Mint and Yogurt Dip

This dip falls somewhere between Tzatziki and Indian Mint Sauce. It's simple to make and (if you're feeling crazy) can be made as a vegan dish*.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsweetened greek yogurt
• 2 tbs fresh mint leaves, finely chopped
• 1 lebanese cucumber, diced into 5mm cubes
• 1/2 tbsp lime juice

Directions:

• Combine all ingredients. 

* If preparing this using soy yogurt, double the quantity of lime juice to compensate for the sweeter yogurt. The resulting dip will be significantly runnier than one produced using dairy yogurt, unless a thickener such as agar-agar is added.

Vegan Yogurt

I've been making my own yogurt for a while, using some of each batch as the culture for the next. It's been a largely successful process (with one unfortunate incident using milk that was about to expire). Needing something yogurt-like for a vegan meal, I intended to make my own. Vegan yogurt sounds like it should be an easy extension of the process (just use soy milk instead of dairy, right?) but suffers from one simple problem: yogurt cultures are based on milk products. The cultures I use are just remains of dairy-based yogurts. The powdered cultures in supermarkets are pre-mixed with milk powder. The only dairy-free yogurt I could find in shops was sweetened and flavoured. Not only does this mean it has the wrong taste for cooking, but flavoured yogurt is also largely useless as a culture.

So I tried searching further afield, checking health food stores in and around Canberra. Several of them had yogurt cultures ready to go, but they were all based on milk whey. Online shopping revealed a few vegan-friendly cultures, but none that would arrive before I needed them (I had not left myself enough time to order the ingredients online and prepare them). Out of curiosity, I checked the packets of probiotic capsules down at the pharmacy and found that they did indeed contain the bacteria needed to turn milk into yogurt. Success! But I needed only a single capsule, and they were sold by the jar. Partial success then; I had a solution but it was a wasteful one.

I had enough time to experiment before I'd need to get some probiotics, and bought two tubs of the least flavoured soy yogurt I could find. When using unsweetend yogurt as a culture, a couple of tablespoons is enough to get the next batch going. Omitted from advertising on sweetened yogurt packaging is that they've been pretty much sterilised before sale and contain barely enough live bacteria to be called yogurt. So using a sweetened yogurt as a starter culture, I used six times as much as I usually would, a full 180ml tub.

I started two batches of yogurt—using my improvised yogurt makers—so that I could try two types of soy milk at once. The milks used were: Macro-Organics (Woolworths homebrand with a pretty label) and Vitasoy. After ten or so hours, I unscrewed the lids of the makers, took out the canisters of yogurt and tried them. The Vitasoy yogurt was still sweet, entirely liquid and had only the most vague taste of yogurt. The Macro-Organics yogurt was similar, but had an added foul aftertaste. At this point, I'd usually transfer the yogurt to the fridge and eat it the next day. Instead I refilled the maker with hot water and returned the Vitasoy yogurt to it for another ten hours. The Macro-Organics was abandoned as a failed experiment.

It took two days for me to ferment the Vitasoy milk to the point where it could be called yogurt. It was still runny and sweeter than I cared for, but that was all I was expecting. Vegan yogurt is runnier than dairy, thanks to the makeup of the milks that can be used, and is typically thickened using agar-agar to give it the desired texture.

So, it is possible to use commercial soy yogurts as a culture to produce a vegan substitue for greek yogurt, but only if you've got a few days of experimentation time to spare.

Spicy Carrot Dip

This Moroccan(ish) dip is simple to make, and extremely tasty. The inspiration for it came from a wonderful recipe on Serious Eats. I used much the same method, but the ingredients suffered from the changes wrought by my penchant for randomly changing every recipe I "follow" just to see what happens.

Ingredients:

• 6 large carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 tsp honey
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• 1 bay leaf, stem removed
• 2 tsp smoked paprika
• 3 cloves* garlic, crushed
• 3 cm length of fresh ginger, grated
• 1/4 cup stuffed† green olives
• 1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tbsp tomato paste

Directions:

• Place honey and salt in a saucepan, then add carrots and top up with 1cm water (note: carrots are not covered). Cover and bring to a low boil, then leave uncovered at a gentle simmer, stirring frequently, for ~15 minutes.
• While carrots are cooking, grind cumin, coriander, fennel and bay leaf using a mortar and pestle or spice grinder
• When the liquid has evaporated and the honey starts to caramelise, remove the pan from the heat and immediately add 1/2 C cold water so the carrots don't burn. Transfer carrots and all ingredients to a food processor and process until smooth.

* I use one of the purple-striped varieties of garlic that are finally becoming readily available in Australia. They're a powerfully flavoured garlic, and have large cloves. If I can't find any, my substitute for 1 clove of purple-striped is: 2-3 cloves Chinese/white/bleached garlic (the name varies, but it's the cheap, white garlic in most supermarkets) or 1/2 tbsp crushed garlic from a jar (yes, it does happen sometimes).

† All I had in the house was a jar of capsicum-stuffed green olives, but any pitted green olives would work.

Canyons and Bushbashing on a Blue Mountains Adventure

There isn't much canyoning down in Tasmania, and I'd only done it twice (both times entirely accidentally) on my home isle before moving to Canberra. The first time, I wound up on top of a cliff wishing I had a rope I could use to get to the bottom and ended up shimmying down a tree. The second was a 1:1 gradient quartzite stream that I descended while wearing walking boots and a 25kg pack. With such promising beginnings in the sport, it's small wonder I wanted to try canyoning with people who know what they're doing.

On the March long weekend this year, I ventured up into the Blue Mountains with a group of ANUMC bushwalkers, mountain-bikers, rockclimbers and canyoneers. While I spent most of the weekend bushwalking, I did take a day off to don my wetsuit, five-fingers and helmet then proceed to jump and slide my way down Twister and Rocky Creek canyons. I discovered, in that one activity, something that tested several of my phobias: claustrophobia, acrophobia and nyctophobia. Now if you don't handle fear the way I do, I can understand why you'd think this meant I didn't enjoy myself. Actually, I loved it. Pitching myself against things that terrify me has thus far proved an effective way of becoming less terrified of them afterwards and enjoying myself while I'm at it.

So I signed up to the next canyoning trip I could join, which promised a nice 60m abseil to put my acrophobia to the test. I donned wetsuit, volleys, helmet and harness and prepped myself for the terror. It was annoyingly easy, thanks to some wide ledges breaking up the descent, but I knew I'd find more canyons to terrify me later.Fast forward to October, and a three day canyoning trip up to the Blue Mountains. Five of us set off for the mountains (five came back as well, in case you were wondering) on Friday evening, bound for a campsite at the promisingly named Barcoo Swamp, which we hoped would be quiet over the long weekend. It turned out to be a pleasant, well-drained campsite and made for a good night's sleep before our first canyon.

The plan was to do Heart Attack*, a "dry" canyon boasting 35 and 40m abseils, and a lot of wading up to waist deep. It also boasts a 16km round trip of walking between the car and canyon. The track to the canyon was pretty distinct for the most part, being an old 4WD trail given over to bushwalkers. "For the most part" omits the off-track section at the end. We descended toward the canyon edge, searching for the promised scrub-bash that would skirt around the 40m cliffs we'd otherwise have to abseil. Alas, said cliffs failed to provide their promised easier way around. We searched back and forward along the clifftops, finding numerous gullies that terminated in cliffs and trees solid enough to be used as abseil anchors, provided we knew that they would land us in the right area.

Eventually, we worked our way along the canyon rim to where we knew we could abseil down. Even with GPS coordinates to guide us, it took us some time to find the official anchor—in part because the coordinates we had skipped four out of the ten digits, or around ±70m accuracy, but mostly because we'd been looking for a more substantial anchor. With a 40m abseil ahead, we were checking every sizeable tree along the clifftop for old slings that would give it away as the abseiling anchor. When we found it, it turned out to be a burnt out hollow stump. Already into the afternoon after our explorations, and faced with a dubious anchor, we made our way back to the car rather than risk being stuck in the bottom of a canyon when night fell.

After a warm day pushing our way through dry scrub without finding our destination, everyone was pretty keen for an easily accessed wet canyon on day two. Our canyon of choice was Death Trap. It was only a few km from camp, and a quick scout the night before showed pretty easy walking through open bush. None of us had done it before, and followed a GPS to the promised start-point. The stream wasn't wide enough to wade, but was pretty easily followed down to where it was.

It turned into a canyon eventually, but even the stream was pretty.

A series of pools made up the upper extents of the canyon, entered by short slides or jumps. One pool, draining via a tunnel in to its neighbour, would have been extremely difficult to climb out of at low water levels and was a possible explanation for a pretty canyon receiving such an ominous name. It isn't a long canyon, and we soon reached the abseil down a waterfall into the last pool.

Not steep enough for comfort.

Something I've had to come to terms with in canyoning is that steeper is easier. Abseiling down a slope is more difficult by far than down a vertical rockface, itself more difficult than an overhang. While acrophobia makes those nice sloping rock faces look more appealing than a cliff, it's actually much easier not to slip and fall if your feet aren't touching anything. This waterfall was unfortunately sloped, requiring the odd stretch of bum-sliding mid abseil, but  the pool at the bottom was glorious and worth the awkward access route.

From the pool, we walked along a broad canyon bordered by sheer cliff faces. There was no way to climb out yet and we pressed down further. Part of the cliff had collapsed, not providing a way up but almost completely blocking the canyon. The "almost" was a slot not much than shoulder width between the fallen rock and the opposite wall. It descended under the rocks, from where a short tunnel brought us back into sunlight. We wandered further, taking in the glorious canyon while looking for a break in the cliffs.

The only way to escape Death Trap is down.

 Soon we found ourselves walking on a path that zig-zagged its way up through the cliffline. The path vanished into obscurity as soon as we hit the top, but there was no mistaking it when we stumbled onto it after a few hundred metres of bushbashing. Wide, well-walked and running straight along the ridgeline, it led to within 300m of our car before veering abruptly. We waved it goodbye, clambered into the car and made for the second canyon of the day, as compensation to ourselves for failing Heart Attack on day 1.

Twister was as fun and even easier than I remembered it, with plenty of jumps, slides and swims along its short but convoluted length. The most dramatic part of the canyon is the final drop, a waterfall with a catch. The pool at the bottom of the canyon is little over ankle deep and no saviour at all for a jump. Instead we jumped into a deep pool halfway down the cliff, and used a handline to descend from there. Scouting for anything recently washed into the pool was the only difficulty, and our leader abseiled the short drop to check for submerged branches. Many groups don't bother checking jumps if they've done a canyon before but—coming from a whitewater background where rapids change with every flood—I was glad we took more precautions. We never encountered surprise submerged branches, but it would have only taken one...

We had considered doing Rocky Creek as well, bringing our day's total to three canyons, but the consensus at the exit track was to head back to camp rather than doing another canyon in the encroaching dark. Although the day had been warm earlier, it wasn't any more and no one was inclined to change out of wetsuits for the steep track out of the canyon.

Our last day of the trip took us to another new canyon for the group, Tigersnake. It was a dry canyon and we swapped wetsuits for quick-dry pants before setting off. The access track was an easily followed fire-trail for most of the way, then a well-walked trail for the rest. Unfortunately we had some old notes for the canyon that included instructions of where to turn off the track and descend toward the first abseil. These instructions proved somewhat outdated and the branch at the promised location led us through what turned out to be an entirely unnecessary bushbash and climb before simply rejoining the track we'd been on. No harm—beyond a few scratches and losing half an hour—done and we would know for next time. There certainly will be a next time.

Down into the canyon.

Tigersnake canyon starts with an abseil down through the narrow roof of the canyon. Its a short descent made tricky by the close confines, and some choose to climb down instead. From there, beautiful grottos and a short descent lead to one of the dodgiest anchors you could ever hope not to trust with your weight. A pile of what amounts to old kindling had been wedged across the canyon and roped together. Closer examination revealed that most of it didn't touch either side, let alone both, and was likely the broken remnants of earlier anchors simply left in place. We put in a backup anchor and abseiled in descending order of weight, the last removing the backup before her abseil.

Not a reassuring anchor...

The anchor held, but flexed and creaked alarmingly. From here our nice dry canyon included a wade through a shallow pool before a short abseil to the top of the main drop, a 17m cliff, 10m of which is an overhang. Now I reiterate that cliffs are easier to abseil than slopes, but I was still awash with a nice gentle buzz of terror as I roped up. I failed to fall, failed to die and the worst part of the descent was that my canyoning harness was a whole lot less comfortable than the nice padded climbing harness I had chosen to leave at home. Durability be damned, next time I'm choosing padding.

A short walk through forest brought us to a choice between another long abseil, or a short and tricky abseil down into a second stretch of glorious twisting canyon. We chose the latter.

One of the only photos that didn't blur
in Tigersnake's gloom.

The abseil starts from on top of a chockstone, which was disturbingly prone to shifting slightly underfoot. There were a few joking references to Aron Ralston, but a second (far more secure) chockstone beneath it meant it couldn't actually fall, just threaten. The abseil dropped straight into thigh-deep water (dry canyons, it seems, aren't dry at all) that smells like it doesn't get much flow to flush it clean. We moved on quickly, and into a series of level-floored cathedral-like chambers linked by twisting passages carved into the rock. The divide between caving and canyoning can be slight at times, and there were a few places where the sky vanished from overhead to cast the spectacular rocks into gloom.

Emerging from the end into open canyon once more, we quickly found the exit track and started making our way back to the car and from there back to camp. There our weekend hit a sour note, with the discovery of the piles of garbage—cans, beer bottles, vegetable scraps, even meat and cheese—that the residents of the neighbouring campsite had left in their wake. Our car already laden with five people, we had enough of a challenge loading our own gear and garbage and couldn't fit a bag or ten of theirs in as well. It made for an unfortunate end to the weekend, a reminder of the attitudes some Australians have toward the bush that stayed with us on the long drive home.

If you're interested in another viewpoint on the weekends adventuring, not to mention some spectacular photos, check out the post on Jessica Hancock's blog.

* Named, not for any property of the canyon, but because the party that explored it was woken up by someone trying to get help for someone having a heart attack.

The wrong white water

Before I go any further, I must warn any rafting readers that the following post may prove disturbing.

Upon moving to Canberra, I looked around for a convenient student group with whom I could go white water rafting. Alas, it seems rafting is not the sport of choice for Canberrans*. So I took up other activities, went canyoning and rock-climbing, got into mountaineering and started sea kayaking. I kayaked on the lake and did a couple of trips out to the coast to paddle there, even tried surfing a kayak. What I did not do was try paddling a kayak on a river.

Rafting down in Tasmania, I met my fair share of kayakers. A lot of them had been rafters once, but turned to kayaking to escape the inevitable faff of rafting's large groups and excessive gear. Others sought the greater thrill and challenge of kayaking, or just a whole lot less work in portaging around rapids. Whatever the reason for their transition, it was seldom reversible; very few returned to rafting after taking up its dark cousin as a pastime, and those exceptions would often bring their kayaks on trips rather than risk boarding a raft. Clearly the kayaks had seductive powers beyond the strength of mere mortals to resist, making any transition a one-way trip. I had gone so far as to take up sea-kayaking and even surf-kayaking—while it's technically possible to surf a raft, the ocean waves are scarcely their element—but I was leaving the rivers to the rafts... until Sunday.

I should have resisted, should have fought harder against the threat kayaking posed to my rafting integrity. Honestly though, I missed the river. There's something awesome about sitting in a river flowing at 70 cumecs†—power enough to crush you in an instant—and looking at the surface but seeing what's hidden beneath it. The combined sense of helplessness against something so strong and confidence from knowing what to do to make it across that water alive is one that I cherish. I hadn't had that feeling since rafting the Franklin over the summer, and wanted to feel it again. Nearly ten years rafting doesn't qualify me for kayaking though, which is a whole new level of terror with a whole lot less control. I wasn't sitting in a kayak anywhere near the rivers I was used to, and there hadn't been any beginners white water kayaking trips in a while. Then one was posted on the ANUMC website, a grade 1-2 section of the Murrumbidgee. So I donned my new ladies' wetsuit (I'll start buying men's outdoor clothing again when the manufacturers stop assuming that all men are overweight and start making clothes for men who are fit because they spend time outdoors), armoured lifejacket and a helmet with my latest ad hoc GoPro mount. After discovering that my knees don't get along well with bracing in a lot of white water kayaks, I spent some time sitting in different kayaks until stumbling across one that wasn't just bearable but was actually comfortable.

We strapped kayaks onto the club trailer and towed it to the get-in at Tharwa Bridge. From there, it was less than 15km down to our get-out at Pine Island. Alas, most of those kilometres turned out to be flat paddling. In between though, there were rapids... well, close enough. Tassie rafters, think of the lower Derwent, only with a few more trees mid-river and without the actually becalmed sections. I assume that any other paddlers will know of a mostly flat river suitable for beginners that can be used as a comparison. On a raft, I would have been dead-bored (my usual way of keeping myself entertained on flat water is to flip my own raft, flip someone else's raft or otherwise conspire to have more people swimming than are in the boats). I could have done with shorter sections of flat-water, but the rapids proved a good introduction to white water kayaking.

The first few rapids were all firmly in grade 1 and easily passed. Then we hit a grade 2. On a raft, I would have paddled straight over the top without pausing, certainly without scouting. The wave train would have given me a moment's entertainment, and that would have been it. A group comprising no small number of beginners needed to be more cautious. A couple of experienced kayakers went ahead to scout, pulling into eddies to point the way for those following behind as we wove between willow saplings. It was easier than I'd expected, kayaks having a lot less momentum to fight against in order to turn them. It was just as terrifying as I'd expected. Let me stress, this was an easy rapid, requiring some quick turns to follow the best lines but with plenty of good lines to choose from. I would have been more than happy to swim it, but apparently kayaking it is a whole different story. My adrenaline levels went through buzz and rush, then kept climbing.

I will gladly confess that I'm an adrenaline junky, but I like it to be delivered in levels that give me an edge and focus my senses, not overwhelm my rationality. I haven't hit the panic level in a few years, and I was quite happy keeping it that way. Apparently skirting around an itsy bitsy stopper at the end of a rapid and having my kayak roll ever so slightly was enough to trigger a panic response. All these years of steadily dosing myself with adrenaline must have been good for something, because I successfully fought the urge to run away (which would simply have resulted in me rolling upside-down) and made it through the rapid without a hitch. When my heart stopped sounding like a bodhrán beating out a quick jig, I realised that I was actually enjoying myself.

If you look closely, you might notice the

boat rock slightly at 0:36. 

There were a few more rapids at similar levels, which lacked the blind terror of the first and helped to remind me that this was an easy river. If I had flipped (which seemed to be my greatest fear) I would just have wet-exited and swam (which didn't scare me at all), rather than faff around trying to set up and perform my somewhat unreliable brace-roll. Most of the group portaged (hoisted boats onto shoulders and walked) one rapid, basically because it was completely choked with willows and we all portaged over the Point Hut bridge with it's recirculating stopper.

Shortly before the end of our section of river, we came across a boat, upside-down and pinned beneath a log. First thing to check: whether there was a body in it. 

Fortunately it was body-free. It was also clearly a flat water craft, meant for fishing on a lake and never intended to tackle white water. We pulled it free and it half-floated briefly before sinking like a stone.

Towing the "rescued" kayak to shore.

Most of the group were all for heading back then, and we paddled the last rapid to the get-out. Three of us kept our lifejackets on, grabbed some rope and walked back up the riverbank. The kayak was submerged mid-river, wrapped on some rocks. We had to swim across channels up to chest-deep before we could reach it. Getting it unstuck proved simple, but returning to shore burdened with a kayak was a more difficult task. We barely had it out of the water when someone came looking for us, car shuffle and packing of the trailer now complete. Triumphantly carrying our prize back, we encountered someone who had just bought an identical kayak and was considering rafting the next section (grade 3-4). Fortunately he was somewhat dissuaded by the condition of the boat we'd retrieved. I sincerely hope I never become that complacent about kayaking on white water, but I'm glad that my spine-crushing terror has faded.

*Early on, I heard Canberra residents described a few times as Canberrites and Canberrians, but Canberrans seems to be the term of choice.

†A cumec is a unit often used by white water paddlers to measure river flow. It stands for cubic metres per second and is the volume of water that passes through one point on a river every second. In theory, it's easy to calculate. All you need is the cross-sectional area of the river, and the average flow rate across that area. In practice, it's almost impossible to measure either number. Yes, you can measure the width of the river, but the depth varies across that width. Yes you can measure the flow of one point in the river, but that varies even more across the width and depth of the river, with eddies (backflow) actually forming along the banks and riverbed. Fortunately there are companies (generally running hydroelectric schemes) who survey rivers and work out their flow rates at different levels, and then give the numbers to anyone who wants them.

Faffing about gerunds

FAF, or faff, is a word that I have found in common usage among outdoor clubs. Faffing is the process of wasting time or being unnecessarily slow and delaying the group you're with. Faffers are those who faff habitually and are almost always late. It's a word well-suited to such clubs and I rarely encountered it anywhere else. This—I thought—was because of the word's origins. FAF was first introduced to me as an acronym standing for F**k Around Factor. I accepted the etymology then and thought no more on the matter, until I decided to look it up in a dictionary. Why I thought it would even be listed remains a mystery to this day, but still I checked and discovered—not "FAF" as I had sought—an entry for "faff" instead.

The OED defines faff as a verb meaning to fuss or to dither. It traces its usage back to 1874 and its etymology back even further to faffle, whose use was recorded in Manipulus Vocabulorum* in 1570. Clearly faff had more history than I had suspected. I thought little more of the matter then, apart from now considering it usable in polite company^†.

But there's more to faff than I'd first thought. Faff is a verb (or "doing word," as my few school-level grammar lessons quite inadequately described them). As well as their shared semantic (meaning-based) traits, verbs share morphological (form-based) and syntactic (structural) traits. This isn't a lesson on verbs (a word class that I'm only beginning to understand), so I'll ignore almost all the traits of verbs and focus on one in particular. In English, verbs cannot be preceded by articles (eg. the, a, an). Articles precede nouns, not verbs. Try saying a few and see how they sound.

"I can write a sentence," sounds fine, but "and the result is the write I have made" does not. Similarly, "I could edit that last sentence to be grammatically correct," sounds fine—if a little formal—but "and the result would be an edit I have made" sounds... fine actually, overly formal but not wrong, per se. That's odd.

So, verbs can't be preceded by articles, except where—apparently—they can. In these cases, the verb is being used as a noun. These are a form of nominalization, where non-nouns can be used as nouns. What does this have to do with faff? Faff may be defined as a verb, but it's now double-timing as a noun on the side. If I faff around all morning, the faff that results can be overwhelming. This all seems like a pretty long-winded way of getting to the point, but I'm talking about wasting time so that seems appropriate.

What does this have to do with this post's title? Gerunds are a particular type of nominalization (specifically, non-finite verb phrases than can be used as noun phrases). They appear in several languages and are pretty easy to spot in English. Just keep an eye out for nouns that look suspiciously like verbs in the perfect participle (also known as the present participle). What am I talking about? Basically, verbs that end in -ing: I am running (verb) more since being inspired by watching the running (noun) last week. Keep an ear out for them next time you're waiting for people to stop faffing about; they're actually pretty common.

* Manipulus Vocabulorum, published in 1570, is a dictionary of Latin and English that was the first dictionary to organise words by rhyme. Despite the claim that Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first monolingual dictionary (that is, it lists words from a language along with definitions written in that same language), Manipulus Vocabulorum includes a section that gives English definitions for English words.

^† I was once asked what FAF meant by someone to whom the definition as I knew it would have been terribly offensive. Suffice to say, I'm more than happy to give the definition of faff if requested.

Summer Sorbets

As September struck Canberra, it brought with it the hottest start of spring on record. Although peak temperatures soon dropped back into the mid teens, the brief foray over 25°C was enough to set my summer tastebuds racing. What were they craving? Sorbet.

My introduction to sorbets took place somewhen back in the fog of early childhood, and lemon sorbet has been a favourite of mine for as long as I can remember. Tragically, it was succeeded last summer, ousted from its place by my sister's sorbet experiments. Her gin & tonic sorbet was delicious, but lime was the real challenger. Now, living 850 km away from her experiments, I've found myself craving homemade sorbets once more. Fortunately, recipes can be emailed easily. Unfortunately, icecream makers can't.

Enter Sam Tan's blog, on which she describes a simple method to make sorbets without the use of an icecream maker. The ingredients are not dissimilar from most sorbet recipes and I glossed over the list in my habitually non-attentive manner. The important thing is how to freeze the mix, not what it contains. Unfortunately it isn't a quick freeze, so the sorbet really has to be prepared the day before consumption. Feel free to play with the quantities; I always do.

Basic Sorbet Mixture

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• Flavouring
• Wine (not only optional but, some might argue, entirely unrelated to the recipe)
• Novel of choice

The quantity of flavouring required varies greatly, not just by your personal taste but also by what sorbet you're making. I've put some below that are to my taste.

• Start off by making a sugar syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan on medium heat. Stir until sugar has dissolved then allow to cool.
• While your syrup is cooling, whisk the egg white until it forms stiff peaks.

  

  Scum!

• Combine your flavouring of choice with the sugar syrup. Pour combined syrup slowly into your egg whites while whisking gently. If you're used to making a meringue by pouring sugar syrup into beaten egg whites, don't panic when you don't get the usual gloriously silky cream. Instead, you should be expecting cloudy liquid topped with a thin layer of white scum. Yes, it does look that unappetising, but I guarantee you that it improves later.

So far, this is quite similar to the recipe books that come with most icecream makers (although they probably don't tell you that a layer of scum is a good thing). At this point, you'd transfer it to your machine and turn it on. Then all you'd have to do is sit back with a glass of wine and your favourite novel for an hour while waiting for your glorious sorbet to make itself. This isn't quite so simple, but don't abandon the wine yet.

• Pour your sorbet mixture (scum and all) into a lidded container and put it in the freezer. The sorbet will expand while freezing and again in later processing. Choose a container large enough to allow for this.
• Sit back with your wine and novel, because there's nothing for you to do for a while.
• Check the sorbet after a couple of hours. When the sides are frozen and the rest of the sorbet has formed an icy slush, stir thoroughly and return to the freezer. It needs to be left for at least three to four hours, but can be left overnight.
• When the sorbet is completely frozen and firm but not solid, transfer it to a food processor and blend thoroughly, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. When it is smooth and consistent, return the sorbet to its container and place it back in the freezer.

  

  Sorbet separates while freezing.

• Leave the sorbet for several hours until hard. It will probably separate slightly with a darker layer at the bottom of the container. Blend again until it becomes white and fluffy. Serve immediately or return to the freezer for later.

There you have it, a simple—although time-consuming—method to produce amazing sorbets without an icecream machine. I've listed a few of my preferred recipes below for some inspiration:

Lemon Sorbet
A simple, classic combination of citric tartness with the smooth sweetness of sorbet.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 1/2 cups lemon juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two lemons

Follow the method for a basic sorbet.

Lime Sorbet
Lime juice has a stronger flavour to it than most citrus, and you need less for your sorbet. Test the flavour as you go though; you can add more juice after the first or second freeze.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 cup lime juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two limes

Follow method for a basic sorbet.

Ginger Sorbet

This is an unusual one that I tried as an experiment. If you're a ginger fan, this balance of sweet, tart and a good tingle from the ginger is for you. It's a particularly good one to try if you make your own crystallised or glacé ginger.

• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1/4 cup ginger syrup (leftover from making glacé ginger)
• 1-2 cm fresh ginger, finely grated
• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Add the ginger syrup and grated fresh ginger along with the sugar and water when making the syrup. Add the lemon juice after it has cooled. Then follow the rest of the method for a basic sorbet.