Boaz

It isn't all about food. I do other things. Today I was sitting at my kitchen table, minding my own business. I was eating bran flakes (improved with flaked almonds and linseeds) and drinking a cup of herbal tea. I was perusing jobs in Scotland that I might like to apply for someday.

The phone rang. It was the hosting coordinator for a local organisation called The Boaz Trust. They try to find hosts for destitute asylum seekers; to keep them off the streets and offer the care and attention that our ruthless government can't seem to afford them.

Nick and I have been talking about using our newly acquired spare room to host someone who needs a roof over their head for some time. We met with the hosting coordinator from Boaz, who explained what was involved - as much or as little as we liked really. You can offer to host someone for months at a time, weeks at a time or on an emergency short-term basis until some more permanent accomodation can be provided for them. Who are these people and why do they need hosted? The answer to this question is best explained by Boaz themselves:

Two out of every three asylum seekers, who flee persecution in their home countries due to civil war or for political or ethnic reasons, are refused sanctuary in the UK by the Home Office. Unable to prove their stories, they are forced onto the streets with no means of support and no right to work.

They are told to go back to their home countries, yet some cannot get the necessary travel documents, or there is simply no safe route back to their country due to conflicts or political turmoil. Many more fear persecution, torture, or even death if they return to the countries they fled from, preferring to live a life of destitution in the UK.

Furthermore, cuts in legal aid have led to many solicitors giving up immigration work meaning that some asylum seekers are unrepresented at their hearings and many struggle to make appeals and fresh claims with no support.

The Independent Asylum Commission estimates that there are 284,500 refused asylum seekers nationwide. Manchester was one of the top three dispersal towns for asylum seekers entering the country in 2007, and many remain once their asylum claims are turned down. Indeed, several thousand refused asylum seekers are known to live in the city.

Many have nowhere to go and have no choice but to sleep rough on the streets. With no national insurance number they cannot even access government funded homeless hostels. These people become like “living ghosts”, hidden from society with no means of survival. Physical and mental illness are common, particularly for those with a history of torture and abuse.

This sounded like a problem we wanted to help solve. Our spare room is a real blessing to us, allowing us to have guests to stay more comfortably than in our old flat (one bedroom and a kitchen/lounge!), but we don't have guests every weekend and it's empty pretty much every weekday. We wanted to give ourselves the summer to settle into our new house, but told Boaz we'd be available to host on an emergency basis from the end of August.

So later today we are receiving our first guest - a lady from the Congo. I'm not sure how things will work out - will we eat together? Will she speak any English? Will she understand my French? Will she be comfortable in our home? Will it be weird having a random stranger living with us? I'm excited about finding out the answers to these questions. A lot of people have told me they couldn't cope with hosting asylum seekers like this. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm naive, but I just believe that if I have the means to help someone out, I have a moral duty to do so. I'll let you know how it goes.

Pear and Almond Tart for Esther

I have spent a lovely weekend catching up with an old friend. I haven't seen Esther for nearly two years, but she is one of those friends with whom you can pick up where you left off within minutes and be laughing together, weeding the garden together, rolling pastry, chopping tomatoes, drinking beer...



Food was a feature of the weekend. We both love great local, organic produce; especially since our Est's a Cumbrian farm girl. We ate pumpkin with deep-fried polenta and sage, pasta with tomato and basil sauce and a pear and almond tart. As promised to Esther, here is the recipe for the pear and almond tart - not one for which I can claim credit. This goes to Thomasina Miers and is from her great book, 'Cook' which was a birthday present from two other great friends. I love the taste of pears with lemon and bay leaves - an unexpectedly fabulous combo. We left out the blackberries cause it was 'too much'. I saved the syrup from the poaching process; Esther thinks it would be great over ice cream. I've been making variations on this tart all summer; it's especially good with plums soaked in brandy. It tends to be a bit runny if you serve it straight out of the oven and i find it benefits from sitting, cooling and solidifying for a while.

Pear and Almond Tart

Pastry
250g plain flour
25g icing sugar or caster sugar
125g butter
2 egg yolks

For the Frangipane:
175g ground almonds
175g sugar
175g butter
1 egg plus 1 yolk

For the pears:
200g caster sugar
1 vanilla pod, split lengthways
1 bay leaf
grated zest of 1 lemon
5 pears, peeled, cored and quartered.
1 punnet of blackberries (optional)
dash of brandy (optional)

Whizz the pastry ingredients in a food processor, then add enough water, bit by bit, until the dough just comes together into a ball. Turn out onto a clean surface and bring together, wrapping the dough in clingfilm. Pat down in a flat circular shape and leave in the fridge to rest for 30 mins. Roll out to fit a 24cm pie dish (Esther says: nice and thin!) Bake blind in a preheated oven 180C/350F/Gas4 and leave to cool.

Place the almonds, butter and sugar into a food processor and whizz briefly. Then add the egg. Combine and set the frangipane mixture aside.

Bring 200ml of water to the boil in a saucepan and add the sugar. Simmer until the sugar has dissolved, then add the vanilla pod, bay leaf and lemon zest. Add the pears and poach for 10 minutes (roughly! mine took a lot longer than this), then drain and slice thinly. Do what you wish with the poaching liquid, but it's not required from here on in.

Spread the frangipane over the base of the pastry case and arrange the pears on top in overlapping fans. Sprinkle with blackberries (if using) and a dash of brandy. Bake for 25-30 minutes until puffed up, golden and beautiful.

Norwegian Tofu Salad

Whilst I was gathering my thoughts for a blog post on my epic bus journey and reflecting on sustainable transport, I invented myself a tofu salad. There is nothing Norwegian about this salad in any way. Other than the fact that the recipe was requested by my friend Matt, who lives in Norway. Not even he's Norwegian. But there we go. Things aren't always what they seem.

Leftover wholegrain rice is the best to make this recipe with - basmati just won't cut it. I used a really nutty organic wholegrain that is almost like pearl barley in texture, and it worked really well.

Norwegian Tofu Salad

Serves 2

Marinade:
100g Tofu, the squidgy uncooked kind (I'm guessing at the quantity cause my scales are broken, so feel free to adjust this if it doesn't look like enough).
3 tablespoons Sesame oil
1 tablespoon Soya sauce
1 cm Fresh ginger root cut into matchsticks or grated
2 cloves Garlic
2 tsp Chinese 5-spice powder

Small portion of wholegrain rice, cooked.

Salad leaves such as rocket, lettuce, celery leaves.
6 radishes
Half a cucumber
3 spring onions

Lime juice
Linseeds or sesame seeds (optional)


Cut the tofu into 1/2cm cubed pieces, place into a shallow dish and add all the other ingredients. Leave to marinade, turning occasionally, for as long as you can (at least 30 mins).



After this time, place the tofu and marinade in a medium-sized pan over a medium heat. Let it fry until nice and brown. Add the rice and turn it over in the mixture so that it gets a good coating of oil (sesame oil is really good for you!). Set aside while you make the rest of the salad.





Wash the leaves, tear them up and pile on one side of a plate. Slice the radishes and spring onions really thinly. Cut the cucumber into thin matchsticks. Arrange them on top of the leaves. My salad came with some nice vegetable flowers that I decorated with. Fun. Squeeze some lime juice over the top; it cuts through the sesame oil really nicely.

Now pile the rice and tofu mixture on the other half of the plate.
I threw some linseeds over the whole plate for added health benefit. Sesame seeds would work nicely too.

Eat. Goes nicely with some Chinese beer.

Setting Out

I'm off to Italy tonight for 10 days, and I'm packing a my bag. A few sundresses, a bikini, some suncreme. 3 books ('The Quiet American', John Simpson's first autobiography and 'Heat' by George Monbiot). 6 balls of yarn. 2 sets of knitting needles. An mp3 player. Some herbal sleeping tablets. A sleeping bag. A pillow.

Random collection of stuff? That's because my holiday begins with a 35-hour coach journey from Manchester to Florence, via London, Paris and Milan. And ends in the reverse order. Craziness.

The reason? To limit my impact on the environment. Totally daft? Probably. As I sit there on the coach counting down the hours, shifting in my tiny allocation of space and losing hours of sleep... I dread to think how many flights will be jetting off from airports all over the world.

What's the point? Well... I guess I just couldn't live with myself if I booked a short haul flight from Manchester to Florence after trying to convince the world to become a more climate-friendly place. So maybe the reason is entirely selfish; I'd quite like to preserve my own integrity and self-righteousness. That and the fact that I'm not sure I can look future generations in the eye and tell them that I was quite happy to emit 476kg of carbon dioxide on a return journey to Italy, just for the heck of it...

So wish me luck. Wish that I don't end up sitting next to someone who is oversized for the seat they are trying to fit into, who snores and spits crumbs of food all over me for 35 hours. Wish that I don't have someone in the seat in front of me reclining into my lap. Wish that coach travel will prove to be a pleasurable experience and something that I can recommend to you all, in the hope that I might convince you that it's not so bad... And that it's bearable as the most environmentally sustainable form of medium-distance transport we have...

And while you're at it... wish for the safety of two of my friends who are currently en route from Leeds to Sierra Leone in order to carry out their medical electives without hurting a world they seek to heal.