Make your own low-fat curds and ricotta

I got this from a recipe for "low fat ricotta" at minimins.com — but this is actually just what my ancestors would have called "curds" masquerading under a posh name.

The recipe is very quick and cheap to make, but as there are no preservatives it will only keep a day or two in fridge.

You need:

• 4 pints 2% milk;
• 2-4 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar.

Bring the milk to just to below boiling point, so that little bubbles are around all the edge but not a rolling boil.

Add the lemon juice or vinegar. Wait until curds form — this will happen quite quickly. Strain the curds through cheesecloth. When finished draining, squeeze the curds and wrap the cheesecloth fairly tightly around them. Put it in the fridge with a plate on top and a tin on top of that, to weigh it down. After about an hour it will be ready to use. You may now add salt if you wish.

Note that the liquid that you drained off is actually "whey", and had many uses in traditional British cooking. It is nutritious drunk as-is, and has been found to stimulate production of insulin in type-2 diabetics. Interestingly, whey is the actual start point for making real ricotta!

"Ricotta", you see, simply means "re-cooked", referring to the fact that the milk is cooked once to separate the curds (mostly casein) from the whey, and then again to separate out the ricotta (mostly albumin and globulin) from the remaining liquid. Without further ado, here's how to do it.

Allow the whey to become more acidic by fermentation, by letting it sit for 12–24 hours at room temperature. Now heat the acidified whey to near boiling point. The combination of low pH and high temperature denatures the remaining protein and causes it to precipitate out, forming a fine curd. Once cooled, separate the curd by passing it through a fine cloth — your cheesecloth will probably do, but a piece of muslin might be better. I don't have times or quantities for this part of the process, so experimentation is the order of the day!

The benefits of Pinot Noir

According to this article, Pinot Noir is "the grape of choice for the calorie-restricted set, rich in anti-aging resveratrol".

HP open-sources webOS

I have to confess I didn't see this one coming!

I was fairly sure that the most likely outcome of HP's strategic review of webOS under Meg Whitman would be to keep it for their "other" products — printers, basically. Second most likely was, I thought, a trade sale to someone who might want their own OS and had the resources — of talent, money and time — to really make something of it; Amazon perhaps (although that boat has likely sailed), Barnes and Noble maybe if they really had the cash (as it might provide a way out of their patent spat with Microsoft), or one of the Chinese telecom companies or tablet manufacturers.

But it was not to be. Presumably HP explored the possibility of a trade sale, and either found that there were no realistic buyers, or decided that there was a better option.

One fascinating possibility is that open sourcing webOS really is the best option. Certainly, this way HP can continue to use it for their non-personal equipment, so it's at least as good as the first possibility raised above. Second, if HP really do continue to invest time and energy developing it, as they apparently are promising to do then I'd be surprised if the likes of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, yes and even Samsung, HTC and (whisper it!) Nokia don't at least take a very careful look at what's suddenly become available. There's a whole class of Android manufacturers who are chafing at being beholden to Google, at having to take Google cloud apps and Google search services, at taking their turns to be picked for the year's Google phone — and it's the big boys who feel this most keenly, not the also rans.

One has to feel that maybe HP have found a revenue stream here. Not from the OS itself, because they've just open sourced it, and not from any associated cloud services or app store because HP don't have them, but from something that's becoming of looming importance now: patents. Dangle an open source webOS as bait, and then sell the patent protection necessary to actually use it to the manufacturers who pick it up. There's a distinct possibility of cramping Android's style with that strategy.

A lot depends of course, on the details. On the open source community's acceptance of webOS as a living platform for one thing: it has to be a project with lots of vitality, like the Linux kernel; it mustn't fall into navel-gazing and obscurantism, like Mozilla. On the specifics of what HP contributes and what it doesn't, for another: an OS kit that can't actually run on anything without substantial and undocumented porting effort would be of benefit to few.

Update
Reading around the web, most pundits seem to favour the cynical interpretation: HP are just using the fig-leaf of open-source to dump webOS without actually having to admit that they are doing so. Comments (to these sorts of article) are a different matter though, with many people making the point that, irrespective of HP's own motivations, the future of webOS (or parts of it) may still be somewhat bright.

If only the Germans...

More and more I'm coming across articles, or comments to articles, that essentially say, "in the short term, everything would be fine if only the Germans would backstop all the peripheral European debt", as though that were some kind of rational thing for the Germans to do. Usually such people are either hopeless lefties / Keynesians (essentially indistinguishable in this case), which goes some way to explaining why I see them more in comments to articles rather than in the articles themselves, or they are academics and no one really expects what they say to make very much sense in the real world (one is reminded of that Baudelaire poem about seagulls: Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher).

Now the short term, like the poor, will always be with you — but eventually the medium and long terms really do arrive! (Incidentally, why do Keynesians always love to justify their position by making that quote, you know the one: "In the long run, we are all dead"? Have none of them realised that KEYNES HAS BEEN DEAD FOR SIXTY-ODD YEARS?) It does no one any good, when the long run is hammering at your door with every sign of breaking it down, to continue to bleat that it would be more convenient to do something else in the short term.

The real reason that the Germans aren't going to guarantee peripheral European debt (unless Angela Merkel goes criminally irresponsible on them) is because they can think past the next sentence. Let's see how that thought process might go shall we? 1) the markets are going crazy because they think that the peripheral countries are likely to default, therefore 2) we should guarantee their debt ... and ... ? At this point, it's obvious that the commenter thinks that the peripheral countries will eventually pay the Germans back, at least that's the most charitable interpretation I can come up with. But if that were the case, the markets wouldn't be worried about it, at least not to the same degree. So what these people are really saying is that the Germans should guarantee the debt, so that it's Germany who'll be left shouldering the costs of the default and not the markets.

Because, and let's be clear about this, what would Germany get from the peripheral countries in return for their backstopping the debt? Promises of reform? Promises to do better in future? Well these countries are all still running current account deficits, they are already broke in fact if not in law, and they are only getting more broke. And they have already made promises, lots of them: that's what their bonds are, promises. And if they default, their promises literally aren't worth the paper they are written on.

As the calls for Germany to guarantee peripheral debt grow, so does my gut rumble that it may be Germany, not the peripheral countries, that exits the Euro.

The Eurozone: seventeen countries divided by a single currency

Reading an interesting article on VoxEU.org which reveals that, inside the Eurozone, "national supervisors require banks not to transfer cash out of their country so as not to be exposed in the event that the crisis degenerates".

I had no idea that that was happening. Though of course I had heard, along with everybody else, that European banks are entirely unwilling to extend credit to peripheral-country banks generally and selected weaker banks in core countries, I had assumed that that was simply every-man-for-himself prudentialism. Though that news is stunning enough, it's the conclusion the author draws from it that had me admiring its neatness:

We have arrived at the paradox of having a single currency with 17 bank and public debt markets segmented by national borders, charging their customers different interest rates. Such a situation cannot last long.

An unsettling day

First the dustbins went missing, now they are back, all without any explanation.

Thursday night I had remembered to put out the main bin and the recycling bin, just as well as I'd forgotten the recycling bin two weeks previously (it's on a two week cycle) and it was full. Friday I forgot to bring them in, so this morning (Saturday) I went out to get them and they were gone.

As soon as I got back in the house I fired off an email to the local council, asking if they'd taken them away for any reason, and asking what I should do if they'd been stolen. I saw mention of a £35 charge for lost or missing bins, presumably per bin, so that didn't put me in a very good mood.

Then just now, about 00:40 Sunday morning, I heard the rumbling noise of bin wheels in my drive. I rushed to the door, put the hall light and the outside light on, and unlocked the door. Two locks, the second one a little difficult to get the key in properly, it must have taken me about 30 seconds to get out the door. Predictably, by the time I got out the bins were back in their accustomed places, and there was no one to be seen. I even went to the end of the drive and looked up and down the avenue: nothing, no one, just the wind in the trees and the yellow sodium lights; it was like some mid-western ghost town so I hurried back in.

Worse, I'd been watching a rather creepy horror story on TV, so I had to check every room in the house before I could settle down. I texted one of my friends, and he said I should look in the bins for evidence: what if they'd been used to transport a body or something? Thank you George, that's just what I need right now! Still, I'll be out there in the morning, looking; as of tonight though, I'm not going out there again for love nor money.

Leaving the Euro

I remember when they were first elaborating what eventually became the Euro. There was a competition to name the new currency. My own thoughts tended towards some kind of derivative of "Mark". Not only was that the name of Europe's strongest currency, there were also antecedents in British history — indeed, much of Europe employed "marks" of one kind or another as units of value.

Another of my favourites was "ecu": there was of course an ECU (European Currency Unit) at that very time, in a kind of virtual foreshadowing of the common currency. There had also been several écu coins in French history, the first one as long ago as 1266. The word is related to Portuguese escudo, ultimately from Latin "scutum" (a shield) and has a long history in the realm of currency.

"Just as long as they don't call it the 'Euro'," I thought, cringing at the very idea (I did, I swear it, I was that psychic person), "that would be so horribly self-important and bureaucratic." Perhaps I meant "beurocratic". But when I thought of how those sophisticated European elites would sneer if the Americans ever decided to rename the Dollar the 'Americo', I realised that our clever EC politicians would never do anything so hopelessly gauche.

---

There's much speculation at the moment as to whether one or more nations might leave the Euro in the near future, and if they did, how exactly that might happen. The modalities, as the French say. A few clarifying considerations might be in order.

Firstly, what is a Euro? Unfortunately I don't have one in front of me, but I do have twenty pounds, and we shall have to be content with that. If you look at the top of the front of a twenty pound note you will see the words "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of twenty pounds". The same idea is true of all our modern currencies, they are promises to pay. To pay what? For that, we need to remember a little history.

Nowadays when we think of currency we tend to think of coins and notes as being more or less the same thing, one perhaps a bit heavier and bulkier than the other. Historically though, they were very different things. Coins were essentially lumps of valuable metal: gold, silver, and for the cheap seats, copper, bashed flat and stamped with the mark (there it is again) of a reputable treasury to guarantee its weight and purity. Notes on the other hand were originally bankers' receipts, handed out when traders deposited their bags of coins with them. They were promises to (re)pay the coins. It was the coins that were valuable. The notes, insofar as they had value, had it because they guaranteed that you could convert them into coins.

Notes of course were a lot more convenient for trading with than coins, especially for large transactions. So despite the fact that there was what we nowadays call "credit risk" associated with them (if the banker went bust and couldn't give you the coins, the notes would then be worthless) they caught on. They were also freely tradeable: if I gave a twenty pound note to my butcher, he could take it to the bank and receive his twenty gold coins without having to prove either his identity or mine. That makes them bearer instruments and further increases their fungibility with coinage.

It's sometimes surprising to remember that this system remained essentially intact up until the early 1970s, when Nixon unilaterally revoked the convertibility of the dollar into gold. What was especially clever about this was that he did it in the context of the then prevailing Bretton Woods System, which defined the dollar as the currency that other currencies were valued against, thus more or less legally obliging everyone else to go along with it, much to the fury of some of the European contingents.

That's really the point when everything changed. Instead of having to redeem their notes in precious metals, central bankers were now able to take your twenty pound note off you and replace it with ... another twenty pound note! Since they were no longer bound by the necessity of converting their essentially worthless paper back into gold, they could print as much of it as they wished, and this, in very large part, they promptly did (neatly illustrating the tension between a currency's dual functions as a unit of exchange and a store of value).

It's no accident that at the very same time as this happened, nations all over the world quietly retired their silver and copper coins and replaced them with almost-worthless substitutes. After all, you can't have twenty shillings being worth more than a pound note can you? You can't have arbitrage between the various components of one currency, can you? If you look at the Royal Mint today you'll see that they are selling a coin with a two pound face value for nine hundred and ninety five of the paper equivalents. That's the scale of the arbitrage that would now be available!

The point
Yes, now to the point of this post. Which is that even today, even inside the Eurozone, there is something that is remarkably similar to the old, national currency note. It's a government-backed promise to pay, that's freely tradeable between third parties. They are issued by country governments sovereignly, and the worth of each government's issue floats freely against all the others. I'm referring, of course, to the currency note's "big brothers", the T-bills and government bonds.

It's remarkable indeed, that in the context of the various European governments' eagerness to remove the ability of financial markets to arbitrage between them, of their eagerness to hide the effective international wealth transfers that were so cruelly exposed in the bad old days of fixed exchange rates, when the richer European countries had to repeatedly intervene in markets to prop up the currencies of their poorer neighbours, that they neglected to remove the one class of instrument that allowed markets to see exactly that, and to do exactly that.

So, in a sense, there still are independent national pseudo-"currencies" within Europe, and I wonder if more could be made of them, in order to relieve the pressure that a common currency creates? For example, Governments could legislate that their bonds could be used to pay taxes. Ok, that's not really a winner: of all parties to a transaction, governments are the most likely not to want to be paid in something as worthless as their own paper. But as a means of retiring their issuance, possibly at a discount, it might be considered. Or how about legislating to make a government's bonds legal tender for the settlement of all transactions in its territory that are over, say, 100,000 Euros? And of course, once you can force people to take your worthless bonds, you may as well make them irredeemable — "consols" as they are called.

In just such a way, by just such a series of steps (and more), European governments could surreptitiously introduce something that was more and more like a freely-floating, national currency, without ever quite leaving the Euro. A way of effectively letting off some steam, without losing face.

The other thing they could do of course, is to say to international bond markets what they said to their own populations in 1971: that the only thing they will redeem their notes for is more of the same. That's effectively what they've been doing for decades anyway, by consistently rolling their debt over from one year to the next — a sure sign, for any student of history, that the next step would be bankruptcy. That would be much more likely to provoke an outcry from the markets than the creeping speciation of bonds, but maybe people really are that stupid.