Jacquie's Journal

Independence

This month's Blog-a-long theme is Independence (mainly because July 4th was Independence Day here in the USA).

I have posted before about the wonderful summer holidays I spent with my Grandparents in Brighton when I was young.  One of my favourite places to go was "The Rockery" in Preston Park I hope they don't mind but I have borrowed their picture to illustrate my story. It was (and hopefully still is now they have done some restoration on it) a wonderful place with lots of secret pathways, waterfalls, stepping stones, bridges, fish and plants.   Let's  flashback to when I was five or six years old. In the picture you can see the main big pond with stepping stones across it.  Do you see that third big stepping stone that sticks up slightly above the others?  My Granddad and I started out across the stones and we got to that one.  "Hold my hand and I will help you onto it" said Granddad.  "No, no!" said I "I can do it all by myself!" "Alright" said Granddad.  Next thing people heard was an almighty splash and there was I in the water wedged between the two stones - it seems I was not as independent as I thought!  My humiliation did not end there.  My Grandparents didn't drive and I had to go home on the bus, soaking wet with weed in my hair.  Once I was home and dry I insisted on going straight back there to try again and this time I held onto Granddad's hand very firmly!

Favourite Recipe

Nearly late! This month's theme is favourite recipe.   I guess I have been having a hard time choosing one because to be honest I haven't been enjoying cooking much lately.   The problem is that I never really know how many I am cooking for which makes buying food and deciding what to cook when is difficult.  And then if we are all in to eat it seems there is always someone turning up their nose at what's on offer.  It's all very being told that our kids must eat more fruit and veg but the phrase "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" springs to mind.  We end up having quick simple things from the freezer with pasta quite a lot.  Anyway enough moaning!

This is a salmon recipe that was part of a high protein/low carb diet I once tried and we have been eating it regularly ever since when   salmon can be had for a good price.  I am afraid I don't go in much for exact measurements so please forgive my vagueness on some of the amounts.

Ingredients

1x 6oz piece of salmon fillet per person.
1 spring onion/green onion per person
1"/2.5cm cube of fresh ginger, grated (this ill be enough for four portions)
soy sauce
lemon juice

Other stuff

You can cook this a couple of ways:
Steamed  wrapped in grease proof or baking parchment paper in a double boiler, or baked wrapped in alumin(i)um foil in 350degs F oven.  Choose your method according to taste and available equipment.

What to do

1. Put the oven or double boiler with water in the bottom on to heat up.
2. Layout large enough sheets of your chosen wrapping to individually wrap up the salmon pieces with some room around them at the top.
3. Place a piece of salmon on each sheet (I leave the skin on because it adds to the flavour and anyway it's so much easier to remove it after cooking!)
4. Chop up the onions and sprinkle that and some grated ginger on each salmon piece.
5. Fold up the sides of the wrapping a bit and pour a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce and about half a lemon's worth of juice on each piece of fish (I never measure the liquid - you just need enough for flavour, but you don't want it leaking out).
6. The soy sauce is already salty so I don't add salt or pepper but sometimes I add a sprinkling of Chinese Five Spice powder.
7. Wrap up the fish with a gap at the top to give room for steam to build up inside, but so it is all sealed in.
8. Put the parcels in the double boiler or oven for about 20 minutes, the fish will flake easily when done.  This is quite a forgiving recipe for fish because it won't dry out if it gets a tad too long cooking.
9. When it's done unwrap and serve with the liquid poured over it.  We usually have it with rice and salad, but it's up to you,  Stir fried veg would go well as it does have a Chinese flavour about it.

Sometimes I cook one big piece of salmon and cut it up at the serving stage.  If you do that it will need an extra five or ten minutes to cook through.

Well I hope you enjoy this recipe if you try it!

Childhood Sweets

This month's theme is "childhood sweets".  One of my earliest memories is of a tube of Smarties.  It was when I was about 5 years old.  I poured them all out onto a plate and sorted them into the different colours and then ate them starting with my least favourite and working up to my favourite.  In those days the colours were light brown, dark brown, yellow, green, mauve, pink, red, and orange and I believe that is the order I ate them in.  The orange ones as I recently posted had orange flavoured chocolate inside and were special.  Reading the history on the link above it seems the dark brown originally had dark chocolate inside and the  light brown was coffee flavoured.  I was born when that was still happening but don't remember if I had them.

Even back then I preferred chocolate to other kinds of sweets.  Milk Chocolate Buttons, Milky Bars (It's the Milky Bar Kid!), Cadbury's Dairy Milk (CDM) that was 6d for a whole quarter pound bar and seemed enormous.  Flakes were another albeit messy treat that had to be eaten over a plate.  Big chocolate Easter Eggs that would be so beautifully packaged and would contain maybe Smarties or Chocolate Buttons were always a treat after the egg hunt in the garden at Easter.

I did also quite like Dolly Mixture, Sherbert Dabs, Fruit Pastilles (Blackcurrant ones were my favourite flavour),and Jelly Babies  (it seemed more humane to end their suffering as soon as possible by biting their heads off first!).  I suffered through aniseed balls because although I didn't like the flavour much I was fascinated that they changed colour.

When we lived in Singapore in the mid 60's I occasionally got a pack of sweets called Melanies.  They were big candy coated sweets with a chewy middle that were melon flavoured I now realise - I didn't know what it was back then but I knew I loved them.  I have made enquiries but  sadly I don't believe they exist any more.

At around age 10 everyone was into bubble gum with amusing Wanted Posters or cards that you could collect and put together to make a big picture like a puzzle - Batman characters was one set I particularly remember.  I never really liked bubble gum - it was ages before I learned to blow a bubble - but I did like the cards and posters - very clever marketing!

The first time I experienced a Terry's Chocolate Orange I thought it was totally magic and most ingenious.

Nowadays I still like chocolate best, but I like to think I am a little more sophisticated with a preference for the dark kind with a high cocoa content or handmade Belgian Truffles. 

Be Careful What You Wish For...

April's Blog-a-long is "Three Wishes" - if a genie granted you three wishes what would they be?  This is so hard - the phrase "Be careful what you wish for, because you may just get it" keeps running through my head. 

My first wish is concerned with "a love of money being the root of all evil".  Corporate greed really upsets me - companies existing just to make profits regardless of who gets trodden down in the process. And individuals who walk about with $ or £ or € signs in their eyes always working on their next get-rich-quick scheme regardless of the harm they are doing their families and ultimately themselves.  I don't understand why nurses and teachers are so badly paid when they do such a vital job compared to sports personalities and celebrities who get paid millions just to get out of bed.

My first wish therefore is for everyone in the world to earn a fair wage for their skills or get a fair price for their produce, so they can look after their families and be secure.

My second wish is about the food industry.  I wish they would stop selling us rubbish and concentrate on providing us with good, healthy, nutritious, chemical free food.  I don't want to deprive anyone of their favourite things but do we really need a lot of the over-processed preprepared stuff that is full of sugar or fat and additives of one kind or another. As part of this wish I wish "they" wouldn't keep changing their minds about what is and isn't good for us.  Eggs are bad then they are good, soy is good then it's bad, green tea is good - will that be bad tomorrow?  Dark chocolate good in moderation -- please, please, please don't let that ever be bad, ditto an occasional nice glass of red wine.

As I have three wishes I think it would be OK to have one selfish one just for me .  What I would like for me is to be able to get a job programming in a medical or biological/biochemical research field with lovely co-workers and bosses.  There is a glimmer of hope that we will soon be able to apply for our green cards (I won't bore you all with the long story, but we have been waiting 3 years for the moment to come, and it will be such a relief when it does get here I can tell you) and then I should be able to get a permit to work - I am really looking forward to it.

There are lots of other wishes I could make but hopefully between us we will make enough to set the world to rights!

Holiday

This month's Bloggers' Paradise theme is Holiday, where we share memories of our best ever holiday with you.  Well, I have been extremely lucky with holidays and really couldn't single one particular one out as being the best.   

When I was a child I spent many happy summers with my Grandparents in Brighton.  When a little older there were family holidays in a tin miner's cottage in Cornwall. 

Once I was grown up and married holidays became a priority, but we are (or at least I am)  not a camper, or backpacker. 

We have a lifelong mission to seek out new civilisations, to boldly go where at least enough men (and women) have boldly gone before to build and staff a reasonably comfortable hotel and a decent restaurant or two. 

We had our honeymoon on the Isle of Mull. We have had skiing holidays in France and Switzerland, first on our own and then with the children as they came along. 

Then we discovered Menorca and spent many happy summers there, sometimes just us and the children, sometimes extended family, sometimes just my sister and me and our children.  We loved it there so much we bought an apartment there.  I should do a whole post on Menorca it is a magical place and I miss it a lot.

There were Merry Christmasses at Center Parcs. 

Then when we moved to the USA and we started having vacations instead of holidays.  We have been to Disneyland and Disney World and all the other nearby theme parks, and Southern Utah and Las Vegas.  There were visits to my sister when she lived in New Hampshire.  Seattle, Washington DC, New York and Maine, Yosemite, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco have also been destinations for a weekend or few days.  Musn't leave out vacations at home here in Salt Lake City when friends or family have come to stay.

What has made every one of these holidays so special? - well lots of things.  Firstly the company - whether I have been with just Gary, or Carolinne, or my family, or Gary's family, or friends or any combination of the above these holidays have been with people who are very special and it is lovely to share fun time with them.  Secondly they have all been about discovery of new places, or new experiences.  Thirdly they have just been plain fun and a chance to play!

Please Blog-a-long with us and share your best holiday memories.

 

Serendipity

Our Blog-a-long theme for February is Serendipity.  February is a special month for me because ten years ago I visited Salt Lake City (and indeed the USA) for the first time for three weeks in February and we had a fantastic time.  We were over here working but still found plenty of time to explore and enjoy ourselves.  The visit was also to see if moving to SLC from England was going to be a good idea.  For the serendipity part though we need to wind back a few more months to September of the year of our 40th birthdays.  We were doing OK, the children were doing well in school  and so on but we were in a bit of a rut.  Gary was working as a contract software engineer but had been in the same contract for seven years and I had given up work to be a stay-at-home-Mum and was thinking it might be time to go back to work - and there were those 40th birthdays looming.  If anyone was ripe for a mid-life crisis it was us. 

Then one day Gary came home and told me he had to go to Salt Lake City to install his software on the hardware a company there was using.  He was there for over a week and he fell in love with the city and the mountains - being a keen skier and mountain biker.  What's more they were so impressed with him that they offered him a job.  We knew we needed a change, but was moving to a whole new country too big a change?  I think he was a bit worried about asking me, but I jumped at the chance.  I had never been to the States before, but I had lived abroad when I was young and was used to moving house at regular intervals.  The children were excited too so in the following February Gary and I went back - this time both of us had work to do , but  as I said we had a really exciting time.  There was a kind of tingly atmosphere of excitement and new beginnings in the air as we visited the sights and got to know the area.  We went into "Experience-of-a-Lifetime Overload" -  we visited Park City, we went snow-mobiling, skiing at Powder Mountain, had a weekend in Southern Utah visiting Zions and Bryce Canyon National Parks, a weekend in San Francisco where coincidentally the Chinese New Year parade was happening, we saw the Harlem Globetrotters play, we went to the Hogle Zoo.  We stayed at the Downtown Marriott on the Concierge floor where I had hazelnut flavoured coffee for the first time.  We ate very well too of course.  We made great friends with the people at the company we were working for and decided that indeed we would like to live there for maybe a couple of years. 

Well it was another two years before we actually moved.  The job was on and off and then on again.  We had to get visas (don't get me started on that subject), and we visited another couple of times to check out yarn stores, schools and the best neighbourhoods for us to live in.  Eventually in October 1998 we packed up the house in England, put it up for rent and flew across the Atlantic with just two bags each.  And here we still are and still enjoying it. 

Sometimes I wonder where we would have been now if we hadn't had that chance opportunity and  stayed in England.  I am sure we would have found other opportunities and been just as happy, but Lucy wouldn't have met Sean and Sam wouldn't have met Sunnie.

For me I know I would still be knitting, but I wouldn't have had my job here or been to any of the exciting places in America we have visited over the years.  Who knows if I would have found my way to Blogland.  My introduction into the cyber world of knitting was via the TKGA which I wouldn't have joined if I had stayed in England.

Treasure

At Bloggers' Paradise one of our members, Knitbert  came up with the brilliant idea of a Blogalong where we all post at least once on the theme of the month.  Linz our resident button expert has come up with this beautiful button to go with it.

The themes will be quite generic, so they can be interpreted in many different ways - according to your imagination and the type of content of your blog.  It will be fun to see what our members come up with each month!

January's theme is Treasure and this is my post on the subject.

When I was about six my Dad bought me home a new magazine for kids.  It was called "Treasure" and I loved it.  We had it delivered each week from then on, even when we lived abroad in Singapore it used to arrive, albeit six weeks late.

Here is a link to a picture of that first issue Treasure Issue 1 I collected every issue and kept them in the special big blue binders you could order.

There was a serialised story - The Borrowers was always my favourite, puzzles, the Mr Answers page where you could write in and ask questions - I once wrote in and asked how many kinds of squirrel there were, The Tufty Club - to help teach us about Road Safety, articles about animals that I used to use for projects at school, and in the centre a big picture with lots going on in it, and you had to find things and answer questions about things in it.  I would spend hours with my Treasure magazines - I have no idea what happened to them in the end, but the binders were very worn out when I last saw them.

There was a more grown up big sister magazine called "Look and Learn" but I never liked that one - it seemed much too stuffy and not nearly as much fun as "Treasure".

Thank you for that opportunity to take a little walk down Memory Lane!