I thought I would start a series of posts discussing food, in particular different food. By that I mean food that many of us have never heard of let alone tried.

We are confirmed foodies and love trying new things. I thought I would pass on ideas for foods that you might want to try out yourself. The foods I will suggest will be family friendly, easy to prepare and will (usually) be healthy. To get the ball rolling I’ll talk about a traditional Irish favourite, boxty.

Image from Wikipedia

Boxty is a traditional form of savoury potato pancake. In appearance it is not unlike a tortilla or crepe. It is made from a batter containing finely grated raw potato, flour, baking soda, buttermilk, egg and seasoning.

It was traditionally a dish eaten by the poor, in fact the Irish version of the name boxty “bacstaí or arán bocht tí” translates to English as “poor house bread”. Despite it’s origins in poverty stricken homes, it is a very tasty and versatile food.

A boxy can be served wrapped around stewed beef or mince, accompanied by vegetables. Alternatively you can place savoury toppings on top of it and eat it like a messy pizza.

Ingredients:

• 100g grated raw potatoes
• 100g plain flour
• 100g finely ground raw potatoes
• 1 egg
• 125-500ml buttermilk
• salt and pepper to taste
• butter for frying

(makes approx 4 boxtys)

Method:

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl using enough buttermilk to give the batter the consistency of cream. Pour batter in to a medium frying pan with butter and fry until golden brown. Vary the amount of buttermilk to make batter thinner/thicker and get thinner/thicker boxtys.

Alternatives:

Made with less buttermilk you can create dumplings than can be cooked in stews or soups.

Yum!

When I got home last night the mommy human had a big pot of past and sauce sitting on the stove ready for me to tuck in. Yummy!

Being Irish, I decided the best way to consume said pasta was to put it in a sandwich. We’ll put anything in a sandwich be it crisps, ketchup, banana or onions.

I took a big bite of the sandwich whilst anticipating the taste explosion that was about to occur in my mouth. Instead the pasta that just happened to be hotter than the sun hit the back of my throat and caused me the most excruciating pain imaginable.

Today, my voice sounds like I am a frog and my god it hurts. I did a stupid.

If you don't back off, I WILL projectile vomit in your face.

I grew up in an area where it was quite common to get married at a fairly young age. A lot of my school friends were married off by their early 20s. Some were clearly quite happy with their lot in life, but a fair few looked a bit miserable. They married the wrong person too young and realised they were trapped.

To me, getting married in your early 20s (or younger!) is risky. You are settling down with someone before you have had a chance to enjoy being single. You are also missing out on some important personal development. This is why I decided not to get married until I was 30. I spent my 20s learning, working in jobs I loved, indulging in my hobbies and having a pretty decent social life.

I was 31 when I met my wife, a year later we were married, a year after the the monkey was born.

I have often wondered how being a parent in your 30s differs from being a parent in your 20s.

Before I continue, let me detail some facts about how having children will affect your life…

• Your social life will take a hit. Even if you have access to an endless supply of babysitters you will find yourself not going out as much as you did before you had children.
• You will be more tired. Looking after children, even just one, drains your energy. After you put the kids to bed you’ll find yourself less willing to engage in hobbies and more likely to pig out in front of the telly.
• Your disposable income will suddenly decrease. Children are expensive when they are born, they get even more expensive as they get older.
• You become more concerned with the future. You will want to save for your children and make sacrifices to your lifestyle to accommodate this. You will also care more about your financial stability and job security.

With that out of the way, lets analyse things.

If you have children in your early 20s you are effectively stopping the development of your social life. You are giving it up before you have had a chance to fully enjoy and appreciate it. In other words, you won’t miss it that much. Us 30-something parents see it the other way. We have had longer to develop our social lives and it hits us harder when we have to curtail our social activities to become parents. Younger parents are less anxious about losing their social life, but we have learned more and had better life experiences to influence how we teach our children.

Us 30-somethings have much more responsibilities than younger people. We tend to be in jobs that require more of our abilities and with it a greater fear of being let go and not being able to provide for the future. This can have a big impact on our home life. Younger people naturally worry less about such matters so they tend to be more ‘sprightly’ and have a much more optimistic viewpoint on life. It’s true what they say, you do get more cynical as you get older.

If us older parents are in better jobs (in theory), then we should have more income. But we also have mortgages, pension plans and lord knows what else to pay for. Younger people worry less about their long term finances.

Also, as we get older we think more about the future. You become aware of your own mortality and start to think about providing for the future. If you have children you think about this even more. But as you may have guessed, use older parents think more about that younger parents.

So do us 30-somethings we make better parents than people in their 20s? It’s hard to say. Young parents have more energy and worry less, older parents have more learned more to pass on to their children but that comes with added worry and and obsession with being responsible. We also tend to be less rash and make better decisions. When we settle down we try harder to make sure the person we are settling down with is truly the right one.

On balance I think I made the right decision to wait till I was 30 before settling down and having kids. I know it is harder considering we worry more and aren’t as fit as we used to be. But I have so many good life experiences that I feel I know more and that help me to be a better father.

What do you think?

Of all the skills a parent can possess, patience is the most important.

Patience is the lowest common denominator skill. The one that all other rely upon when children are involved.

Patience is the skill the helps you to persevere and keep going when you child refuses to learn and do what is right.

Patience is the skill that keeps your love for you child as strong as ever, even when thy are behaving at their worst.

Patience is what gets you through all those years when your social life goes out the window and you have far too many sleepless nights, because you know it is all worth it.

A parent who lacks patience can never be a great parent. Do you agree?

It may surprise you to learn that the vast majority of school in Ireland are owned by the Catholic church,  a legacy of the days when the Catholic church almost had more power over the people than the government did. Although schools are staffed by ordinary teachers, the management boards usually have a few priests on them making sure that the little kiddies are made to believe in their own backwards view of religion.

I think this is a bad thing.

Now before I continue let me say that I am a Catholic and I believe there is something up there, but I do so in my own way. I reject a lot of the Catholic churches teachings and I think it needs to work on the whole tolerance thing. That being said I don’t care what you believe it, or if you choose not to believe, either way I’m cool.

I was born in England where the dominant religion, Anglicanism, tends to be ‘happier’ and less involved in day to day life. This rubbed off on the English Catholic church. Things were less dogmatic and there was much less self-pity.

When I was 9 I had to move to Ireland, the culture shock was quite something.

It was bad enough for me, a boy with an English accent moving to a Catholic (i.e. Irish Republican) part of Northern Ireland during the worst excesses of the 1980s troubles, but I also had to experience ‘hard core’ Catholicism.

I had never before experienced priests giving orders to people on the streets. I was once stopped and asked why myself and my mother had not been to mass recently. Not knowing how else to respond and being shocked by the priests rude attitude, I told him to mind his own business. He grabbed me by the ear and told me that he would “beat some manners in to me. Fortunately I was a practitioner of Jiu Jitsu and knew how to make good my escape. Later that evening the priest turned up our home and demanded an apology from both myself and my mother. He didn’t get one.

What was worse was having to go to a convent school.

Firstly, I was being forced to learn religion is a way that contradicted my mothers easy going interpretation of Catholicism. I was slapped a few times for not praying hard enough!

Secondly, I was too free willed for thir liking which led to more slaps.

And worst of all was the view by teh nuns that we make our own problems. So when I got bullied, I was the one that got punished for causing myself to get bullied. Weird eh?

In a nutshell, my experiences there made me think that nuns were evil.

When I moved on the secondary school (what we call high school) in 1987 things were changing. The government had declared that schools could no longer use teachers or priests or worse still Christian Brothers as teachers.

Christian Brothers? Think of them as male nuns. Men who couldn’t make it all the way in the priesthood. They are uniquely Irish. Although they are suppsed to be the manpower arms of the church, the ones who go out and man schools and do laborious work for the church – I seen them as henchmen for the local diocese.

My secondary school was a Christian Brothers school and it would be another two years before the last one stopped teaching.

Like the convent school, we were force fed a very strict form of Catholicism and had to go to mass once per week in the schools own chapel.

One day I heard a ‘Brother’ (as the liked to be called) complaining about modern teenagers being too free willed and tolerant. He said “they need to be given a good hiding with a  (a big club), that will teach them who’s boss”.

And therein lies the problem. The Catholic church is losing power and influence in Ireland and it can’t handle it. It has taken 30 years, but finally we are at a stage where the government has said the Catholic church can no longer own or operate schools. But this will take time, I expect another decade or two.

The Catholic church in Ireland has a long track record of doing horrible things to the people, in particular the children. And despite all the recent government reports that more or less said “You guys are douchebags!”, they still think we should shut up and just come back to church and start donating again without making an issue of the whole affair.

“Ah Robert!” I hear you ask “But there’s new blood, they have moved on”. But they haven’t. They still teach the same intolerant views and refuse to accept common sense principles such as contraception and doing away with celibacy in the priesthood.

Plus, if you choose to become a priest now after all that has happened, you are probably more old school Catholic than any priest has been for a few decades.

I do not want to offend, but our view is that our soon should go to one of the few secular schools in Ireland. We’ll take care of his religious development in our own way.

The monkey does some strange things at times. Things that make us wonder where he learned them from.

An example of this is that he can be very bossy at times. But bossy with very specific instructions and language. For example I took him to the playground today to let him expend some not needed energy. In the playground there is a toy Jeep, big enough for four (small) people. The Monkey got in to the drivers seat and ordered another child’s mother to sit in the back – “You, sit on back seat!”. I was both mortified and embarrassed by this, even though he has done similar many times before.

Both myself and the mommy human are fairly easy going with the monkey. We do give him specific direction, but we vary the tone and words we use so as to encourage his vocabulary. When he is bossy he tends to say “You” followed by his very specific instructions. On the other hand we would say “Monkey, would you go and sit over there please”.

After much head scratching we found out where he had learned this habit, it was from an older child at his creche.

Now this leads me on to wonder just how much the monkey learns from other people and how much of it conflicts with our ideals. I know that all children learn from every aspect of the world around them and to try and prevent that would do immeasurable harm. But what if my son sees something that teaches him a bad habit, or if some other adult tries to encourage him to do something in a manner that conflicts with our teaching or principals? I remember going to a convent school and being told by the nuns (nasty folk!) that I was not to watch certain harmless TV shows, despite my mother not having a problem with them. I would be horrified if someone tried to influence my sons morals or ideas in a way that conflicted with our easy going approach to life.

Should I try worry about this, if so where do I draw the line? Or should I just accept it and let him learn freely? It would be interesting to hear you opinions.

Now here’s an article that might ruffle a few feathers, is it mums or dads who have an easier time when bringing up children?

I have heard it said that mothers switch in to ‘baby obsessive’ mode when their child is born, whilst dads became background providers. In other words mums look after the baby, and dads make sure the family is provided for. This may have been the case many years ago, but nowadays I would assume that such responsibilities are shared between mum and dad. I know that is the case with my family.

Even with responsibilities balanced out between mum and dad, there are some significant differences in how we parent. For example in Ireland, mothers are entitled to six months maternity leave after having a baby. That’s very nice I’m sure you would agree. But dads get nothing, except what their employer offers them as a perk. In my case I get just three days, if I want more I have to take it from my annual leave entitlement. The problem with this is that it assumes the father is the most important earner. That is no longer the case. Although I am a fancy computer programmer type, my wife is a much-needed childrens speech pathologist and it is harder for her to take time off from her job than it is for me. It would be nice if we could split the six months of leave between us, but the law does not allow that. It means both parents would get to spend equal amounts of time with the baby at a very important time in its development.

Another issue is that there seems to be a wide ranging assumption that when a child misbehaves that the mother is primarily responsible for the child displaying such traits. If you were going to complain about a child’s behaviour and you could go to wither the mum or the dad who would you go to first? I would assume the mum and I can see why that would be a pain for her.

There are also lots of little things that make it more difficult to be either a mum or dad. For example dads can feel a little bit uncomfortable taking their child to the park by themselves because they assume that other people view men without wives/partners in parks as suspicious. Mums sometimes feel like they must live with being labelled as ‘homemakers’.

Plus, there is the big one – children preferring one parent over the other. This can cause so much stress like you wouldn’t believe.

Personally, I think both parents have it equally as bad, but that individual family circumstances can change this balance. I know in my family’s case we share the pain and joy. But we may be lucky, what do you think?

You may have noticed a lot of new posts suddenly appearing. That’s because I have decided to close down an old blog and merge the posts in to this one.

My old blog was called Gentastic and it dealt with man issues, in particular how to be a gentleman. I haven’t updated it in yonks, mostly due to time constraints and my creative juices on the subject matter running dry due to the monkey being foremost on my mind.

The subject matter of Gentastic does tie in nicely with the subject matter of this blog. Namely, how to be a better man and with that, a better father. So this seemed like a good place for all those old posts to live. I hope you enjoy them.

PS There will be broken links and images not displaying properly. Sorry about that. I’ll get them fixed, eventually.

So yesterday we all went to a local cafe for dinner.

I had spicy beef pizza (freakin’ hot), the mommy human had a Calzone and the monkey had and little olive and pepperoni pizza.

Jake has developed an odd habit when eating, he will take a piece of his food and try to get me to eat it, by stretching out his arm and shouting “EAT IT!!!” Sometimes he will even try and physically forc it int o my mouth. If he wasn’t so small and cute it would actually be quite intimidating. Thankfully we can battle back with the timeout.

Methinks he may have a career as a prison officer.

I'm gonna kick you in the chest!

As I have mentioned before I love child friendly establishments. It means myself, the mommy human and the monkey can go out for a nice meal safe in the knowledge that we will have good time and not be panicking about the lack of essential facilities.

A lot of places claim that they are child-friendly, but a then again a lot of people claim they don’t like Daniel O’Donnell, yet someone keeps buying his god awful records.

What does a child-friendly establishment need to be truly child-friendly. I have my own little list…

• High chairs.
• Understanding staff.
• An easily accessible family friendly toilet with well maintained changing table.
• A prominent sign near the entrance advising patrons that the establishment is child-friendly to stop grumps complaining abut children being there.

These are the basics, if any of these are missing the as far as I am concerned the establishment is not truly child friendly.

The problem is that a lot of establishments think that all they need is a high chair to call themselves child friendly. The whole changing table thing seems to have passed them by.

I have been to far too many restaurants where the staff say “Yes, we are child friendly here’s a high chair” and then I have to take the monkey to the toilet…    …yep, changing a baby on a toilet seat is not a good experience.

I may be getting jaded, but if you tell me you are child friendly and are missing any of  the above essential facilities, then I am going to start think that maybe you have conned me. Jus’sayin’.