Here's some random stuff for you to read:

Hoofprints Through Time - a blog about hoofed animals and their history (and also their current problems, concerning old breeds).

A post about the Victorian Hangover (which is not the hangover that you get from drinking too much).

A German article about the recent find of a 17th century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea.

 

Here's a short Pixar film about... well, about fitting in, or making oneself fit in, changing oneself, and changing things. If you've been the only woman in a group of men, some things might be familiar...


I hope you'll enjoy it, too!

I've sort of stopped living under a rock in some regards, all since this pandemic thingie really started to take off - I'm now actually following the news (or at least some of it). Which means I'm also looking at the numbers. Or should I say The Numbers?

And ah, they are not pretty, not in Germany, not anywhere else except maybe in China, where things seem to be all under control for now. It's weird, to me, how there's this rise in new infections everywhere and yet, if you look at German people and German news, a lot of voices can be heard that say "don't restrict this or that now, or our economy won't make it".

For instance, there's a ban on renting hotel rooms to people from "high risk areas", which is every city or district with a 7-day incidence of more than 50 new cases per 100 000 inhabitants. That 7-day number is the one most important for German rulings right now, and there was, theoretically, an agreement on things having to happen as soon as it's crossed in a place, but every step is debated there as well.
That ban on renting is, understandably, not looked upon kindly by the hotel owners. Especially since it's not the same in all of Germany (welcome to our federal state system), because the states could not agree on a common line.

And that is one of the main things lamented over these days - there's no common politic, no common guideline, no common rules for Germany. (Same is true for the EU, by the way, which is also not quite perfect, but that's another can of worms.) It would be easier in some regard if there was a firm rule of, say, "everyone has to wear a mask in public if numbers go above 35". I can see that it may be hard to find a set of rules that all the federal state heads can agree to, but at the moment, it seems to me that there's lots of talking only, and lots of "if this or that is restricted, that part of economy will die", and nothing really happens, and numbers are still rising. A part of this, I think, is due to utterings (found in the news) like "you can't compare the numbers now with those from April, because there's much more testing now". Oh really? Well, you can still see that the numbers are rising, and how quickly they do that, and it's not so hard to figure that while exponential growth with 50% of tests coming out positive and with 1.5% of tests coming out positive is still exponential growth, and since we all know that the earlier this growth is stopped the better, it would be much more sensible to act sooner rather than later. Sigh. The humans. (Me included. I'm also not happy about the prospect of restricting our still very limited social life even further...)

We still don't know so much about the virus, and how quickly it spreads in what kind of situation. All we can do for now is try to break the infection chains again. We've done it before, rather successfully... so I'm hoping we'll be able to do so again. Before winter really starts... and especially before everyone goes to see their family and extended family for Christmas.

Germans were asked not to go visit family for Easter; that's something that we also usually do, and we stayed home here this year. The same, though, is much harder to imagine happening for Christmas, and I'd be much more unwilling not to go see my family then. So. Stay careful, and safe, everybody. Let's get this wave dealt with, doing our bit... so we can all have a bit more normalcy back in a few weeks!

I like oat, and I like cookies, and consequently I also like oat cookies. There's the kind that you can buy at IKEA, for instance - flat and crunchy and oaty and... sweet. Very, very sweet.

I've had a bit of a fancy for oat biscuits for a while recently, but wasn't willing to buy them, because of a) their overboarding sweetness and b) plastic packaging. Then came an opportunity to bake some... so I did what I usually do when something like this comes up. I trawl the Biggest Of All Cookbooks (aka the internet), pick out about a gazillion of recipes, look at all of them and then I either mash up between two and five of them, or I take one and modify it according to my whim. Sometimes both. (In very extreme cases, the recipe that I pick gets slaughtered so completely that there's not too much over of the original... but hey, it's just guidelines anyways, right?)

In this case, I stuck with the typical modification that I make when getting baking recipes off the 'net, which is reducing the sugar contents. I might also adjust butter quantities, and I always substitute butter if the recipe calls for margarine or shortening; I also use spelt flour instead of wheat as a standard mod. That's a leftover habit from the time when I had trouble digesting wheat; fortunately, that is not the case anymore, but I've just stuck with using spelt as my standard flour. No point in overdoing it with the wheat consumption and tempting fate! This time, the original recipe called for spelt already, so no switch needed.

The cookies were supposed to go all puddle-y in the oven, as in "melt into flat thin shapes" and then crisp up. Mine didn't, which may be due to the slight modifications I made - possibly they'd do that more if the oven temperature is a little lower, and they are instead baked for longer, but the dome shapes were nice, too. I pressed them a bit flatter once I realised they would not flatten themselves, which let them turn out a bit crunchier.

So, here you go - my recipe for sweet, but not overly sweet, oat cookies:

100 g butter
100 g rolled oats
60 g brown sugar
30 g honey
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon, ground
120 g wholegrain spelt flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
45 g almond flakes (optional: roast these in a dry pan)
60 ml milk

Melt butter and let it cool a bit again. Mix butter, sugar and honey together. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir in the butter mixture; this will form a crumbly mass. Now add the milk to form a sticky dough.

With wet hands, form c. 36 small balls and place them on baking sheets. Leave enough space between cookie balls so they won't run together (in case they do run, which mine didn't). Bake for about 10-15 mins at 180°C, no fan. (Maybe try 160° and see if they will go flatter.)

Once cool, store in an airtight container if you like to keep them crisp.

Enjoy!

I found out on the weekend, by happy chance, that there's a special exhibition running in Bamberg:
Die Bamberger Kaisergewänder unter der Lupe. Methoden und Ergebnisse der aktuellen Forschungen. The exhibition started on September 25 and will run until January 10, 2021. It is presenting the results of the research done on the imperial garments that are conserved in Bamberg in the last five years. These are splendid pieces, and I will definitely go there to look at them - it's almost on my doorstep, after all!

There's also two virtual exhibitions that might be interesting: One about the cultural history of distancing (and social distancing), and one showing some works of Albrecht Dürer. Both are in German (and they were a bit awkward to look at in my browser).

Progress has been made! There was some embroidering in the evening, and during weekend free time, so here's some more proof:



As you can see, I've opted for the Bayeux kind of couched work - long stitches covering the ground, then long stitches across those, and the latter stitched down to hold everything in place. It was nice and quick to work, and I really enjoyed it.

It's far from perfect, but then, it's just some fancy mending after all!

And for those of you interested in that kind of thing, here's the back of the cat:



You can still see where the original hole was if you look closely!

While I'm at the (winter-)garden pictures - here's some more:



This, according to the seed packet, is a "Tenessee Teardrop" chili plant. It's also supposed to have these light fruits, at least at the start. They should turn proper yellow later, then purple, then orange and finally red as they ripen. I'm looking forward to that. (And yes, I have a thing for chili peppers that have purple or violet fruits at some stage. Or black - black is fine with me, too.)

And it's now the time of the year that the physalis plant is starting to flower:



The plant is several years old now, and it stayed in its pot in the wintergarden all this year. It could theoretically move outside during summer, but I was too lazy to lug out the heavy pot with a very long plant support in it, and then lug it back in again.

The plant needs quite a lot of water, and will grow much better with regular doses of some kind of plant food, but otherwise it's rather uncomplicated. Apart from needing some support that you tie the very long stems to, that is. I prune it back vigorously after all the fruits have been harvested; that's usually the case in late spring or early summer. Flowers start again in autumn, when it's getting colder outside. The fruits stay smaller than those you can buy in the supermarket (though with enough water and fertiliser, they do get bigger than without). There's lots of them, though, and no transport for them - if you don't count the very short way from off the plant and straight into me!