the World element! What bigger challenge and adventure does he want?  Sorry for blowing out my two-link title once I got my rant on.