https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095318062065

Holly Welch, Kyiv (2025)

31/10/2023

In the Levant, there's a diverse array of dishes called mahshi (stuffed vegetables), including kousa bil labn (stuffed courgette cooked with yoghurt), beitenjan mahshi (aubergine simmered in a rich tomato sauce), malfouf (rolled cabbage leaves) that resemble delicate fingers, and waraq einab (grape leaves) that are similar to dolma eaten in Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Iraq.

What all these mahashi (the plural of mahshi) share in common is that they are filled predominantly with rice then layered inside a big pot to be covered in steaming broth or sauce and cooked on the stove until tender.

25/10/2023

New images of a dying star have revealed structures that no previous telescope could detect, according to astronomers.

The pictures are of a dying star at the centre of the Ring Nebula, 2,600 light years from earth.

An international team of scientists, led by Cardiff University researchers, say they reveal a triple-star system.

The pictures show about 20,000 dust clouds, known as globules, in the nebula.

Dr Roger Wesson, a research associate at Cardiff University who led the analysis, said: "We can now see the subtle influence of a third, previously unknown star in the system, alongside a much more distant companion which was identified in 2021."

11/09/2023

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has closed its investigation into the debut flight of SpaceX's giant Starship vehicle, which ended with a bang in April.

The investigation — which SpaceX led and the FAA oversaw — identified "multiple root causes" of the April 20 launch failure and 63 corrective actions the company "must take to prevent mishap reoccurrence," FAA officials said in an emailed statement today (Sept. 8).

The end of the investigation marks a major step toward the second-ever Starship test flight, which SpaceX wants to launch soon from its Starbase site near the South Texas town of Boca Chica. But, FAA officials stressed, it doesn't clear the path completely.

28/08/2023

The Blue Moon of August 2023 will also be joined by a special guest in the sky: Saturn.

The ringed gas giant will be just a few days past opposition, the point at which it lies directly opposite the sun as seen from Earth, making it especially bright in the night sky.

As viewed from New York City, Saturn will be in the constellation Aquarius, above and to the right of the moon. From the Southern Hemisphere, however, Saturn will appear below the moon.

22/08/2023

Alain Llorca, chef and owner of his eponymous one-star restaurant, about 18km from Nice in La Colle-sur-Loup, is fond of the dish, which has become one of his signatures (see recipe below). Often stuffed with creamy ewe's milk cheese aged for months before being blended with ingredients like locally grown aubergine, basil and olives, he says that his stuffed courgette flowers "highlight other flavours from the South of France".

However, his elevated version of the dish is a far cry from its humble origins, even within Llorca's own family, where they would dip the blossoms in batter and pan fry them with herbs. "We eat them like that, hot or cold, on a picnic at the beach," he said. Courgette flowers are a speciality of the region, where many people are also accustomed to making clever use of leftovers at home. "It may be a family way of making courgette," he explained. "We collect everything that we don't eat the day before to put in the flower."

Llorca wasn't the first chef to take courgette flowers from rags to riches, so to speak. About 30 to 40 years ago, an ingenious chef – Jacques Maximin, who worked in the kitchen of the opulent Hotel Le Negresco in Nice – began cooking the courgette and blossom in a new way, elevating and popularising the region's emblematic dish into a work of culinary art.

18/08/2023

The revival of a lost language

The ceilidh isn’t the only part of traditional Cape Breton life that people are trying to preserve. Many locals are learning to speak Gaelic – commonly known as Nova Scotia Gaelic – which had nearly become extinct due to an education act issued by the English-speaking majority in the early 1900s that forbade its use in schools.

“My grandmother told me several times that when she started school she had actually gotten the strap for speaking Gaelic, but that was her mother tongue,” Gillis said.

According to Gaelic language teacher Carmen MacArthur, English was also thought of as ‘the language of progress’, so many islanders stopped speaking Gaelic to their children so they wouldn’t be at a disadvantage. However, thanks to enthusiasts like MacArthur, who value Gaelic as an essential part of Cape Breton identity, the language is seeing some resurgence.

14/08/2023

The origins of Kernewekare found in Common Brythonic, a Celtic language spoken by native Britons that diverged into Welsh, Breton (still spoken in Brittany, France) and Cumbric (spoken mainly in northern England and southern Scotland until about the 12th Century) when Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed British kingdoms westwards – and even across the English Channel to Brittany – from the 5th Century CE onwards. In Britain's south-west, the isolated Cornish peninsula became a natural refuge for the language, and as many as 38,000 people (out of a total population of around 50,000) spoke Kernewekat its peak in the Middle Ages.

The number of speakers fell dramatically, though, when the Tudors imposed English in Cornish-speaking churches after the bloody 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion (a mass uprising against the English monarchy that left thousands across the south-west dead), and, by 1777, just a handful of Cornish speakers remained in far western holdouts. Pentreath's death came to represent the death of the language itself – until a Cornish scholar named Henry Jenner published A Handbook of the Cornish Language in 1904, which kickstarted a Celtic revival in Cornwall.

09/08/2023

Balinese chef I Made Ta**ra Wijaya recalls the same remedy. However, these days, with infinitely more finesse, he incorporates moringa into the raw-food menu at Fivelements Retreat. Wijaya's colleague Chef Ni Putu Yuliastuty now harvests moringa in the retreat's kitchen-garden every day and has become an expert at using it in smoothies, vegetable-based green juices, soups and salads.

"Even though we grew up with this plant as part of our diet, I never realised it was so versatile," she said.

"It's peppery so it adds good flavour to anything," Wijaya added, as the pair worked together in the kitchen. "Sometimes with natural medicines we say, 'more bitter more better'. In the old days, Balinese women would wean their babies off the breast by smearing juice from moringa leaves around their ni***es. Times have changed though. These days they're more likely to use toothpaste."

Holly Welch

31/10/2023

25/10/2023

11/09/2023

28/08/2023

22/08/2023

18/08/2023

14/08/2023

09/08/2023

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category