Monday, 26 September 2011
Coming up in a couple of Saturday's time (the 8th of October) and then again in November (the 19th) is Growing Young Disciples (.pdf) and all day training event for youth and children's ministers. The first event is in Southampton and the second (ON MY BIRTHDAY) is in Central London. In ultra-exciting news, if you come to either event you can hear me speak for some length of time in a workshop style format about "5 ideas for reaching out into your community". In even more ultra-exciting news, if you come to Southampton you can keep me company all day, because I don't know anyone else there and I'd like some company.
Monday, 26 September 2011
This is the coolest website you'll see all week. A curating of various biblical infographics. I quite like this flood one.
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Bolognese is great because it's easy to make, requires one pan, can sit on a hob for hours and tastes great for it, and can be made in vast options (the only limit is the size of your pan). It's also the basis for lasagne and nearly the same recipe as chilli and shepherd's pie and cottage pie. Learn one recipe, use it lots more. It's also nearly impossible to undercook it and kill someone. But then undercooking food and killing someone -heck even giving people an upset stomach- is nigh on impossible with most every single food you'll cook (unless your cooking food that's already turned bad before you cook it, but why would you do that?).
You have two options here:
A) Brown some mince, pour over some jar of bolognese sauce, cook some pasta, serve.
B) Do it all yourself. Note how I don't say "do it properly yourself" just "do it all yourself" because doing the above still counts as feeding people properly, it's just not as fun or as cheap or as tasty as if you do it yourself. If you want to do it yourself therefore, here's a recipe.
Pre-Amble
Pre-amble: Don't worry if this recipe looks long, it's because I like to waffle and everything is explained in painstaking detail. The recipe is a really simple relaxed recipe, the only thing to worry about is if things start to stick to the bottom of the pan, because that's the prequel to burning and that makes stuff taste nasty. If slicing vegetables is taking a long time and you're worried stuff will burn while you're doing it just turn the heat down and don't panic.
Minimum cooking time: 40 minutes if you can cut up stuff quickly.
Maximum cooking time: Ages. Leave it to sit warm on the hob barely simmering after you put the tomatoes in and it'll sit for hours. Add some water if it dries out. Or make everything but the pasta the day before, let it cool down, fridge it, then re-heat on the hob up to two days later with freshly cooked pasta.
Ingredients
- Cooking oil
- Onions, 1 large onion for every two-three people
- Garlic, 1 clove per person plus one extra
- Beef Mince, about 150-200g per person, which is like one of the small mince packets for two or three people
- Optional: Suitable vegetables, e.g.; Mushrooms / Courgettes / Peppers / Carrots, A handful or so cut up per person.
- Optional: Red wine / Worcester Sauce, either about half a glass per 4 people of wine or 1 good glug per person of Worcester Sauce.
- Tinned / Cartoned Tomatoes, one tin / carton per two people-ish
- Tomato Puree (or if you don't have any ketchup), one good squirt per person
- Loads of dried basil, maybe a fifth of a basil per two people? I like Basil and Basil loves tomato sauces.
- Some other herbs, I'm a big fan of oregano and cinammon here, but some people like rosemary and thyme.
- Whatever type of pasta you prefer. I like the medium sized tube ones with pasta but each to their own. You can even use actual spaghetti but only if you like watching people struggle to eat it. Use whatever it says on the side of the packet per person
- Mature cheddar for grating on top
- Salt and Pepper (Obviously)
Recipe
- Find a big pan high-sided pan and heat some oil on a medium heat, dice some onions and throw them into the oil. Push them around the pan every now and again so they don't burn untill they're soft and slightly coloured. (Pro youth work tip, in every youth group there is one young person who states they hate onions. They don't, they hate the big lumps of onions that aren't properly cooked. So just make sure they're diced fairly finely and cooked properly.)
- Slice up the garlic fairly into small bits and throw into the pan with the onions and push it around for a couple of minutes. (To peel garlic quickly, take a clove, slice off the tough end, then place the wide flat side of your knife on it and press down with the palm of your hand, the garlic should then squish outwards releasing lots of nice juices and the skin should come off slightly. Peel the rest of it off then cut it up. Or buy a garlic crusher, but for every minute you save on cutting up add two minutes to the time it'll take to wash the stupid thing up.)
- Dump in the mince with some salt and turn the heat up a bit, push it around the pan so it starts to brown all over.
- If you're using veg: While it's browning cut up the veg into small-ish pieces. (See above pro youth work tip about Onions for the Mushrooms, Peppers and Courgettes.)
- When the meat's browned thrown in the veg. If things start to stick to the bottom turn it down a bit, and move it around some more.
- If you're using wine or Worcester Sauce (and do, because it'll taste nicer): Pour it into the pan and stir it around and let it cook a bit.
- You should now have a bunch of browned meat, onions, and veg sitting in a pan in some juices from the meat. This is good.
- Open the tins or cartons of tomatoes. Pour them over the meat.
- Add the puree or ketchup. Stir in.
- Add the lots of basil and some other herbs. I like oregano and a bit of cinammon. Add salt and pepper. Taste it. Does it taste nice? Does it need more salt? (Probably, salt is a whole essay in itself, but for now just put in salt to everything in small amounts frequently and taste it.)
- Depending on how good quality your cans or tins of tomatoes are your sauce will now be more or less watery. Let the pan now simmer for about twenty minutes or untill the sauce has reduced down (water's boiled or evaporated off and so the sauce is thicker). If the sauce gets to thick or the bolognese starts to stick to the bottom of the pan add some more water. You can serve it really at any point here as everything's cooked, but it'll taste better the longer you leave it.
- Cook some pasta as the packet says when the bolognese is nearly done.
- Place a portion of pasta in bowls (not plates! It'll make a mess!) and ladle some bolognese on top with lots of grated cheese for people to help themselves to. Maybe some salad as well? Bread to mop up? You decide!
Bonus option C
At any stage between "browning the meat" and "pouring in loads of tomatoes" you can just give up on the recipe and pour over some shop bought bolognese sauce. You'll have made nicer than normal shop bought bolognese.
Bonus option Lasgane
Make bolognese as above (even the day before). Make a white sauce (or just buy white lasagne sauce from a shop). Place a layer of bolognese in baking dish, then a layer of lasagne sheets, then a layer of white sauce. Repeat. Repeat again if you have enough food and space in the dish. Finish with a layer of grated cheddar and / or Mozzarella (Sainsbury's sell basic Mozzarella balls, this is fine). Place in oven at around 160-180 for 40 minutes or untill nice and brown.
Bonus option Chilli
Do exactly as the same above but replace the veg with now non-optional kidney beans (drain them from the tin before pouring them in) and replace the herbs with lots of ground cumin and paprika, a bit of ginger, cinammon and coriander, and as much chilli powder as you wish. Serve with rice instead of pasta. That's really it. (To make it even better, chop up some chillis and put them in with them garlic. You can also add cumin seeds with the chillis if you have any. Add tabasco sauce at the end if it's not hot enough. Also brown the onions with less oil and over a much hotter heat so they smoke slightly, but those things are all optional so don't worry about them.)
Bonus option Shepherd's or Cottage Pie
Shepherd's pie involves lamb mince, cottage pie involves beef mince. Make it like bolognese but add at most one tin of tomatoes (you may just want to throw a couple of fresh ones in instead). Also you should probably put some chopped carrots in as part of the veg. Because you don't have tinned tomatoes in which would add liquid pour in some water or chicken stock (you can pretty much always use chicken stock whenever stock is called for) so it doesn't stick. Also replace the massive amounts of basis with a wider variety of herbs (rosemary and thyme in particular, especially rosemary if you use lamb). When it's made, place it in a baking dish and then put mash potato on top. Oven it for 40 minutes or until the mash is golden brown.
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
It's cookery week on The Grove Is On Fire and today's first lesson is this; how to cook some hot dogs! If you don't know how to cook hot dogs you will by the end of this. If you do know how to cook hot dogs you'll feel patronised.
Ingredients
- As many hot dogs as your young people will eat (probably 3 or 4 per person)
- Slightly less hot dog buns than you have hot dogs (you can always put two hot dogs in a bun, you can't put one hot dog in two buns).
- Condiments (e.g. ketchup, mustard, mayo, whatever you want).
- Optional: some sort of cooking oil, onions (say one medium sized onion per four people, but whatever, you probably have onions in your kitchen, relax).
Recipe
- Fill up a large pan with water. Turn it on so it starts to boil. When it's boiling turn it down slightly so it's almost but not quite boiling (this is called simmering).
- Open the hot dog packet or jar, get rid of the water inside the packet or jar, put the hot dogs into the simmering water. You can do them all at once, or do half of them now and another half later. Whatever.
- After five or so minutes (hot dogs are already cooked, you're just re-heating them, so if they haven't been in for long enough or are in for too long, it doesn't really matter.) remove them from the water. and put them on a plate. If you're being classy put them on a plate with some kitchen roll so they dry out better.
- Get the young people to help themselves in an orderly fashion.
- Wash-up.
Optional Extras
To make the hot dogs even nicer you can fry some onions to have with then. That's easy.
- Cut up some onions.1
- Fry them. That means put a small amount of oil in a frying pan, let it heat up a bit till the onions sizzle slightly when they're put on it (you can test this by putting an onion in the pan and seeing if it sizzles), then pushing them round the pan fairly frequently so they don't burn until they're towards the brown end of golden brown. This'll take twenty minutes if you put them a low enough heat that means you can wander off for a bit and come back or ten minutes if you don't mind turning the heat up but having to keep an eye on them.
- Serve with hot-dogs.
See! Cooking is easy. Alright, it's debatable if you can call this cooking, but look how ridiculously easy it is to cater for large numbers of young people. And this is also how you learn to cook, do ridiculously simple things, then do less simple things, then before you know it you can do complex things.
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
How to cook? Gee, I'm a youth worker, I don't need to cook, I order pizza and buy those ready baked chocolate brownies from Sainsbury's!
Bare with me.
I've been reading A Meal With Jesus and am convinced by it. Sharing food with other people is a joyful, grace teaching, Christian thing to do and inviting people into your home, including the young people you work with, is a good thing to do. To steal just one bit from his book; he cites 1 Timothy 3:2-7 where it lists a bunch of qualifications for leaders in the church and includes in them 'hospitable'. We often ask for youth ministers who can play an instrument (and there is good reason for that) but we rarely ask for youth ministers who are hospitable. Now being hospitable doesn't mean you need to know how to cook. You can clearly be hospitable by ordering in a bunch of pizza or asking a volunteer or young person to cook, but you know what, cooking's not hard. Cooking for large numbers of people isn't that hard either. There's no reason why you can't be pasable at it and know the joy of it. So this entire week I'm going to devote this website to teaching you how to cook.
But before we do that, some points. The best way of learning how to cook is to see how good food is. This may seem obvious but also quite useless, as don't most people enjoy food but don't seem that fussed by cooking? But next time you eat food cooked in someone's house, take your time over it and think how good it is. Stand in the kitchen and chat to them while they cook it. You'll see how good food is, and then you'll realise you can probably cook it as well.
The other thing to say is that things that seem hard initally aren't really that hard when broken down and done slowly. You might think dicing an onion is hard, but in reality if you do it slowly with a sharp knife it's one of the simplest things you can do. What's hard is doing it with any measure of accuracy. It's a bit like playing the piano. Playing a C on a piano is not hard. It involves you pressing a key down. Playing a whole scale is not hard. It involves you pressing 7 or so notes down one after the other. What is hard is doing it with any speed and precision. That's why people practice for hours. Learning takes minutes, being good at it takes years. It's the same thing with most skills in cooking, you just need to practice. There are no magic tricks to make you brilliant at anything really fast, and as long as your knives are semi-decent and sharp, no tools that'll make everything really easy. Nothing in cooking is magic (apart from thickening sauces and making mayonaise. That is a bit magic, but you don't have to worry about that.), it's just practice. If you're rubbish at cutting an onion then you'll get better.
And that's my advice really. Tomorrow, we'll actually talk about cooking. Today I'm going to home to cook a load of Mexican rice stuff.
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
But God. Glorious.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Frequently the complaint is made that prison to too soft on prisoners, especially young prisoners. They have Playstations! And TVs! And a pool table! Now some of these criticisms are probably valid but some of them seem to stem from the idea that prison should be necessarily worse than the outside world. If the young people actually prefer prison to the outside world, the logic goes, then surely we're doing something wrong! For the person who thinks that, here is how you'd make prison worse than the outside world for some young people.
- Verbally abuse them by telling them they're scum who are hated by everyone who's ever met them, especially their dad.
- Hit them around the head regularly. Every now and again punch them in the gut.
- For meal times leave a bit of milk and some cereal in their cell. Also leave a note saying that if they want anything else they'll have to get it from the shop. Feel free to have a shop nearby they can access, but don't leave them any money.
- Don't stop prison fights. Wait till it's over then only give the attacker a further sentence 25% of the time.
- Regularly throw them out of their cell for a few nights, forcing them to sleep in the canteen.
- Fine them whenever they break any rules and then choose one guard whose job it will be to threaten injury, death, and the harming of their loved ones whenever they walk past them if they don't pay those fines tomorrow.
If you want to make prisoner harder for some young people than their outside life, you can't just do one of these things. Accomplish all of them and you may just succeed in making their life worse.
It's not so much that prison is soft on people, it's more that life is astonishingly hard on some.
Monday, 5 September 2011
Youthwork Magazine has a job opening for a part-time journalist which sounds amusingly fun. The blurb is below.
Youthwork is a popular and influential monthly magazine, which aims to inform, resource and encourage salaried and volunteer youth workers in the UK and beyond through a printed magazine, websites, podcast, social media and training events.
The successful candidate will need to demonstrate journalistic skills in writing and copy-editing. Candidates with youth work skills and some additional cross media skills in web, pod/vodcasts, radio, TV, social media, may be preferred.
This part-time role (21 hours a week) may grow into a full-time post working across media platforms in 3-6 months (to be discussed at interview stage).
Applications closes on the 3rd of October, the first task the appointed person has will be to correct the name to 'youth work magazine'.
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