who only by moving can balance

"By the way," said A., "the milk's starting to turn, so if you want to make cheese or something...?"

I have also, today, made a Mohnpotitze (Lidl is currently selling approximately the correct thing as, bafflingly, Stollen with poppy seed filling; it is nothing like Stollen, I have no idea what they think they're doing, etc etc etc) where I rather fucked up the structural integrity but am otherwise pleased with it, and a set of Experimental Macaron to use up my various egg whites left over from other cooking. There's lime and a little cinnamon in the macarons themselves, and I've made a coconut cream-chocolate ganache, so my baby brother will theoretically be able to eat them tomorrow, though he'll probably turn his nose up at them. This is particularly exciting to me because I followed abondgirlsfooddiary_feed's recipe, i.e. baby's first attempt at Italian meringue, and (a) I feel accomplished, (b) these are undeniably the most macaron-ish macarons I have made to date, and (c) while it is true that having freehanded them all with teaspoons I did end up with one-and-a-half dozen approximately matching pairs, if I'm going to be doing this again (which I rather suspect I will, if only to use up the whites from my adventures in pasta making) I really do think I want to acquire a piping bag in addition to the syringe-with-nozzles I liberated from the mouldering ancestral pile this week.

(... I should perhaps explain about the Mohnpotitz. It's an Austrian food, and as with a fair bit of Austrian the "Potitze" part of the word is actually a loan from Slavic; basically, it's an enriched yeast dough wrapped roly-poly around a poppyseed-sugar-rum filling. You can also do it with walnuts. I seem to recall the walnuts being easier, but it's been some time since I last made Nusspotitze and so that might just be an effect of this version actually being dairy-free.)

1. I got to the end of this Graun article on how to make meringue before I clocked the title. (I am having an Erudite Discussion about Meringue on the book of faces, you see, or at least a discussion about whether or not they ought be chewy and how one goes about achieving effects various. It is a source of some frustration to me that Molecular Gastronomy, a copy of which deborah_c gave me for... a birthday Some Time Ago, mentions meringues only in the context of putting them in a bell jar you then PUMP ALL THE AIR OUT OF, because it is fascinating on a great many topics -- how to make pastry with chocolate! the physics of boiling dumplings until they rise to the surface! -- and mysteriously lacking in tedious detail on this one.)

2. I have decided that macaroni cheese is much improved by steaming a head of cauliflower over the top of the pasta water (chopped into florets & the stalk into chunks) and mixing it in. This is perhaps obvious but it had not previously occurred to me, and I am a Fan.

3. Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for roasted sweet potatoes and chickpeas, and linked onward to an article about the perplexing USois use of "yam" and "sweet potato". I am enlightened. (I will promptly forget it again, no doubt, and discover it once more In The Future and be delightened again, but I can't quite see this as a downside.)

4. ... and a bonus, edited in post-facto because my mum just put it on facebook: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's potato peel soup. YOU'RE WELCOME.