a journal of the plague and pestilence year [stop the war!]

Still standing, impotent, facing Ukrainian cities shelled by Russian bombs…

Read the third & last volume of Arnaldur Indriðason‘s Inspector Konrad new trilogy, Tregasteinn, with no further enthusiasm… There are even more repetitions than in the previous volumes, including recaps from these previous volumes. If this is a literary style, it should be discontinued! If the author thinks the reader has trouble remembering what he wrote a few pages earlier, he should think again. If the author himself cannot remember what he wrote, this is worrying..! Also read Spinning silver by Naomi Novak, a mix of Eastern Europe tales, like Rumpelstiltskin, and of centuries of anti-Semitic persecutions, from a feminist viewpoint where all leading characters are women. While the book has been praised and nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo awards, and won the Locus award,I found it hard to keep up with the rather thin story and fell asleep while the characters were taking yet another sleigh among a fantasy version of Russia or Ukraine… Speaking of whi(t)ch(es):

Watched Juvenile Justice, a 2022 very dark and graphic Korean series on judges in charge of juvenile delinquents. The story is a wee bit thin and the many connections between the characters a cheap trick, with long static shots of the main judge lost in her thoughts and endless passages about her annotating mountains of reports on the case, but the resulting zoom on the judicial procedure and on the harsh penal system make it worth watching.

slow food all’italiani

chocolate mousse [recipe]

Chocolate mousse may be my favourite desert, most likely because it was considered the top desert by both my mother and my grandmother!, but it is very easy both to miss and to mess the outcome. Which is why I never eat mousse in a restaurant and why I statistically fail to make a proper mousse about 40% of the time [no reproducible experiment available, though]. My recipe is indeed both incredibly simple in its ingredients: only use a bar of baking chocolate and 7 eggs, and highly variable in the output: a wrong kind of baking chocolate, an improperly melted chocolate, an imperfect separation between whites and yolks, those are sufficient reasons for the mousse not to hold, producing instead a chocolatey custard of no particular appeal… Here is the recipe (essentially the one provided inside the Nestlé dessert wrap):Ingredients and utensils

• 7 fresh eggs, fresh as they are used raw (avoid double-yolkers as well!, as they are hellish to separate);
• a 250g bar of (bitter) cooking chocolate like [my grandmother’s] Menier dessert, Nestlé dessert, or Poulain dessert, or bitter dark chocolate, with a high cocoa butter content;
• two large bowls and a smaller one;
• an egg-beater or a cooking robot

Steps

1. Break the chocolate bar into small chunks and add four spoons of water;
2. Melt the chocolate by bain-marie or microwave using a temperature and duration as low as possible, and let it cool down;
3. Separate white from yolk one egg at a time in a small bowl, setting aside [for another recipe] any egg where yolk could have gotten mixed with white, dropping each white into a large bowl and 5 or 6 of the yolks into another large bowl;
4. beat the whites into a hard and even harder foam;
5. mix well the melted chocolate with the yolks;
6. incorporate as gently as possible the whites in the chocolate mix, to avoid breaking the foam, by portions of ¼, until the preparation is roughly homogeneous;
7. cover and put in the fridge for at least 5 hours.

Warning

Since this recipe uses raw eggs, the mousse should be eaten rather quickly, within the next 48 hours. Although it usually vanishes in one meal!

double-yolkers

Last night I was cooking buckwheat pancakes (galettes de sarrasin) from Brittany with an egg-and-ham filling. The first egg I used contained a double yolk, a fairly rare occurrence, at least in my kitchen! Then came the second pancake and, unbelievably!, a second egg with a double yolk! This sounded too unbelievable to be…unbelievable! The experiment stopped there as no one else wanted another galette, but tonight, when making chocolate mousse, I checked whether or not the four remaining eggs also were double-yolkers…and indeed they were. Which does not help when separating yolks from white, by the way. Esp. with IX fingers. At some stage, during the day, I remembered a talk by Prof of Risk David Spiegelhalter mentioning the issue, even including a picture of an egg-box with the double-yolker guarantee, as in the attached picture. But all I could find first was this explanation on BBC News. Which made sense for my eggs, as those were from a large calibre egg-box (which I usually do not buy)… (And then I typed David Spiegelhalter plus ‘double-yolker” on Google and all those references came out!)