Damper recipe

I'm in the mood for writing, but I just have run out of time today. What with church this morning, a magazine design team meeting, baking for three things I had committed to providing snacks for this week, cooking dinner, having a rest, and (yet to come this evening) pricing items for CAJ's twice-annual bazaar, my day is gone.

Let me quickly tell you what I'm making to go with dinner tonight. It is a regular on our menu. We also make a modified version whenever we go camping. It's Australian Damper; very similar to what other countries call soda bread (you can probably help me with other names you might give it).

It's easy and makes for a good addition to a meal. We usually have it with bacon and eggs for dinner. But it also is great spread with butter and a sweet topping like syrup for dessert.

For our hungry family I make this quantity (and get some left over), but you can halve it or freeze leftovers for later:

4 - 4 ½ cups of plain flour (for Japanese flour you need the larger amount)
4 teaspoons baking powder
75g butter (I don't use this the camping)
1 ½ cups of liquid (this can be milk or water or half of each)

1. Rub butter into flour & baking powder mixture using fingers (or a pastry blender, which I love).
2. Add liquid and mix to a soft dough.
3. Shape into a log and place on oven tray.

4. Brush with milk and sprinkle with sesame seeds (latter is optional).  
5. I bake at 200˚C for 15 minutes and then 180˚C for 20-25 minutes (until brown and sounds hollow when tapped). But you'll need to figure out your own oven. I have a fast, hot oven.

Orderly Japanese trains

I trekked across Tokyo again today for a mission meeting. We worshipped and prayed together and then ate lunch as well. It was a good type of meeting to go to (I did have some business to do with a couple of people too, but that wasn't the main point of being there).

I took a different route to get there today and ended up going through an unfamiliar station. It is the fascinating thing about Tokyo trains that makes it different to most other cities in the world (correct me if I'm wrong). Because there are so many train lines criss-crossing the city, there are often a plethora of choices as to how to get to a certain location, much like when driving you can take often several different roads to get somewhere. The differences between the routes sometimes come down to how long the transfers are between trains, or how many stairs, or price, or even how crowded some lines are over others.

Some of the 158 train lines connecting 882 stations in Tokyo (data from here).

Though I've been in Tokyo a decade now, I still marvel at the orderliness of Tokyo train stations and the people who use them (40 million a day). At peak hours, like I was using the trains this morning, people generally calmly walk in designated places and it's usually clearly marked. 

You can't assume that the flow of traffic will be "walk on the left side", as it is in this photo. Someone has determined how the flow of traffic best works and you follow the arrows. Though it is a given that you always stand on the left side of the escalator, leaving room for those who want to walk up the escalator on the right side.

It isn't just the walking that is orderly. There is a clear way to line up. When the train pulls up, you approach the train, but move to the side of the door to allow anyone to get off. There is no pushing and shoving to get on before people get off, or to get in front of the person lined up in front of you. Mind you, as I mentioned in this post, sometimes there is pushing, just to get onto the train, but that is only when the train is very full already.

Back when we first arrived in Tokyo nearly 12 years ago, and for some time after that, I didn't think I could ever be thankful for the complicated train system. But I am—much of the time it is an amazingly efficient way to get so many people around such a crowded, enormous city.

Mask eating shield candy!

I'm a bit confused by this product. I won it in a fun "bingo" game with CAJ parents a few weeks ago. Here's what one website says about it:

Product name: mask eating Morinaga shield acidophilus tablets (yogurt) 

Shield acidophilus tablet, the dry season of customers who have a vague uneasiness. Easy sweets warned that not is a yogurt taste developed in the wake lock crackers. Developed to know that there is a special lactic acid bacteria have been verified the effect of various kinds of lactic acid bacteria, lactic acid bacteria by using lock crackers. 

[Product features]  

• Health management in the dry season to "shield" lactic acid bacteria tablets goodies is.  

• Can one day consume 10 billion pieces in 3 grain lactic acid bacteria.  

• You can lock crackers can easily consume yogurt taste, so to worry about young children, in the habit of eating.

[The origin of the mask eating nicknamed] "Shield lactic acid bacteria" is a shield, to protect you. "That image is easy to understand, such thought in the development team. "Eat my mask" is flashed when you finally have meeting designers and packaging design.

-And shield lactic acid bacteria—Many immune cells reside in the intestine, has suggested that lactic acid bacteria ingested immune function. Shield lactic acid bacteria is lactic acid bacteria was chosen from among several thousand shares owned by Morinaga milk industry, focusing on "immunity".

I'm feeling pretty confused. Would you eat it? When I won it I asked the Japanese parents in the room about what it was and their explanation didn't help much either. I've tried one and I'm not totally enamoured by the flavour, nor am I convinced that it is helping me in any way!

Another new driver's licence

Today I renewed my Japanese driver's licence. I now have had a Japanese driver's licence for about 17 years (and an Australian one for over 25 years)! That sounds amazing to me, have we really been here that long? Sometimes, if I think about the consequences of something going wrong in Japan, it scares me to get out on the road, but for the most part I'm fine. I'm really thankful that Australia and Japan have an agreement that allowed (after a decent amount of red tape) us to transfer our Australian driver's licence without a test.

In the midst of our camping trip last July, stopping for lunch and food
before moving on to our next scenic campsite.

Having a car and a licence gives us a number of additional options like being able to explore more of Japan on our budget because we can take a tent and being able to serve others by helping them get to school sporting events, retreats, and conferences. These two things are wonderful gifts to us and to others.

Today I was also able to do this "chore" with a friend whose birthday falls this month also. We got the job done then stopped for lunch and coffee on the way home. We had a great informal "debrief" on recent parenting stresses, plus lots of deep conversation about doing life as internationals. It was a wonderful excuse to spend extra time together. We're both busy people, with eight children between us, so an excuse to do this alone was great. And again, in this cross-cultural life you never know how much time you're ever going to have a friend in your locality, so it's best to grasp it in both hands and make the most of it.


Here is the description of the much lengthier process I had to go through last time I renewed my licence. I've been "good" since then (no traffic infringements) and was rewarded with a much shorter process in a closer (and smaller) location. It only took us about an hour and a half, as opposed to half a day!

Not working too much

"Can I be so bold as to ask, what's going on with your world of work: Is your life of work balanced appropriately? Do spiritual and relational commitments suffer because of your job? Could it be that you're asking work to do for you what it cannot do? How often do you feel torn between the demands of work and the responsibilities of family?" from Awe by Paul David Tripp p. 170.*

This is from a book we received for Christmas (I wrote a little about it back in January in A Coffee Date?). The whole book is challenging but the chapter on work is making me think about my responsibilities as a manager. This question bubbles up: If I am expecting so much of the people on my team that they are neglecting their other responsibilities, am I doing the right thing?

The books says that when we look to our work for our identity, we find it hard to resist the pull of the challenges, demands, and rewards we get from there. After all, work can offer us achievement and success, that can be a powerful temptation. Work can offer you power or control. This too can be a dangerous temptation. Work also offers us affluence and possessions, which we all know is difficult to resist, but it also is not a good place to find our identity.

Working too much, Tripp says, is a problem when awe of God is replaced by awe of something else. When we consider how glorious God is, we can get things in the right perspective. Here are some areas Tripp points out:

1. The gifts you have that enable you to do your work come from God. By using them we are being wise stewards and glorify him.

2. All of our time is God's. The time we invest in work is God's. I have a certain amount of allotted time (and energy) and God has called me to do certain things in that time, not all of it is work. In my case I have my marriage, children, and I have other relationships as well. I am wise if I search out God's will for how I use all my time, acknowledging that, as a finite being, if I spend more time in one area, it will impact other areas that God's also called me to invest time in.

3. Life is not all about me, it is much bigger than that. I'm in the service of a great King, going after personal glory should not be my goal.

4. I'm under God, that means that my success and power is not for me, indeed it is small in comparison to God's power. I'm to use that power for God.

I think this next point is what's hitting me most:

5. "God is too wise and loving ever to call you to one area of responsibility that will necessitate you being irresponsible in another."

That's thought provoking, especially when I know that many missionaries feel overwhelmed and that they have too many responsibilities. It is also challenging when I think about the team I manage for the production of Japan Harvest.

Many of my team members are keen to help with the magazine, in fact they are passionate about it. I'm very thankful for that. However several of them struggle to find the time to do what I ask them to do. My job is to keep them on track. However, am I encouraging them to do something that they shouldn't be doing? I cannot tell. 

I know from watching my teenagers at the moment as they struggle to meet deadlines, that their struggle (most times) isn't because they've been given too much to do, it is because they've been poor masters of their time. They've wasted time in various ways, but usually, on electronic devices.

Now I'm not accusing my magazine team-mates of doing that! But I really cannot tell from my angle if I'm asking them to do too much. We're adults and we need to make those decisions for ourselves. In thinking this through I think my responsibility is to be sensitive and continue to question them as to whether I'm asking too much of them. I also need to be careful in not setting the standard too high. I think we can be guilty of striving for too high a goal and spending too much time trying to get there. Are we doing that because we crave the achievement, the success of having a great product (in this case)? Or because we desire the praise of others?

So then there's this heart-searching statement:

If it seems impossible for me to balance my life of work with doing what God calls me to do in my family and church life, I am in the situation not because God's calls are unmanageable but because I am seeking to get things out of work that I should not. And when I do that, I will work too much and too long, and other places in my life will suffer. (p. 180)

*I do have a problem with this quote that doesn't quite fit into this post, and it is about parenting. Our family often is also our work. Last night I sat supervising homework in our dining room until 9pm (context here being that I usually go to bed around 9.30/10 and generally supervise much more loosely, but I could sense rebellion in the troops, plus I was on my own last night and had no hubby to relax with). 

To stay sane I played card and word games on my phone while I sat with the guys (otherwise I would have been an impossible nagger, for it was simply not fun to watch the work). To their credit the boys didn't complain about me doing "fun" activities while they worked. If they did I had an answer: I wasn't enjoying sitting at the dining room table any more than they were. I was longing to relax after a day of work, but my work wasn't over, my work at that moment was helping them stay focused and get their work done. 

Family is work too, even when they get a bit older. The first part of this post is not so applicable to mums who find the demands of their kids overwhelming—they don't have many choices when it comes to dealing with that. We do live in a broken world and our work burdens are often hard to carry because of the imperfections around us and in us. That applies to the family too. If we and our spouses and children were all perfect, family life would be a whole lot smoother though. However, we do know that God promises us these things:

"It is God who arms me with strength and keeps my way secure" (Ps 18:32 NIV).

"God is our refuge and strength, an every-present help in trouble: (Ps 46:1 NIV).

"So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand" (Isaiah 41:10 NIV).

That doesn't exempt us from making wise choices about what we say yes to, but it does give us hope when we are struggling to cope with what God's called us to do.

First athletics meet of the season*

On Saturday we went to the first athletics meet of the season for our two younger boys (our eldest is not doing a sport for school this season, he's hoping to get some extra time for schoolwork).

It was the first time, I think, that David and I have gone on our own to a meet without any accompanying children. For both the cross-country and wrestling seasons David has been a bus driver. But not for track and field. We didn't drive either. It is on the other side of the city, out near the bay. Between here and there there are millions of people and nearly as many cars, so trains are a much wiser option.

We also left at a nice time: 8.30, as opposed to much earlier for both wrestling and cross-country. We could do this because neither of our boys were in the first events. However our middle son was in pretty much the last event, so we stayed till the end at 4pm. It was a nice peaceful journey and after the stress of the last week, it was great to have a low-stress journey to the the meet.

It was not a brilliant day, weather-wise. Most of the day we had drizzle or the kind of drifting misty rain that makes umbrellas ineffective. The day before had been quite a warm day (nudging into the 20Cs) and hence it was very tempting not to dress warmly and I didn't put as many clothes on as I should have. 

As the day went on it seemed to just get colder and colder. Being outside in early spring misty rain, the cold tends to get into the bones after a while. I was so thankful that I'd hurriedly packed some long under-clothes in my backpack. I ended up using all of them and lending a pair of socks to a friend who was also struggling. Many parents left early, though, often due to the cold. I have to admit it was pretty chilling, looking at all those teenagers walking around in t-shorts and shorts in the drizzle.

Thankfully, though, there were quite a number of parents around to hang out with most of the day. There was plenty of time to talk, although you still have to be pretty alert to what's going on or you could just miss one of your child's three events of the day! I missed our youngest's relay because I was getting my camera out of the bag. 

Athletics meets aren't quite as intense as wrestling meets (but I don't find them as stressful, either).There isn't as much going on all the time and you are further from the action. And some events just seem to be very poorly organised. It took them all day to get through four discus events (all morning to do the high school boy's discus, and I'm sure that there weren't that many athletes).

 While waiting for the discus to start on the other side of the field to the
 stands, I was able to capture some more cherry blossoms.

Our two boys mostly did sprints: 100m, 400m, 4x400m, and discus for our middle son. 100m, 200m, and 4x100m for our youngest. They both did well. 

As I've explained before, the meets are organised in terms of educational level, not age. So all the middle schoolers (grades 6, 7, and 8) compete against one another. This doesn't give much success and encouragement to the grade 6 kids, but thankfully they can at least compare their times in this, unlike wrestling.

Our middle son is therefore the top of the heap and had high expectations to match. He came second yesterday in both the 100m and 400m (out of 63 competitors for the 100m, 15 for the 400m), so was very satisfied with that, though he'd like to improve his times. Our youngest son, if you compare him only to the other six graders in the events, also came second, though in reality it was 28th for the 100m and 16th in the 200m. He also wants to improve his times. So they've both got good goals to keep them motivated to train.

We're doing this for six weeks running this time (although I'm taking a break to volunteer at CAJ's Thrift Shop on the 22nd). Hopefully the weather will be better next week! That would help the sprinters too, the track was a little slippery.

*Americans would say Track Meet, Australian say "athletics" but I've got a feeling it wouldn't be "meet", what is the noun that Aussies would use here? "Carnival" doesn't seem quite right, though I know it's used in terms of school athletics events in Australia.

Self-saucing pudding

I had fun this week by putting the word "pudding" up on my Facebook page and asking my friends, who hale from a variety of backgrounds, how they used this word. I had over 100 responses. This is a summary of what they said:

Americans: it is a smooth, gelatin-type creamy dessert of varying flavours, often based on Jello. Although a handful of exceptions came up: bread pudding, banana pudding, rice pudding, and cottage pudding. Edit: I knew I could get in trouble writing this. My American proofreading friend has said this is wrong. He suggested I put this: "It is a sweet, smooth, milk-based creamy dessert of varying flavours." Other feedback suggests that it is not necessarily made with gelatine or Jello.

Australians: many remember when they were growing up that the sweet course after mains at the evening meal was called "pudding" no matter what it was, but now call that course "dessert". 

British: were split. Some call anything sweet you eat after dinner pudding, some do a similar split to Australians. I believe it is something of a geographical split, but I don't have a clear reference for that. Some also had other things they called pudding, non-sweet things like Yorkshire pudding which goes with roast beef or a steak d kidney pudding.

I got no responses from other English-speaking countries like New Zealand, South Africa, or Singapore.

On Thursday I made chocolate self-saucing pudding (my recipe is here) to share with friends who invited us to dinner on Friday. I have a US friend who is curious about the creation of this dessert, so here are some pictures of the process:

First the cake-like batter went into the dish.

Then I mixed together cocoa and brown sugar.

And sprinkled this over the top of the cake-like batter.

After that I gently poured boiling water over the whole thing.

Finished, it looked like this and then went into the oven.

I neglected to take a photo of the end effort. Actually the dish I used for this was too small (because I'd doubled the recipe and calculated badly on the volume, a common problem for me that makes me a bad packer too). Because it was too small, the final product didn't look great as it had overflowed and baked onto the edge and outside of the dish. 

However it tasted great. On top it looks like a normal-ish cake-like dessert, but when you take out a serving, you find thick chocolate sauce has formed at the bottom (check the recipe I linked to above to see a photo of this). Magic!