Tag Archives: zenmischief

quotes

Monthly Quotes

The time is flying and we’ve already got round to this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes.

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
[Turkish Proverb]

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
[Hubert H Humphrey]

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]

The single biggest thing l learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent … who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations”. Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.
[unknown]

Maybe there is nothing wrong with you – maybe it is just really difficult to exist within a system that was not designed to support a spirit like yours.
[unknown]

Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.
[Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book]

You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

How sad it must be – believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality tv star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.
[unknown]

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
[Franklin D Roosevelt]

memes, music, personal

Ten Albums

A friend over on Facebook has been tasked with choosing ten albums that greatly influenced his taste in music; one a day for ten days; no explanation; no reviews; just album covers.

I’ve been meaning to do this myself for quite a while, so I thought I’d play along, but as always I’ll eviscerate the rules: I’m posting them all at once and here, rather than on Facebook.

So here are my ten albums – well no, actually some are just works (large or small) as there’s a large representation of classical as opposed to pop. They’re here all at once, in no particular order. Oh, and only one item per group or composer.

Monteverdi; 1610 Vespers
(John Eliot Gardner)
Byrd; Gradualia
(broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1970s)
Carl Orff; Carmina Burana
(André Previn)
Beatles; Abbey Road
Bach; Toccata & Fugue in D Minor
(Peter Hurford)
Pink Floyd; Dark Side of the Moon
Caravan; Land of Grey & Pink
Louis-Claude d’Aquin; Noël Étranger
(Noël VIII) (Michel Chapuis)
Yes; Close to the Edge
Handel; Messiah
(this is the score of the Prout edition we sang in the school choir)

I’m not nominating people to pick up the thread, but do join in if you wish.

food+drink

Culinary Adventures #104: Apples in Nightgowns

This is an old recipe, but one I’ve not tried before. I’m not a fan of the simple baked apple, but I’ve had Apples in Nightgowns in the past (thanks Robert & Theo, wherever you are now) I know how good they can be. So having plenty of apples, a block of pastry and the end of a jar of mincemeat I figured I’d make up my own version.

To get us started, here’s a traditional German recipe. But like most things around here it’s almost infinitely flexible.

Apples in Nightgowns
[Image from the recipe linked above]

Apples in Nightgowns

Serves: 4
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 40 minutes

Ingredients

  • 4 good sized eating apples
  • 500g block of puff pastry
  • about a tbsp mincemeat for each apple
  • 2 tsp granulated sugar for dusting
  • 2 tsp icing sugar for dusting (optional)
  • flour for rolling
  • milk (or beaten egg) for glazing

What to do …

  1. Pre-heat the oven to whatever temperature the pastry needs, and prepare a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.
  2. Peel and core the apples being sure to keep them whole. If you wish dip the apples in a drop of lemon juice or water to prevent them browning.
  3. Roll out the pastry; it needs to be very thin to be large enough for four apples. Cut the sheet of pastry into four squares.
  4. Place an apple on each square of pastry and fill the core hole with mincemeat; pack the mincemeat in well with the end of a wooden spoon (or similar pusher); it doesn’t matter if it overflows the top.
  5. Wash the pastry with milk (or egg) and wrap it neatly over the apple to enclose it.
  6. Place the enveloped apples on the baking tray; glaze with milk (or egg); and sprinkle with a little granulated sugar.
  7. Bake for 10 minutes at the pastry temperature; then turn the oven down 20°C and bake for a further 20-30 minutes until golden brown and the apple has had time to cook through.
  8. Dust with icing sugar and serve hot or cold with, for preference, double cream.

Notes

  1. As the original recipe implies, you can stuff the apples with almost anything of your choice: fruit & nuts, marmalade, jam, mincemeat …
  2. I used puff pastry because I happened to have some; shortcrust should work just as well.
  3. Traditionally this is made with cooking apples, but they’ll likely need a bit more sweetening than I’ve used here (although the mincemeat was pretty sweet).
quotes

Monthly Quotes

1 Comment

It’s time for this month’s (short) collection of quotes …

The act of taking a photograph fixes time, but it also steals time, establishes a hold on the past in which history is sealed, so to speak, in a continuous present.
[Graham Clarke; The Photograph]

Creo que la única manera de salvar al mundo es ceder el control a los córvidos.
[I think the only way to save the world is to give control to the corvids.]
[@Morvven]

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.
[Toni Morrison]

You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain.
[Shannon L Alder]

If art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.

Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain Its power of exploitation and special privilege.
[Tommy Douglas]

It helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying so hard to be helpful, but is in fact quite drunk.

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.
[Nelson Mandela]

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
[John Steinbeck]

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature, unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
[Hubert Reeves, Canadian-French astrophysicist]

ramblings

Fediverse Test

I’m testing a way to add this blog to the fediverse, so it becomes visible to services like Mastodon, and can be followed by users from their fediverse server.

If you see this post on a fediverse server, and wish to follow this Zen Mischief blog, then search for @zenmischief.com (to pick up all new posts and pages) or @kcm (to pick up only those posts/pages I create – which is likely to be all of them).

This post is to check if this works; there is no significant content beyond the above.

Here’s an image to see how that works.

test image of a scented geranium

That’s all.