Another night in which I could not find sleep. It was so bright outside that some of the pics look as if they have been taken during dusk or dawn but it was actually more around midnight.
Every now and then I am asked for one of my recipes which is why I will start to publish some of them on my blog. In general I am more interested in a result than in complicated processes which is why I often alter the process of cooking into a more convenient and less time consuming way as long as the result stays the same.
When we moved to Australia we suddenly had lemon trees in our garden. Being a big fan of lemons I started to make all kind of things from our lemons. Here comes my recipe for Lemon Curd.
Ingredients:
75 g Butter
225g Sugar
3 Eggs
3 Lemons
For the preparation I use a metal bowl which fits onto one of my pots in which I heat water. The heating over a hot water bath has the advantage that the content is heated slower and more even.
Preparation:
Once the gelling process is far enough you can take to bowl from the water bath and let it cool down. Stir from time to time to avoid that a skin builds up on the top.
If you intend to fill the bowl I am using in the picture you have to multiply all ingredients times 4x !
Enjoy!
You probably always wanted to know what I am doing at night when I cannot sleep. Here is the answer … I go out and make photos.
My latest toy.
Brute sound but very enjoyable ride.
The last days with all these disasters in Japan made me think about an article I wrote nearly 30 years ago. I think it must have been about 2 years before the Chernobyl. I was studying physics and wrote an article in which I collected arguments why mankind should conquer space and how to achieve this goal.
The perhaps funny thing today is that at this time, despite the discussion and my personal engagement against nuclear power, this was not the original impulse for my desire to write this article. Actually I started thinking about our global situation after I read the book ‘Worlds in Collision’ from Immanuel Velikovsky. Not that I think our cosmos is as chaotic and dangerous as he writes in his book but there is a considerable chance that a huge meteorite might hit the earth changing everything here.
Once the first thoughts in this direction are done more and more pieces get visible painting an unsettling picture.
The scenario splits up into two groups of dangers.
First there are global catastrophes:
and many more perhaps individually not fatal catastrophes which might boost each other when coming together (as we can just see in Japan).
Second there are the man made dangers:
only to name some of them.
Now we can start to argue about how to prevent these catastrophes from coming.
In my original article I started to develop a quite futuristic approach which was probably the reason why the article has never been published.
To leave Earth and go into space is not a technical problem, it is an economic problem. It needs a lot of money to build the first stations in orbit so that considerable amounts of people can start living in space. Money nobody wants to spend at the moment because there are always more urgent, political motivated projects which have to be funded. No politician and no economic leader is interested in plans which will take perhaps hundreds of years, will be a long struggle without immediate return on invest and low actual visibility to support their position.
So probably we will stay bound to earth until all needed resources are spent for other, more urgent, projects and we finally have to realize that we succeeded in making our earth inhabitable but have no means any more to go somewhere else.
What is to do? If our main problem lies in the economy perhaps we should start there. Rethinking how our society is built and which our common goals should be would be a good start. But after all the problem will come back to us personally. We have to change ourselves. Our attitude about fighting against each other to become the leader of the pack, our focus in economic success. We have to overcome our animalistic heritage. And it is exactly this point where mankind will be standing at a crossroads.
Recommended reading: Elena Filatova’s report about Chernobyl
