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Recipes

Homemade marzipan🔗

Version [2022-12-15 Thu]

Tools:

  • freezer
  • bowl
  • 2 small pots where one is fslightly bigger than the other (for melting chocolate)
  • 2 spoons
  • 2-4 dinner plates with metal foil on top

Ingredients:

  • Three parts by weight almond flour
  • Three parts by weight dark chocolate
  • Two parts by weight rum (not Rhum Agricole, which is very different) or brandy (also known as "cognac" when it comes from France)
  • Two parts by weight date paste (f you don't know what this is, check a local Middle Eastern/Indian grocery store)
  • saffron (optional)

Note: the date-paste is practical, but for some extra cleanup work, you can replace it with raisins blended in a mixer, being aware that most home mixers will perform poorly at this task. Since many of the raisins come out this process undamaged, that creates a more chunky result. To make it a bit easier, marinate the raisins in the rum for a few hours or overnight to allow them to expand and become less sticky.

Gently melt the chocolate.

Mix all other ingredients in a bowl, but add the rum last, gradually, until it's easy to form the mixture into balls in your hands.

Shape the mixture into bite-sized balls.

Now coat the balls in chocolate one at a time, by dropping the ball into the melted chocolate and using two spoons to turn it over once (thus completely covering it in chocolate) and move it onto the foil-covered plates.

Put the plates in the freezer for at least 30 minutes. After that it should be easy to separate the balls from the foil.

Version <2017-Dec-11>

Making your own marzipans in 20 minutes:

  • 3 parts by weight almond flour
  • 2 parts by weight dark chocolate
  • 1 part by weight powdered sugar
  • 1 part by weight rum, brandy/cognac or arrac
  • 1 part by weight raisins or chopped dates (optional)

Gently melt the chocolate.

Mix almond flour, sugar and raisins in a bowl.

Add rum to the bowl until the mixture can be shaped into clumps with your hands.

Shape the mixture into bite-sized balls.

Now you have two options:

The direct way - Pour the melted chocolate onto a dinner plate and roll the balls in it, placing the finished products on another plate.

The slower way - Freeze the balls for fifteen minutes, then roll them in the melted chocolate directly in the kettle. You may be able to use more of the chocolate this way, since all of it is kept liquid in the warm kettle.

Store in the fridge. Enjoy!

How much do you get for the money? Assuming

  • 300 g flour
  • 200 g choc
  • 100 g sugar
  • 100 g raisins
  • 100 g rum

then total weight is 800 g high quality marzipan, for a price of <150 SEK. This beats all Anthon Berg products since they are not as good and cost more, some of them much more.

Tallow

TL;DR:

Chop. Heat in kettle. Strain into bowl or carafe, dropping solids into second bowl. Wait a few minutes so that particles in carafe sink to the bottom. Pour liquid tallow into chosen container, leaving the bottom layer of particles.

Old:

Slow-cook the stuff whole. You'll have a lot of leftover fatty solids, if you don't mind gorging for a few days. Drawback is it spends a long time at hot temperature, so I have some worry about oxidation.

For maximum extraction, cube it and pulse it a bit in a blender, to rip apart membranes. Then either dry-render or wet-render. Haven't tried this yet. Maybe try it without the blender, so as to create less dishes. Just finely chop it. This would be easier if it's semi-frozen. 2-4 hours in cold water should be about right if the bags are one kg each. Will try with blender, I think, for my first time, so my results can be compared to the online recipes I've read.

One interesting trick to prevent oxidation might be to add berries, herbs or ascorbate during rendering, but I don't know the consequences. Might it create an environment ripe for botulism bacteria? This is why pressure-cooking jars of finished tallow is a neat idea, although pressure-cooking might defeat the point of adding antioxidants.

Sauerkraut

GROCERIES

  • Non-iodized salt (MUST be non-iodized)
  • Cabbage. You should know how much each head weighs – it'll be on your receipt from the grocery store. For every liter of space in your Fido jars, buy 1.5 kg of cabbage.
  • (Optional) A few carrots, straight shape with uniform thickness, to act as a weight-spreader

EQUIPMENT

  • Cutting board (two if you're a team)
  • Knife (two if you're a team)
  • Giant bowl or kettle, maybe several bowls. I prefer 2 liters of space for every kg of cabbage you have. So 5 kg of cabbage -> find a 10-liter kettle.
  • 1.5L or larger Fido jars.
  • (Optional) Disposable gloves
  • (Optional) A plate or extra cutting board to temporarily place some of your cabbage on.
  • (Optional) A tiny vase, salt shaker, sturdy shot glass, or other glass item

STAGE 1

Boil your glass jars and knife in a kettle. Sterilize your cutting boards by pouring boiling water over them.

Wash your hands. Every time you touch something you shouldn't, wash your hands again. Learn to wash your hands properly (Google it).

Peel off outermost cabbage leaves and throw them away. Cut away blemishes.

Peel off a few more leaves, for use as "hats" later.

Cut cabbage in thin strips, or in thick strips and dice them. Either makes it easy to work with. Dicing thin strips is redundant though.

As your cutting board gets full, keep dumping the cut cabbage into a giant bowl (I use a ten-liter kettle). If you have to split a cabbage head into two separate bowls, take note of how much you split off if you want to give them the proper amount of salt (this is why it's easier to just have one giant bowl).

Once you've filled your bowl to about 75%, stop. It's easier to work with two 75% bowls than one 100% bowl.

Add an appropriate amount of salt. In American, this is around 3 tablespoons of non-iodized salt per 5 pounds of cabbage, or I guess 1.5-2.0 ml per 100 g cabbage, i.e. slightly over 1 tablespoon (15 ml) per kg. More finely ground salt will be more dense, so use slightly less.

Take into account the fact you're not using the cores or outermost leaves of your cabbage heads, so they weigh a bit less than they did on the grocery receipt. It's not important to get this number very exactly though. If you've spread the contents of a cabbage head into multiple bowls and don't know how much went into each, just make sure to get the total sum of salt correct.

Now put on gloves if you have. Use your hands to mix the salt with the cabbage. Mix well because uneven salting may give ground to spoilage bacteria later (some people do make unsalted sauerkraut, but it's down to luck). If you're using coarse salt, you may have to gather granules from the bottom of the bowl repeatedly.

Take a break of minimum 30 minutes. The salt will soften the cabbage.

STAGE 2

Put on new gloves. Pick up fistfuls of your proto-sauerkraut and drop them into Fido jars. As the jars get full, press the contents down to make more space. You'll be surprised at how much can fit.

Once a jar is filled to a couple of centimeters below where the "neck" of the jar starts, take some of the cabbage leaves you saved and put them on top of the contents, covering them. These prevent tiny fragments of cabbage from floating to the surface.

At this point, it may be enough to put a tiny vase or salt shaker on top of all this and close the lid of the jar. The vase should end up pressing the contents down. If it doesn't, cut some carrots lengthwise and lay them on (you may have to shorten the carrots), then put the vase on top of all that. I like to put an additional carrot on top of the other carrots, lying across, to press them all down. Cut a flat surface on the top of this carrot for the vase to find a stable ground.

You're done!

Now, for the first week, come back daily and burp the jars, just in case. A lot of gases build up. The Fido jars able to handle it though, says the internet. Also if you can find a relatively cool place (13C?) to put them for the first week (and then room temperature for the following weeks), this supposedly enhances the taste.

Pemmican

NOTE: I have fears about freezing it, residual water may freeze and create microfractures in the block, and then I'm not sure about shelf-life.

NOTE: Making pemmican has little point unless you are going traveling. If you just want to store large amounts of Paleo food outside the freezer, drying meat and rendering tallow would do the job, both will keep perfectly well on their own.

NOTE: If you just want to compress food for bringing with you somewhere that also has a freezer, or stock your own freezer, you can create different kinds of "forcemeat", e.g. kalvsylta, polsa and leverpastej.

General principles of pemmican still apply: reduce water as much as possible, and fill in any "air gaps" with fat or gelatinous broth. The difference being that pemmican has zero water, while the other dishes retain some water.

Ok, finally the recipe for pemmican:

Melt tallow and stir it into pulverized dry meat. Use less tallow rather than more because you don't want so much that some oil separates from the powder. If you'll want to pressure-cook it later, observe the mixture while the tallow is still in the melted state so that you can be confident nothing will separate when you stuff a glass jar with the mixture and boil it.

What links here

Created (7 years ago)

An Accidental Ode to MSWord Hotkeys

This was triggered by the discussion on news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305055.

I feel that much of the perceived difference between modefulness and modelessness is in your head (doesn't make it less real, I admit). Look, are you familiar with the concept of a hotkey sequence? They're the most visible in Emacs, where many commands are bound to a sequence such as C-x C-s.

Everything we do on a keyboard is part of a sequence. In Vim, you can type :wqa to execute a command, and if someone made a similar binding in Emacs, it would be represented in their notation as S-; w q a, and more importantly, it would feel different to many people. Because in Vim, : makes you enter a state where you can type anything you want in a free-input field, and in this case you type wqa. In Emacs, pressing S-; will make the minibuffer display S-; while nothing happens, indicating that you've begun a hotkey sequence. As you press each key, they'll show up: S-; w q a … It feels like you're in the same state throughout, where Emacs is doing nothing and waiting for you to reach a sequence that is bound to a command. In particular, you feel constrained. In the Vim equivalent, you can backspace whereas in Emacs if you press the wrong key you have to re-do the sequence.

But you're ultimately doing the same thing with your fingers. Someone recording your fingers wouldn't know if you were executing an Emacs command, a Vim command, or merely typing ":wqa" into the body of a blog post.

When you type the word "hi", you are executing the sequence of pressing the h key followed by the i key. I grant this is a silly example, but I need to show that every keystroke comes in sequences. Sequences are the universe, the backdrop of everything that happens during keyboard input.

Modern editors typically have hotkey sequences consisting of a single step. Obviously, a single hotkey is always better than two in a sequence. By the same token, two hotkeys are better than three, and so on. You want the fewest number of steps in the sequence, for convenience. Cheers to modern editors!

This is complicated by the question of which hotkeys you put in the sequence. If they are single letters like w q a, fine! If they are C-c C-x p, not so good. The latter looks like three keystrokes but is four, or five if you count having to release the Ctrl key before pressing p, which I find at least as annoying as having to press it in the first place.

Now, back to modern editors: they typically have hotkey sequences consisting of a single step. But what hotkeys? Almost always a combination like Ctrl-F, which is two keystrokes minimum.

Given that they're modeless, of course they have to do it this way. And it's not so bad. The thing about Vim Normal mode is that single-hotkey commands don't even need modifiers, you can just press f, no Ctrl.

The drawback is that you have to enter a "mode", which sounds weird.

To get around this, I will describe another basic concept of keyboard input, which has many names but that I'll call a hydra. A hydra is a many-headed beast of Greek myth, that grew new heads whenever one was cut off. It's also a way of making hotkey sequences more persistent. For example, suppose that you wanted to execute the following commands: 

C-c C-x p
C-c C-x l
C-c C-x a

Lot of work, right? But, if the sequence C-c C-x is a hydra, then what you have to type is 

C-c C-x p l a

That is, the first parts of the sequence don't have to be retyped.

The way hydras are typically implemented in Emacs is that they're nonpersistent (compared to a Vim mode, see later). As soon as you hit some key (let's say r) that isn't bound to anything in the hydra, it exits the hydra and does what that key would have done instead, i.e. instead of it trying to execute the equivalent of C-c C-x r you simply type the letter r onscreen. The hydra is exited trivially, unlike modes in Vim that have to be exited with the ESC key.

Now the meat of the topic. All that a mode is, is a type of hydra. The Vim Normal mode is a hydra that starts with ESC, and it's very broad, having many different keybinds coming after ESC. We might say that the hydra has one head for every key on your keyboard: there are none undefined. It's a persistent one, as it's not easy to exit. The escape hatch is the i key, which instead puts you in the Insert mode hydra (and doesn't insert the letter "i": it's a whole keystroke merely to change mode and do nothing more).

If you like to view it this way, all editors are constantly in a hydra, just one that doesn't need to be entered with any key beforehand. Modeless editors aren't modeless, they have one mode.

Now think about this: What is easier to press, Ctrl-F or Ctrl then F? Is it easier to press the D key and the F key at the same time, or to press them in sequence?

YMMV, but many feel that pressing two keys in sequence is more comfortable than two keys at the same time.

So over of pressing d and f together, we always prefer the sequence d and then f. What if the reason you do this is that 'd' puts you in a different mode, where the 'f' key will do what you want? Does it make a difference? In the Vim paradigm, yes: you will also have to exit that mode when you're done. Then it can be preferable to just press a chord such as Ctrl+F and not think about entering and exiting modes.

Suppose the mode wasn't persistent? I.e. suppose by pressing d you enter the mode, then by pressing f, you execute that command and return to the mode you were in previously.

Well. Then it's not a mode as most would define it, just a hotkey sequence. (It can be a hydra though: hydras may have both persistent and non-persistent heads, a mixture of those that grow back and those that don't)

If you want to take the classification to the extreme, each hotkey in a hotkey sequence is a small mode, a non-persistent one, wherein the next hotkey will do something it wouldn't have done otherwise. Emacs has hundreds or thousands of these small modes while Vim has three big modes. Most editors have one (by virtue of rejecting hotkey sequences altogether).

Microsoft Word is actually an exception. If you're a whiz with hotkeys there, you know what I mean: they use hotkey sequences (all of which start with Alt), though never with modifiers. It's like the best of Vim and Emacs: the modes are non-persistent and automatically exit (unlike Vim), and they don't need you to hold down the Ctrl key either (unlike Emacs). The only way to improve on this would be make some of those sequences into hydras, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Word has done that too.

Word is bad in so many ways, but it seems the keyboard input was competently designed.

Anyway, I hope modes don't feel weird now.

Keyboard design

What links here

  • 2023-09-13
Created (7 years ago)

Memorize memories of flashcards with flashcards

Combination of SRS and memory castles.

The basic memory castle

For the thought experiment, instead of flashcards, suppose you have a stack of cheatsheets. You wanna memorize them. You go and put the cheatsheets in a memory castle.

In mindspace, you can alter the cheatsheets – the words are no longer confined to A4 sheets, and art can be three-dimensional and include the sense of touch.

Obama's insight about blue suits can be represented by Obama wearing a blue suit, e.g. (Though the presence of a person would be overpowering, so persons should only be used for important insights. A framed Obama?)

For advanced potential, perhaps add smell to different rooms – if you focus inwardly on really feeling that smell, you kind of will smell it, regardless of what your flesh nose is sensing. And then, turn your attention to the room, and it should come back more easily. To mint new memory objects, it may help to go in meatspace to smell the appropriate thing for that room.

For example… an Indian-styled room, smelling of chai tea. Go smell some meatspace chai before even trying to envision it (because memory retcons itself, you may cause details to disappear forever).

Instead of words, you can have objects. Suppose you've read a book and written notes from it. Eventually these notes become a box of objects in your memory castle.

Merging with a Spaced Repetition System

Now make a small change to the thought experiment. Instead of representing what were originally paper cheatsheets, your memory objects represent what were originally flashcards. These flashcards still exist in your SRS, so they are now effectively duplicated.

Now start adding a new class of flashcard to the same SRS deck.

For this new class, you can put pictures of your memory rooms. Eventually you can even draw the objects you've created and put those drawings in SRS – so your SRS contains both the original flashcard and another flashcard that refers to the first one! (Option: attach a random image to every flashcard, well before turning them into memory objects. That way you can reuse those images)

Take care, don't create too many objects. You don't need as many flashcards as you think.

Memory objects can themselves hold memory objects. For example, in one room, you might find a bicycle (a Ribbing bike). On its saddle, you might find a Buddha statue. On his lap, you might find a flower. On the petals, you might find a fly. On the fly, you might find a crown. On the surface of the crown (really zoomed in), you might find a golden castle on a flat field of gold. Inside the castle, you might find a banquet. In the banquet, you will NOT find another Ribbing bike – don't reuse objects.

For a grace period, you practice on flashcards both on actual paper/SRS, and in the mindworld. Eventually, you may detach from the software and have it all in your head.

For true spaced repetition, try a Leitner system (inside the mindworld!). Arrange your objects. Hold them, smell them – every time you handle an object. Arrange them in a system. Not necessarily numeric. Just "on that desk" is recent stuff, "upstairs on that bookshelf" is old flashcards, "in the wine cellar behind that scary vampire nest and in front of the liliputian" is some old but important stuff. Re-use things from your life. The amphitheatre, some notes on love and relationships in Momo's room, with whom you can have a conversation while you're at it. You would of course draw your imagination of Momo's room often.

Sketch, sketch, sketch. No need to sketch the memory objects in use (you can if you want), just sketch the rooms, the 'bases'.

Use emotion. Fear (the scary vampire nest) is one. A narrow bridge…

Flashcard front: Buddha Flashcard back: Buddha with rose on his lap

Flashcard front: Rose Flashcard back: Rose with a fly

etc.

What links here

Created (8 years ago)
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