Pudding, glorious puddings

You know how it is when the friendly waitperson offers the dessert menu – and everyone hesitates? No-one wants to be first to mutter, “Oh, go on then”, even if you are secretly hanging out for crème brulée or chocolate mud cake.
Or pudding.
Yay, pudding! Winter is the right, the only time of year to eat puddings in all their creamy, stodgy, comforting glory.
Naturally, the web is laden with them. It amazes me that cookbooks still sell in their thousands when all you have to do is Google “pudding” and a million recipes fill your screen.
Ah, but can you trust them? That’s the question. Which is why we do still want books and magazines full of recipes by our favourite cooks. And why we’ll never discard the yellowing, grease-spotted pages of our mothers’ recipe books.
My Mum’s Lemon Delicious Pudding is still my favourite, preferably scoffed with melting vanilla ice-cream. Others swoon at the thought of rice pudding, and bread-and-butter pudding. All sweet, soft and golden.
But puddings weren’t always like that. If you live in Labrador you might sometimes have a traditional ‘Jiggs Dinner’, a roast-meat Sunday feast that also includes salted beef, boiled veges and pease pudding. I had no idea what pease is and found it's hummus-like stuff made of split yellow peas, cooked with water, salt and spices and, sometimes, a bacon or ham joint.
It’s also known as Pease Pottage and there’s a Pease Pottage Village in Sussex - so-called because the locals used to feed pease pottage to convicts being transported from London to the South Coast.
Then there’s Scotland’s Red Pudding – which shows how keen the Scots are to exclude anything remotely green from their diet. You can get Red Pudding, a true artery clogger, only at chip shops. It’s a sausage-shaped lump of various ground meats, suet, spices, fat and colouring, dipped in thick batter and deed fried.
You can’t ignore Black Pudding or Blood Pudding, a sausage made from cooked blood and eaten all over the planet. And White Pudding, which is similar but contains no blood, though it may have brain matter instead. All of which is a vegetarian’s nightmare.
Turn then to a true sweet-pudding lover’s paradise – a British hotel devoted to after-dinner delights.
The Three Ways House Hotel in the Cotswolds hosts a weekly pudding club where members are expected to eat a full main course and then sample and vote on the delights of seven puddings. You can browse the club's “pudcasts”, contribute your own puddings to their “Wikipudia of Recipes”. You can even stay in one of their luxury pudding-themed rooms. The Spotted Dick and Custard Room, anyone? I'm not kidding. That's it at the top of this blog, complete with spotted bed cover.
The most famous pudding of all is the one trotted out at Christmas. If you’re keen to do a Christmas pud in the most traditional way, you can find Mrs Beeton’s recipe here at Jane Austen's World.
Actually, with all its suet and shredded carrot, it doesn’t sound too appetizing at all. I’m off to get lemons. Now, where did I put Mum’s recipe book?
This article also appears in the August issue of Next magazine, on the Webmistress page. Become a Next fan on Facebook, too. Look for Next Magazine NZ

Online evolutionaries

With great hair, perfect makeup and huge CVs, they’re the world’s new powerful females. But forget tired old feminist notions. This lot still want to change things, but differently – via conscious evolution. Not heard of it before? You will.
The movers and shakers are mostly American – hence the big hair. But they have big minds too and have been chipping away at this idea for years.
At evolve.org you can meet the maven of the movement, Barbara Marx Hubbard. “Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly,’ she says. “It acknowledges that humankind has attained unprecedented powers to affect, control and change the evolution of life on Earth.
In simple terms, it means that we must improve our ability to use our powers ethically and effectively to achieve a positive future.”
In other words it’s about working with others to do good, rather like your local Lions Club.
But the visionary Barbara and friends are thinking big, driven by the conviction that the whole planet is royally stuffed and right now is our last chance to rescue it.
The web is quaking with sites devoted the cause. Marilyn Nyborg is pushing Women Waking The World. Kathy Eldon is heading the Creative Visions Foundation. Dr Elizabeth Debold teaches Evolutionary Enlightenment, which is about discovering the “explosive emergence of a new women's spiritual liberation”.
The Feminine Power Global Community – tinyurl.com/2cdabuq – is keen to tell us all about "the three power bases of the co-creative feminine”. The push is to reach for “the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world.”
Whoo, heady stuff. Aspirin, anyone? There’s a tide of similarly urgent prose out there.
Jean Houston at tinyurl.com/25ve8jp says it’s about “all of us together co-creating the human and social changes needed to make a better world.”
I feel like shouting back, “Jean! Love your work, but co-creation? I can barely co-create a coffee date. The world is a tall order!”
Having been to a few of her events I know she’d come back at me sternly with her favourite saying by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
For more, check out the gals at Women on the Edge of Evolution. At tinyurl.com/2dhr535 they offer hours of info for free.
And for one of my favourite takes on changing your world go to a wise bloke, influential author Peter Russell. He works with lovely images and calming words. Enjoy at tinyurl.com/2exkq99

This story (and more) is from Lindsey's Webmistress column, in the July issue of Next magazine, out now.

Arrowing contempt

I love that TV can still teach me things. I learnt (on History or Discovery or one of the more worthy channels) the origin of that universal gesture, giving people "the fingers". In the time of Henry V, hordes of men used to engage in bows-and-arrows warfare. Good archers were the secret to winning battles and each man needed two strong fingers to pull back the string of the bow. The French vowed to hack off the fingers of any archer they captured so they couldn't fight again. When the English won a battle, they would jubilantly jab up their fingers in the air so their French opponents could see they were still intact. It's the defiant "nyah-nyah, can't-beat-me" gesture still so often used today. Ain't history wonderful?

How many days have you had then?

I was a tad disconcerted recently to come across a website - www.peterrussell.com/age.php - that could calculate for me in a millisecond how many days I’ve been alive. For me, it’s more than 23 thousand days.

Terrifying thought! Of course, not all of those thousands of days have been in any way special. Life just progressed. Chores were done. I turned up at work. I cooked, showered, slept, talked, walked, shopped and drove around. All pretty darned ordinary, really, except for the miracle of being alive at all. We take that for granted usually, unless we’ve survived something that should have or could have killed us. Then life itself becomes stunningly interesting.

Russell (pictured right) has a hugely expansive worldview and is the author of some pretty profound books. I loved his "The Global Brain Awakens". He prefers of think of his life in days rather than years. “I can hold a day’s experience in mind quite easily,” he writes on his site. It’s much harder, he says, to go back and take stock of a whole year. Many incidents and discoveries are inevitably forgotten.

He also finds it more meaningful to think he’s lived through more than 20,000 days, rather than 50-plus years. “And it reframes the future. I have, probably, thousands of days still to come. Thousands new days to discover, enjoy and learn from.”

I don’t quite agree with him. I think we can go back and take stock of events many years after they’ve occurred. But I do agree that life is all about discovering, enjoying, and learning about your existence. Your life, everyone’s life, is unique. It deserves to be noticed and celebrated.

I heard Peter speak at a conference once and was amused by his pointing out of the totally obvious. He was trying to get us to think fresh, think real. He did it by getting us to consider sunset. Humans have been saying sunset (and sunrise) for gazillions of year. After all, the sun does seem to us earthbound citizens to set and rise. But it's a very long time since we've known that actually the sun doesn't go anywhere - it's just that the earth keeps on rotating. But we don't care and just keep on mis-labelling the appearance and disappearance of that bright old light in the sky. Does us good to think about things differently, I reckon.

iPhones and Passings

My friend writer Helen Brown lost her iPhone. Quel bereavement! Because she was on holiday at Byron Bay and was just about to pack up and leave, there was no chance of it turning up under a cushion as might have happened at home.
“No doubt it's jiggling about inside the shorts pocket of a virile surfie,” she wrote in her blog. http://browngentry.livejournal
But then she added, “Living without it is surprisingly liberating. Not being available every second of the day is the definition of 21st century freedom.”
How wedded we’ve become to our gadgets. I’ve just switched over from PC to Mac because everyone I know who owns a Mac just loves it. Adapting is currently doing my head in but I’m beginning to see glimmerings of how good it will be once I’m sorted. And how I will hate to ever lose the thing.
I remember once, in the midst of writing a book, how I refused to leave my laptop in my car at a secluded beach to go for a walk. I had a thousand projected-related emails in that computer and couldn’t bear to think of losing the lot to a smash-and-grab thief. “I’ve got my life on that thing,” I said to my thwarted hiking buddy. She rolled her eyes, obviously thinking how pathetic I was.
This week I was reminded that the important things in life sometimes have nothing to do with technical wizardry.
I was in a hospital emergency room, waiting for a friend to have a health problem seen to.
We chatted with a staff nurse as she set and supervised an IV drip. My friend is also a health professional, so the chat was more open than would normally be the case.
The nurse talked about a dreadful day she’d just had as one of a team working on a young patient who was dying of a sudden and massive internal bleed.
She said how hard the emergency team had worked to save the patient, and how gut-wrenching it had been to lose the life of that stranger.
“Then,” she said casually, “We blessed the room.”
I was amazed. How do you do that, I wanted to know. And how often? Oh, all the time. Do you call in a chaplain? ‘Sometimes,” she said, “if there’s one around. But often we do it ourselves .”
Quietly, without fuss, someone will sprinkle water and maybe say a small prayer to send on the soul and make the space fresh for the next sick or injured body to occupy.
Emergency care is, of course, also a matter of employing high-tech skills and gadgets. But sometimes even the best skills and gadgets can’t work miracles.
How good it is to know that at least some of those highly trained and overstretched workers will spare a moment to do what human beings have always done. That they’ll pause, pay respect and carry out a small, unseen ritual to honour the passing of a life.
We may be wedded to our gizmos in the 21st century, but our humanity still runs deep.
Sitting there, in one of the country’s busiest emergency departments, I was immensely moved.
* I’m running a ‘Story of My Life’ one-day workshop in Auckland on May 9. Your life, with all its drama, deserves to be written about. Remember, no life is ever ordinary. For more info check out www.storyofmylife.co.nz

Orcas in the pen

I saw a Shamu show in 1977. Now that’s a long way back. The place was Sea World San Diego. It was a terrific show, featuring astonishingly large animals in very small pools. The trainers were all very fit, loud and smiley and yelled things like “yee-hah!” a lot. It was like a blue-water rodeo. Our little daughters were thrilled and wanted to take home a stuffed toy Shamu as well. We enjoyed the whole sloshing, glossy, superific experience.
It makes me feel a bit squirmy now. Maybe I’ve just grown up, finally, but now you couldn’t pay me to go to such a show. Last week another Shamu (how many of them have there been, I wonder?) was in disgrace after hauling trainer Dawn Brancheau into the pool, killing her.
Since then we’ve seen people weeping at poolside as the show went on – with the trainers now safely out of reach of those big jaws. If Dawn had been a friend of mine I’ve have shed tears for her too, because it seemed she loved big, bad Shamu and all his other Shamu mates. But it’s the orcas I’m feeling most sorry for.
The UK Independent’s Michael McCarthy wrote an excellent piece (re-run by the NZ Herald) about about why orcas (which are actually big dolphins) should be left alone to run around in their huge natural playground, the world’s oceans. He wrote , “Ending up in Sea World is the orca equivalent of you and me being imprisoned by a lunatic in a cupboard under the stairs.” Right on, Michael.
But of course the sad fact is that humans make a pile of money from locking them up and making them do silly tricks. There are currently 42 in captivity around the world. I guess their presence helps experts get to know them better, so some might justify their capture on ‘scientific research’ grounds. But isn’t that what we deride the Japanese for when they kill Antarctic whales?
Orcas’ survival time, once they’re penned in, is only about four years. In the wild, they can live up to 50 or 60 years. So is it surprising if they get tetchy, stressed and bored? And the trouble is, freeing them all would be enormously expensive. It cost millions for the ‘Free Willy’ campaign, and poor Willy only lasted 18 months when finally let loose, despite lots of care and attention during the transition from pool to ocean.
But we’re all a bit strange, we humans, when it comes to being entertained by other creatures, even other humans. Once, on holiday in Peru, I was ashamed when some of my travel mates insisted that the tour bus stop so they could take pictures of peasants and their donkey ploughing a field. The Peruvians showed enormous grace in obligingly smiling for the cameras. They were given nothing for their time. Then we left them to their subsistence drudgery and rode on in comfort to our next nice lunch.
Not long after that some residents in a swanky Auckland street expressed outrage at the fact that busloads of Asian tourists were slowly cruising past their homes (how dare they!) to take photos of householders trimming roses.
If orcas can talk to each other – and I have no doubt they do, even if we can’t fathom the language – I wonder what they say about us beastly humans?

Gagging for caffeine

I had a grim week this summer. I stopped drinking coffee.
It’s the second time in my life that I’ve gone cold turkey – both times on the advice of naturopaths who told me that coffee is not my friend.
So I knew how tough it was going to be. And this time around was no different from my previous experience. I felt shivery, headachy, utterly out of sorts and yes, there were those sharp leg pains back again.
The emotional tug was worse. I had to look the other way each time I passed my favourite cafes, lest I got lured inside to worship at the espresso machine.
Before, I couldn’t start the day without a plunger of stiff black stuff with breakfast. There also had to be the mid-morning flat white and maybe an afternoon one as well if I was meeting friends. Each time a cup was placed before me I would admire its heady aroma, the richness of the crema and the dinky little pattern on top created by a caring barista.
There was the whole ceremonial ritual of playing with the spoon, stirring, skimming off a little foam, slipping it between your lips. I can't like Starbucks because of the spoon shortage there. A wooden or plastic stick is no substitute. But overall, even Starbucks will do if there's no alternative. A good coffee (or so I believed) makes everything better.
When I stopped and become an outcast, I began to realise how intensely our world is engaged in a coffee culture that did not exist a few short years ago. There’s a cafe on every corner to feed our habit. Mobile vans are on patrol for office and factory workers who can’t cope without double-shot lattes. Portable machines take centre stage at farmers’ markets. Every second person on the street is carrying a cardboard cup with plastic cap. Forests are being felled to make those cups.
We’ve gone as ga-ga over coffee as we have over bottled water.
Petrol outlets are probably making more money from caffeine (and water) than they are from fuel. The weatherbeaten guys who used to check your oil and tyres - ah, in the good old days - are now hunched over steaming machines in the BP shop, looking embarrassed about having to faff around with chocolate powder and sugar tubes.
We are so hooked.
I decided that stopping coffee was like stopping smoking. Smokers convince themselves that having a cigarette calms their nerves, when really all it calms is the desire to have another cigarette. We have to have a coffee to perk us up, when really we just need to have one to make us feel like the last time we had one. We’re addicted.
At least lattes don’t give you cancer. At least not as far as we know. But surely when it hurts to give something up, it can’t be doing you much good.
So at breakfast now, I drink green tea. But being healthy can’t last for long. I’m back onto flat whites. Just once a day. Damn, it’s good.