Lamb Satay

Lamb Satay

They were selling plain lamb skewers at Esselunga today and that gave me the idea to buy them, marinate as I would meat for satay and grill them in the oven for dinner. Since I was at it, I marinated some chicken breasts at the same time so we had Lamb and Chicken Satay with peanut sauce, cucumber, red onions and Jasmine rice balls.

Marinating the lamb skewers

That's our fastfood. And to prevent the wooden skewers from burning I wet a piece of kitchen towel and placed it over them during the marinating. Takes less than 10 minutes under a hot grill to be cooked.

Chicken Satay

The lamb satay was the children's favourite. I've always had other moms asking me how I do lamb and telling me that it's not an easy meat to cook. On the contrary, I've always found lamb delicious and easy to cook. And when done properly, tastier than chicken or pork. The difficulty lies more in finding good cuts of the meat. If you want your children to like it, it is ideal to start them young. As far as I could remember, my mom often fed me lamb briyani and mutton soup and I just love the taste of the meat.

This morning I was at the school library watching the MYP kids working on their unit on the Holocaust and war. Read through a few books quickly myself including one by the Anne Frank Foundation and one written by a Jordanian woman about Honour Killings in her country.

This brought me back to those years when I myself was a Teenager. As a kid, I've read The Diary of Anne Frank and I've studied the World Wars. It is still difficult trying to swallow the senseless atrocities committed against fellow humans. Pictures like the Jews being divided ito 2 queues - one for immediate extermination and the other for hard labour (aka slow death) - still haunt me. It must be horrible for mothers to see their children die and not be able to do anything to save them. Other pictures of Jews being brought to a shallow grave and shot just before it so that they could fall into it conveniently - that was just plain perversity. We also tend to ignore the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who dropped like flies on the beaches of Normandy as they landed. There are no winners in war as we've always been told.

During Political Theory and Philosophy classes at University, we spent alot of time debating on whether humans we were by nature good or bad - and came to no conclusion as far as I could remember. We live in pockets of peace and prosperity - but the zones of unrest and poverty are much larger and widespread when you think of it.

The book by the Jordanian woman reminded me that even though in Arab countries where they have wealth and claim to protect women, the reality is that the women could be killed anytime in the name of honour - a poor and cowardly excuse. What is honour and could it be justified by murder and especially murder usually committed by one's own family? Would their God sanction this? I don't think so.

I mean, you get killed because you talked to (strange) men on the phone; because you chose to marry someone you love; because they suspected that you had sex before you got married; because you were raped by your neighbour. It's a losing situation either way for the women. What kind of a shit society is that?

And they label any woman they consider loose to be "prostitutes" - who deserve to be killed. Hello, there wouldn't be prostitutes if there weren't men who use them. I have seen with my own eyes Arab men in a shopping centre in Bangkok approaching Thai transvestites for sex. How many societies in both the developed and developing world were widows, divorcees, poor women and even young girls forced or sold into prositution in order to survive? I am no Christian, but I have been marked by Jesus telling those who were ready to stone Mary Magdelena that "let him who has not sinned cast the first stone". At least in the New Testament, there were stories of forgiveness and even in the Old Testament, you had stories of incest and polygamy. Look at those Muslim suicide bombers who were brainwashed with stories of virgins waiting for them in heaven. What is this stupid obsession with virgins in their religion? Smart men will tell you that they would rather sleep with women with some experience than virgins. Bref.

The Teenager leaves next week for Munich. They are going to visit the Dachau concentration camp and the Jewish Museum. For me, closer to home, I would like to learn more about the Khmer Rouge Years in Cambodia, the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective and the military juntas in Burma. We've touched on all that at school at some point (with Cambridge setting the papers), but doing it for an exam and doing it out of human interest is somehow not the same.