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food+drink

Culinary Adventures #107: Blackcurrant Fool

For my recent birthday I tried something I’d not done before and made blackcurrant fool. I don’t do puddings very much due to the need to minimise sugar intake, and I’m not used to mucking about with cream. But I felt like having a go, after all it can’t be hard! Besides we had some blackcurrants taking up much needed space in the freezer. So here it is …

Blackcurrant Fool

Serves: 4-6
Preparation: 15 minutes + cooling + 10 minutes
Cooking: 15 minutes

Blackcurrant Fool

Ingredients

  • 500g blackcurrants
  • 100g caster sugar
  • 300g double cream
  • 250g thick Greek yogurt
  • Splash cassis (optional)

What to do

  1. Simmer the blackcurrants for about 10 minutes with the sugar and a splash of water (or cassis) until the fruit has broken down and the juices have become syrupy.
  2. Sieve to remove stalks, skins & pips; and set aside to cool.
  3. Once the blackcurrant has completely cooled, whisk the cream until soft peaks hold.
  4. Fold in the yogurt.
  5. Then fold in the blackcurrants, and combine – more or less, depending on the level of marbling you want.
  6. Divide into bowls/glasses and chill before serving.

Notes

  1. I’ve adjusted the quantities from what I did as there was too much, too sweet, blackcurrant cf. the cream. While you want something sweet, you also want some sharpness, and don’t want jam. So don’t overdo the sugar.
  2. If you’re using frozen blackcurrants, don’t worry to thaw them. They’ll cook from frozen, although you’ll need to add about 5 minutes to the cooking time.
  3. Don’t waste time removing stalks etc. from the blackcurrants as they’ll get sieved out.
  4. When folding in the yoghurt and blackcurrants, go easy; there’s a fine line between mixing thoroughly and mixing too much. The more you work the mixture the more the whipped cream will break down.
  5. Decorate with some flaked almonds, or a sprig of mint or basil. Serve with wafers or sponge fingers if you wish.
history, memes

What Happened in 324?

Over the next few months we’ll have a look at some things – things which seem to me to be interesting or curious – which happened during other years ending ..24. Some years are busy; in others nothing much seemed to have happened, so there are some gaps. We’ll do a different year each month, starting at 324.

Notable Events in 324

Unknown Date. Constantine I (below) founds Constantinople and incorporates Byzantium into the new capital. He reorganises the Roman army in smaller units classified into three grades: palatini (imperial escort armies); comitatenses (forces based in frontier provinces) and limitanei (auxiliary border troops).

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here we are with the first of our monthly round-ups of recently encountered quotes for this year.

Sometimes words aren’t enough and that’s why we have middle fingers.
[unknown]

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.
[Terry Pratchett, Hat Full of Sky]

If there was an asteroid headed towards earth, [the Republicans] would all get in a room and say y’know what we need? We need tax cuts for the wealthy.
[Barack Obama]

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
[Ursula K Le Guin, 1929-2018]

May the long time Sun
Shine upon you
All love surround you
and the pure light within you
Guide your way on.
[Believed (based it seems on no evidence) to be from an old Celtic lyric poem. Used by Mike Heron of Incredible String Band in the lyrics of “A Very Cellular Song”, on their album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968)]

What we need are garage sales for our souls, to clean out the tattered sweaters of bad memories, the gently used futons of childhood trauma, and the rusty bicycles of unrequited love.
[@EdmondsScanner; https://twitter.com/EdmondsScanner]

Our bodies are like tubes or levers or computers, but they are, above all things, like bags. Bags that are stuffed in other bags, stuffed in still more bags. Our bodies are nesting bag situations like the used bags stuffed under your kitchen sink, with the added bonus of thumbs and anxiety.
[Bethany Brookshire; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-body-is-bags-bags-and-more-bags/]

You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.
[Mahatma Gandhi]

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.
[Bill Nye]

Religions like all other ideas deserve criticism, satire and fearless questioning.
[Salman Rushdie]

Our society tends to view the big blue expanses on maps as mere liquid filler with fish in it.
[Helen Czerski, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/ocean-breathing-climate-crisis-carbon-oxygen-helen-czerski-blue-machine]

What is said is never what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said.
[Kevin Powers; The Yellow Birds]

Have spent the last two days writing detailed descriptions of non-human cosplay … you just haven’t lived until you’ve imagined how a worm would wear a wedding gown originally designed for a moose.
[Annalee Newitz; https://wandering.shop/@annaleen/111733412615696439]

Pugwash has two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: cowardice and greed … It may be that the captain is popular because we all have something in common with him. What would YOU do if you saw a delicious toffee on the nose of a crocodile?
[John Ryan; creator of Pugwash]

I fold my worries into paper planes and turn them into flying fucks.
[unknown]

amusements, memes, music

January Quiz Answers

2 Comments

Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

Music

  1. Queen guitarist Brian May is also an expert in what scientific field?  Astrophysics
  2. What is the correct name for a metallophone with tuned keys?  Glockenspiel
  3. Which German composer wrote the famous composition Ode to Joy which is the official anthem of the European Union?  Beethoven
  4. In Tudor times, which English composer and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal was repeatedly fined for recusancy?  William Byrd
  5. Peter and the Wolf is described as a “symphonic fairy tale for children”. Who composed it?  Sergei Prokofiev

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2023.

environment, ramblings

On Paper Tissues

Having had a filthy cold twice in recent weeks (no, not Covid, either time) I fell to thinking about the resilience of paper tissues and their propensity (or not) to fall apart when wet.

Tissue-type paper (the sort that’s designed for personal use) that we generally encounter seems to come in four basic qualities:

  • Paper Hand Towels (as in many communal toilets)
  • Kitchen Roll
  • Tissues (eg. your bog standard Kleenex)
  • Toilet Roll

Their robustness when wet depends on the quality of the paper, and the length of the fibres from which they’re made. The longer the fibres, the more robust the final product.

While paper can be recycled up to seven times, it can’t be recycled infinitely. Eventually the fibres become too short to cling together and just have to be composted. The shortest fibres go into packaging like corrugated cardboard, egg boxes and toilet roll. Remember, the shorter the fibres the less robust the paper.

You can demonstrate this for yourself next time you have a runny nose. Wipe your nose on a paper hand towel and observe how well it survives – and that this is the same as when you use it to dry your hands. Repeat this in turn with kitchen paper, ordinary tissues and then toilet roll. Observe how when wet each is progressively less robust than those preceding.

paper strength experiment

You can actually do this more scientifically, as shown here and above. Yes, that site is advertising a particular brand, but you can use the method with any papers you choose. It’s a good experiment to do with kids.

This varying strength is deliberate design. You want the hand towel and kitchen paper to hold up: they’re intended for mopping up spills. Tissues a bit less so. Toilet paper, on the other hand is designed to fall apart when wet – if it didn’t the drains would pretty quickly get clogged. By the time your piece of toilet paper is 50 meters down the sewer it is nothing but mush, so it flows easily with the rest of the liquid. Also think about why a sheet of corrugated card packaging left in the road in the rain disintegrates so quickly.

This is why we are always told not to put paper hand towels etc. down the loo: they don’t break down quickly so they cause blockages.

There’s far more goes into paper production than we often realise. Just think of all the different types of paper you come across: from high-end glossy magazines, though artists’ drawing paper and copier paper, right down to egg boxes and loo paper. It is all deliberately designed to have particular characteristics for specific jobs.

amusements, memes, music

January Quiz Questions

Again this year, each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.

Music

  1. Queen guitarist Brian May is also an expert in what scientific field?
  2. What is the correct name for a metallophone with tuned keys?
  3. Which German composer wrote the famous composition Ode to Joy which is the official anthem of the European Union?
  4. In Tudor times, which English composer and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal was repeatedly fined for recusancy?
  5. Peter and the Wolf is described as a “symphonic fairy tale for children”. Who composed it?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

history, memes

January 1924

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.

21. Born. Benny Hill, English comedian and singer (d. 1992)

21. Died. Vladimir Lenin, Russian revolutionary, first Premier of the Soviet Union (b. 1870)

22. Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

26. Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) is renamed Leningrad; it will revert to Saint Petersburg in 1991