Cosmology for Christmas

I found this YouTube video via a link by a friend on a private mailing list. The channel owner, Christine Simpson, has not monetized her channel, has a tiny audience, and clearly made this video for fun. If you have the slightest interest in, or knowledge of, modern cosmology and physics, this video is very funny. If you are interested in having a Christmas party with a cosmological bent, watch it for the food ideas. Either way, I thought it worth sharing with my readers.

Christine, by the way, is interested in baking, sewing, dancing, and physics. She obtained a MSci in Physics at the Imperial College London in 2013, and she is presently working on her PhD in Gravitational Wave Data Analysis at the University of Edinburgh as part of the CDT in Data Science in the school of Maths and Informatics. She is way out of my league, but any of my readers interested in finding out more about her activities can check out her website, https://www.christinensimpson.com/.

Merry Christmas!

As a Christmas food statement, I will leave you with a recent video by emmymadeinjapan, which shows Emmy making a gingerbread house entirely covered, and decorated, in meat and animal products.  (Why yes, those are pieces of salami masquerading as shingles.  And a SPAM door.  And the yellow stuff is Easy Cheese.)

Not safe for vegans.  Or people who like their gingerbread houses to be pretty.  Or who have sensitive stomachs.  But it's a hoot otherwise!  (Even more of a hoot if you don't have to eat any of the "gingermeat" house afterwards.)

Just in case you are screaming for "brain bleach!" right about now, here's a link to a post by Jen of the Cake Wrecks blog, which features pictures of lovely, conventional gingerbread houses.  Gingerbread houses that most of us would enjoy admiring, and would be willing to eat after admiring them.  For something in-between the meat house and pretty gingerbread houses, here's a slideshow from GoodHousekeeping.com with pictures of 42 different gingerbread houses, ranging from a pretzel log cabin to a modern house with a palm tree.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Cabbage Soup--Success!

I made my first pot of cabbage soup yesterday.  It came out almost perfectly--very close to the soup my mother made.  

Here's what I did. Interested readers can look up my inspiration recipe if they wish to track the changes.

Ingredients:
1 onion, chopped.
2 stalks of celery, chopped.
2 pounds of raw green cabbage, chopped.
1 pound of dried yellow split peas.
6 cups of homemade chicken stock (I used the chicken stock recipe in the Soupsong book).
2 cups of water.
Butter (as needed).
Additional water (as needed).
Salt and black pepper to taste.

Directions:
Saute the onion and celery in butter for about 5 minutes, or until they are softened.  Do the same thing with the cabbage (I used an entire stick of butter for the purpose, adding it a bit at a time as I went through the vegetables).  If you do not do the sauteeing in the soup pot, add the vegetables and any leftover liquid from the pan to to soup pot when finished.

Rinse and sort through the dried peas (for pebbles or any other undesirable items) and add the peas to the pot.  Add the chicken stock and 2 cups of water and stir.

Bring the contents of the soup pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and let the pot simmer until the peas are soft and have released most of their starch into the soup (which took about 3 hours for me).  Add more water during the simmering process if the soup gets too thick before the peas are sufficiently softened.   Season to taste (I used at least 2 teaspoons of salt, and about 1/4 teaspoon of pepper; you may want more, or less, than that.)

Be prepared for a lot of soup!  I filled a three-quart container nearly to the brim.

Many variants are possible.  For example, if you want to make this soup vegetarian, use olive oil instead of butter to saute the vegetables and vegetable stock instead of chicken stock (Soupsong provides a vegetable stock recipe also).  If you like more seasoning, add sprigs of fresh herbs to the pot as the soup boils, and then simmers.  Rosemary, bay, basil, or thyme are each good candidates, or you could use a small bag of fines herbes.  White pepper could be substituted for black pepper if you don't want to risk dulling this soup's bold yellow color.

Enjoy! And have a wonderful Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

EDIT:  (12/27/2012)  I probably should have simmered the soup a bit longer; there were a few bits of pea in there that were chewy instead of soft.  But other than that, the soup came out just fine, and was enjoyed by all.

Christmas Cabbage Soup

Although I have never cooked a holiday dinner (having always had a parent or in-law willing to do the honors), I have always wondered how I would go about making such a meal if circumstance required me to do so.

When I was a child, our major holiday meal was Christmas Eve dinner.  By tradition, this was to be a "meatless" meal; that is, fish was the only non-vegetable food to be served.  Our meal was a combination of the exotic (which may well arise from my parents' memories of their European immigrant parents' Christmas Eve meal) and the mundane (i.e., items that could easily be purchased at the local supermarket).  Here are the dishes we always had:

• Fish (invariably haddock, because frozen haddock pieces from the supermarket were easily bought and prepared);
• Cabbage soup;
• Mushrooms (bought canned, and easily heated);
• Bread (served with honey for dipping);
• Raw garlic cloves (served with salt, also for dipping);

There could also be other side dishes, depending upon the time and resources my Mom had available, such as carrots, mashed potatoes (Mom made really good mashed potatoes, so they showed up often), etc. But the above items were what made an ordinary family dinner Christmas Eve dinner for us.

The bread and the garlic are no problem. In fact, since most supermarkets now have good bakeries (and some even have "organic" sections) obtaining suitable bread, honey and garlic is easy.  It is also easy for me to obtain raw white mushrooms and sauté them (which easily beats the B&B brand canned mushrooms my mother used).  

The fish would be more challenging, as I have never cooked fish. However, I have a slow cooker cookbook with a recipe for how to steam salmon in the slow cooker, and I see no reason that would not do. It would certainly be more interesting than the bland haddock my mother used to make!

The real difficulty would be the cabbage soup.  I remember how Mom's cabbage soup tasted, and what it looked like (thick, yellow with a hint of green, and buttery).  But I never watched her make the soup and she didn't have a written recipe.  In addition, she died long ago, so I can't ask her.  What I do have is the Internet, where recipes for cabbage soup (like recipes for so many other foods) are legion.

So I have been looking on the Internet, and I've finally found this recipe, which looks as though it comes close. The only difference between this recipe and what I remember is that this recipe uses sauerkraut for the cabbage and oil for sautéing the vegetables. But I could easily substitute freshly shredded raw green cabbage and butter. I plan to try this recipe out in time for the holiday, and blog about the results. Wish me luck!