Grandad's quote of the week

‘Experience is a very good school, but the fees are too high’
- Jim Beardsmore

I think that this saying has within it volumes of wisdom. It is very sophisticated indeed, even though it is apparently so simple.

The whole success of the human race versus other creatures on earth is related to our ability to learn from the knowledge and experiences of others. Learning just from your own experience can be like accepting data as valid although it has come from a statistical sample of one.

A related saying is my own; ‘Do not allow yourself to learn too much from your own experiences, they may be giving you very misleading information’, this is the reciprocal of the same idea.

Grandad's quote of the week

“Imagine that what you are doing is, next week, to be published on the front page of newspapers, If you do not want this to happen then don’t do it!"

The nature of truth

‘The Nature of Truth’: The word ‘Truth’ is used to cover quite a lot of different meanings. these separate into two broad areas; one is the actual truth of things and events unrelated to human opinion or observation. All events, (These words meaning every thing that happens however large or however small, for example a single electron and everything that it does over all time and everything all humans have ever done individually or collectively), possess their own truth. Humans can only hope to glimpse at a tiny fraction of these truths although it is possible to learn something of the general physical and mathematical rules by which such things as atoms and humans behave. It should not be necessary to understand the mathematics of Alan Turing and Kurt Godel to accept that full knowledge of all events is unknowable, no matter how powerful our Gods, this does not mean that we are prevented from looking upon God as the sum of all altruistic thoughts and behaviours through all universes and all times by all sentient beings and the virtual (and thus indestructible) force for good across all times and all universes.

The second broad area of ‘truth’ is the various sets of beliefs, experiences and assumptions which settle into the brains of humanity from time to time under the influence of multiple forces, practical and psychological.

With regard to this second area it is troubling to note that there seems to be a disparity between the intensity of belief and the probability that this belief will turn out to be true. I have performed no valid statistical tests on this problem but my impression is that the two are negatively correlated but with a low degree of certainty with regard to individual samples.
One can meditate upon one’s own beliefs over time and discover that unless one is of a singularly rigid temperament then one’s beliefs change with time and fresh experiences. It would be very sad if they did not. Now there is a problem here; How can one predict which of one’s beliefs one should ditch today on the chance that this belief will change next year? It is plainly impossible and probably harmful to try with excessive zeal. This suggests that the only reasonable option is not to suddenly stop believing everything we believe but to hold these beliefs more lightly, with true intellectual humility. I do not think that this idea is truly original, several ancient philosophers from Lao Tse to Jesus Christ had the same idea. The pity is that we do not apply it often enough.

Grandad's quote of the week

"Never depend on a man for your living"

Grandad's quote of the week

"True love should not be looked upon as merely an emotional sensation in the mind. Real true love is found in behaviour, in actions and faithfulness. It is discovered as time goes by.
It is not what you think it is what you do."

Grannie’s Mildly Spicy Soup

You never know in life when you may be penniless and need to make a living somehow, you could always make a living out of this recipe!
 
 
Ingredients;
1 medium sized sweet potato
1 onion
4 cloves of garlic
2 small carrots
1 ‘long thin mild sweet red pepper’ [I will let you know the proper name when I can remember it, they are nearly 12 inches long]
1 tablesp tomato ketchup[high quality]
1 tablesp worcester sauce
1 teasp horseradish sauce
some fresh thyme
chicken stock[about 700 mls]
 
 
Peel and dice the onion, sweet potato and carrot, finely dice the sweet pepper, strip the small leaves off a few sprigs of thyme.
Fry the onion, garlic, sweet pepper and thyme together with a little olive oil until soft,add a little ground black pepper and a little sea salt, then add the ketchup and worcester sauce.
 
put the vegetables into a pot with the chicken stock and bring to the boil, add the contents of the frying pan and  simmer till tender then give them a quick whizz in a blender, return to pot and bring to desired heat, serve into pre warmed soup bowls with a side plate of best ciabbata bread and very best butter.
 
 
[Armed with that one recipe, a few crocks and a rented shack with a flashing red neon above the door and you will be in business, you need fear unemployment and the dole no more!]

Grandad's quote of the week

"Beware of achieving that which wish, ask yourself if your desires are worthwhile, honourable and suited to your real abilities and nature."

Mollie the cat

When we had Rosie, ‘the best black labrador anyone could have’, Mollie used to come into the garden walking along the top of the drystone wall hunting for mice. She usually kept to the wall so as to avoid being chased off by Rosie. What we did not realise then was that she was hunting for food because she was being bullied by her sister. Her home then was with another family who were out all day. When Rosie died Mollie came into the garden more and we realised that she was undernourished so we put her food out occasionally. She was so pretty; tabby with a white chest and paws; that I tried to befriend her. At first she seemed terrified of any approach but very slowly she would allow me to stand nearer and nearer to her food saucer. Eventually she allowed me to stroke her and we started to become friends. I realised that she was adopting us rather than the converse so I went to see her ‘owners’ to tell them what was happening, Fortunately they were very understanding, they knew we had lost Rosie and they felt they would be better off with one cat rather than two who were not friends. Mollie took to her new home overnight and soon her bones started to mature and she was much healthier, the only thing that terrified her was the sight of her own sister in our garden, fortunately this does not seem to happen very often now. Mollie has qualities of non-verbal communication beyond most cats, or other pets of any sort, she has a very high level of social intelligence with the ability to make you turn from states of anxiety and pointless obsessions to lying on the sofa next to Mollie with a benign smile and a sense of pleasant calm and mutual affection. She possesses the quality of watchful meditation which is infectious. There is no need for self-help books or DVD’s, just sit with Mollie for a while and absorb a sense of magic!

Grandad's quote of the week

"If you are all happy, then I am happy. And if I am happy then everybody is happy!"

Grandad's quote of the week

"Ignorance is no bar to self importance"
- BBC Northanger Abbey (not in the original book)

Grandad's advice for being dumped

When I was a GP and a lady came to see me, red eyed and weeping, worn out with worry, loss of self confidence and a sense of rejection after her husband had departed leaving her with the kids; one of the pieces of advice I would give would be, "Buy yourself a new dress, go to the hairdresser and get a new style and go and see you beautician." It was amazing how quickly they would see that this was a good plan and would return in a week or two more confident, more positive and looking smart.

My next bit of advice would be; look for a better quality chap next time and don’t hurry, there are at least ten ‘duds’ to every high quality chap! You need time to find out if they are any good or not.

Grandad's quote of the week

"Strong views, weakly held"
-Evelyn Waugh

Grandad's crepe suzette

One of my favourite pancake/pudding recipes is crepe suzette;

Ingredients:
Crepes
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons butter, melted
Sauce
- 1 orange
- 75g butter
- 4 or 5 heaped dessert spoons of sugar
- A small amount of brandy (good, but not expensive will do)

1. Make some light pancake batter
2. Peel some zest from the outer surface of the orange with a zester, put it in a frying pan (a small heavy crepe pan is best)
3. Add the butter (How much depends on how many you want to make)
4. Add about 4 or 5 heaped dessert spoonfuls of white sugar
5. Heat gently, stirring the butter and sugar together with the zest. Watch for the gradual caramelisation of the sugar, it will at first start to turn pink then light brown, don’t take it past very light brown
6. Now, whilst stirring constantly, slowly squeeze in the juice of half the orange followed by a slow steady drizzle of brandy
The skill here is slowly change from a hot fat mixture to a hot water (orange+brandy) mixture without bringing the sugar out of solution and forming toffee. It is necessary to slowly increase the heat as you drizzle in the liquids to keep the sugar in a hot dissolved state,
you need just enough brandy/orange juice mix so that when the mixture cools it does not separate out.

If you only want only a small number of crepes then you can fry small pancakes in the mixture itself and serve onto a warm plate or if you want to eke out the mixture for a lot of crepes the fry them separately serve and spoon on the mix.

I do a ‘Caribbean banana dish which is very similar but use brown sugar and rum and a lot more range juice the cook batons of peeled banana into the mix and slowly cook until soft, this dish is very popular at bbq’s

Love grannie and grandad

Grandad's quote of the week

"You don’t get to choose who you love"

Understanding the universe with Grandad

Just as professional theoretical and practical physicists try to understand the nature and origin of the universe so do ordinary folk gleaning what they can from New Scientist, Scientific American, the ordinary press, TV etc. Dissatisfaction with some of the theories as explained by the professionals leads us to make our own hypotheses. There also seems to be some sort of minor ‘turf war’ between the string theorists and others, string theory opponents say that the theory is unprovable and that the string theorists get too much publicity and university funding. What is going on?

We are told that space can be distorted or warped; that space is involved in the force of gravity, perhaps space is altered by the presence of a large mass such that smaller masses are attracted to, or fall towards the larger mass.

Elementary observation tells us that space, throughout the universe, is perfused with all sorts of electromagnetic radiation including light, radio, and other waves of various wavelengths, they criss-cross the universe in every possible direction, presumably at times causing interference patterns. Also atomic and sub-atomic particles, either in isolation or in small or larger groups are in constant swirls of motion around and across the universe, gravitational forces seem to pervade all space.

It is plain that if space can become warped, let alone all other issues, then it must follow that space is ‘something’ and not ‘nothing’. It would appear that in order to understand the universe then we need to not only understand matter and energy but also their relationships with space. The constant velocity of light also indicates, to a naive observer, that perhaps it is not merely propagated through space but propagated by space, the nature of space determining the velocity .
Perhaps a better understanding of space would lead to a better understanding of matter, energy, ‘dark matter’, gravity and the birth of the universe. Perhaps matter [or energy] is a subset of space, ie it is space in busy whirl?

Students are taught in subjects like, ‘The History of Science’, of the old, comprehensively discredited, theory of the ‘ether’ as the pervasive structure of the universe. Whilst the particularities of this theory are now untenable, may it be possible that it needs a partial resurrection? Perhaps it is fear of the possibility of mockery which prevents physicists from studying the ‘ether’ of space more vigorously?

It appears that all matter is in fact forms of energy as photons or various particles, the particles in turn being packets of waves, in complex bundles of compressed energy. Is it not reasonable to conclude that they have no identity without the space in which they exist, in other words they may be forms of space in confined and energetic motion? Just as we have had to learn that matter, mass and energy are the same thing, the different words being used for convenience and by custom only, so we may need to learn that ‘space’ and ‘matter’, are different forms of the same thing or, if they are truly separate they must be mutually dependent, neither can have existence without the other.

If these ideas have only a partial truth then we need to look again at theories as to the origin of the universe. I doubt if I am the only one who believes that there is a lack of beauty in the idea that all of the mass/energy of the universe was at one time confined in a primordial ball which for some reason exploded to fill our present known universe. Almost all other leaps forward in our understanding of the true nature of things have possessed great beauty.
If it is accepted that universes achieve senescence and death as well as birth then it is possible to imagine our universe becoming completely amorphous where nothing changes and nothing moves and thus time does not exist [Time being taken to mean the rate of change of an observed set of changes compared to a reference set] Amorphous states are notoriously unstable; accepting the universality of the conservation of energy means that a truly amorphous state is a condition waiting to explode. Comparison might be made with the formation of powerful weather systems from large masses of air whereby these quiet masses of air gradually become swirling storms,[ the ‘butterfly’s wing’ theory; a very minor semi- random movement sets of a massive weather system into violent action]. There may also be analogy with thin plates of splat cooled pure iron [manufactured for large transformers to reduce eddy currents] if these have been cooled so quickly that the iron has not formed a crystalline structure, it is virtually amorphous, if it is struck a light blow with a pointed instrument a wave of crystallisation passes through the material releasing heat.

The analogy intended to show here is that perhaps the ‘singularity’ which fired off the universe may not have been very powerful at all, the quiet mass of the ‘dead’ universe just needed a jolt, a ‘seed’ to set it off. How about a squirt of energy from some distant giant black hole belonging to quite another universe? The matter thus would not have to be ‘created’ simply changed from one form to another by a wave of Crystallisation. If anyone, in possession of the data, cares to comment on these thoughts it might be interesting to others.

Grandad's quote of the week

"You have to pay the price for who you are"
-EM Forster

Grandad's quote of the week

"If you don’t know what you want, you’ll get what you don’t want"

Grandad's advice on petunias

Petunias need quite a lot of water, plus some liquid fertiliser.

Water them right to the bottom of the pot and put them in a little shade, although in Whitwell they need full sun this may not apply in Brisbane.

A quotation from a lady gardener of about a hundred years ago called Gertrude Jekyll [she is famous in the world of gardening [look her up, study her works and her architect friend Edwin Lutyens], they are both worthy of study, she said “do not give me a plant and then ask where to put it in your garden; give me a place in your garden then ask me what to put there”. That is, in a single sentence, the fundamental of gardening! I suggest that you remember it for ever.

Modern gardening has enlarged and superseded Gertrude but she laid the foundations. [A nice joke but a statement she meant seriously, gardening for the wealthy English, “Every garden, no matter how small, should have at least three acres of woodland.”!!!!
I never tire of making this quote. It makes me laugh still, every time I say it, I laugh at it and agree with it at the same time.

Grandad's advice on herb gardens

(My herb garden)

Things to consider always are: how and where do the plants grow in their natural habitat; nature of the soil, especially natural Ph, [eg limey or peaty soil], well drained or boggy, sandy or clay, amount of nutrients.

Most vegetables are bred to make use of a nutrient rich soil but quite a few naturally come from low nutrient conditions and do not like excess fertilizer.
Herbs like thyme, sage, oregano and rosemary grow on sunny, nutrient poor hillsides, whilst chives and sweet basil need more moisture and feed
It is always worthwhile to research exactly where the wild versions of the herb live naturally[including the base rock of the soil[limestone,granite,sandstone etc]

As a generalisation it is best to water pots so that all of the soil in the pot is thoroughly moist then let that watering be used up before watering again, it is ok to let the pot stand in water for up to an hour to make sure that the compost is well wetted but no herbs will grow in stagnant wet conditions, modifications of care have to be taken into consideration according to the microclimates of a particular garden and different sites within that garden and the latitude of that garden.

I would always have oregano, sage and sweet bay as well as perhaps tarragon in my herb garden. You could also grow chillies outside I would guess (for Australian climate); there is a wide variety of chillies and once you have gotten used to using them you will never go back.

All parts of the coriander plant are edible, seeds, leaves, stems and roots! It is best to grow these in short rows and sow again every few weeks, cut with scissors whilst immature.

Grannie's orange cake

Grannie says that the recipe is easy to do and I can confirm that it gives good results - Grandad

- 2 cups self-raising flour
- 3/4 teacup caster sugar
- 5oz (141g) butter
- 1 teacup mixed dried fruit
- 2 eggs
- grated rind of one orange
- juice of half an orange
- 2 dessertspoonfuls of orange marmalde

1. cream the butter and sugar together
2. add beaten eggs
3. add fruit zest and juice
4. add marmalade
5. slowly fold flour in [seive the flour first to make sure that it is an even powder]
6. stir in the fruit
7. Cook in the middle of a moderate oven; 300 degrees F (148C) for 1 hour

GOOD COOKING!

Derived from ‘Auntie’ Sylvia's recipe

Grannie's favourite cake (can be GF)

Ingredients
- 4 ounces (113g) of self raising flour [or gluten free flour of your choice][if you use GF flour then add a level teasp of baking powder]
- 6 ounces (170g) of ground almonds
- 5 ounces (141g) of butter
- 5 ounces (141g) caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 3 ounces (85g) of mixed dried fruit
- half a teasp of vanilla essence

1. Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together.
2. Beat up the eggs, add whipped egg mixture and flour alternately, so mixture does not curdle, fold in the rest of the flour.
3. Add fruit and lightly stir together.
4. Bake for one and a quarter hours @ 150 degrees C

Thats all folks! Love Grannie and Grandpa

Grandad's spiced potatoes

Ingredients
- Potatoes
- Extra Virgin olive oil
- Fenugreek seed (ground)
- Cumin (ground)
- Seed coriander (ground)
- a few cardamoms
- a black cardamom
- a couple of star anise
- some crushed fresh garlic
- finely chopped fresh ginger
- finely chopped fresh chilli (to taste)
- a little ground black pepper
- a pinch or two of salt
- a heaped tsp of turmeric
- a combination of oils (can change depending on what is available) - groundnut, walnut, roasted sesame


1. Choose a top variety of pots. Preferably not kept in store for too long. Boil with a pinch or so of sea salt until just cooked, they need to still be firm, drain while hot and return to saucepan.

2. Sprinkle the pots with extra virgin olive oil generously and leave to stand. [use the same management for roast pots too]. Now get the spices etc ready. Mix equal parts of fenugreek seed, cumin, and seed coriander put in a grinder [like a coffee grinder that hasn't been used for coffee!] and spin roughly, a few green cardamoms, a black cardamom, a couple of star anise, some crushed fresh garlic, finely chopped fresh ginger, finely chopped fresh chilli pepper [to taste], a little ground black pepper and a pinch or two of salt, a heaped teasp of turmeric.

3. Warm the frying pan add a mixture of oils [according to what you have] eg groundnut oil, walnut oil,roasted sesame oil [only a teasp of this] etc. warm the oil then add the spices gently moving them about, when the spices are part cooked put a saucepan lid on the frying pan and turn the gas right down to cook the ginger, then add the potatoes and gently stir them into the spices, fry for a while then put under the grill until the pots are a pleasant brown but not burnt!!!!!

I like to do pots exactly like this but there is short cut: boil some pots,drain, tip into a hot frying pan with some butter, add couple of teasp of a good quality Madras curry paste and fry! Bob's your uncle! easy peasy. [but I can tell the difference]