Warm Xmas, turkey in brine, and ring out the old

Firstly, a Guid (good) New Year tae yin and aw (to one and all) and I hope that 2013 brings you all love, luck and laughter in droves. For the first time ever, my wife and I left the UK and had Xmas in a warm country. We went to Dubai (see photos below) to spend Xmas with our son, daughter in law and 1 year old granddaughters Abigail and Lola. I thought that it might be strange for it to be 28 degrees on Xmas Day but we’d been there for 4 days and were accustomed to the heat (very pleasant) by then. Many people of my age whom I met in Australia told me of Xmases when they were children when the tradition was still to eat inside – with no air conditioning - in a house in which an oven had been on for hours roasting a turkey, and their mother – it was always the mother in those days – sweated buckets to produce the meal. My son Stuart is an excellent cook and although I’m not usually a turkey fan, I enjoyed his moist and tasty turkey – perhaps it was the 24 hour soaking in brine - a la Nigella Lawson - that did it. In the brine is water, salt and pepper, peppercorns, cinnamon, caraway seeds, allspice, star anise, mustard seeds, onion, ginger, maple syrup, honey, parsley and orange. Another key tip is to baste the turkey well while it cooks.

So, back to Scotland for New Year. In Dunbar, we have a very local expression Auld Year’s Day and Auld Year’s Night for what you probably call New Year’s Eve and what many people in Scotland call Hogmanay. On my poetry calendar for the 31st December, was an extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam which included the lines:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,/Ring, happy bells, across the snow:/ The year is going, let him go;/ ring out the false, ring in the new

In Scotland, we talk about being home for The Bells i.e. the strike of midnight. Traditionally, you should clean your house, empty the ashes from your fire, and clear all your debts before The Bells. Oh aye, and as soon as the bells have struck, have a wee dram e.g. Bruichladdich. Cheers.

Dubai lantern and Burj Al Arab

 

View of Dubai from 125th floor of the Burj Khalifa

Bird paintings and book, and Gosford Bothy

This week we went across to see an excellent exhibition of bird paintings by Mike Warren at the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club at Waterston House near the attractive village of Aberlady, about 20 miles (32K) from Dunbar. This exhibition mainly featured paintings from Mike’s new book American Birding Sketchbook. What strikes the view of the paintings is not just the accurate portrayal of the birds in their natural habitat, but the vibrancy of the colours of that habitat. In some of the pictures, it could be argued that the birds are, in fact, not the most attractive feature e.g. the variety of colours Warren gets in a picture featuring autumn leaves is outstanding, from the subtle yellows to the blowsy reds. So this is not just a book for birders (who I believe prefer this name rather than twitchers) but for everyone who enjoys the outdoors – either in practice or visually or both. I contacted the artist and he’s given me permission to include the front cover of his book below. You can also see some of the stunning paintings for sale on his website. Waterston House itself is a very welcoming place where you can see a range of books, binoculars, cards, posters and for the serious birder, there is the SOC library.

Just across the road from Waterston House is the splendidly named Gosford Bothy Farm Shop, set on the large Gosford Estate, which includes the impressive Gosford House. The farm shop is one of those modern buildings where, once you enter, you are taken back in time, as the shop includes a stunning range of butchered meat, as well as fresh vegetables and a range of “country” items such as jams, pickles, olive oil etc. (Vegetarians maybe stop here) We bought beef olives which are stuffed with wild boar meat. When cooked in a casserole with red onion, dirty carrots and local potatoes, they taste delicious. Beef olives are thin pieces of steak stuffed with, depending on where you buy them in Scotland certainly, sausage meat or white pudding. We also bought some very tasty – and notfatty – lamb and mint sausages. We’ll go back to both the SOC club and the farm shop.

American Sketchbook

Oats and buttermill loaf and smoked haddock quiche

It’s a dreich (you can listen to the definition on this link) winter’s day here. The sky and sea are uniformly grey, the promised snow has not materialised and the rain arrives from the SW. So what’s a man with no work (of the money earning kind) to do? firstly, up the High Street to the community baker’s. Above the door it says “The proprietor: The Community”. They have a great range of bread which I enjoy e.g. sourdough with rye but today it’s an oats and buttermilk loaf for me (1st photo below). It has a rather crumbly texture but a lovely crisp shell and a different taste from most breads. Having it today with homemade lentil soup was a treat and even looking out the window, it seemed a little brighter. The oats tends to fall off the top when you cut the bread, but no waste here, just heat up your soup in a bowl and brush the oats into your soup. It’s also very nice toasted.

While up the street, I got some undyed smoked haddock from the fish shop, and shallots, mushrooms and potatoes (Saxon) from the fruit and veg shop. I was making smoked haddock quiche with shallots, mushrooms and cottage cheese. It’s a mixture of recipes I’ve come across and I make my own version. I have a 10in (25cm) metal quiche dish, so have to adjust the ingredients to suit as most recipes go for the 8in version. I put 4oz of wholemeal and 4 oz of plain flower in a bowl, plus 3.75oz of margarine and mix this with a hand mixer (which I prefer to use rather than my food processor). I add one egg and some iced water and mix this to make a pastry ball which is slightly moist – better too moist than too dry. I put this in the fridge for 30 min. I rolled the pasty out and lined the quiche dish, leaving an overlap of pasty. I pricked the  pastry all over and brushed it with beaten egg. If you do this, you don’t have to use baking beans and grease proof paper. I put the pasty into the oven for 15 mins at 190 degrees. For the filling, cook the chopped shallot in oil for a couple of minutes, then add the sliced mushrooms (I used 8 medium sized button mushrooms). Remove to a plate to cool. Wipe the frying pan clean and add a bit less than a quarter pint of milk and the haddock (I had 12oz). Cook this gently and turn the haddock once. Remove the haddock with a slotted spoon on to the plate with the mushrooms and onion. Put the liquid into a jug and put in the fridge to cool. Put the haddock, mushrooms and shallots back in the pan and add 6oz of cottage cheese. Mix this gently. I mixed the cooled liquid with 2 beaten eggs and some single cream. I carefully laid the filling into the pastry case and slowly poured over the egg mixture. The quiche is then cooked for 35 mins – after 25 mins, I turned the heat down to 180 degrees. The 2nd photo below shows the result. We had it warm tonight i.e. not straight our of the oven, but removed (carefully!) from the quiche dish and put on a wire tray.  Very tasty and tomorrow we’ll have it cold for lunch.

Oats and buttermilk loaf

 

Smoked haddock, shallott, mushroom and cottage cheese quiche

Digital literacy project and seafood

If you haven’t signed up for the FutureLab Newsletter then you should do so immediately, as it is an excellent way of keeping up to date with a range of ICT issues in education. The latest issue reports on a digital literacy project – with a difference. This project involved students conducting their own research and included them developing their own research questions, undertaking the research, analysing the results and publishing their findings. There are a number of interesting mini projects here and I’m sure that it might be fairly easy for you to replicate this in your own school i.e. by getting your students to pick the issues in which they are interested – and they may well be similar to those in this FutureLab Project. I think that this is an interesting development – and one which we TLs and SLs have been suggesting might be done in the past. It’s called digital literacy – I would include it as part of information literacy, but no matter what terms we use, what’s important is what our students learn.

On holiday in Nice recently, there was an abundance of seafood on offer – in markets and in restaurants, where it can be quite expensive, depending on you budget. I particularly like mussels and clams (see picture below) done in herbs and wine. While the seafood itself tastes nice, it is when you have emptied the shells of the flesh and you are left with a herby/fishy soup, into which you dip some fresh bread, that you really enjoy this dish. It’s also easy to cook this dish -and of course, it’s much, much cheaper to buy some mussels and clams, and cook them with some white wine, a bit of garlic and herbs such as parsley. The BBC has some excellent recipes.

Seafood dish

Education Eye and summer soup

From FutureLab an interesting new tool called Education Eye which ‘maps hundreds of the top educational websites, blogs, forums and practitioner case studies’. It looks like a very good way of trying to keep up to date with some of what’s going on in the web. You need to register to use the tool to get access to the articles, many of which give links to others, but registration is brief. Once into the Eye, you can search for what interests you e.g. I searched for ‘information literacy’ and found some interesting material. It’s certainly worth a try and may well be a good shortcut to keeping up to date.

It’s summer here in Scotland, so  the heavier winter broths give way to lighter summer soups. No more grating carrots, potatoes or turnips (aka swedes) but a much easier combination of chopped leeks, courgettes and broccoli, with some dried and fresh basil added to your choice of stock. This is, in fact, fairly fast food, as you put the leeks into the pan and sweat them with margarine or butter or olive oil, according to taste, then add the courgettes and broccoli. give it a good stir round, so the vegetables are coated. Add your basil and stock, simmer for about 20 minutes, let it cool and then liquidise. You can also add potatoes if you like to this soup. Of course, what I (and the French of course) call courgettes, you (and the Italians of course) may call zucchini. In Australia, it’s zucchini and broccoli is pronounced broccol-eye. Serve with a spoonful of creme fraiche and crusty bread and that’s your lunch fixed.

Googlegen and courgettes

In the post are 2 hard copies of the journal Scan and I’m alerted,  in one of the articles by my colleague Lyn Hay  and byColleen Foley, to a report on the Google generation by 2 UK academics. The report argues that the Google generation are people born after 1993 who are “growing up in a world dominated by the internet’. One of the  interesting aspects of the report is the negativeviews of the Google generation which are pointed out by the authors. This will be familar territory for TLs who are witness to the often limited ability of the Google generation to actually use Google effectively. The report refers to research showing that student information literacy ‘has not improved by widening access to technology’; that students tend to rush searches and lack a focus on evaluation of  what they find; that students’ search strategies are often limited; and that students’ effective use  of keywords in searching is often lacking. One of the recommendations is that libraries become more ‘e-consumer friendly’ and ‘less stodgy and intellectual’. How does this fit with your library?

I’ve been growing courgettes this year – first time for many years. If you’re reading this in Australia, then you’ll be more familiar with the term zuchini. The French and the British don’t often share terms but in the UK, the term is courgette. The origin of the vegetable is from Mexico about 7-9 thousandyears ago. I like to use courgettes in cooking Italian recipes such as lasagne or spaghetti dishes but they are a tasty ingredient of ratatouille. The courgette flowers are attractive (see picture below) and you can eat them, although I’ve never tried it.

Courgette flowers

Resources for School Librarians and Deuchrie Dod lambs

An excellent source for a wide variety of topics relating to school/teacher librarianship is Resources for School Librarians. This is a site that some/many of you may have visited and it regularly pops up when you search for school library topics. Its areas include Learning and Teaching (including information literacy); Information Access (including collection development); and Technology (including a very good section on Web 2.0). It is USA based but international in nature and certainly worth bookmarking for future use.

Out in the countryside recently, up near Deuchrie Dod (pr. Due-kri), the fresh spring grass was providing excellent food for the sheep feeding their lambs (see picture below). A Dod is a Scottish word for ‘a bare hill with a rounded top’ although it has other meanings which you can search for in the Dictionary of the Scots Language.  Spring lambs in Scotland of course are nice to look at but also (vegetarians stop reading now) make a very nice roast. So put your leg of lamb on a layer of shallots, add stock and good red wine and cook slowly. Serve with new potatoes and Knowes Farm ”sun and dung” dirty carrots. Delicious.

Lambs near Deuchrie Dod

Pathfinders and making soup

My students have just completed an assignment in which a good number of them have designed pathfindersand have used a range of wikis such as Wetpaint, pbwiki or wikispaces . If you do a search for pathfinders school libraries, you will find lots of examples butmost of them, while providing a range of resources suitable to their student audience, often have very content-driven annotations. What I teach my students is that pathfinders should contain information literacy skills advice at the start  of the pathfinder and in teh annotations. Some students search within websites effectively and are good at interpreting what they find in relation to their purpose – but as we know, many are not. So including reminders in the annotations of resources about searching and interpreting is likely to help many students in your classes.

One of the most therapeutic things that I do is to make home made soup. I think that the processes of chopping, slicing, peeling, grating, stirring, seasoning, tasting and simmering are all relaxing. I realise that this might sound awfully middle class, educated, comfortably off and western and I know that for some people in the world, making soup used to be and often is, a chore. Given that admission, however, making soup e.g. lentil soup which I made yesterday, is relaxing and satisfying. My recipe? I used stock from the gammon joint we had, washed the lentils and added them, bringing the stock and letnils quickly tothe boil. I then added chopped leeks, grated turnip (aka swede in England an other places) i.e. large, round and thick purple skin and grated carrot. For more stock I used a vegetable cube and yes, i know there can be a lot of salt int these cubes. Stir the whole thing together and simmer for maybe half an hour. Delicious.

Teacher librarian world view (2) and fish pie

In my last post, I referred to the articleby Ann Dutton Ewbank and Judi Moreillon, entitled Is there a teacher-librarian world view? This we believe..  I’ve been thinking more about this and, if I was writing that article, I would cite information literacy as the first element in the discussion. The logic for this is that, unless students have the requisite IL skills to access and make sense of the information resources in the library and accessible by the library, having access may not, in itself, be all that valuable. The other aspect of the article that is interesting from a world  point of view, is that it focuses on democracies. As we know, not all countries in the world are democracies but it surely does not follow that, because a school library exists in a non-democratic country, the role of the TL is somehow diminished. So we do have to be careful of taking a Western style democratic view of issues like the role of the TL and the information literate person – who again might not be a democrat (note the small “d”).

Having friends round for a meal the other night, I discovered that the term “fish pie” means something different in Australia than it does in the UK (and possibly other cold (?) countries. They expected a pie to have pastry on it. The recipe I use (adapted from a few I’ve found) has a base of sweated leeks (chopped small) and broccoli (steamed and chopped), then a layer of fish and prawns poached in milk – the milk has butter in it and is used as the liquid to make a parsley sauce i.e. milk and butter liquid from fish and prawns combined with fresh finely chopped parsley and thickened with cornflour. You leave this layer to cool. Meanwhile, boil some potatoes and sweet potato and mash these together with some butter (or alternative). Add a layer of potato on top of the existing 2 layers, line with a fork so it resembles a ploughed field and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 190 degrees centigrade or until it is bubbling. The fish I used here in Wagga Wagga was barramundi. In the UK, I’d use a mixture of haddock and smoked haddock. If you are a ‘pastry pie’ person, try this alternative. I used a square dish and one of my guests asked why I didn’t use a round dish. The answer, of course, is that, in Scotland, all Pi R Squared.

Information literacy and cooking (reprise)

In the last post, I was talking about information literacy maybe being ‘a way of thinking’ and there was an excellent comment (Thanks Cathy) which pointed out that getting students to think about their information literacy skills is important but also that “an awareness and attention to the way one is thinking” is also crucial. But how to do this? I think that teachers and TLs often shy away from this part and assume that if we teach students about information literacy skills then the thinking will automatically come along with it. As we all know, for most students, it doesn’t. My own recommendation is to get students – no matter what grade or level they are in – to talk about this in groups and maybe recommend to each other ways of thinking – yes about thinking although I wouldn’t necessarily use that that phrase with younger students – about information needs etc.

Well, you cook something and it turns out very well so you go back to the same cookbook and try another recipe. This time it was Hungarian goulash with potatoes and onions. So I followed the recipe and it was as bland as a politician at election time and the accompaniment was basically fried potatoes and onions. So what would I tell students about this? Always evaluate your information sources and just because you find something useful and relevant and useful in that source doesn’t mean to say that everything in that resource will be useful – or tasty. I’ll still use the cookery book, however.