Hello Blog Friends!
Here we are at the start of another month. Overnight it seems that summer has vanished and we are looking autumn squarely in the face and, yes, I have now heard and seen the first flocks of geese flying south to their winter homes in the States🙂.
The schedule of meetings has not let up with one or two just about every day, however it is good to interact with a variety of people and topics and to balance these times with the hours spent typing alone on my laptop, albeit with a furry snout resting on my feet.
This week has also included further preparations for the upcoming Children’s Ministry event at which I was asked to speak. I managed to compile a bio, as requested by the facilitator, and smiled to myself as I struggled to enter the correct years in which I had served in various ministries, thinking of my former boss and mentor, Brett Cane who always expected accurate statistics when one prepared any sort of report! Statistics were never my forté and I’m a great one for deleting files after 5 years whereas Brett used to want to keep piles of files and old photos seemingly forever! We had many discussions about just how many old group photos of Senior Youth Camp could be used to decorate the walls of the CTM office at St. Matthew’s Church (I settled grudgingly on three as a compromise and carefully placed them on the wall behind my chair so I didn’t have to look at them all the time 🙂)
Another task I undertook this week was making a detailed inventory of the Day Camp Team supplies stored in my basement. When Isaiah 40 closed the Friendly Home building and we lost our supply room the DC committee made the hard decision to radically reduce the amount of supplies carried by each Team. This actually made a lot of sense at the time since the majority of our Teams were travelling by air and the fees for excess baggage (paid by host communities!) were higher than the value of the baggage contents so it made more sense to ask communities to purchase supplies in advance as in the end it was more cost effective for everyone plus they could utilise all their extra supplies for children’s ministry long after the week of Day Camp.
After making the hard decision in 2020 to stop sending out Travelling Teams we are now left with figuring out the best way to disperse these core supplies. When we emptied the Isaiah 40 room we made a commitment to see nothing go to waste and those supplies found their way to inner city schools, day care centres, churches and recycling depots with only a few small bags ending up in the garbage. We want to apply the same principle to the items that remain and so at our October meeting we shall be going over the list I have created and attempting to allocate everything to a suitable “home”. This is another big task but one which will honour the work of everyone who was involved in crafting many of these supplies and making sure that they are still used for children’s ministry.
Outside of office hours and meetings I have continued with garden work and am enjoying the cooler weather as I prune down the various perennials. Soon there will be many leaves to rake but right now the grass is a brilliant green in the golden light of autumn and there are still splashes of colour from Asters, Sedum, Cosmos and Black-eyed Susans. A friend passed on to me Barak Obama’s third book “A Promised Land” and I’m enjoying taking an hour or so each afternoon to read a few chapters. It is very well written although I must confess my eyes start to glaze over when he gets into discussing the details of America’s fiscal policies 🙂
During the past few days in my spare time I’ve completed the final pair of socks for my Godson’s Christmas gifts, yay🎉, and am moving on to knitting a small shawl for myself out of some leftover brown yarn.I’ve also sewn a small tweed skirt as part of the Christmas for a little girl I know 🙂.
This afternoon is the last episode of our Autumn Day Camps Cook-Along when Chef Syndi-Belle will be teaching the young cooks how to make her “Easy Apple Pie”. In order to be ready to launch the Google Meet on time, I’m once again hurrying to do my Saturday baking this morning along with all the other weekend chores so I think I had better add our recipe and get this blogpost finished 🙂
As promised, throughout October I shall be featuring soup recipes and today I ‘m sharing a favourite- “Hot and Sour Soup” just the thing for a quick weeknight supper on a chilly autumn evening.
Hot & Sour Soup
- 8 cups chicken broth, preferably homemade
- 4 oz. bacon, diced
- 4oz. sliced mushrooms
- 4 cups Pak Choy (or Bok Choy) roughly chopped
- 4 oz. fine Udon noodles
- 6oz. firm tofu, julienned
- 2 fresh chillies, chopped
- 2 Tbsps. Tamari
- 1 tsp. sugar
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 Tbsp. sesame oil
- ¼ cup apple cider vinegar
- 3 Tbsps. cornstarch dissolved in ¼ cup water
Bring the chicken broth to a boil, add the bacon and cook for a few minutes or until it rises to the surface. Add the mushrooms, pak choy and noodles and continue to boil for 4 minutes. Stir in the tofu and seasonings. Continue cooking for about 3 minutes, or until the noodles are just al dente. Gradually whisk in the cornstarch mixture, stirring until the soup is nicely thickened. Serve immediately, serves 3-4.