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sethoflagos

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Everything posted by sethoflagos

  1. My dairy intake for 25 years has been limited to the occasional bit of cheese due to food poisoning concerns back in the day. Your point is well-taken. My interest is in a bit of balanced risk management.
  2. Do you simmer the milk first? I've seen kefir recipes that omit this stage and am wondering if I need to bother with it. The whole point of UHT is that it's already been heat treated and is pretty sterile anyway.
  3. ... and Nigeria too: Tinubu stops otter, rages Uganda dad nag. Use garret to spot subunit.
  4. With the notable exception of South America, there is a certain degree of correlation. Maybe it's just ''the poors''. Point taken. Without wishing to overdramatise, I've had a few mildish bouts of cholera when I was younger and fitter, and know a few people who've lost friends and relations to it. Under the circumstances and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, might even a single study be enough to justify a modest shift of dietary habits? I''ve a long line of ancestors who seemed to fare pretty well with dairy products.
  5. Following my little test run, I couldn't resist trying out a full quantities batch with our local in season pineapple (again, substituting for apples and raisins/sultanas). Equally delicious! Harking back to your "Third Condiment" reference, from what I've read the 'mustard' in Kashmiri cuisine would most likely been pressed mustard oil. I don't think sale of this is permitted in the UK (high erucic acid content), but we're not so limited here, so in place of the lemon and mustard I substituted a couple of dollops of homemade lime pickle which seemed to cover the necessary bases.
  6. So I'm caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Thanks! 🥺 Geographical correlation?
  7. Diet modulates Vibrio cholerae colonization and competitive outcomes with the gut microbiota Seems that I need to persist with my new casein rich diet. Is it a coincidence that the Venn diagram for endemic cholera and lactose intolerance overlap considerably? Or just one of life's little ironies.
  8. 15 kW is a fairly typical Level 2 charging rate for an EV. Perhaps a couple of high mileage commuters treated themselves to an EV apiece and got a nasty shock when the next electricity bill came through the letterbox.
  9. Just for contrast, $20 pm covers my grid electric for a 4 bedroom, 3 floor apartment in Abuja, Nigeria. It isn't overly subsidised. Though it's only available ~ 70% of the time. Bottled gas for the cooker (which I use daily) is considerably less. These numbers vary immensely with climate and personal expectations. PS. Nigerian tariffs are between 4c and 15c per kWh depending on supply uptime.
  10. It's simply due to friction forces from their pretty extreme velocity encountering the thin air of the upper atmosphere. It's very much a surface effect so a car sized bolide may be losing incandescent molten material from the surface while the bulk remains at well below freezing point. Depending on composition, the extreme temperature gradient creates enormous stresses due to differential expansion, until the internal bonding fails and successive layers of skin are blown off like the layers of an onion. It isn't 'burning' in our normal understanding of the term.
  11. Thorsburg quarry in Sweden is pretty well-known for having yielded over 100 fossil meteorites from the Ordovician period (nearly half a billion years back). Similar examples are quite common. No. Basin areas in deserts tend to consolidate pretty well without needing to be submerged. Many other examples. Tell-tale inconsistencies with the contextual setting, chemistry, and radiometric age of the surrounding country rock. There's only so many ways that lumps of planetary mantle and core materials can arrive on the surface. Highly resistant, stable minerals such as zircon and spinel are useful markers.
  12. I suspect you are confusing local and non-local effects. In any freely expanding system, there's a tendency for any group of like particles in a local comoving space to approach parallel-ish trajectories with zero relative velocity (all others will have migrated into adjacent spaces with or without the assistance of a declining frequency of collisions). From an arbitrary frame of reference, they may still be moving fast as billy-o, only not with respect to their immediate neighbours. So the local thermodynamic temperature asymptotically approaches absolute zero. What happens then depends I guess on exactly how flat the universe is at the largest scale. If the universe is closed and finite, they may ultimately run head first into something coming fast in the opposite direction. That would warm them back up a bit.
  13. Can it (product c) at least) be called ''kefir" if kefir grains are not used? My initial starter culture was a spoonful of fermented cucumber brine and a broken dried red chilli. Different bacterial strains and AFAIK no significant yeast involvement. Other significant differences are the considerably higher fermentation temperature, and the consequently unavoidable (I think) whey separation. A bit of a divisive dismissal perhaps? 😉
  14. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, US congressional approval is neither here nor there. The key foreign policy criterion is Article 2.4 of the UN Charter Ultimately, this establishes that the avoidance of igniting potential global conflict supersedes all other considerations. The European powers have learnt this through bitter experience; the US self-evidently has not.
  15. I have been experimenting with making the traditional Indian yoghurt dahi based on this recipe. However, I've been unable to source fresh milk locally and have been using a homogenised UHT brand sourced from Poland which nonetheless has a fairly standard composition of 3.5% fat, 4.7% sugar, and 3.2% protein. By trial and error, I've had to modify the preparation methodology somewhat to obtain satisfactory results. As both the chemistry (denatured proteins etc) and process are fundamentally different, I'm strapped for the appropriate terminology and chemistry of what I'm making here. Helpful suggestions and observations welcome. Method: bring 1 litre to the boil then simmer for 15 minutes on a very low flame. Allow to cool to ~40o C. Add a tablespoon of live culture from previous batch, stir well and leave to ferment for 24 hours in oven heated by oven light (ie around body temperature). Refrigerate. Products: a) ~ 500 g of a thick white aerated curd that can be spooned off the top. Something between Greek-style yoghurt and Lebanese libneh. Gets more cottage cheesey on cold storage. b) ~400 g of somewhat cloudy sour whey. As a replacement for water in flatbreads, it makes the dough more workable and elastic. Which is good. c) residual balance of homogenous white yoghurt, denser than the whey. As far as I can tell, a) + b) = c). Slightly thinner than what I expected for dahi, but it makes a really good lassi.
  16. No need to worry unduly. Bonny Crude has similar low-S and API gravity to Brent crude, but with greater reserves and no Navy to speak of, hence Drumpf's recent attempts to foment religious upheaval in Nigeria. However, it is apparently okay now to take out the leadership of rogue nations, so swings and roundabouts.
  17. The same playbook as the Dutch East India Company over 400 years ago. Given the huge imbalance of forces, naked imperialism is not that hard. Basically, we seem to be seeing the launch of the Drumpf West India Company.
  18. The mustard and ginger notes would make this a perfect condiment for pork hot or cold, I think. I do like a plain Bramley apple sauce, but this is a more adventurous option.
  19. Spot on! Apples were first domesticated in the area around present day Tajikistan, and the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir have been major producers for millennia. Btw, your recipe is for a preserved chutney. It can be eaten as soon as it's cooled, but normal practice would be to bottle and store somewhere dark and cool for a month to fully mature. As it happens, I'd bought some freshly picked pears and udara this afternoon that should be a good match the sweet and sour of the cooking apples and raisins. I'd everything else to hand in the kitchen so I brewed up a test batch (about a pint) and as soon as it's cool, it'll make a nice contrasting (and pretty authentic) side dish to my rajma and roti (also a Kashmiri standard). Post post: Delicious! Spoilt for choice between the chutney and gherkin raita.
  20. Our family home for nearly fifty years was 64, Main Street, Askham Bryan. Ken Dixon lived at 54. It's a small village with just the one pub.
  21. When the trend towards milk chocolate began after WWI, Rowntrees and Terry's decided not to try competing with Cadbury's for that end of the market. They specialised on more niche and quality products.

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