alexist

(three food posts in a row, oh dear)

I decided to make raspberry mousse (let's have fun with the multiquick!)

The recipe I have makes what is probably stupidly large yield (this is what happens when you get your recipes from professional cookery books), so I scaled it down. For 1/3 of the recipe, I needed 8oz (225g) of puree.

Puree 3 punnets of raspberries (450g), strain (discover food mill WILL trap raspberry seeds... though these seemed to be a large-seeded variety). Weigh. 110g. Hmm.

So I buy some more today--4 punnets, just to be sure (Neil moaned, but I'd started the damn thing, I was going to finish it). Puree, strain, weigh... total of 450g. hmm! So I did 2/3 of the recipe.

I should have done 1/3 anyway and frozen the rest of the puree, but I didn't think of that. More fool me, because I now have way more raspberry mousse than we will ever eat.

Oh, and it called for Swiss meringue (where you put the egg whites and sugar in a bowl over simmering water, stir until hot, then whip) instead of the regular. This isn't substantially more difficult from an effort perspective, but I discovered that Swiss meringue is hell to fold into anything. I had to use a wire whip and probably lost some air (normally, you use a rubber spatula). (I'm sure I've made Swiss meringue before, but I can't remember what for. Normally I use regular meringue; occasionally Italian [sugar syrup beaten into whites, which "cooks" them and creates a very stable meringue] which really is a pain, at least in small quantities as it's hard to take the temperature and then bits of syrup go everywhere when you're beating it in.)

It tastes right; now let's see if it sets. The amount of gelatine called for sounded like way too much, so I halved it. (It wanted an ounce, which is a whole packet of leaf gelatine!) It was the first time I've used the sheet variety, too. In the States I used powdered, but the one time I tried using the Supercook powdered gelatine here it didn't work properly so I've tried the leaf. At least this stuff soaked up the water properly...

And I remembered the other reason raspberries are annoying to cook with... the puree stains like hell!!

Now to go make a roast dinner...

I've been playing with Fink, and have XEmacs installed.

Of course... now I've forgotten how to do the customizations so I can get back to having a white background!! (I set up my .xemacs so long ago I can't remember it now... and of course it was on my old PC, and I don't have a copy now)

ETA: Worked out how to do it using customize faces... I suspect that back when I first configured XEmacs, it was just a question of sticking a line in ~/.xemacs, because I don't remember doing it this way before. Of course, that dates me as it is--nowadays ~/.xemacs is a directory, not a single file!

But I am Happy, because XEmacs in X11 works properly, instead of belching on anything non-ASCII the way Emacs runs in a MacOS terminal does. So now I don't have to edit out all the UKP signs from LJ posts before formatting them for Mono.