At the West Yorkshire Humanists March lecture Professor Karl Atkin, head of the University of York’s Health Sciences department, presented a talk on genetic screening during pregnancy.
Much of the screening has only been introduced in the past 10-20 years, and with generic screening becoming more common, Professor Atkin asked whether we were having the right discussions about ethics as we proceed.
When you buy a Kenwood stand mixer, you get a hardback recipe book with it. It is designed to get you started. The first section is things you can do with each of your attachments. Sensible enough.
This quickly loses track though. It talks about mixing things on medium. What is medium. I have ‘minimum’ and then 1-6. Is it half way up the dial? Somewhere else suggested I should only mix dough on min and 1. Which is it? I would expect a book designed to go with the product to be a little more clear.
The recipe for brioche was a disaster. The contents of this bowl in no way constitute a dough. Or anything you could bake. At best, you might be able to get it off your dough hook with a lot of hot water and scrubbing.
The Norwegian Skillingsboller was a much greater success though. I was sceptical when they first went into the oven. They were already tall enough and things normally rise rather than expand out. They did indeed however, and all was well.
The agony of choice. When we visited Waterstone’s to find a new book on bread (as one does), I spent ages trying to decide. I eventually settled on The Larousse Book of Bread by Éric Kayser.
This, I now know, was a mistake. All the recipes use a liquid sourdough starter. I did not have much luck last time I tried making a starter. However, this attempt was even more of a disaster. I found the instructions confusing and the results worthless. It wasn’t liquid enough.
Luckily, when I bought the book, I noticed that you could also use dry starter. However, despite the book’s promise that I could easily find this for sale, I actually couldn’t.
Not only do all the recipes use liquid starer, but they also use fresh baker’s yeast. Another product which is not easy to get hold off. Most supermarkets only sell fast-action yeast. Some might sell another dried yeast. None sell fresh.
My next option would be to replace all of this with fast-action dried yeast and try to adjust the recipe accordingly. This is a whole new challenge. Getting the end result to turn out like it is supposed to when you are doing it when you have to adjust the flour and liquid levels to compensate for the lack of starter is difficult. Not to mention that you are now making a different kind of bread: it isn’t a sourdough any more.
Once you have got past this stage you get on to the recipes. Using the term “recipes” is being quite generous because for most of the book there is only really one recipe. Each one is basically the same bread, moulded into a different and given a slightly different slashing pattern across the top. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, it is basically the same bread.
In Paul Hollywood’s Bread the book explores many different types of bread that are very different from each other. It feels like there is none of that here. You are exploring many different shapes of the same bread.
The closest the book gets is near the back when it talks about breads “with extras”. These were hit and miss for me. The seeded load (yes, that’s right, bread with seeds in it!) was good. However the dried tomato bread was ugly and unpleasant to taste.
There are some nice features about the book. The photos are great. They break the process down into easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions. You also get a photo of the finished product. It comes in hardback with a ribbon. Quality wise it is a very well put together book.
In summary though, I would not recommend this book.
Later this month Sky at Leeds Dock are holding their second bake off. The first was an open cake competition; this one is a cupcake challenge. Last time, Dave won it with a cake baked by his wife. This is dubious enough, even before you discover he made her get up at 4am, despite being heavily pregnant, to finish it. I’m not bitter about the whole experience, but I do want to up my game a little this time.
I made loads of variants: different cupcakes and different toppings on the cupcakes. In the end, these two won out.
The Sainsbury’s salted caramel cupcake boxset actually produces a really nice cupcake that is light and airy. However, my homemade golden caster sugar cupcakes with salted caramel frosting eventually bested them in the taste test. It produces a denser cupcake that is easier to eat.
This is a prototype of the blueberry cupcake. The actual ones will be different however. They will be more blue in colour, and use lemonade flavoured frosting that is a lighter blue, rather than the turquoise shade of this fudge-based frosting.
This stuff should be illegal. It is a jar of salted caramel that you would eat with a spoon. If heroin is banned, this definitely should be.
How did my mum spend Mother’s Day this year? Mostly in the kitchen, cooking.
What can I say, she is a Worfolk, you can’t make her relax. We had family visiting from Canada, so a family party was in order. We did our best to help: my sister made breakfast and a pavlova, and I contributed a cheesecake and a tray of cup cakes, but there is only so much cooking we were allowed to do!
After the food we got together for a group photo.
Back in January, James left us, like a traitor, for a research job in South Korea. To commiserate is leaving we went for a meal at Red Chilli. I’ve only just found the photo on my camera.
Last week was Elina’s birthday. I took her out for lunch. After, I hurried back to the office. However, something got in my way.
Hypothetically of course, we all know the bridges could open. However, I always thought there was a general understanding that they wouldn’t. People have to use those bridges. Because of this, I had to walk an extra 50 metres round the dock! No doubt you are now staring at the screen, open mouthed, in shock. Somehow though, I found the strength to carry on.
Worst of all, there was not even a boat going through it. It looked like it might be maintenance. At least a boat would have been mildly exciting.
I’m concerned about my weight piling on as I approach 30 so I bought us a set of scales for the bathroom. When they arrived I climbed on – and received a nasty shock. Admittedly I have not been on the scales for quite a long time, but I have put on 9kg since I did.
This takes my BMI from a just healthy 24.9 to an officially overweight 26.1. I never really doubted BMI as a measurement, mostly because I was in the healthy zone. I accepted it doesn’t work at the edges (short people and tall people), but it seemed like an accurate measurement for me. Now, I am thinking about joining the angry club of deniers.
I have recently been looking up the NHS recommendations for diet and exercise. Here is how it compares:
| What the NHS recommends | What I do |
|---|---|
| “at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity such as cycling or fast walking every week” | At least four and a half hours (270 minutes) per week. I walk to work every day, 25 minutes each way, and walk to lots of other locations in town too, including running up and down the stairs from my apartment on the 4th floor. It’s not concentrated exercise, but it is quite a lot. |
| or “75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity, such as running or a game of singles tennis every week” | Two hours of vigorous aerobic exercise per week, on average. I spend 30 minutes doing the Parkrun on Saturday morning and three hours training with Leeds Samurai. I don’t always make both events, and sometimes there is standing around at training, but overall it averages to more than 75 minutes a week. |
I consider my diet quite good as well. I eat fruit every day, home-cook most nights, always with a range of vegetables, and sometimes without meat. We limit out intake of junk food and processed meat and I try to take healthier snacks to work, though with limited success. Just one area strikes me as a problem: we have a pudding every night.
I won’t claim my diet is perfect but it has given me pause for thought. If I can apply so many good behaviours to my life, like walking to work, like exercising every week, like eating plenty of fruit and vegetables, like avoiding junk food, which is all hard and takes a lot of self-control on my part, and still put on weight, how hard is it to stay thin? For some people, who put on weight easier than I do, it must be almost impossible.
I’ve heard people advocating that obesity is entirely the fault of the individual and they should just eat less. To me, this seems like a gross over-simplification of a complex problem. Even to practice some of these positive behaviours requires significant lifestyle changes: much of my time is structured around planning my diet and my exercise, and actually doing them, and I’m not even winning. If someone says to you “right, you need to find an extra hour per day to fit in exercise and planning and preparing healthy meals” where would you find that time? How would you motivate yourself to carry through on that, every day, for the rest of your life?
Many of us have found that time of course. But probably not overnight. Chances are we were raised with some of those behaviours also. If you are a regular person, who hasn’t had that benefit, and has a lot to deal with in their lives, it is a difficult problem to solve.
And that’s the story of how I tried to turn my weight gain into a social justice issue.
A recent photo of me
My recent speech “Morality Explained” was the final project I needed to complete in order to achieve my Advanced Communicator Silver award.
Legal tender is money, right? But what is illegal tender? If we have a term like ‘legal tender’, what does that mean, and what does it mean for things that are not legal tender? I was thinking about this on my walk home today. Luckily Wikipedia came to the rescue with a good write-up on the subject.
Legal tender is anything that can be used to settle a debt. If I owe Fred £10, I can give him a £10 note and the debt is paid. He cannot say “no, I only accept coins”, because a £10 is legal tender and therefore has to be accepted as payment of debt. The UK has some quite complex rules on it. For example a ten pence piece is legal tender, but only up to a certain value of £10. Someone is not obligated to accept a payment of £1,000 in 10p pieces. Guidelines are available from the Royal Mint.
Things get a little more complicated around the union. Notes issued by the bank of England are legal tender in England and Wales. Scottish bank notes however, are not. In fact technically Scottish bank notes are not even legal tender in Scotland, though they are typically accepted to be by general agreement.
Another issue that comes into play is whether you have a debt, or whether you are treating. If you have not yet established a debt, the trader is under no legal obligation to accept your money. So a shop or a bus could refuse to accept a £20 note from you (many shops due refuse £50 notes) because no debt has yet come into play. However, if there was a debt established and then payment has requested, so as an invoice or a restaurant meal, they would then be obliged to accept your legal tender.
It is sometimes claimed that stamps are legal tender. This is not the case, and was confirmed by the Royal Mint.