Grannie's Shin of Beef Casserole

Ingredients:
Two red or white onions diced
Half pint Guiness ale, half a pint of water
2 lbs [1 kilo] shin beef
Herbs; thyme sprigs, parsley, 2 bay leaves,
Teasp. English mustard,; tablesp. Tomatoe puree; shake of salt and pepper; Tablesp honey

1. Cut beef into bite sized cubes
2. Marinade the beef in a cool place overnight in; the beer, 3 or more cloves of garlic [crushed] and a couple of sprigs of thyme.
3. Next day strain and dry the meat on kitchen paper roll. [put marinade mixture on one side]
4. Fry the cubes of meat with some oil [suggest olive oil, butter mix] until sealed, then add the marinade mixture to the frying pan to heat together with the meat, also add 400 ml of dissolved stock cube[beef]
5. Put this in a slow cooker. Ensure the meat is covered with liquid; if necessary add a little water.
6. Adjust the cooker to ‘high’ for about 30mins then ‘low’ for about 6 to 8hrs.
7. Drain the meat from the gravy
8. Mix 1 to 2 tablesps cornflower with the same volume of cold water, add to the boiling hot gravy
9. Season the gravy with some Worcester sauce and mustard to taste, add the honey and tomato puree whilst hot, pour the gravy over the meat into a hot casserole dish, ready to serve.
[serve with mashed potato and vegetables of choice]
[this is Grannie's tried and tested own recipe]

‘Walking with God’

Almost everyone wants to be righteous, to do the right thing, and they also find the self-righteous to be a pain in the neck. Almost everyone desires to be protected from evil but find very disturbed paths to this purpose.
This god who walks by our side does not need to possess a real or physical existence, a virtual, or imaginary existence will provide the purpose.
Children imbue their teddy bears with powers of comfort and friendship, paediatric nurses and doctors know the importance of these to children under stress. Adults too need imaginary ‘beings’ and heroes as in plays, books, song and music etc. They may make fun of children’s teddy bears yet they are unconscious that they too have their own ‘teddy bears’, they are simply more sophisticated according to education and intelligence. Sometimes a picture or a letter can summon up the comforting images of home and love. It takes imagination to realise that imaginary or virtual images, thoughts and emotions are as real as the rocks on the hill, because you cannot touch them does not mean they have no real existence.
Naturally mental illness can cause images and ideas that are ridiculous and dangerous but they are very real to the patient, because some imaginary ideas and thoughts are wrong or put to very evil purpose indeed does not mean that good ideas, thoughts an images should be expunged. This would leave cruelty to work unchallenged.
It is a strange paradox that those who are in most need of walking with god in a spirit of humility are those absolutists who behave as if they already possess the word of god.
The words of the old ‘gospel’ hymn: ‘ Just a closer walk with thee’ [you can listen to it free on the internet] say it all, echoed in the refrain in the Beatles song;
Let it Be.

All We are Is Work in Progress

All things, people, plants, other animals, all inanimate things do not exist in the past or the future but solely in a moving fragment of time which we call ‘the present’. The set of beliefs, convictions, knowledge, superstitions, behaviour patterns, physical attributes and history which is our individual identity is a shifting and moving thing. We change our beliefs over time according to new knowledge and experiences, this is healthy and normal but we cannot predict at any one time how our beliefs will change in the future. A paradox occurs here; the less a particularly strong belief is related to evidence then the easier it is to make it an ‘article of faith’ and a dangerous loss to our identity if we abandon it particularly if our habits,customs, social life and welfare are engaged in its continuance. A cursory look at the history of authoritarian regimes of government shows how harmful this can be.

This is true for personal and family relationships as well as those of governments of nations and empires. There is only one general answer which is to accept that all of our ideas, beliefs and habits have value in as much as they allow constant adaption for the better.

Coq au vin

the equivalent in chicken pieces of one large bird diced into chunks
2 tablesp of flour
Salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper
90g butter
100g [or a bit more] best bacon chopped into gougons
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 carrot diced
4 tablesp brandy
600ml good red cooking wine (We used Wollemi shiraz-cabernet sauvignon in ours, plenty of other grapes would do; grenache-shiraz, pinot noir, etc.)
Garlic cloves, crushed, to taste, we used 4 large cloves
large sprig of thyme and two bay leaves[tied together as a bouquet garni, to be fished out at end of cooking]
bunch of fresh parsley and coriander leaves roughly chopped (I snip them into the pot with scissors)
1 or 2 lumps of sugar
2 tablesp of good olive oil, or more if necessary
8 small shallotts peeled (or fewer large ones)
1 teasp wine vinegar
225 g mushrooms (we used shitake type)

1. Coat the chicken pieces with the flour with plenty of salt and pepper
2. Melt 25g of butter in the casserole dish [pyrex] add the bacon, onion and carrot and fry gently until bacon starts to turn colour
3. Add the chicken pieces and fry hot until they are golden brown all over
4. Pour warm brandy over the chicken and set light to it under a lower heat then pour in the wine and stir.
5. Add the sugar lumps, bouquet garni and garlic, bring to the boil then cover and simmer very gently until the chicken is tender.
6. Meanwhile melt 25g of butter in a frying pan with half a tablesp of oil
7. Add the shallots and fry till just brown, add pinch of sugar, vinegar with a tablsp or so of chicken stock, cover and simmer for 10 minutes or so, then keep warm.
8. Melt 25g of butter into a heavy saucepan with a little oil and add the lightly chopped onions, cook until brown but do not burn.
9. Add all ingredients to the saucepan and simmer until the chicken is well done and tender (about 1 and 1/2 hrs at slow simmer)
Serve with new potatoes or roast potatoes and vegetables to taste.

Drugs

As I got older as a GP I found more and more young people were suffering problems caused by taking drugs [illicit ones I mean, often obtainable at school] All the different drugs that young people take are different from each other with different side effects and consequences. Kids who take drugs visit their doctor much more often than kids who don’t take drugs but often the actual complaint from the kid would apparently be nothing to do with drugs, perhaps they did not feel very well. Often they looked upon their drug taking as normal and fairly harmless even though the grades they were getting at school would be sliding down the scale and their parents were becoming very worried for them.

It was difficult to give the kid a good reason to give up the habit that they recognised as valid. Telling them that the habit would shorten their life, make them fail their exams and mess up their brains and relationships did not seem to cut much ice. Many drugs are demotivating and very harmful to fulfil ambition or potential. [Not true for nicotine or caffeine but nicotine has a host of harmful effects, caffeine less so, fortunately for us coffee drinkers]
One idea that did seem to wake them up a bit, and not used at drug clinics was this; “Sooner or later you will be in work and be responsible for others, like I am in work at this minute. How would you feel if I stared at you with glazed eyes and just suggested that you should chill out and don’t worry, taking no notice of what you said or what you were worried about?
If you work hard, for years, to get a skill so you can earn your own living it gives you a feeling of satisfaction. What if you can get that same degree of satisfaction from taking a ‘recreational’ drug? Where will that leave you, where will it leave society? Have a nice day!"

Wisdom

“When I think of all the crap I learnt at High School, it’s a wonder that I can think at all.” Paul Simon song.

I am an admirer of Paul Simon, his music, lyrics and style. The quote, to me, reverberates with interesting complexities, many of them contradictory.

It echoes feelings of adolescent intellectual rebelliousness. Of course, Paul Simon is very clever. There are elements of both wisdom and foolishness in the possible meanings and thoughts which can stem from the line. There are resonances of J.D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’; I am sure that Paul Simon is a J. D. Salinger fan.

I think I was born with very high levels of intellectual rebelliousness myself, it can lead you into trouble and out of trouble, it takes wisdom to control it but wisdom is in short supply and difficult to find. Or is it? In King John, one of Shakespeare’s characters says, “Wisdom cries out in the streets, but no one listens”. It is a very profound statement, wisdom is easy to find; all you have to do is close your eyes, relax, and ask yourself what a wise person would suggest you should do. Notice that I say ‘what a wise person would advise you to do’, not what the wise person would necessarily do, because wise people are much better at being wise for others than they are at being wise for themselves.

Wisdom requires quite a lot of knowledge as well as good systems of thought and, very sadly much of what people think they know, and firmly believe, really is total crap. Ignoring what you learn from High School will not help at all. Treating everything you think you know with healthy scepticism helps a lot but it cannot be the complete answer. We have to make decisions, sometimes we have to make them very quickly indeed, and sometimes the very worst decision is to make no decision at all but just keep threshing the possibilities over and over again in the mind. It may be here that what you learnt from High School can save your life, or even more importantly, somebody else’s life. (There is a song, which I like, and fits me; ‘Somebody saved my life today’, for me that person is Fay, my wife, now you see why I love, admire and care for her so much.)

Words and Meanings

Alice in Wonderland said that words mean ‘whatever I want them to mean’. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician so he knew how much truth may lie in the absurd.

Many disputes, from personal to international are not founded on true realities but more on the different meanings ascribed to words. People are murdered because they will not give loyalty to a particular group of words.

Who owns the meanings of words? The compilers of dictionaries perhaps, but they base their conclusions on nothing more weighty than common usage.

Words and their meanings change with time, they are truly democratic, belonging to the people. Efforts by authoritarian groups and individuals to ‘own’ or control the meanings of words always fail in the end. The very ambiguity of words is also a strength a necessity and a thing of beauty, they are alive just as we are alive and evolve as we evolve.

An interesting word is ‘GOD’; There are those who define this word in ancient and simplistic ways and then write books to prove that the poor fellow does not exist. For the average educated person anthropomorphic gods are, philosophically speaking, ‘dead in the water’ anyway, so proving that an elderly gentleman is no longer sitting in the sky organising every atom in the universe does not really deserve books and fame. Wholly abstract, virtual or spiritual definitions or understandings suffice without recourse to possibilities which deny reason.
The only thing that needs to be abandoned is the use of intimidation, violence or cruelty to prove that a given definition is true, the validity of any idea is inversely proportional to the intimidation necessary to support its existence.