I was inspired to try this out by following the trail of a LifeHacker blog post on making macaroni and cheese in a coffee mug to The Family Kitchen blog. My eye was caught by a side panel link to "Microwave Chocolate Peppermint Pudding in 5 Minutes!. I did store the URL away but then when I went to make it, I couldn’t be bothered to check my stash and came up with “Chocolate-Peppermint Pudding” at the FatFree Vegan Kitchen. My final recipe was an adaptation of the latter and took more than 5 minutes, but not much longer. The result is something that tastes an awful lot like After Eight mints! Note that this is gluten-free and can be vegan.

Time & Results

• Preparation time: 5 – 10 minutes
• Cooking time: 5 – 10 minutes
• Servings: 2

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch ([1])
• 250 ml (¼ cup) sugar [2]
• 375 ml (1 ½ cups) milk [3]
• 1.25 ml (quarter teaspoon) peppermint extract
• Peppermint sticks for garnish (optional)

Preparation

1. In a 1-litre (4-cup) microwavable bowl, blend the cocoa powder, cornstarch, and sugar together.
2. Slowly, while stirring well, mix in the milk. Stir until most of the cocoa powder seems blended in. Some may seem to remain but this will mix in during cooking.
3. Microwave on high power for 1 -minute, then stir well.
4. Repeatedly heat for 30 seconds and stir until the mixture boils, watching carefully to ensure it doesn’t boil over. The mixture will gradually thicken as it cooks.
5. When it boils, heat it for another 30 seconds, stopping the microwave if it threatens to boil over.
6. Add the peppermint extract, stir the pudding well, and ladle into 2 serving bowls.
7. Garnish with peppermint sticks, if desired.

Notes

1. Cornstarch is known as “cornflour” in the United Kingdom.  ↩

2. I used caster (raw) sugar, but regular white granulated sugar would be fine. FatFree Vegan Kitchen suggests you can halve the sugar and add 2 tablespoons of stevia or other sweetener instead.  ↩

3. To make this vegan, use fat-free soymilk, rice milk, or any other non-dairy milk.  ↩

Personal Notes

The FatFree Vegan Kitchen notes you can experiment with other flavours, like orange extract or even peanut butter, or even cook it on the stove. I didn’t try any of those variations. I did, however, put my pudding in the fridge to cool. The consistency later seemed a little rubbery. Perhaps I should have left it to cool to room temperature? Nevertheless, it was tasty!

I’m a science fiction junkie. I don’t remember the first science fiction book I ever read, but I do remember starting very young. My father gave me all his science fiction paperbacks, many bought during the 70s when he was on the road a lot for work. His collection included Heinlein, Simak, Clark, and tons of Asimov. As a teenager, I expanded that collection significantly by trading in my grandmother’s Harlequin Romance novels at the local used bookstore at increasingly outrageous exchange rates until they wouldn’t take any more. My choices often were anthologies. They had more pages and there seemed to be a ton of thick choices.

I’m still a science fiction aficionado although I’ve “traded” in my paperback buying habits in favour of unabridged audiobooks and e-books. To that end, I ran across the following earlier this year and I thought I’d share: Free Science Fiction, Fantasy & Dystopian Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman, and Beyond. This lists a variety of formats, including text and audio–alas, not for every book included. You might find it worthwhile to check out. Enjoy!

As a self-confessed scifi short story junkie, the most vivid stories that have stuck with me have been short stories. For example, Sandkings by (surprising to me!) George R. R. Martin creeped me out immensely and I didn’t see the corresponding The Outer Limits episode. You’ve heard the aphorism that people resemble their pets? This story riffs on the reverse, showing what happens when our “pets”, insectoid aliens, caricaturize us, flaws and all. I wonder how much better we’d be as people if we all had our own Sandkings putting up an incontrovertible mirror?

Which science fiction stories have most stuck in your mind?

However, it does leave me wondering how to structure this particular type of sharing. Most of my circles were set up around my various interests or social groups. As surprising as this may sound, for a person who seems rather open (or maybe I misperceive myself?), I feel I’m intensely private with a very, very small circle of people I consider friends. I’m therefore not sure how to share this particular thing. Yes, with that small group of people—who don’t even have a Google+ circle!—but I do want it to go a little wider than that. There’s a line to be drawn somehow between privacy and over-familiarity when sharing. Things to make you go, “Hmmm…”

Niall Sclater posted an article on his blog yesterday about personality and tweet clouds.  Inspired, I ran used Wordle of my top used words. TweeetStats, like many text analysis tools, uses a stop list, removing common words like “and”, “the”, “a”, etc. TweetStats gave me the option of additionally removing the names of people to whom I was replying, so terms like “@psychemedia” and “@AJCann” have also been excluded. It could use some better stemming. “Courses” and “course” appear as separate entries, as do “game” and “games”.

Credit: Screenshot by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Generic license
Image: Graph of Michelle’s Twitter client usage. Most common is Twitter for iPhone at over 1500 tweets, followed by Syrinx (for the Mac) at 1000 and then Tweetie for the Mac.

Looking at the generated stats, I apparently reply a lot.  54% of my tweets, according to TweetStats, have been replies.  I’m not sure the data is complete though.  There’s a big gap in the chart (see image below), making it look like I didn’t have any tweets between January 2009 and January 2010.  That’s definitely wrong! Missing an entire year’s worth of tweets likely influences my tweet cloud considerably. I suspect the missing bits are due to restrictions that Twitter has on the amount of requests for information that can be sent. I am not convinced it even reflects all of this year’s tweets. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could comment on that.

Although I tried Twitter for the iPhone for a day or two, I never really used it that much. I believe that Tweetie, which I did use, got rebranded as Twitter for iPhone, so my past usage of that client. The interface usage statistics also include “Syrinx”, which I don’t remember using beyond opening it up. I certainly used Tweetie for Mac far more than I’ve used Syrinx. I suppose it’s possible that’s another renamed Twitter client. Prior to using Tweetie for the Mac, I used Twhirl. That doesn’t show at all and I used that for a long time. Another victim of the missing time? Possibly.

Credit: Screenshot by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Generic license
Image: Michelle’s timeline of tweets since 2008.

Examining the word cloud at the top of this post, I obviously spend too much time marking or talking about marking.  To be fair, some could be assessment principles or assessment research.  After all, learning, students, and research are quite high too. That said, other than I’m Canadian with a penchant for “good” “think”ing, what does this say about my personality? Does it really reflect my obsessions? I do think a lot, but I also read a lot and play games. They feature in there, but not as much as I would expect. I maintain multiple Twitter accounts, so perhaps my interests have been split somewhat and this main account distributes my interests more evenly, making it harder to represent me on the basis of my tweets.

I see I am stereotypically Canadian; “thanks” figures quite prominently. I also share and acknowledge the words of others, because “rt”, short for retweet, frequently occurs. Something is interesting from what doesn’t appear: negative terms. “good” and “interesting” are there, but words of complaint or dislike or other negative emotions do not feature often enough to show up on the word cloud. That suggests I am a positive person. I would disagree with that. I think I can be highly critical and frequently negative, but I tend to keep it to myself rather than impulsively blurting it out on Twitter.

Are you what you tweet? What does a tweet cloud reveal about your personality and interests?

Galileo and Copernicus, two Norwegian Forest Cats, came to live with us late last year as kittens.  They love the outdoors and will spend hours outside on their own, coming back periodically for attention and food.  This is unlike our older two cats, Kitty 1 and Kitty 2.  They’ll go outside, but often only if we accompany them.  Otherwise, the older cats are happy to be hanging out in the house where we are.    Local residents of Lee Green (Lewisham) were startled today to see me out walking Galileo and Copernicus.  More accurately, I was walking, and they were bounding behind or in front of me.  They’re incredibly well behaved.  Their penchant for following us is a bit of a problem when we’re going shopping or taking the train.  We often find ourselves being tailed and need to scoop up a cat and return him to the house.  Still, I’d rather have it this way.  It’s much more interesting.

China Moon Ten-Spice

Makes 3/4 cup

This recipe is taken from China Moon Cookbook by Barbara Tropp (©1992) Why have ten spices instead of five? To quote Barbara Trollop, cookbook author, “I can’t say, except to suggest that the result is doubly good.”

Ingredients: Whole Spices

• 2 tablespoons fennel seeds
• 10 star anise, broken into points
• 2 tablespoons Szechwan peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
• 3/4 teaspoon whole cloves
• 3/4 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1.5 teaspoons black peppercorns

Ingredients: Ground Spices

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Preparation

1. Toast the whole spices together in a small dry skillet over low heat, stirring and adjusting the heat so that the spices toast without burning. Stir until the spices are fully fragrant and the fennel seeds and lighter-coloured spices are lightly browned, and 5 minutes. Stir in the ground spices.
2. Using a spice grinder or a clean coffee grinder, grind the mixture finely. Store in a tightly covered jar.

Personal Notes

I have to admit that I haven’t tried this yet. I don’t have a spice grinder anymore either. I had an old-fashioned hand-kranked coffee grinder that I’d bought at a flea market in Zürich, but it’s still in Zürich. Perhaps I’ll have to ask my friend there to ship it back to me. It would be great for this. In the meantime, I’ll try it with a mortar and pestle.</p

I’m no longer married, so I’m not sure that “going out on ‘date’ night with my ‘spouse’” applies exactly, but I still think it’s a good practice, so I had decided to carry it over into my new relationship.

We started off fairly well in achieving this. I set aside Tuesday evenings as “Tuesday Evening Date Night” and then moved it to Wednesday when we had a regular Tuesday evening commitment. That then was shunted to Friday evenings as Wednesday developed a regular activity elsewhere.

Then things went by the wayside. I’ve just gone through a very, very busy period of intense work and buying a house. I admit it slipped. I’m resolved to try to be better and to commit to making a time for this each week. I’m including an additional conditional too: it should involve leaving the house at least once a month. World of Warcraft and movies snuggled together on the couch are fine, but let’s add some variety too!