Negating the Nativity

The Christmas season is well underway in not-so-sunny-Edinburgh with a Christmas market springing up in Princess Street and a hand carved nativity in Elizabeth Square. The streets are festooned with twinkling lights - a tradition which really does work better in the Northern hemisphere where it gets dark at 4pm than in Australia where you have to wait until at least 10pm to see any effect at all.

With all the yuletide preparations comes the inevitable media focus on the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas. While one would think the meaning would be sufficiently conveyed by the title (CHRISTmas), there is, as always, some debate on the matter.

Two articles on the same page of today’s Guardian
particularly intrigued me. The first, in the weekly advice column, was a question from a woman concerned about how to explain the meaning of Christmas to her young son: “We are not a religious family and I do not feel comfortable telling him the story of the birth of Christ, but do not want him to grow up recognising Christmas as a merely commercial event concerning toys.” The second, in a regular I’m-a-hip-yet-thoughtful-dad column seems to provide the answer: “Religious or not, we do Christmas because we believe in our children...It is them whom we are worshiping when we layer all the trappings – the reindeer, the carols, the image of Bethlehem under a starry sky – around the one central adoration of a child.”

It is an impressive feat for two separate writers to miss the point so completely on a single page. Whether people choose to practice a religion or not, there is no getting away from the fact that Christmas is a religious festival. To take that away, as the first writer does, leaves very little meaning in the holiday at all – especially if she wishes to keep the focus away from gift giving as well. The second writer, while accepting that there is a religious basis to the season, seems to think that the nativity is just a nice story to remind us how special all children are.

No one would suggest that Eid is just a festival for feasting or that Rosh Hashanah is a celebration of the family. We are happy to accept the religious basis for the holidays of other religions, yet seek alternate meanings in festivals of the Christian faith.

Whether or not one ‘feels comfortable telling the story of the birth of Christ,’ it is worth remembering that it is the fundamental reason why Christmas became the festival it is today. Everything else is just more decoration.

Apple and Pear Crumble

For the past few months we have been ordering an organic fruit and veg box. Every Thursday we receive a huge crate locally grown, seasonal fruit and veg. The fun part is that we never know what we're going to get. Last week's box included a whole red cabbage and a giant turnip - not items that I would normally choose to buy! It has been a real test of our collective cooking skills to use up all the produce each week before the next box arrives. I will continue to share some of the better recipes that have resulted from our organic adventures.

Apple and Pear Crumble

4-6 serves

4 cooking apples peeled and sliced

2 pears peeled and sliced

1/2 cup sultanas

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon water

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 cup flour

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup butter


1. Preheat oven to 120 Celsius

2. Butter a medium size baking dish

3. Place fruit, lemon juice, water and caster sugar in pan and bring to boil

4. Reduce heat and continue simmering until apple is soft

5. Pour fruit mixture into oven dish

6. Place flour, brown sugar and butter into mixing bowl

7. Crumb dry ingredients together until they look like fine breadcrumbs

8. Sprinkle dry ingredients over fruit

9. Bake for approx 30min or until top is golden

10. Serve with fresh whipped cream

Homemade Christmas Decorations

Roast Pumpkin and Spinach Risotto

Serves 4

1 pumpkin or 2 med butternut squashes peeled and cut into small chunks

Olive oil

45g butter

2 large onions sliced

300g Arborio rice

1.75L homemade chicken stock

250g spinach leaves

75g double cream

45g parmesan cheese grated

Salt and pepper

Parsley to garnish



1. Cover pumpkin in oil and salt and pepper and roast for 30mins or until soft

2. In a large saucepan sauté onions in butter until they begin to soften

3. Add rice to butter/onion mix and continue to sauté for 1-2 mins until grains are well coated with butter

4. In a separate saucepan bring stock to boil

5. Pour 225ml of simmering stock onto rice mixture

6. Bring rice mixture to a lively boil then turn off heat. Cover and leave for 10 mins

7. Add a knob of butter to rice mixture, return to heat and bring back to boil

8. Gradually add ladles of simmering stock to rice mixture while stirring continuously until stock is finished, rice is cooked and mixture is thick

9. Stir in pumpkin and spinach to rice

10. Stir in cream and half the cheese to rice

11. Season with salt and pepper to taste

12. Turn off heat, cover and leave for 2 mins to let flavours blend

13. Serve topped with parsley and rest of parmesan

My Soup is too Hot

I was once called over to a customer’s table and berated because her soup was too hot. After explaining to her that by law soup has to be boiled before it is served, she still insisted that I take it away and bring her a bowl to her temperature specifications. So I walked the soup back to the kitchen, sat with it for 2 minutes while it cooled down and then walked it back to the customer’s table. She tried it and pronounced it perfect...

In my long, inglorious waitressing career I’ve met many fine and interesting people. I’ve also met some of the rudest and most demanding. To see some good come of my vast experience, I’ve devised a rough etiquette guide to educate people about what is and most definitely isn’t acceptable restaurant behaviour.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that you should never do in a restaurant/cafe/bar:

1. Order Off Menu
Unless you are a blood relative of the chef, you should never order off menu. It’s not clever or cool. Nobody will think you are special. We are not hiding the good stuff from you. This goes for adding ingredients to what is listed on the menu. Kitchens only order what they plan to use in their dishes (you know, the ones listed on the menu), so even if you feel like banana with your pane cotta, it may not be available. I realise this may come as a shock to some customers.

Even if the extra ingredient is available, you can’t just have it without paying for it. There is rarely anything just hanging around in a kitchen. Everything in a dish is portioned and priced; therefore it’s not easy to add something without it increasing the price. Conversely, removing something does not automatically lower the price as the kitchen will still have ordered the tomato for your roast vegetable Panini even if you don’t want to eat it. For this I am eternally sorry but what can I say, capitalism is a bitch.

2. Let your Children Run Wild
I understand that you think your child is better than all others but trust me, they’re not that special. I’m all for bringing children to restaurants BUT only if they are well behaved. It’s a restaurant not a playground and I’m a waitress not a babysitter. I’ve had children make repeated attempts to run out the front door straight onto a busy road while their parents chatted away seemingly oblivious. It shouldn’t be my responsibility to stop little Jack and Isabella from getting squashed by a passing truck. I’ve had kids use tomato sauce to draw pictures on the window, without their parents either stopping them or attempting to clean it up. I regularly have children running in and out of tables, irritating other customers and creating a minefield for staff. Generally restaurant plates are hot, heavy and awkward. If you are ok with one of these plates or a hot coffee to be dropped on little Rocco’s head, then by all means don’t stop him from running amok. However, if you are the sort of person who is likely to complain when this inevitably occurs, how about keeping him in his seat?!

3. Complain Incessantly
I’m sorry we enforce the smoking law/don’t serve coffee without a food purchase/don’t have enough high chairs but that’s the way it is. If this is really going to bother you, please feel free to go somewhere else. Please don’t try to get into a full on debate with me about the merits or this policy. I am way too far down the pay scale to make any changes, we can’t alter the policy just for you and besides, I like the fact I no longer have to work in a cigarette smoke haze. By all means demand to speak to the manager but chances are it’s probably company policy and the manager will tell you the exact same thing anyway.

If there is something really wrong with your meal (eg. A hair, band aid, still frozen etc) no one is going to mind you politely bringing it to our attention. However, you are not entitled to a free meal just because you don’t like what you’ve ordered, think the portion is too big/small or have changed your mind. Once it’s sitting in front of you, unless it’s so raw it gets up and walks away, consider it yours.

4. Do a Runner
It’s hard to believe that anyone actually does this on purpose but they do. In all the restaurants I’ve worked in any discrepancy in the days takings is made up from the tips jar. Therefore, when you do a runner, it isn’t the super rich restaurant operators who gets stung but the minimum wage earning staff. And believe me, it’s not fun to watch the whole shifts worth of tips disappear to cover some twit’s idea of a good joke. This also applies to stealing the cutlery/pepper grinders/sugar bowls.

5. Yell at, Swear at, Threaten or Grope Waiting Staff
It happens more often than you think. It’s scary and totally not ok.

6. Click Fingers or Wave Credit Card
It’s just plain rude. It’s not that hard to attract attention and if you’re really in a hurry you can always pay at the till.

7. Forget your Manners
It’s not that much to ask you to say please and thank you. This also applies to children. It is not cute in any way to have a child demand something from waiting staff. If it is old enough to speak, it’s old enough to say please and thank you.

8. Forget to Tip
Unless you received truly appalling service, you should always tip any time you eat a meal out. Making a living on the minimum wage is not easy, especially if you are a student and can only work limited hours. On any bill over $20 you should tip a minimum of 10%. Leaving $1 or $2 on a bill of over $50 is totally unacceptable. A bill of $50 or over implies that you are either a big party or have had several courses. Either way this would have required a certain amount of time and service and while tipping should never be mandatory, it is definitely the polite/customary thing to do.

By passing on these helpful hints, I aim to do my bit to aid the world wide waitressing fraternity - May their customers always be gracious, their bosses always honest and their chefs always sober.

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Covered in Mayonnaise and Dill

With David Miliband in Russia this week to look up long-lost relatives and avoid talking plutonium with Sergei Lavrov, I have been thinking about what a strange and unique place Russia is.


My observations about the vast diversity that is modern Russia are based on a narrow perspective; I lived in Moscow for one year while working as a language teacher. My interest in Russia however, runs far deeper. A long standing Russophile, I majored in Russian history and politics at university and wrote my honours thesis on Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. Before moving to Moscow I began to learn Russian with a wonderful old Georgian woman who once worked in Afghanistan teaching the occupying forces mother tongue to some no doubt unenthusiastic locals.

There can be no question that Russia remains critical to global affairs. Its sheer size and rotting nuclear arsenal guarantee that it can never be left out of any international discussion for very long. Whether it is North Korea, Iran or Afghanistan, Russia plays an intimate role in all the most important geopolitical conundrums. In spite of this, many everyday Russians still feel that they lack the respect of the international community.

Smarting from the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the Soviet empire and the wilderness years of Yeltsin, the past decade has seen Russia embracing tradition by turning to a strong-man leader to restore national pride. Vladimir Putin has enjoyed vast popularity as both President and Prime Minister of the Russian Federation and has a pop song dedicated to him to prove it. He is so beloved that it is possible he will be returned to high office in perpetuity – a very modern Tsar.

There is widespread apathy among many Russians when it comes to such political machinations. While we in the West may frown upon Putin’s manoeuvring as blatantly undemocratic, most Russians I’ve met are at least accepting of, if not downright enthusiastic about his ongoing reign. There is an undeniable tradition of centralised power in Russia and Putin has not only restored national pride but raised living standards as well. The fact that he has simultaneously dismantled the democratic credibility of the country means little to ordinary Russians who are far more economically secure now, current crisis notwithstanding, than they were 15 years ago.

What is strange is the level of concern the Russian authorities have for creating a veneer of democracy. One would think that having an acquiescing constituency would give the Kremlin some sense of invulnerability but that is clearly not enough for Putin and friends. During the last presidential election most of my students readily admitted that the outcome was preordained yet there was a widespread campaign of intimidation to ‘encourage’ people to vote for Medvedev. This was coupled with instances of outright fraud. One friend of mine’s father went to vote only to see that his wife and daughters (who hadn’t planned to vote at all) had already been ticked off the voting register by someone voting in their place. Given that the pre-election polls showed that Medvedev should have easily won the popular vote anyway, it is odd that the Government decided to pursue such tactics.

Fortunately, for all the convoluted high political dealings, there are many positive aspects to living in Russia. The Moscow metro is undeniably the best in the world. Ok so you do frequently end up feeling like a sardine in a tin can but the reason 9 million people use it every day is because it’s so damn efficient. The trains run 2mins apart and the stations are works of art. It also has the world’s longest escalators just for fun (unless you are in a hurry...).

Russians take art and their country’s contributions to it very seriously. My students were horrified to learn that we didn’t have to study Pushkin at school in Australia. When I told them that we studied Shakespeare instead they deemed it a second rate education. While the likes of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and Shostakovich remain more popular in the West than in their country of birth, there is deep and enduring pride in the countless other Russian members of the poetry, classical music, opera, literature, ballet and fine art pantheon. For someone who comes from a country where only sportsmen receive such elevation, it was a wonder to live in a place where artists were considered national heroes.

Similarly feted were veterans of the Great Patriotic War (WW2), which is basically any Russian over the age of 65 given that everyone of that generation was involved one way or another. It is difficult to describe how fundamental the Second World War was to shaping modern Russia. While the rest of the world may regard Stalin with abject horror, for many Russians (including Prime Minister Putin) he was a greatly misunderstood, brilliant war time leader. Ask any Russian who won the Second World War and they will tell you it was Russia. If you ask them about the contributions of the other allied countries, most people will tell you that they made a necessary but ultimately insignificant impact. Compared to the Russian sacrifice this is in many ways true but perhaps not the most tactful assertion if you want to boost your international standing. Every Victory Day, Great Patriotic War veterans dressed in their best and proudly wearing their medals watch the impressive military parade in Red Square and the surrounding streets. Many are handed flowers with heartfelt thanks by members of younger generations. It’s a genuinely moving sight. It is a great shame that veterans of Russia’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya are not treated with anything like the same level of care and respect.

Russia is still a violent place. While it has lost the Wild West feeling of the early 1990s when rival gangs regularly shot one another to pieces in public places, it is still quite easy to see blood flow in the streets. This goes hand in hand with the fact that alcohol is consumed with impressive regularity. Beer is considered a soft drink and you can frequently see people having one at breakfast time. Domestic violence is thought of as a family issue and the police are usually reluctant to respond. There is no law against rape within a marriage. There is even a saying ‘he wouldn’t beat me if he didn’t love me.’ However, if you are not in a violent marriage, a criminal gang or involved in heavy drinking sessions, the average person is not too likely to become a target for violence. Unless you are an investigative journalist, human rights worker, defence lawyer or political activist that is...

There is also the frightening spectre of far right nationalists. One night, while walking to a bar, I stumbled across a murder not long after it had occurred. There were lots of police, reporters and a dead body with its eyes still open lying in a pool of blood in the snow. Unlike many crimes, that one made the papers as it turned out to be a hate crime committed by skinheads - a totally innocent Tajik man was walking home when he was ambushed and stabbed to death on a street corner. Even among educated liberal-minded Russians runs a distinct vein of racism. An African or Chinese person might be met with no more than curious stares but woe betide anyone obviously from a Jewish or Muslim background. I was met with disbelief when explaining to my students that Caucasian and white were synonymous in English. Telling them that they were all of Caucasian appearance nearly led to a walkout. To be from the Caucasus is to be from a lower caste in the eyes of many European Russians.

Despite their open hostility to the people of the Caucasus and surrounding nations such as Georgia, Russians are quick to embrace their neighbour’s cuisines. This is probably due to the greater usage of spices in Caucasian food, ingredients distinctly lacking in traditional Russian food. Generally speaking a Russian meal is incomplete unless at least one dish contains lashings of mayonnaise and dill and maybe some sort of pickled fish. In fact my personal favourite combines all these plus beetroot and has the brilliantly translated name of “fish in a fur coat.”

My stay in Russia was alternately hard and rewarding, dull and surprising, routine and astounding. For every day I trudged to work to try to convince my students that you really do need to use articles and prepositions in English to avoid sounding like a caveman, I was richly rewarded with all the complexities of living in such an endlessly fascinating and important country. I do hope that David Miliband experienced as much.

Grey is the New Black

Does Noel Fielding ever worry about grey hair? There must be a few grey strands creeping in to his tousled mane surely. As I sit here watching ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ it occurs to me that outside of (male) newsreaders, it’s pretty rare to see anyone under the age of 40 on TV with grey hair. It’s not as if the general public only start to grey the day after hitting the mid-life milestone so why is this the case on TV? I think the under 40 demographic need more grey haired role models in the public eye.

The tragic cause of my position on this subject is the creeping realisation that the occasional grey strand I noticed a year ago is gradually morphing into clumps. And not only am I under 40 – I’m under 30! I initially approached the problem by pulling out the offending hairs, going so far as to have my long-suffering boyfriend seek and destroy the ones I couldn’t see at the back. We would sit together like a couple of grooming monkeys, competing for who could find the longest one. While this kept the grey at bay for a while, it only increased the number of white hairs in the long run. If I were to pull out all the grey hairs I have now, I would be left with bald patches instead of grey flecks.

Dying my hair would be the obvious solution to this problem but I’ve always been fond of the natural dark brown colour of my hair. Other than a few ill advised home dye attempts in my teenage years, I’ve never dyed my hair before and I’m sceptical that any dye would look natural.

Men my age do not face this dilemma. One friend has been going grey since we left high school and it has only served to make him look more like the serious economist he has become. My boyfriend has a multitude of white hairs but as he was a reddish blond to begin with, it is difficult to see them without examining his head at close quarters.

So rather than pulling out the greys, dying my hair or having a sex change, I’ve decided to start campaigning for more young, glamorous grey haired people in the public eye. Imagine a world where grey was linked to adjectives such as stylish, sexy and alluring instead of merely distinguished at best. So go on Noel, let go of the dye dependence, grey is the new black.