03/15/10

Day 27: They Stole Our Idea

There’s a new product heading to the supermarkets and that product is a Marmite Cereal Bar…Jo told me about it after seeing a billboard advertising poster.

Whilst I love marmite and love this idea I am a little cross about the prospect of a marmite cereal bar and the reason behind my anger and upset is quite simple…ME AND HEIDI CREATED THE CONCEPT FIRST!

Back in September (link) I blogged about our attempt to make Marmite flapjacks which I believe this cereal bar is obviously trying to be…so if you buy a Marmite cereal bar in the shops remember the concept was here first!

From Baking With Heidi & Marmite

03/11/10

Day 23: Cheesecake

Whilst I have 3 more serious topics I want to blog on over the next few days I don’t have time to do a massively serious blog today however back to the baking theme of a couple of days ago and onto desert!

Today in preparation for tomorrow night’s youth group murder mystery/pudding party Heidi and myself attempted to make a cheesecake and actually it was pretty easy to make!

It was simple a case of mixing a load of crumbled digestives and butter, pressing them down into a base (in a tin!) and then mixing up some icing sugar, some soft cheese and some lemon juice before adding whipped cream (we made a lemon one!)…if you’re interested the recipe was something like: 300ml cream, 125g digestive biscuits, 75g butter, 300g soft cheese and 60g icing sugar (plus 1 lemon)…try it, it’s easy…I’ll let you know if it tastes good tomorrow!

03/9/10

Day 21: Gym

Attached to the school I do some youth work at is a gym and since starting I’ve had the best intentions of joining and last week the application form finally moved from my desk into the gym and Saturday (as my twitter followers will know) was my induction session where I was shown around the various instruments of torture (I mean pieces of equipment!) and shown how to use them properly and after an hour and a half I left feeling knackered but enthusiastic!

I went back today to have a fitness programme put together…the gym there is very clever and you get given little USB style devices which go into each machine which tells you your programme, what to do, automatically adjusts the machines as you work through and tracks your progress.

The programme set for me includes a variety of activities aimed at variety and tackling everything from cardio to strengthening muscles and so I’m looking forward (and also dreading) giving it a test run either this evening or in a day or two.

I’m hoping that overall my levels of fitness will increase from unfit to fit and it’ll give me something active to do…we shall see!

The gym also has a decent sized swimming pool which I shall also test swim at some point!

03/7/10

Day 18/19: Oops & talent

Yesterday I managed to forget to blog but seeing as Sunday’s in lent don’t technically count today can count as yesterday!

I had a few things I wanted to blog yesterday so I’ll pan them out over the next few days however last night I went to ‘South Cave’s Got Talent’ which was a fund-raiser for Lucy heading off on mission…there was a good turnout of people both to watch and to perform a variety of talents, I had also been asked to be the sound/video geek for the evening so thoroughly enjoyed playing with P.A’s and actually made my electro-acoustic sound nice through the PA system (perhaps part of that was because I wasn’t playing it!).

It’s always interesting to see people from church doing things you never expected and there always seems to be a sense of humour in people you’d never seen before or a talent you just never expected and church things like this always seem to be good fun.

It also reminded me that I need to get into some open-mike nights and the-like because whilst I didn’t perform last night I keep desiring to have a go sometime and with a lot of my spare time spent mixing a potential album at the moment I think I need to get some music out there!

03/5/10

Day 17: Pummells and Spanish Chicken!

Just over a year ago Mike and Yvonne who had hosted me throughout my time in Peterborough moved half-way around the world to New Zealand and after countless meals prepared by them in my time in Peterborough I was able to return the favour tonight for a couple of hours as part of their flying visit to Britain.

As I blogged back on day 5 I love having a house to host people and lent seems to be in part a time of hosting friends…in the last few weeks Joel, Vicki, Caroline, Dave, Mike and Yvonne have all passed through at various times for various lengths of time and it’s been so nice to be able to catch up with people….alongside this the regulars from South Cave have popped in many-a-time.

A really simple recipe that I was given a few weeks back was one for Spanish Chicken, it’s quick to prepare and makes a nice main course for guests so to make this blog useful here’s some instructions!

Ingredients: chicken (1 breast per person), chopped tomatoes (tin…1 tin = 4 people), 2 cloves of garlic, 1 onion, tomato puree and syrup.

Instructions: Assuming you’re cooking for 4 people fry the chicken breasts in some oil for 3 minutes a side, in another pan fry the onion (chopped) and garlic (also chopped), then add the tin of tomatoes, the table spoon of tomato puree and 2 table spoons of syrup and cook for a few minutes.

Then put the chicken in a dish, pour the tomato sauce stuff over it, cover the dish with tin foil and pop into the oven (pre-heated to 180 degrees) for an hour. Simple and tasty!

03/3/10

Day 15: Seperation of Church & State

I’m sure I’d blogged on this previously but a search of my blog seems to prove me wrong!

I’ve spent much of today planning my second lesson on the Amish for the A level students tomorrow and one part of the Amish belief which I find myself agreeing with more and more is their belief in the separation of church and state.

The thing is in principal there isn’t anything wrong with a nation being ‘Christian’ especially if the laws and morals of society are based upon Christianity (or perhaps that should read ‘based upon the teachings of Christ’) however in Britain our so-called Christian country doesn’t seem to be any more!

Whilst many of our countries morals (such as murder is wrong!) match Christianity and our country is blessed with freedom for Christians to practice without being persecuted the national identity of Christian seems to me to cause some confusion!

For starters the most recent census of South Cave said that 80% of the villagers are Christian (this is around 3,200 Christians!) and whilst I admit that we never really know who is and isn’t a Christian I can’t help but feel that this statistic is incorrect.

Facebook has proved an interesting tool with understanding people’s religions thanks to the ‘religious beliefs’ section of a profile and I’m amazed at how many people I went to school with are Christian/Catholic/Protestant yet actually they’re probably no more Christian than I am a tea-pot (feel free to dispute my position as a tea-pot!). I don’t mean this in a judgmental way but in a way that says ‘is being Christian an identity that comes with being British?’

If this is the case then there are some serious misconceptions out there…misconceptions that perhaps we would not have if the church was not attached to the state.

To finish this blog on a controversial one liner what’s going to happen when Princes Charles becomes king? Are we seriously going to have a non-Christian head of the church?

02/21/10

Day 5: House

Whilst Sundays’ in lent don’t count I will still be sticking to my lent things on a Sunday so I guess that means I’ll actually end up with 40-something blog posts and whilst today’s post is edging closer to being posted on Monday I thought I’d blog…better late than never!

Over the last week I’ve been lucky to spend time with some of my favourite people in the world and they’ve all ended up at my house whether they’ve stayed for a couple of days or just been around for breakfast or for a drink and I’ve really begun to realise how much I love having a pad!

It’s really nice being able to have somewhere where you can invite people around casually and being able to make people feel welcome and look after them. It’s great being able to have friends stay and awesome being able to sit up drinking a nice single malt and chatting until the early hours without thinking you have to go home soon.

Hospitality is a very nice thing to be able to offer….however guests mean cleaning up…so now I need to wash up!

02/20/10

Day 4: Murder!

I’ve realised that so far I’ve failed to blog but my weekend’s been busy, had Joel and Vicki to stay Thursday and Friday and Caroline arrived this morning and this evening we’ll be out and about in Hull.

However I have just enough time for a quick blog and will therefore lower the high quality blogs I’ve set in the last few days!

Last night 8 of us did a murder mystery, other than a murder mystery I did a few years ago with a youth group I’ve never done one properly and so was pretty excited about the idea.

The murder mystery was set in Australia with a selection of suggestive character names and had ten rounds revealing interesting and disturbing facts about our characters whilst we had some good food between rounds (not all ten I might add!) and whilst the murderer was obvious when you look back a voting error of ‘he can’t be the murderer, it’s too obvious’ on my part meant that I didn’t get it right…in fact only one of us did.

All in all is was a very fun evening, lots of laughs and a really nice social thing….even if I finished off by walking through South Cave at half midnight wearing flip-flops, shorts and a t-shirt!

01/30/10

Twitter Lists

On Twitter you can make lists and follow them…I never have but I’m on 5 lists including ‘Youth Ministry’ and ‘Youth Workers’ which is always nice to be on but my favourite list that I’ve been included on comes from Mark Tuma

It’s always encouraging to be an ‘actual person’ – follow me on twitter

01/18/10

A Few Weeks In Pictures

Having spent quite some time working out why photos weren’t uploading properly from my mac and solving the problem I thought I’d post some photos from the last few weeks…click them to see full size…or head to ‘Photos’ and look at the albums! Enjoy

01/13/10

The Youth Worker’s Office

Whilst I wait for my printer to print some Safeguarding Leaflets for volunteers I thought seeing as I haven’t blogged for a while and now I’m back working in the office now heating is restored I’d blog a guide to the youth workers office!

A brief guide for what is maybe the dullest blog post ever!

I have my Macbook set up on extended desktop so I have the screen across two monitors giving me a nice large workspace…on the small shelf I have my very beautiful Apple Keyboard and all-singing-all-dancing Apple Magic Mouse.

Also on my desk is my retro e-mac (right hand side), a USB Whack-It game which I got for Christmas and is very amusing, a selection of junk including a gym leaflet, notepad and capo and finally my ‘Joke a day’ calendar which works as a list of things for me to do each day…in case you were interested here is today’s joke:

Two snowmen in a field. One turns to the other and says ‘Can you smell carrots?’

(Suitable joke I feel…serious blog post coming later!)