Banking for Kids – B is for Bank Charges, O is for Overdraft

Bank accounts for children are a great idea. They can keep their pocket money safe, save their birthday money and learn how to use a debit card and ATM. If they don’t spend their money it just builds up until they have enough to buy that huge Lego kit or a computer game they are desperate for. Unless your children bank at FNB that is.

We opened bank accounts for our children two years ago, so that they could learn about banking and taking care of their money. We were happy to find that FNB provided a Future account, designed for children, with a debit card, three free transactions a month and no monthly fees. Money could be paid in and withdrawn at the ATM. The kids duly memorised their PINs and paid in their pocket money. Occasionally they used their cards to purchase a toy or a Christmas present, but mostly they were saving their money.

Until last week, when our 12 year old son tried to purchase a book at Bargain Books. He learned first hand how embarrassing it is to have your card declined,not once but three times, despite being sure that you had enough money for the purchase. Luckily his aunt was on hand to bail him out.

Back home I logged on to their internet banking and found that he had much less money than he thought. His savings had been whittled away over a period of time by R5 monthly fees. First thing on Monday morning I rang the bank sure that there was a mistake. No, I was informed, the accounts had been changed to include monthly fees the previous year and there were now no free accounts available.

On asking why I had not been informed of these changes, I was told that the onus is on the customer to check their accounts every month. For children’s accounts?

How can a bank like FNB that presents itself as a family bank offer a children’s account and then change it to start charging fees without informing the account holders by letter?

My son has now lost over R100, most of the money that he had left in his account from his birthday, in monthly fees and declined transaction fees.

Our children have learned a lesson in banking that their parents had not intended. Bank fees can run you into overdraft and you are better off keeping your money in your piggy bank.

Needless to say I am outraged, furious, frustrated and all the rest. We are taking this further with the bank, but in the meantime I am spreading the word any way I can. Front page of the papers would be good.

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Herb Garden Growing

Has anyone seen my creativity?

I was sure I had it somewhere around here a while back...

Unless I buried it all in the herb garden and it still hasn’t sprouted.

Everything else is sprouting nicely. My rocket is ready to pick already and I’ve got some recognizable parsley and coriander coming up in not very neat rows. There is still a thrill in planting little tiny seeds and seeing them transform into real plants.

Which I will soon be able to pick. And use unstintingly in my cooking. It is however a lesson in patience. Each day I go out there and wonder whether I can just pinch one little leaf to put in a salad. And contain myself and wait.

Luckily some of the other  herbs I planted as bigger plants have settled in nicely.

I’ve been dosing my cold with lemon thyme tea, pinching sprigs of tea tree for gentle inhalation for the kids’ colds, taking a leaf of sage to go with thyme, lemon, honey and ginger for coughs and using the lemon balm/melissa in a soothing tea too.

There is plenty of oregano for tomato sauces and the stevia is getting big enough to try it out as a natural sweetener in cooking. I’ll let you know when I start experimenting.

The catnip is bushing out wildly, unmolested by the cats, who went mad over it and rolled it half to death when I first put it in. The fennel and chamomile have gone crazy and my established rosemary plant looks like an alarmed hedgehog with all its new spring growth.

And the new mulberries are ripening. We’ve been feasting straight from the tree a few berries at a time, but next year, moles allowing, there’ll be enough for berry muffins and summer pudding again.

It’s a growing patch full of wonderful energy, goodness and vitality.

I have a moon calendar on the wall and decided to go the whole way towards biodynamic gardening, planting by the moon, not just when it is waxing but in the most propitious astrological sign too. I know there is a lot more involved than that but am learning a little at a time.

There are a few rose quartz crystals tucked into beds and I’ve been moving them around nearer to any plants that seem to be struggling.

This little basil plant is lagging way behind its siblings, but is looking a little greener on top since yesterday when the quartz joined it... so maybe it really is working!

Even the grass, which is growing all over the garden from the compost we mixed in, has been useful. Whenever the children’s rabbits and guinea pig need feeding I go and weed a handful of grass for them. They convert it almost instantly back to compost!

I'm loving this whole sustainable cycle. Loving the fact that I can pick fresh herbs for teas as natural remedies for all sorts of ailments. Loving the fact that there are all those flavours growing just outside my kitchen.

Soon , soon, soon I’ll be able to try all those recipes that demand bunches of fresh coriander and parsley. Can’t wait.

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Spring Festival

Life has been flitting past too fast, getting away from me, leaving me with a permanent hair-blown-back feeling. Our festivals mark the passing of the seasons and seem to swoop round ever faster. Luckily they also make me slow down and notice things: the flowers, which have passed from pure white snow carpet of white daisies to gold bronzed dusting of yellow daisies; pypies succeeded by watsonias, tall and elegant in all shades from white to salmon pink to fiery orange; the moon still waxing then and now just past full; the herb seeds germinating and showing themselves in my new herb garden; strawberries starting to ripen in the veggie garden with the promise of enough berries for strawberry jam this year.

Our spring festival is a celebration of water and flowers - flower crowns, flowered archway, flowers floating in water. The girls rushed around gathering posies to decorate the circle - bright magenta vygies, red bottlebrush, orange golden shower and pink wild pear as well as gazanias and daisies. Our son's friends only arrived late, so the usual sand and water-work constructions of engineering genius, getting ever more elaborate every year, weren't there and it was a simpler event but just as lovely as ever.

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Building A Herb Garden

Small seeds grow into bigger things. In the case of my herb garden, one seed of an idea has taken root, thrown out off-shoots and taken over completely.

All I planned to do was make another bed. The herb garden was looking neglected and all but the toughest herbs had shrivelled away in the heat of last summer, leaving just my stalwart rosemary and lavender bushes, as well as the scented geraniums that seem to thrive here whatever you do to them. Last year I ended up growing my basil and parsley in a pot, which is crazy seeing how much space we have here.

So this new bed was to be slightly raised, with lashings of compost and organic matter added to make a nice cushy home for the pickier herbs – basil, parsley, sage, oregano and so on. My sisters-in-law planned to give me some herbs for my birthday to re-stock the new bed. That was going to be all.

Then I thought of bricking the main path through the garden, basically just a sandy track worn by the dogs running through to chase cars, with some leftover bricks we had stacked in a corner.

That is when things took on their own momentum. Before I knew it, the whole family had taken the idea and run with it. Now one bed was nicely laid out the others needed to be raised to the same level. No point just bricking the one path, we’ll level all of them to be bricked. And what about the area beyond the bed.

We should lay out that at the same time, and round the rain-water tank… so we’d better make a proper retaining wall that side to build up the area around the olive trees, which is at a higher level than the main herb garden.

Our two farm-workers also joined in the enthusiastic makeover and have been working on the paths and beds all week making everything just so, asking me to decide things every step of the way, so my usual vague, see what happens, not quite ever finishing things off modus operandi has been thwarted. Now I have to live up to the garden, which is obviously planning to be finished and beautiful this year, rather than in some dim and distant future.

Seeing how things were taking shape so alarmingly quickly, I felt that I needed to put my own mark on the garden. The scarily straight and perfect motorway outline of the main path, so carefully worked out with string lines and levels, had to have something to slow it down, to keep the energy meandering among the herbs.

So I decided that I would lay the bricks for the path myself, in a herringbone pattern. And that is why I’ve stayed away from my blog for a couple of weeks. Last weekend I was putting in the time and putting in the bricks. Every day in the week while supper was cooking I’d nip out and put in a few more. This morning I reached the house end of the path. The only reason I’m here writing about it now is because the rain started bucketing down.

The only trouble is, our vision has expanded way beyond the leftover bricks in the corner. We’re going to have to go and order another shed-load of bricks to get all these paths paved and my weekends are sorted for the next month or so! But it’s going to look gorgeous. And once it is all planted up, I’ll have a medicine garden on my doorstep. There are already two tea tree plants waiting to go in and some buchu, as my sister in law couldn’t resist buying a few plants even before we got to my birthday.

So my next project is learning about herbs and their medicinal uses, courtesy of Margaret Roberts’ excellent books and hopefully a visit to the herb lady who lives on a farm quite near us.

I'll post some more photos when more paths are finished and the beds are planted up.

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Guava Delight

Spring is in the air and yet the guava season continues. Our trees have been prolific this year, but are considerately allowing their fruit to ripen a little at a time now, so that we can get through one basket before we fill the next and stagger back to the house weighed down with golden globes of perfumery.

At one stage I really did think I was going to get sick of guavas before the end of the winter, but they keep luring me back with their fresh fragrance and unique flavour. Hard to remember the time when I first came to South Africa and found the scent overwhelmingly pungent, in my less charitable moments likening it to cats’ pee.

Recently I’ve been working on finding new ways of processing and preserving guavas, so that they will last us year round. My attempt at guava jelly was an abject failure, or at least not the jewel-bright perfumed delicacy that I was hoping for. Plus I was horrified by the wastage involved in making jelly: all that tasty fruit pulp left behind in the jelly bag. So I moved swiftly on without bothering to perfect my jelly-making skills.

I found this suggestion for using guavas instead of the traditional quinces to make a paste, or rather a sweetmeat, in Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book: my absolutely favourite recipe book on fruit of all time, in fact I'd go so far as to say it's the bible of fruit recipes, so I'd hope they use this book in cooking schools online. Reminiscent of Safari dried fruit snacks, these guava squares have a much better texture and of course they are home made, so a whole lot cheaper…. unless you charge your time by the hour that is. The thing about this recipe is that someone needs to stir the pot constantly for about an hour and a half, as the mixture burps and splutters its way to the required thickness. So this is a weekend job, for when you have several willing helpers to take turns at stirring, or at least entertain you with scintillating conversation as you perch on the counter working on your stirring muscles.

The rewards are a house smelling wonderfully of guava jam and a few months’ supply of reasonable healthy sweeties, to sneak into your kids’ lunch boxes or package as loving gifts for home-sick family members overseas who haven’t smelt a ripe guava in ages.

This is only really worth doing when you have a couple of kilos of guavas to process so that you get a goodly stock of sweets from all your hard work stirring, but you can use any amount of fruit as the sugar is put in according to the weight of puree.

We’ve christened the result Guava Delight, as it is just a bit like Turkish Delight only much, much nicer.

Recipe for Guava Fruit Sweets
(adapted from Jane Grigson’s recipe for  Quince Paste)

Ingredients
Guavas – about 2 kg/ 4lbs
Sugar – about 1.5kg

Rinse the guavas and cut into quarters. Put into a heavy based pan with ½ cup of water. Bring to the boil and simmer covered until the fruit is tender, stirring a few times so that it doesn’t catch. Puree through a sieve or food mill/mouli. Rinse out the pan.

Weigh the resulting puree and return it to the pan, with 750g sugar for every 1kg of puree. (1 ½ lbs sugar per 2 lbs puree.) Cook over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved, then raise the heat to medium and cook stirring constantly until the mixture is very thick and is coming away from the sides of the pan. This usually takes us 1 ½ hours and we could probably carry on longer to get it really thick, but we have usually had enough by then! It will splutter and spit as it thickens, so have a glove on your stirring hand to avoid burns from the hot mixture.

Line a baking tray or two with baking parchment and pour the mixture into it to cool. It should be about 1 cm/1/2 inch deep. Smooth it out evenly. Now it needs to cool and dry out a bit in a warming drawer or over a radiator for a day or so. It is ready when it can be cut with a hot knife into squares that retain their shape.

Cut the paste into squares and dip them in sugar then pack into air-tight boxes in layers separated by baking paper. These should keep for months or years as long as they are kept dry.

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Storytelling

This story was related to me today from memory on the way back from school in the car; the fruit of Middle Daughter’s class assignment to make up her own story including a list of words, the meanings of which they had to check in the dictionary.

The Maid Servant
Once upon a time there was a maid who worked for a rich man, who had a long beard. One day she discovered that she was pregnant. When she told the man, he felt rage grow in him, and tore at his hair and shouted at her that she couldn’t work for him any longer. She went home and took her dogs for a walk.

Later on he came downstairs and saw some plumage on the table. He felt ashamed of his anger and wanted to say sorry, but then thought he couldn’t. He made a heart out of metal.

The next day he went to her house and said he was sorry and that she could have her job back. She said Yes.

I haven’t done justice to the story in the re-telling here and have probably got some of the words wrong, but hopefully I've captured the drama and high emotion of her story-telling.
I tentatively asked whether ‘pregnant’ was one of the words on her list, thinking it a little strange for a class of 10 year olds.

“Oh no” she replied, “but I wanted to use the word ‘discovered’.”

We racked out brains to think where she could have got the inspiration from for a story involving a woman  thrown out for being pregnant. Not Disney of course (I don't remember that particular re-working of Cindarella), none of the horse books they’ve been reading, and they never watch any soaps. Finally I remembered the scene in Mamma Mia where Donna tells Sophie,
“When I was pregnant with you, my mother told me to go, and not to bother coming back”.
Phew! That must have been the germ of the idea, I was beginning to put it down to a traumatic past life experience!

Now it remains to be seen what her rather conventional male teacher will make of it.

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Green Muffin Cases

My inner Scrooge really loves the whole green movement – Reduce Reuse Recycle is a great excuse to save the pennies and polish your halo at the same time. No longer are you stigmatized as being stingy when you re-use your shopping bags, you are now a green heroine, nobly saving the planet as you shop.

Paper muffin cases are a case in point. We bake muffins every week, often double batches for school bake sales. I used to use muffin cases all the time. It’s easier and more convenient. But if you think about it, that piece of paper just becomes litter within minutes, if the kids pounce on the muffins straight away, and it’s just one more non-essential to add to the weekly shop. So I stopped using paper muffin cases most of the time for home-baking, and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I just had to soak the tins a bit before washing them.

And yet there are times when a paper case really does make a difference, like when you are trying out a chocolate chip muffin recipe and envisage gooey melted chocolate going to waste all over the tins. Of course I now had no paper muffin cases in the house after my frugal/green spree of conscientiousness. I’d also nearly run out of baking paper for the same reason, just a few odds and ends left over from a series of cakes, which left me with the stash of butter papers in the fridge.

When I was growing up, butter papers were always saved in the fridge. They knew about frugality in those days, having grown up with rationing and wartime shortages and lived through Seventies coal miners' strikes and all. Saving butter papers was a habit that transferred itself to me, despite our generation's prodigality. A fridge full of butter papers generally isn’t all that much use, not very zen either, cluttering up the place. Quite handy for greasing baking trays, but that’s about it. Except when you need muffin cases at the last minute.

I think they worked perfectly – perhaps not very elegant, but they have a certain green chic about them, don’t you think?!

But perhaps the scraps of baking paper made the more elegant version. They make me think of The Sound of Music, a drift of nuns in sparkling white wimples…

And Marisa's chocolate muffin recipe? The kids loved them, in fact Middle Daughter made them all by herself. Me, I'm holding out for dark chocolate chips for the next batch, with the good dark Nomu cocoa, but then that would be my inner chocoholic, who vanquishes the inner Scrooge every time.

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