From the Koyzis kitchen: spinach turnovers

Although this is not a cooking blog, I thought it might be nice to include a favourite from my mother’s kitchen. It apparently comes from an early effort of my father to communicate to her something his own mother used to make in Cyprus. I doubt she got it exactly right, but the result is delicious nonetheless. There may even be a subconscious influence from the Cornish pasties enjoyed by her immigrant Finnish forebears in the upper peninsula of Michigan. I hadn’t eaten spinach turnovers in probably more than two decades, but a few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at them once again, with great success. Nancy loved them. Here’s the recipe, using imperial measures:

2 pckg. frozen chopped spinach

2 pckg. ground meat (e.g., beef or turkey)

2 c. Uncle Ben’s^® rice or other long grain rice

1 small chopped onion

Salt to taste

Approx. 2 Tbsp. cinnamon

Biscuit dough (or use boxed, commercial biscuit mix such as Jiffy^® or Bisquick^® — amount to be used depends on the number of turnovers desired)

Cook spinach in as small an amount of water as possible. Drain well in strainer. While spinach is cooking, begin cooking rice per directions on package, using slightly less water than suggested. Turn off burner under pan for the last five minutes and let rice sit, still covered. Chop onion. Brown meat in skillet, adding chopped onion. Mix spinach, rice, meat and onion. Add salt and cinnamon to taste – probably ½ teaspoon salt; possibly as much as 2 tablespoons cinnamon. (Cinnamon flavour will lessen during baking.) Mix well.

Roll out biscuit dough thinly. Cut out using round circle 5 to 6 inches in diameter (e.g., the top to a metal canister). Roll the resulting circle even thinner. Put above mixture on one side of the circle, pulling the other side over the mixture to form a half circle. Pinch edges together, marking entire edge with the tines of a fork. Pierce top of each turnover with fork tines. Bake 15-20 minutes in a 375-400 degree oven until lightly browned. Brush with butter, margarine or extra virgin olive oil while still hot. Enjoy.


Spinach turnovers

Depending on the amount of biscuit dough you’ve prepared, you will likely have a large amount of the mixture left over. This can easily be frozen and used later. Altogether, making spinach turnovers from scratch takes about two hours. But with the mixture already prepared, the time is cut down to about an hour.

I remember as a child absolutely loving to drink a cold glass of milk with spinach turnovers. My tastes have evidently changed in the ensuing decades, because the milk didn’t quite go as well as I remembered it to. All the same, I would be hard pressed to recommend a good wine to go with it. I’ll leave the beverage up to you.

Ledra Street to remain closed

As usual, the government of Cyprus appears determined to forgo another opportunity: Greek Cypriots reject new crossing point to the north.

Government falls

It's off to the polls for Canadians, after the Martin government is defeated in the Commons. Few people may be aware of this fact: "The Liberal defeat marks the first time a government has fallen on a straight motion of no-confidence in Parliament."

In other news, Prince Edward Islanders overwhelmingly rejected electoral reform, sad to say.

Electoral reform in PEI?

Prince Edward Islanders vote today on whether to adopt a mixed-member-proportional electoral system, which just happens to be my personal favourite. Let's hope the measure will win at least "60 per cent of the votes, and majority support in at least 16 of the island's 27 electoral districts."

Blood and belonging to the Liberals

Ukrainian-Canadians do not want Michael Ignatieff running for the Liberal Party in the forthcoming winter election. Neither do I.

Cyprus: unilateral reunification?

This is a rather extraordinary development, coming as it does on top of last week's news: TRNC launches one-sided initiative towards reunification of divided Cyprus. Ten years ago this past summer, Nancy and I stood at the barricade at the north end of Ledra Street in Nicosia, saddened at our inability to walk any further into the occupied zone. And now it's being opened.





Could this be the beginning of the end of Cyprus' division? Perhaps, but there are possible complications: Greek side raises concerns over Ledra crossing. Nevertheless, this Cyprus Mail editorial holds out hope: Ledra crossing a step in the right direction.

Conservatives. . . and conservatives

There are conservatives. And then there are conservatives. In the latest entry in the WRF's Comment series, Russ Kuykendall reviews Adam Daifallah and Tasha Kheiriddin's Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution. Although Kuykendall (aka Burkean Canuck) and I undoubtedly share much in terms of political perspective, I have never been enthusiastic about wearing the conservative label, whether begun with an upper- or lower-case C. I will not go into detail explaining this reluctance, because anyone can easily discover this in chapter 3 of my book.

That said, however, I will be the first to admit that, if the secular media were to pay any attention to me, they would almost certainly peg me as some sort of conservative, mostly because I oppose legalized abortion on demand, support a stable definition of marriage and family, and believe that government is under no obligation to manifest a supposedly benign neutrality towards a variety of personal lifestyle choices, much less to subsidize them.

All the same, the variety of conservatism I dislike most is the libertarian variety, exemplified by the likes of Ayn Rand and Friedrich von Hayek. Conrad Black is a caricature of the libertarian conservative, in which the common good or the public interest is ancillary to the ego of the sovereign individual — especially the individual with the economic means to have his own way. As I've written before, a government content only to protect a free economic marketplace falls short of doing public justice. It should encourage the wealthy to use their resources for the public benefit, probably through a careful design of the tax code. Those conservatives who can recognize this are worth co-operating with. By contrast, those claiming the conservative label, but who, following Marx's stereotype, do no more than to try to conserve their own spending power, are definitely not worth the time of day.

Arguing About a War In Question

Here is the latest Capital Commentary from the Center for Public Justice, by Center president James W. Skillen:

Ask yourself just one question. During all the argument over the past three weeks about whether U.S. forces should leave Iraq quickly or stay the course, why was there so little reference to the upcoming Iraqi elections on December 15?

President Bush says American troops will stand down when Iraqi forces are ready to stand up. But what is the relation between military forces (whether theirs or ours) and the future Iraqi government? Can Iraqi forces be made ready to take over even if a stable Iraqi government doesn't materialize after December 15? On the other hand, if Iraqis do elect a government on December 15, will it really be governing Iraq if American forces, under U.S. command, are still required for many more years?

At the beginning, the American military intervention in Iraq aimed to overcome Saddam Hussein's imminent threat to the security of the United States and Iraq's neighbors. Then it became a war to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictator. And then it became a war to bring democracy to Iraq and the wider region. Yet on those terms, once Hussein was gone and a new constitution and transition government were in place, what enemy was left for the American military to fight?

The enemy that still exists, we hear, is the Sunni terrorist insurgency within Iraq itself, along with some anti-American jihadists coming in from outside Iraq. However, as even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and American commanders now state publicly, that enemy cannot be defeated by American military forces. But then the question again: what "war" is the American military now fighting?

This is where the remaining words and phrases we have grown so accustomed to using over the past three years become more and more slippery. The so-called "Iraqi forces" in the now "liberated" Iraq, which is about to certify its "democracy" with elections on December 15, may be a mirage. The military and police forces that the American military is trying to train in Iraq come from, and are primarily dedicated to, Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni communities. Many, in fact, are tied to, if not directly representative of, militias in those regions. In that respect, there is not an independent "Iraqi force," like our American military, under the firm control of a national government and independent of all local governments.

Furthermore, those diverse forces in Iraq closely align with the new constitutional order of the country, an order that, above all, solidifies the independence and autonomy of Shiite and Kurdish regions. The Iraqi constitution is far weaker than the American Articles of Confederation that failed our culturally homogeneous colonies after 1776.

This is why the "war" in Iraq is so disconnected from the upcoming elections and vice versa. If the elections are successful, in the same way that the passage of the constitution was successful, the not-yet-unified country of Iraq will be dominated by a Shiite majority. That majority will respect and largely ignore the Kurds, who will govern themselves. And it will either succeed in putting the Sunni minority in its place or will have to fight that minority if enough Sunni factions continue their terrorist insurgency. If the elections are unsuccessful, it will simply mean that the civil war has already begun.

This is why the main planning now being done in Washington is for the exit of American forces rather than for an expanded program of nation building. Within the framework of American policy our military no longer faces an enemy it can defeat, and nation building was never part of our plan. I just hope that the sad moment will never come when Americans are willing to accept the post-exit explanation that after our forces "liberated" and brought "democracy" to Iraq, the "Iraqi people" apparently did not want to keep it.

— James W. Skillen, President

Black wants back

This request might be just a trifle opportunistic: Black wants citizenship back. And just what does Canada have to gain from this? Someone badly needs to tell Lord Black that citizenship is not a consumer item, to be removed and put on again at whim — like one of his wife's pair of shoes.

Hope for Cyprus?

The British think-tank Chatham House has expressed doubts that Cyprus' reunification could ever be made to work, as indicated in this Cyprus Mail report and in the Chatham House press release. However, the Financial Mirror reports an intriguing development: Is Turkey imposing a legal solution on Cyprus? According to the report:

Reports that the Turkish government is pushing the Turkish Cypriot administration to change its constitution so that Greek Cypriots can be allowed to return to the property from which they fled during the invasion in 1974 has taken the (Greek Cypriot) Republic of Cyprus government in the south completely by surprise. However, if reports are true, it could a sign that, in the absence of agreement with all parties, Turkey will follow in the footsteps of Israel’s Ariel Sharon and implement its own solution.

It remains to be seen how Papadopoulos and the Greek Cypriot government will respond to this initiative.

A new cause célèbre?

For those of us non-coffee drinkers, is there such a thing as fair-trade Postum?

Danish for breakfast?

After decades of gutting Canada's military capacity, the federal government finds another way to assert sovereignty in the arctic.

Neuhaus on American ecclesiology

One hates to lift a single sentence out of its larger context, but what Fr. Richard John Neuhaus says here has a certain aphoristic quality and is definitely worth repeating: "In the absence of a strong and deep ecclesiology, American Protestantism has always been prone to embrace America as its church, and to react with angry disillusionment when America fails to live up to that role." Coming from someone who so often seems to ascribe redemptive significance to what he insists on calling the American experiment, such a statement is striking. It also bears no small resemblance to what was written here: A mixed legacy: evangelicalism's puritan roots.

Beignets du monde

If the Dutch have their oliebollen and the Greeks their loukoumadhes, what do Canadians have? Timbits!

Expats' extravagance exposed

How the mighty are fallen: Rise and fall of the doyen of decadence. There's more here: Black's career takes a further step into darkness.

Later: Some of the very wealthy are keenly aware of their responsibility to use their wealth for the benefit of others. Lord Black appears not to have been among those, as indicated in this episode related by Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal. Black apparently once asked, "since when is greed a crime?" I guess he's finding out for himself.

'Fair-trade' coffee?

One of my colleagues sells fair-trade coffee. But John Larrivee, an economist at Mount St. Mary’s University, argues that the notion of fair-trade coffee is flawed, citing analogies to other products: Why Not Fair-Trade Beer and Cakes? Is Prof. Larrivee wrong or right in his analysis? If the former, where does he go wrong?

Try these with your waffles

For the second morning in a row our Theresa has requested kalamata olives for breakfast. Yesterday she ate these for all three meals. Typical second-generation Byzantine-rite Calvinist, I suppose.

Putin's Russia

Last week one of my colleagues called my attention to this fascinating article: Reading Russia Right, by Dmitri Trenin. Here is the abstract:

After the fall of Communism, Russia reverted to czarism. But more importantly, Russia embraced capitalism. Although not democratic, Russia is largely free. Property rights are more deeply anchored than they were five years ago, and the once-collectivist society is going private. Indeed, private consumption is the main driver of economic growth. Russia’s future now depends heavily on how fast a middle class — a self-identified group with personal stakes in having a law-based government accountable to tax payers — can be created. The West needs to take the long view, stay engaged, and maximize contacts, especially with younger Russians.

In my Russian politics class this semester, we have discussed the constitution of the Russian Federation, including both the written document and the "unwritten" constitution as it actually functions. Here is Trenin's verdict on the latter: "[Vladimir] Putin’s regime is openly czarist. Its defining element is that the presidency is the only functioning institution." This underscores my own thesis that constitutional democracy presupposes supportive political traditions, the development of which takes time.

'I told you so'

Science has proved what mothers have known for ages: Cold weather may help cause colds. Of course some of us have been wearing hats all along. Watch for my salute to hats coming soon in this space.

The Whitlam dismissal, plus 30

Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of a constitutional crisis that can still get Australians hot under the collar.

Just out from Comment

Here, as promised, is my contribution to the debate raging on the virtual pages of Comment: The city and its renewal.

The (new/old) Russian anthem

The Russian national anthem came up in conversation yesterday in my Russian politics class. Coincidentally this story appeared in the international press: Atheist challenges Russian national anthem. Oddly, the tune to this anthem is that of the old anthem of the Soviet Union, with music composed by Alexander Alexandrov. In 1990, just prior to the demise of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin's government adopted a distinctive anthem for the Russian Federation, called simply Patriotic Song, with no lyrics and composed by Mikhail Glinka, the founder of the national movement in 19th-century Russian music. But when Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, he brought back the music of the former Soviet anthem, albeit with new lyrics. Putin is not, of course, a communist and he is reputed to be a practising Orthodox Christian. Yet in many respects he is resuscitating the autocratic ways of his predecessors, thus seemingly vindicating the tired cliché that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Those interested in the history of the Russian anthems should look up the Russian Anthems museum, a wonderfully informative website boasting many recordings of the relevant music. My personal favourite is the Osipov Orchestra of Folk Instruments' recording of the Patriotic Song — a version I am confident Glinka would have approved.

A Muslim's assessment of Islam

Irshad Manji is the author of The Trouble With Islam Today and writes on this subject in the Los Angeles Times: From books to virgins. Manji argues that "dogma is hobbling our faith, because we Muslims have forgotten Islam's own tradition of independent thinking: ijtihad," which left the doors open to "discussion, debate and dissent." At one time the islamic world was a hotbed of philosophical thinking, with Moorish Spain playing a prominent role. Cordoba, one of the largest cities in Europe at the time, had 70 libraries. From the 8th to the 12th centuries "Islamic civilization led the world in ingenuity."

So what happened? The Caliph in Baghdad suppressed ijtihad in an attempt to secure the political unity of his empire. Since then unity has come to be conflated with uniformity. The chief casualty is the vitality of Islam itself. The solution? Ordinary Muslims need to be informed of "their God-given right to think for themselves," and thereby seize the initiative from the extremists. All of this sounds good, of course, but my guess is that Manji's "feminist-lesbian-journalist perspective" (see the Amazon.com description) just might be an obstacle to her gaining a wide following among her fellow Muslims.

Marshall at Redeemer


Yesterday we were privileged to have Dr. Paul Marshall deliver the second annual Bernard Zylstra Lectures here at Redeemer University College. He spoke three times. His chapel address, titled, "The Church at the Start of the Third Millennium," was a sobering survey of the state of the church around the world, focussing especially on the persecution of Christians. Yet out of this we were also heartened to hear of the growth of the church, especially in China, where it has expanded phenomenally over the past 25 years. The afternoon featured an in-house open forum in which my esteemed colleague, Al Wolters, and I were part of a panel discussion with Marshall concerning Islamic Law, on which he has just published an edited volume, Islam’s Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law. The evening's public lecture was titled, "Understanding Radical Islam," in which he gave the audience something of a history of Islam itself over the course of some 1,400 years.

Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, Freedom House, in Washington, DC. From 1980 until the late 1990s, Marshall was a professor of political theory at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, where he succeeded the late Bernard Zylstra, after whom the lecture series was named. I myself first met him a few years before that, when he was still a Ph.D. student at York University and I was just beginning masters studies at the ICS under Zylstra.

Among the many articles he has written are the following: The Islamists' other weapon and Islamic Counter-Reformation. Here is a recent interview with Marshall in FrontPage magazine on the subject of "extreme Sharia."

I think I speak for others in saying that I was impressed by the thoughtfulness of Marshall's presentations, given the potentially polarizing nature of the topics. All in all, it was a worthwhile and stimulating day.

Unusual weather

What? A tornado? Here in Hamilton? And in November? Must be global warming.

One man's prognostication

One of my students alerted me to this site. If Gregory D. Morrow's predictions are at all plausible, then perhaps we shall soon have a Conservative minority government.

Classical Christian education

In today's Breakpoint commentary, Chuck Colson endorses something called "classical Christian education," whose goal is the cultivation of both knowledge and character. Of his own alma mater Colson says that it "no longer has a core curriculum. You can go through the school without ever knowing who Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, or Freud were." Perhaps he should urge prospective undergraduate students to come to Redeemer and similar institutions. On the other hand, Colson errs in thinking it possible "to [free] science from philosophical assumptions and instead [look] at what God has made." Rather he should be urging the application of correct philosophical assumptions to the exploration of God's world.

Dallmayr on democracy

Fred Dallmayr was one of my professors at Notre Dame more than two decades ago. As part of the Opening Democracy debate, Dallmayr writes of Mobilising global democracy, arguing, in a not so veiled critique of the Bush administration, against those who who would spread democracy by force of arms. Instead he makes a case for cross-cultural learning as a better alternative, drawing on the centuries-old pattern of harmonious coexistence among Christians, Jews and Muslims in Moorish Spain as just one example. Point well taken. But will such a pacific approach be an adequate response to this: The Islamists' other weapon?

Reading the signs of the times

Recently I have not commented much on Comment and the excellent articles it runs from week to week. The debate on agrarianism continues with three recent entries. I myself will shortly be making my own contribution with a piece on cities. (I'll let you know when it's published.) But I especially want to call belated attention to Gideon Strauss's trenchant essay, What is to be done... to understand our moment? Strauss organizes his thoughts around four challenges to "Christian cultural faithfulness in these times": those of (1) modern liberal capitalism; (2) Salafiyyah Islam; (3) China; and (4) post-western Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Not only is Strauss's essay well worth reading and thinking about, but it might also provide fodder for informal discussion at a soirée with one's friends.

A Christmas election?

Is the end near for Paul Martin's minority Liberal government? Perhaps.

La crise française — encore une fois

The continuing violence in France threatens President Jacques Chirac and the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Could it bring down the Fifth Republic after nearly half a century? There are precedents. Four, to be exact. My prediction? Assuming the régime survives, the Front National will improve its showing in the next elections.

Organizing ecclesiastical labour

Time to send in the CLAC? CAW fails in bid to unionize United Church. Of course, as the Globe article points out, it is difficult to distiguish management from labour in such an organization. Given the polity of the United Church, might the congregations themselves be considered management?

La crise française

Paris is burning and France is in turmoil. What next for Chirac and Villepin? Could last year's headscarf ban have been a contributing factor to the current troubles?

Another birthday

Seven years ago yesterday our daughter Theresa was born unexpectedly 14 weeks early. Her original due date had been set for 10 February 1999, but she came into the world more than three months before then. Thank God she was born in a hospital with a level-3 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). There she remained for the first three and a half weeks of her life until she was out of danger, after which she was transferred to a hospital across town with a level-2 unit. Altogether she was in hospital for over 10 weeks. When she finally came home, she was still very small, weighing less than 5 pounds. It was a scary time for us, and I kept a huge number of people informed of her progress over email, asking for their prayers. At some point I intend to turn our experience into a book, but it is still not emotionally easy for me to reread those emails and my own personal journal entries from then.

Two sundays ago Nancy was in church talking with Susan, the director of the junior choir with which Theresa sang for just over a year. Nancy mentioned to her the upcoming birthday, and something clicked in Susan's head at hearing this information. It seems Susan was part of a Bible study back in 1998, and the group was asked to pray for a little girl who had been born early to a Redeemer professor and his wife. Only now was she putting two and two together.

Nancy told me about this when we were home, and I was deeply moved — as well as humbled at the ways of God — to learn that a woman we didn't even know at the time was among the many people praying for Theresa throughout those trying early weeks of her life.

Letting go of the past

The following is my column for the 24 October issue of Christian Courier:

A few weeks ago I became aware of a campaign to have the fabled Aghia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, in Istanbul returned to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. HagiaSophiaBlog.com is trying to collect at least one million signatures on a petition to convince the European Union (EU) to make return of this architectural wonder a condition for Turkey’s membership in that organization.

As a Christian with Orthodox roots on the paternal side, I must admit that this initially struck a chord with me. The Patriarchate has never relinquished its claim on the building, which the Ottoman Turks turned into a mosque after they conquered the city in 1453. As recently as the end of the Great War, many Greeks hoped that the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of Constantinople by the victorious allies would lead to the Divine Liturgy once again being celebrated beneath the dome of the church built by the Emperor Justinian in 537.

Indeed, Aghia Sophia contains some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world, including this haunting icon of Christ (see the third image in the sidebar under "Web pages"), thought to have been fashioned shortly after the Byzantine Greeks recovered Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1261. These were covered over by the Muslims after the conquest, but in the early 1930s, shortly after the secularizing government of Mustafa Kemal had made the historic building into a museum, restoration of the mosaics was permitted. It continues as a museum to this day, despite the competing claims of two religious communities.

When I learned of the petition for its return, my first inclination was to sign. After all, the seizure of this historic place of worship was an obvious injustice. Shouldn’t it be rectified after all these centuries?

The answer to this question is not as obvious as some might think. If we say yes, we risk opening a pandora’s box in which long dormant injustices come pouring out, awaiting a resolution that may be impossible to achieve without unleashing further injustice. Should the two American continents be returned to the aboriginal peoples? If so, what do we do with the scores of millions of people of nonaboriginal descent? Should Israel be returned to the Palestinians, who were displaced from their homes nearly 60 years ago? If so, what do we do with the sabras, the generations of Israelis who were born there and know no other home?

In common law jurisdictions there is a concept known as the statute of limitations, which imposes time limits on the opportunity for injured parties to redress grievances. Why? Because in its absence injustices would continue to multiply until they overwhelmed the mundane concerns of ordinary people, who would be unable to get on with their lives because they were so consumed with the desire to right the wrongs of an increasingly remote past. Eventually, their descendants would be stewing over crimes committed against forebears generations earlier, thereby poisoning lives that might be better lived if they could manage – as the cliché puts it – to forgive and forget.

It is precisely in those parts of the world where people have allowed the wounds of the past to fester that establishing and maintaining political community is such a precarious venture. The Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans come immediately to mind.

Aghia Sophia is unlikely to be returned to the Orthodox Church and will almost certainly remain a museum. However, there is ample reason for the EU to raise the issue of Turkey’s current treatment of its religious minorities, including the Patriarchate, while letting the past be the past.

Orthodoxy and original sin

The remarkable Mr. Rob Joustra, from his base in Japan, writes on why Orthodox theologians object to the western church's notion of original sin as inherited guilt. Something to ponder over a plate of sushi.

Corruption in Russia

Has Russia become more corrupt under Vladimir Putin? Yes, says a recently released report from a Russian thinktank. However, after reading the report more carefully, Peter Lavelle concludes that the level of corruption has actually decreased, even if the amounts of money involved have gone up.

Istanbul protest

This story will cause those who remember the events of 6-7 September 1955 to shudder: Nationalists demonstrate against Greek Orthodox patriarch. Someone needs to remind these "Turkish nationalists" that the Patriarchate was there first.

New rules from Brussels

What? This sounds like a joke: European Union lowercases 'Christ': Brussels' grammar rule says title to be spelled with small 'c' in future. Who could possibly take this seriously? One can more easily believe that Pluto's "new" moons will be named Goofy and Mickey.

De Souza on Neuhaus

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza profiles Fr. Richard John Neuhaus for The National Post. My question: Although Fr. Neuhaus may have been born in this country, can he really be called a Canadian public intellectual? That seems to be stretching the definition a bit.

All Saints Day