Kerry Beal

Ornge is the helicopter and advanced paramedics that comes and picks up our most urgent cases.

Parasailing I believe it's called.

How we get them back on the ground until Ornge comes and picks them up.

I usually try to leave on Haweater weekend - this year we are staying a week longer than usual.

That and hummingbirds I understand

Financiers - all pistachio flour.

Getting their annual jump in the water off the dock picture - the dock being under water right now.

Butter poaching with the Control Freak - it's what the cool kids are doing! Here you go. It's by no means a typical cake - more like a financier. So that's my next thing. Batter is in the fridge - will bake them off in the am before work.

Here's another interesting experiment mentioned in Beckett's The Science of Chocolate. PROJECT 1: AMORPHOUS AND CRYSTALLINE SUGAR Apparatus: Beaker. Magnetic stirrer. Thermometer sensitive to better than 0.1 1C. Balance capable of reading to at least 1 g. Granulated sugar. Skim milk powder. Boiled sweets, e.g. Fox’s Glacier Mintss (NB not pressed or tabletted sweets such as Poloss which are more crystalline). Aim: To show how amorphous and crystalline sugar differ when they dissolve in water. 209 210 Chapter 12 The crystalline sugar causes the water to cool down as energy is required to separate the molecules (heat of solution). Amorphous sugar is in an unstable state, however, and gives out energy when it changes to its stable, lower-energy crystalline state. This means that there is spare energy so the water becomes warmer. Procedure: Pour 10ml water into a beaker and place on the magnetic stirrer. Place the thermometer in the water and continue the stirring until the temperature is constant. Breaktheboiledsweetsintosmallpieces.(Thiscanbedoneby placing them within a material bag and crushing them with a hammer. CARE: TAKE APPROPRIATE PRECAUTIONS.) Weigh out about 10g granulated sugar and also of the crushed amorphous material. Drop this quantity of granulated sugar into the water and record the temperature for the next five minutes. Repeat the procedure using the amorphous sugar. This time the temperature should rise. The experiment can also be tried with skim milk powder.This contains lactose, which is normally in an amorphous state owing to the rapid spray-drying process. This normally gives a much greater temperature rise than the boiled sweets.

And back out of the pot, picked clean and poached in butter!

Meanwhile, Anna and I enjoyed a variation on the Amaretto Sour of last night.

Kira had fun swimming with the dogs, then was treated to an "anemic chicken thigh" salad on white Texas toast.

It's Haweater Weekend starting tomorrow - crapload of people on the island. Police are brought from away in the interest of ongoing community/police harmony. Our police go to other communities on their special long weekends to police there. There will be a huge PowWow in Wiki this weekend as well. I'm working ER most of the weekend. Might prove interesting!

Of course I'd have to get up a little earlier! Looks like you are going to have a windy day.

By grinding they will be come smaller and smaller crystals - I'm going to paste something from Beckett - The Science of Chocolate here which discusses amorphous sugar. Electron microphotographs show sugar is amorphous in chocolate (properly made chocolate I'd argue). So I wonder what would happen if we dissolved these sugar alcohols, then freeze dried them before adding to the cocoa mass. Although if a melanger is too dear and takes up too much counter space then a freeze dryer might not be much better! "Sugar can also exist as a glass, i.e. a non-crystalline, though solid, structure. A good example is a clear, boiled-sugar sweet, which is often mint flavoured. This happens when sucrose solutions are dried too quickly and the individual molecules do not have time to form the crystalline structure when the water is removed. One way to manufacture amorphous sugar is to freeze-dry a sucrose solution. Amorphous sugar is not birefringent as it does not possess a structure such that it can bend the light in a polarising microscope. There are other ways of determining amorphous sugar in sucrose systems (see Project 1 in Chapter 12). Amorphous sugar is important in chocolate making as it can effect both the flavour and the flow properties of liquid chocolate. Its surface is very reactive and can easily absorb any flavours that are nearby. It is also formed from crystalline sucrose at high temperatures. These may occur when sugar is milled. If there is no other material around, the sugar may take up a metallic note. (This can be demonstrated by finely grinding sugar in a food mixer with a metal blade or bowl and then dissolving the sugar in water; it will taste metallic compared with a solution made from the original material.) On the other hand, if it is milled together with cocoa, 26 Chapter 2 some of the volatile cocoa flavours are absorbed by the amorphous sugar rather than escape into the atmosphere as they would otherwise do. This will then produce a more intense flavour chocolate. Care must be taken when milling sugar, especially by itself, because of the high risk of an explosion. The amorphous state is an unstable one, and in the presence of water it will turn into crystalline material. Once the change has taken place the moisture is expelled, as crystalline sucrose is essentially anhydrous. About half the mass of chocolate is sucrose, so the particles within it are very close together. The moisture on the surface makes them stick together. This eventually builds up a skeleton, which holds the sugar together even if the fat melts and runs out of it. This is the basis of a method used to create a chocolate suitable for sale in hot climates. If the chocolate has not yet been solidified, the stickiness on the surface of some of the sugar greatly increases the viscosity of the liquid chocolate. Crystalline sugar can also absorb moisture, depending on its surrounding conditions. The storage conditions that should be used can be determined by means of sorption isotherms. Figure 2.11 illustrates the curve for sugar at 20 1C. As was noted earlier, the equilibrium relative humidity is the relative humidity at which water is neither taken in nor given out. This means that between 20% and 60% humidity the sugar will maintain a moisture of between 0.01% and 0.02%. At higher humidities the moisture content increases dramatically. Damp sugar may be microbiologically contaminated. In addition it will stick together and form lumps, even if the humidity is reduced again. In the chocolate industry, sugar is stored in large silos containing many tonnes. Great care must be taken with the storage conditions as otherwise the silo will block up and fail to empty. Very often the air inside them is dehumidified."

Fresh yeast? I've bought it vacuum sealed so I suspect you can. I certainly vacuum seal my dry yeast and pop it in the freezer until I need some more to replenish the fridge bottles. Pizza dough usually gets the non vacuum seal bag treatment in my house.

Will do!

This Copper Pot stuff wouldn't remind you of Canadian Club in any way! I'm not a Canadian Rye fan at all.

That would be lemon gin and Ruby Rouge wine for me!

Looking outside to see how the evening was coming along - I noticed on of the local docs and one of the other locums who is up (there are a crap load of us here right now) out for a walk. So I tagged along with them down to Low Island for a couple of pictures

1 1/2 ounces Canadian Whisky, 1 1/2 ounces amaretto, 1 ounce lemon juice, 1 tsp simple syrup 1/2 ounce egg white. Dry shake, then ice shake, then rocks glass, twist of lemon rind, cherries.

The evil whole wheat Texas toast made into a grilled cheese for the child. Chicken thighs CSO for the adults.

Apparently when you ask how much booze goes in a cocktail it can sometimes be interpreted as the amaretto part rather than the booze part. Hence you end up with a cocktail with twice as much booze as called for. A very intoxicating and very delicious amaretto sour Going forward – I think all our amaretto sour’s will contain twice as much Canadian whisky as the bourbon called for

Give it a try!