Lemon cordial

A really easy recipe, more suited for Spring or Summer drinking really but very refreshing served over ice cold sparkling water.

Makes 1.2 litres

3 large unwaxed lemons
350g / 12oz caster sugar
1 litre water

Wash the lemons, then thinly pare off the rind with a vegetable peeler, being careful not to pare off too much of the bitter pith.  Put the rind in the cooking pot of a slow cooker with the sugar and water.  Cover and switch the cooker to high.

Heat for 3o minutes, then stir until the sugar has dissolved.  Cook for a further hour and a half, then leave to cool.

Halve the lemons and squeeze out the juice.  Stir into the syrup, then strain through a sieve and pour into sterilized bottles.  Store in the fridge for up to 10 days.  Serve over ice and dilute to taste with sparkling mineral water.

Lemon curd

Another slow cooker recipe. Although you use it more as a bain-marie than a cooker, so you could just balance a bowl over a saucepan of water instead.  There is a lovely point where it becomes curdy as you heat it at the end, which is very satisfying.

makes 8 x 190ml jars

finely grated rind of 6 large unwaxed lemons
the juice of above lemons (about 400ml)
900g / 2lb caster sugar
a pack of unsalted butter, diced
6 medium eggs, beaten

Put the lemon rind, juice, butter and sugar into a heatproof bowl small enough to fit into the cooker. Pour hot water into the ceramic cooking pot until it reaches half way up the bowl.  Switch the cooker to high and leave for 15 minutes, or until the butter has melted and the sugar has completely dissolved.

Remove the bowl and allow to cool. Sieve in the eggs and whisk to combine. Switch the cooker to low and replace the bowl, covering with foil and cook for 1.5 hours, stirring occasionally until it thickens.  I usually have to pour the whole lot into a pan and heat it gently to get it to thicken up, but that might just be me.

Once the curd is the right consistency, pour it whilst it’s hot into warm, sterilized jars. Strain through a sieve before potting if you prefer a smoother curd.

Cover each jar with waxed disc and lid. Store in a cool, dark place or in the fridge and use within 3 months. Once opened, use within a week.

Ecoworrier 3 – Plastic

Him Indoors gets home from work to find me standing in the kitchen, staring intently at a yoghurt pot.

HI: Problem?
Me: I can’t recycle this.
HI: Nope.
Me: But why?
HI: Cos it’s made out of polystyrene or something, probably.
Me: Why can’t they recycle polystyrene?
HI: Dunno.
Me: And then there’s margarine tubs, what are they made of?
HI: Dunno.
Me: And then there’s…
HI: Can we talk about something else now?

Understandably, this does not make for an inspiring conversation when you’ve just got home from work. But I’m annoyed by the seemingly arbitrary rules about which plastics can be recycled, and which can’t.

Wandsworth have a great recycling scheme, in that you can just bung everything in an orange sack, and they’ll take it away and deal with it. No sorting into five different bins, for which you need a specially segmented drawer and a metal detector, it’s really straightforward. Except for the fact that there is a list of plastics which they don’t recycle, including yoghurt pots, plastic bottle lids and margarine tubs. This is confusing to a bear of very little brain such as myself, because they look pretty similar to bottles to me.

Happily, the labelling on food packaging has recently been simplified. Rather than a confusing combination of triangles, numbers and initials, you now get a breakdown of the packaging components and a grid telling you whether each bit is “widely recycled” (65% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items), “check locally” (15% – 65% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items) or “not recycled” (less than 15% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items.) Admittedly if you were really interested this is less useful than finding out exactly what your packaging is made from, but frankly, life is too short.

So what is it that makes some plastics recyclable, and some not? First of all, there are some lovely videos at recyclenow.com about how plastic bottles and various other things are recycled in the first place.

It seems that bottle lids must be removed not because they’re made from plastic which can’t be recycled, but because they are made of different plastic from the rest of the bottle, and so would contaminate the plastic if still attached to the bottles as they go through the recycling plant.

As for margarine tubs and yoghurt pots, these are currently not recyclable because they are made of mixed polymers, which are much more difficult to identify and separate efficiently, and would again contaminate the rest of the plastic if they were melted down along with all the bottles.

If it were possible to make bottle tops, margarine tubs and yoghurt pots using the same processes as bottles (i.e. blow-moulding, I think) then I guess they could all be made out of the same plastics and melted down for recycling together. Also, if there were a market for the recycled plastic that these items are currently made from, then the infrastructure would gradually be put in place to enable this to happen.

As it is, there’s not a lot we can do except to (a) wait for better recycling technology to come along (b) support the market for recycled plastics by buying loads of lovely recycled stuff (c) buy fewer items made of these ‘non-recyclables’ in the first place and (d) use margarine tubs and yoghurt pots as plant/seedling pots and craft materials for the time being, so that at least they don’t end up in landfill.

The Reverse Graffiti Project

Presumably when they catch him they’ll make him spray it over with a special ‘reverse pressure washer’ hooked up to the San Francisco sewers, but until then, “Moose” has left a rather beautiful reminder of how dirty the world is. I wonder if it’s still there? More info here.

How to name your baby

We haven’t settled on a real name for Little Wilb yet, but I thought I’d share some of the baby-naming strategies I’ve been mulling over recently.  It’s an intimidating responsibility, and one which is not without its pitfalls.

Aside from dropping the poor kid on its head or leaving it at a bus stop, giving a baby a bad name is one of the worst crimes a new parent can commit.  This is after all, the handle your child is going to carry with it for the rest of its life (assuming it doesn’t change it by deed poll out of desperation at some stage) and it will blame you for the name you chose as the root of all its various incompetencies during its teenage years anyway regardless of how inoffensive you thought it was at the time.

Here are a few strategies you could use to try to avoid the most obvious perils on the road to the registry office.

Strategy 1: Choose something popular.

This appears to be a good strategy for avoiding ‘Darius syndrome.’  Darius syndrome is the fate which befalls names which are a bit different but perfectly fine, until somebody of the same name becomes famous and ruins it for everyone due to their astonishing lack of talent/downright evilness.  You might be all set on Darius, having found it in a baby name book and learnt that you are naming your little bundle after a Persian emperor, and then along comes… Darius, and you’re scuppered.  To illustrate this point further, here is a graph of the popularity of the name Adolph (variant of Adolf) in the 20th Century.

If you were naming your child in April 1889, as Mr. and Mrs. Hitler were, Adolph or Adolf would have been one of the most popular names going.  And, if you’d looked it up in the baby book (assuming such things existed back then) you would have been reassured to learn that your baby was to be blessed with the qualities of a ‘noble wolf.’  Not surprisingly the popularity of the name took a bit of a nose dive in the late 1930’s, and has now more or less disappeared out of the charts.

Whilst there’s not much you can do to predict a fascist despot ruining your baby’s name, sticking to popular and somewhat more middle of the road names will probably ensure that your child doesn’t end up with every introduction resulting in a raised eyebrow by the time he reaches his mid-teens.

Strategy 2: Choose something ‘different’.

The down-side of strategy 1 is that you don’t want to go for the same name as every other parent in a 30 mile radius, lest your baby ending up thinking it’s name is actually ‘MattB’ by the second year of school, so as to distinguish him from MattA, MattC and MattD.  But then I heard recently about a girl who was the second ‘Sienna’ in her play-group, so there really is no predicting which direction trends will travel in.  Unfortunately, a ‘different’ name is only different at the point of naming, and if everyone has the same idea, then you’re stuck with a permanent initial stuck on the end of your name for the next 16 years.

Also, when you’re going for different, don’t forget that you may be shouting your chosen collection of syllables 20 or 30 times a day.  It’s worth considering this before settling on Philomela or something equally long and difficult to articulate in a crisis.  Bear in mind that it needs to be easy enough to shout quickly and at volume across Tesco’s car park when your adorable toddler is on the brink of slamming a shopping trolley into somebody’s Peugeot.

Strategy 3: Choose something topical

I don’t know if the parents of the several thousand 18-month old ‘Obamas‘ are regretting it yet, but they have managed to combine the pit-falls of strategy 1 and 2 in one fell swoop here.    You can bet your bottom dollar that there will have been a lot of parents who fancied naming their children Obama following his election in 2008, and those children will no doubt end up as ‘ObamaA’, ‘ObamaB’ and ‘ObamaC’, so as to avoid confusion (see Strategy 2.)  There is also the danger that Obama’s popularity will take a further tumble, and then the name doesn’t seem like quite such a clever idea after all.

Even if his presidency is a resounding success, it’s not like this will rub off on any of the baby Obamas, because we just don’t associate people with their name-sakes.  Do you think of the silver screen stars when you meet an Audrey or a Marilyn?

Strategy 4: Choose something cool.

The best place for picking up cool baby names is undoubtedly your local Apple store.  Have a bit of a mooch around, pretend to be shopping for an iPod or something, but secretly you are looking at the employee name tags for inspiration.

Choose the guys who have chosen to wear long sleeved t-shirts under their  staff t-shirts.  They are undoubtedly the coolest.  If you’re really lucky, you might find one who’s also wearing a scarf, an unfeasibly large pair of headphones around the neck and a baseball cap.  Check out the name on the end of that lanyard, and you’re onto a winner.

I hope I’ll be able to settle on a name myself at some point in the near future.  If in doubt, at least give the poor scrap a sensible middle name, so that they can choose that instead if Griselda doesn’t float their boat.