Tying up loose ends

ACN-NW Baba Ganouj

This is my last entry for the month of July and also my final one before I head off on Thursday for a week’s holiday. In some ways I am ready for a break, in others I am wishing that I had another couple of weeks before going. Now that all of the children are in residence full-time and the University has settled down for the summer, my WHOLE family is here ALL the time and ACN-NW is a very busy place indeed! This afternoon is deceptively peaceful (son 1 out with a friend, daughter out at work, son 2 out with husband on a walk), so it felt like a good time to collect my thoughts before I undertake my final push to sort things out before I go off.

Things have really begun to pick up in my office over the last couple of weeks. Let’s face it, for all of the hard work I have done up until now still only a handful of people know that I am here. This is beginning to change, though—in the past 2 weeks I have had a number of phone calls from benefactors who live locally and would like to make donations or from people who can’t through to HQ in Surrey and need information about something or other. Even though sometimes I get calls on weekends or after hours, at this point it is still so exciting to get any call at all that I am delighted to hear from anyone at any time. This may change, of course, but for now I am happy to reach out to those benefactors who ring ACN-NW on a Saturday morning on the off chance that someone is in. This past Saturday was an excellent case in point. I had a lovely chat with a benefactor who lives near Wigan. I was able to help her with some Mass stipends and she now knows that ACN has an active presence in her region—Result! The excitement kept on coming because shortly thereafter the postman came and delivered a generous donation to ACN in memory of a man from Merseyside. How cross could I ever get with dealing with ACN business out of hours when I get to meet new benefactors and experience the generosity of the friends and family of former benefactors?

So far, this week has been largely devoted to PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS, the Final Push. Almost everything has been written and edited, and Lorraine and I are just finishing up the last few texts before delivering them all to Patricia by the end of play tomorrow. This has been hard work—I am not by nature a ‘finisher’; I am an ‘ideas person’—so I have had to put on my ‘details’ hat and stop myself from coming up with new plans for just long enough to finish this initiative. Still, now that it is nearly done, I can appreciate how undergoing the process of thinking, writing, thinking again, editing, waiting for approval, getting involved with other things for a bit, coming back to it, writing some more and so forth has really helped to sharpen the offering and to make it more meaningful. I hope that the primary schools throughout my region and Scotland think so, too!

I have also done some more work on the ACN-NW Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom. These are going to be great! When I get back from Dorset or Devon (I didn’t pay much attention when my husband booked the cottage!), I am going to need to think seriously about publicity strategies. It would be a shame to organize these wonderful events only to discover that no one knew about them! I’ll put my head together with Marketing at HQ and I’m sure that we’ll come up with something fabulous.

Over the weekend I attended an appeal by William Pilkiewicz at St Edmund’s in Little Hulton, near Bolton (Diocese of Salford). My husband and eldest son came along as well and we were all able to lend a hand. William did a great job and the parish responded enthusiastically. It is nice to go to Mass in a new church in a different place and observe how the comforting familiarity of the Mass can be interpreted in so many slightly different ways. It was all rather uplifting, I thought.

Yesterday I decided to hold a taste-testing session for my recipes for typical Middle Eastern school dinner food (this is part of PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS). The accompanying picture shows the ingredients for ACN-NW baba ganouj. Here are two of my recipes, in case you are feeling peckish:

Hummus

Ingredients: 2 cans chick peas (410g each); 2 heaping tablespoons tahini; 3 tablespoons olive oil; juice of half a lemon;2 cloves garlic, pressed; salt to taste

Method: whiz all ingredients together in a food processor until smooth. You can use a potato masher or even a fork it you don’t mind a few lumps!

Baba Ganouj

Ingredients: 2 large aubergines; 2 cloves garlic, pressed; juice of 1 lemon; 3 tablespoons tahini; 2 tablespoons olive oil; salt and pepper to taste

Method: bake or grill the aubergines until the skin is cracking and bubbling and the inside is very soft; you will need to turn each several times. Halve each aubergine lengthwise and scoop the soft flesh into a food processor add the remaining ingredients and whiz until smooth.

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading!  Caroline