Learning to Cycle

Wheeee!  Bam! Crash!  [pain].  Wheee!  Clash-crash Oh NOOOO!  [more pain, blood, mud, shame, humiliation]

Bath, New York, USA.  Learning to ride a bike as a twelve-year-old was ghastly.  Especially since everyone else had been riding for years.  I was fat and clumsy, desperate to be safely secure inside my home, away from the entertained eyes of the street.  The STOP sign and the telephone pole and the mailbox-on-a-post were the victims of my vehicle, no matter how much I tried for them not to be.  What was it that everyone else knew that I didn’t?  Relief (but no solution) arrived in the form of Mother calling me to supper.

It was the next morning in bed, just I was emerging into the reality of another Day of Failure, that a new thought whispered into the shattered soul.  I remember the moment as clearly now as I did then: “perhaps I crash into the telephone pole and all, because they are what I’m looking at.  If I look at the road, just maybe that is where I’ll go.” It worked.

Thus was born a maxim in stilted twelve-year-old words:

Look at where you want to go, not where you don’t.

This reminder has come in handy when learning to drive, going through thick fog, ice, darkness, when the “Ain’t-it-ghastly!” brigade is full upon me, in raising children (slightly), and for students who want to give up.  It has helped.  It changes the focus.

Funnily enough, it chimed in easily with the work my husband John was doing in business.  He used a system called using Appreciative Inquiry. (https://positivepsychology.com/appreciative-inquiry/#appreciative-inquiry.)  He supported companies, and (later) churches to look at their strengths, using their successes for opportunities to expand — valuing the best of what is, envisioning a future, talking and planning, innovating. It was delightful.  Goodbye to moaning morosely on lacks, threats, weaknesses, and if-only.  Hello to what’s good and how can we have more of it?  Meetings were places of bubbling excitement, expanded dreams, and laughter.  Results: positive do-able targets with wide horizons.

Hmmm.  You know…. I could have told them that when I was twelve years old. 

 

Impossible Pie

A trip down the Memory Lane of the Seventies:  coffee-walnut cake, Black Forest Gateau, and …… (trumpet voluntary) Impossible Pie, a pie that makes its own crust as it bakes. 

If you don’t have/want Bisquick, whip up your own very useful baking mix.  It has many uses. You can add cold water and squoozzle it around with your fingers to make pie crust.  Fling in milk and you have pancakes or scones.  Apparently, you can even make brownies with it.   If you don’t have a standard US measuring cup, find a teacup that holds 8 fluid ozs and use it for all the “cup” measurements. 

Baking Mix. 

Put 2 cups plain flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, and 8 ozs of your favourite grease (butter/marg/non dairy fat)  in a food processor and whizz until the consistency of fine breadcrumbs.  Store in a jar in your fridge to grab at any time you need it.  Triple the recipe for big families, or marathon baking.

Impossible Vegetable Pie.

Oven 400 C, or nice and hot. 

 Place in a hot oven.  Bake for 35 – 47 minutes.  (The longer time — in my oven — ensured a totally brown crust underneath.)

*Vegetables… The major ones need gravitas – broccoli, asparagus, leeks, green beans, cauliflower.  My sister Vicki sauteed some mushrooms and added them very successfully.  A few bits of frozen corn and/or peas etc. make a colourful pie.   

Notes:  I’ve made this three times, once with tuna, and twice with blanched vegetables.  Thanks to all the taster-guests who asked for the recipe.  It’s very obedient.  Didn’t overflow in the oven even when filled to the brim.  Alert:  this recipe was made for a US sized pie pan.  British pans can be smaller. 

If you try it, add your thoughts to the COMMENTS page so that others can have the benefit from your wisdom.