Last week someone said on the Radio that Size Zero was a very strange concept. What Size Zero says, the commentator pointed out, is that the idea of disappearing altogether is something to celebrate. The disappearance of women, the disallowance of them to take up space in the world, is made to seem virtuous by the label Size Zero. It’s a sick idea. And anyone who is using Lent to feed the idea that they should be disappearing is certainly not hearing the liberation of the Christian Gospel, which is supposed to save us holistically, body and soul. Emphatically it does not denigrate the body in favour of the soul, although the way some people interpret the gospel you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

Maybe, if you are a person who has got caught up in the obsession with body size and regular dieting and weight control, the smartest thing you could do for Lent is not give up chocolate or cake or dairy or whatever, but give up dieting. 

Chips. By which I mean freshly cut up and, quickly fried fingers of potato. Yes, vegetables. Real food. I do not mean the little processed, flat snack crisps that get called chips in the USA. Nor do I mean the tiny and incredibly vile little things they serve up in fast food places, made of powdered and reconstituted potato and about three thousand additives. No, I am talking about real chips. Go on, you know you want to.

I don’t have a deep fryer (all that hot fat, too scary…) but here’s my recipe for home made chips:

Heat up your oven nice and hot. About 200 – 220 degrees C (400-425 F, or gas regulo 6-7). Now peel some big potatoes suitable for frying or roasting. Maris Piper are rather good. Slice them into big fat fingers (you could also do wedge shapes if you want posh chips) and dunk them swiftly into a pan of boiling water. Drain them and toss in a dry tea towel.

Now toss the chips in sunflower oil until they are coated generously. (Don’t use olive oil, it doesn’t do too well at high temperatures). Spread out on a baking sheet. Bake till they are golden brown, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. The timing depends on the size of your chips and the heat of the oven, but somewhere between 20-30 minutes is about right. Yum.

And before you start on about them being bad for you, check this out:

A 100g portion of oven chips contains just 4.2g of fat – that’s less than a chocolate digestive at 4.3g fat, a small pot of natural yoghurt at 4.5g fat or a jam doughnut at 10.9g fat.

An average portion of battered cod and chips has fewer calories, at least half the saturated fat and just a tenth of the salt of a cheese and tomato pizza.

Link: Chip Facts & Figures.

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

But the happy coincidence of the Collect with the timing of Christmas preparations has led to a double meaning here, for this is also the Sunday that traditionally is the day for giving the home-made Christmas pudding a final stir.

The pudding was made with thirteen ingredients, to represent Christ and his disciples, and the stirring was supposed to be done from East to West, in memory of the great journey of the Magi. Every member of the family would take a turn at stirring the pudding, before it was sealed up ready for cooking, and while they stirred they made a wish – and, like most wish-making traditions, the wish had to be kept secret if it was to come true.

Into the pudding would also be stirred a few more wish-making features. A coin was stirred in, either a silver sixpence (about the size of a modern-day 5p piece) or a threepenny bit, a ring, and a thimble. On Christmas day each person would hunt through their serving of pudding to see if they had got one of the good l;uck charms – the coin was supposed to bring wealth, the ring foretold a marriage, and the thimble was the sign of a life of good luck.

You see what you miss if you buy a ready made pudding in a plastic pot?

EDIT:  Andy asks in the comments whether there’s a reason for having a Christ the King sunday, and for it to come as the last sunday of the church calender and not earlier?

The answer to that depends on whether you mean why was it put there in the first place, or how has it come to be interpreted subsequently. ‘Christ the King’ was insituted as a feast by Pope Pius XI in 1925, and was celebrated at the end of October. It raised no small controversy (still does from time to time) because many felt that the idea of “King” was outmoded, and didn’t any longer convey the meaning it had once contained. The Pope, however, thought it should convey King of all creation, rather than an oppressive King. After Vatican II the feast was moved to the last Sunday of the Church year, the Sunday before Advent, and placing it there gives the idea of Christ the King the sense of the fulfilment of the journey from anticipation through birth, life, death , resurrection, ascension, pentecost. And conveniently, the contemplation of Christ as the fulfilment of everything at the end of everything takes you right back to the already-but-not-yet aspect of the Kingdom of God, which neatly leads you back into Advent the week after. So I have to say its location as the last Sunday of the church year works rather well from that point of view.

Having said that, and although I don’t dispute the theological concepts that feed into Christ the King, I do think that the name itself gives all sorts of problems of interpretation. The ideas could just as well – or perhaps better – be delivered with diferent language, I think.

]]> http://maggidawn.com/stir-up-sunday/feed/ 7 http://maggidawn.com/the-morning-after/ http://maggidawn.com/the-morning-after/#comments Sat, 18 Jun 2005 04:57:00 +0000 maggi dawn http://dev.maggidawn.com/the-morning-after/ time for bed now….

…and eat properly.

(And yes, I know I sound like somebody’s mother. But then Mother knows best, doesn’t she?)