Recipes

Baked Lima Beans with Pork

375 grams dried Lima Beans soaked overnight ( or cannelini)

1 large onion diced

1 tin of roma tomatoes

a piece of cook pork neck *–around 300 grams cut into rough cubes

2 -3 tablespoons of olive oil

2-3 tablespoons of brown sugar –or pomegranate molasses, or a mix

1 tablespoon of kecap manis

Optional - three cloves of garlic – with the skin on is better but remember this later was they can look like beans but the papery skin is a bit too chewy

½ teaspoon of peppercorns or lots of ground pepper

a few whole chilies are good too, or ½ teaspoon of Japanise Chili powder – and a whole star anise is so good I don’t know why I’ve put it in the Optional set

250ml of water ( more as needed)

Rinse the lima beans, pick out any bad beans and cover with at least 2 inches of water to soak overnight. Remove any bean skins that have floated off and drain the water and turn the beans into a large casserole dish with a good fitting lid. Mix in all the other ingredients, to give this dish a head start heat through on the stove top and then put slow oven (120C) for four or five hours. If you had a slow cooker this would be a good way to cook them. This dish is best cooked slowly but you can speed it up by turning the oven up to 150. Check the beans every now and then, you might need to add more water so they don’t dry out.

This is very good with eggs for breakfast or as filling for sandwiches and rolls for lunch, though also served with crusty bread and vegetables for dinner.

*You can substitute a sliced up meaty ham hock or smoked speck for the cooked pork neck, if you use a fattier pork omit the olive oil.

Curiosity Cabinet

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

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