Lemon sorbet

Some time ago a friend quoted the old saying about when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I replied that I make sorbet. She said that wouldn't do for her as she's allergic to eggs. I mentioned that I don't use egg in my sorbet and she asked for the recipe. Having typed it up I thought I might as well reproduce it here.

Citrus sorbet (eggless)



Ingredients

3 or 4 lemons or limes, preferably unwaxed
granulated sugar
water

This recipe is based on the one in Larousse Gastronomique, but adjusted as a result of much experimentation. The secret of making a sorbet without using egg whites is to add enough sugar to lower the freezing point significantly. Larousse specifies a target density of 1.1697 (spurious precision there) but uses such a large quantity of water that a lot of sugar has to be added later on.

1/ Weigh the fruit, in grammes.

2/ Make a syrup.
For every 100g of fruit, use 30g of sugar and 20ml of water. Put sugar and water in a small pan and bring to the boil, stirring continuously. The sugar probably won't dissolve until it's nearly boiling. Boil gently to make a clear syrup. Stand the pan in a bowl of cold water to cool.

3/ Finely grate the zest then squeeze the juice from the fruit. You should have about 40ml of juice for every 100g of fruit. If you've got a very different amount it might be worth making more or less syrup.

4/ Mix the zest, juice and cooled syrup.

[Dons white coat] Now, here comes the science bit.

5/ Weigh an empty measuring jug. Pour the mixture into the jug and weigh again. Divide the difference in weight by the volume of mixture to get its density. This should be in the region of 1.17, a bit over is better than a bit under. If the density is too high, stir in a little water and measure again. If it's too low, stir in a little sugar and measure again. You can guess how much sugar or water to add - 10ml of water adds 10ml to the volume and 10g to the weight, 10g of sugar adds 10g to the weight and very little to the volume.

6/ Pour the mixture into a suitable container and place in the deep freeze. Stir it every half hour or so, particularly as it begins to get slushy. You could fold in some beaten egg white at this point, but you don't need to.

7/ Remove from the freezer half an hour or so before serving.

8/ Serve as it is, or with a sprig of mint and a dash of vodka poured over it to make a 'colonel'.

plustek OpticFilm 7300 film scanner

I'm not an avid photographer, but have still managed to accumulate over 2800 35mm slides before I bought my first digital camera in September 2003. These have been sitting in a couple of shoe boxes, slowly decaying, for up to 30 years. A few weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and transfer them to modern, indestructible, digital form.

A bit of web searching suggested there are three classes of film scanners on the market: cheap & nasty, twice the price but OK, and 30 times the price & out of my league. I soon decided against the cheap & nasty category. If I'm going to spend many hours scanning all my slides, I'd rather not have to do it twice.

The mid range in scanners appears to be dominated by plustek's OpticFilm series. After comparing the different models, I chose the OpticFilm 7300 model as it has slightly better dynamic range and is faster than the base models, and I feel I can do without the infra red dust detection of the more expensive models.

Since buying the scanner I've scanned just over 500 of my slides, starting with the very first picture I took with my Zenith E - a big, clunky, Russian made SLR I bought in 1978. I'd previously catalogued all my slides, giving each one a 4 digit number, so scanning them in order seems the most sensible way to proceed. The picture above is slide 0038, taken in my parents' garden in 1978.

Now would seem to be a good time to record some of my experiences with the slide scanner. Overall I'm quite impressed, but there are a few significant annoyances that do impede the process of scanning.

Mechanically the unit is pleasingly solid, and the slide holder grips the slides firmly while being easy to load and unload. However, when sliding the holder into the scanner it is quite difficult to stop in the right place. There are dents in the side of the holder that engage with something spring loaded inside the scanner, but the action is not nearly positive enough. Quite often the prescan shows the slide to be incorrectly positioned and a nudge is needed, followed by a repeat prescan.



After the prescan, the edge of the image area has to be set. The SilverFast SEplus software supplied with the scanner has an automatic function to do this, but it quite often fails, particularly with under exposed slides or if the image contains strong straight lines near the edge. I do realise that finding the ragged edges of a scanned slide is a non-trivial image processing problem, especially as the prescan image is quite noisy, but I'm surprised at how often it fails. Even when it succeeds, it consistently treats the top and bottom edges of a slide differently, as in the example above.

What really annoys me though is that the software darkens the area outside the image frame, thus hiding any picture area that's missing. This makes manual adjustment a two stage process - drag and drop the boundary line beyond the slide edge (to undarken the image) then drag and drop it to the actual edge. I think the software should lighten the area outside the boundary to make any missed image more visible, not darken it to make it less visible. It's a diagnostic tool, not a slide show application.

After setting the image area, there are numerous controls to adjust the scan brightness, contrast, gamma, colour balance and so on. These are much more powerful than I need, but may be useful if I rescan a chosen few slides that merit extra care. These slides would probably also get the noise-reducing, time-consuming, multi-scan treatment as well. For now, I just use the auto-adjust function, occasionally choosing a different "image type" such as "evening" if it gives a better looking result.

One curiosity about the software is the choice of positive, negative, or Kodachrome film types. All the slides I've scanned so far have been Kodachrome or Ektachrome, and the Kodachrome setting has given a better colour balance than the positive setting. I haven't attempted to scan any negatives.

Having already catalogued my slides in a database application, I decided to reuse this data to label the slides. After some hours experimenting with different Python libraries to process EXIF and IPTC data I finished up with a script that seems to do the job. If you follow the link to flickr from one of the above pictures you'll see the description and tags that were automatically extracted by flickr from the image's EXIF and IPTC data.

What I did on my holiday, part 3

Our hotel was almost deserted on Monday morning, in stark contrast to the previous day. We checked out nice and early and went into Bouillon for a bit of shopping. The only supermarket in town is a branch of colruyt. I don't know the pecking order of Belgian supermarkets, but colruyt appears to be at the budget end. They did have some Luxembourg wines and Duvel beer though, which is all we wanted. At the checkout we found they don't take VISA cards - luckily we still had enough cash on us.

After a trip to the bank to top up our cash reserves we wandered around Bouillon for the last time. We also bought a big box of real chocolates and some local beer in a gift pack with a glass.

The drive to Brussels was largely uneventful, although the sat-nav took us down some rather narrow shopping streets in the southern suburbs. We arrived at the Cantillon brewery museum just before lunch time.

We had hoped to find a nice little bar to have lunch in. However, that part of Brussels has a largely immigrant community and bars were thin on the ground. There were a few sandwich shops, but we settled on a Lebanese fast food joint, and had a couple of delicious pizzas which were very good value.

Returning to the brewery we did the self-guided tour. As on my previous visit more than ten years ago, and when we arrived that morning, there was a school trip having the guided tour. I hope Belgian schoolchildren realise how lucky they are to have such interesting visits! After the obligatory tasting I bought a dozen bottles and a T-shirt. I bought 3 each of Grand Cru Bruocsella (75cl), Gueuze (37.5cl), Kriek (37.5cl) and Rosé de Gambrinus (37.5cl).

On my previous visit I bought a lot more than this, but the UK pound wasn't quite so weak back then. These are beers for keeping. A few weeks before the holiday Sarah and I drank my last bottle of Rosé de Gambrinus. Although it was over ten years old it still tasted perfect, with immense depth of flavour.

Leaving Brussels before rush hour, we drove to the little town of Ittre where we stayed our final night. We had a swim in the hotel's pool, then had a look round the town. It was very quiet.

That evening we went to a restaurant called l'Abreuvoir. This was a stunningly good choice. We were lucky to get a table, as it was almost fully booked. (A couple who arrived shortly after us were turned away.) There was a written monthly menu, but the better option was the daily menu, which was recited by the waitress. This cost a mere 30€, including wine. The food was imaginative, fresh, and tasty. The service was friendly and efficient. This was not only the best meal of the holiday, it was the best meal out Sarah and I have had in years.

We came home the next day, after looking round Bergues (where we also had lunch) and shopping in Calais. All in all, a most enjoyable short break.