Friday 26 September 2008

Birthday lemon meringue pie

I’ve been reading all sorts of beautifully lyrical blog posts on other blogs about the coming of autumn. For many people it means a chill in the morning air, lovely orange pumpkins at the farmer’s market, and leaves turning red. For me it has meant abandoning my nice cosseted days at my old family desk at home, and returning to the hurly burly of commuting to Oxford, the steady flow of young people at my office door wearing bemused expressions as to how their degree got into the state it has, and the occasional battle with reluctant technology in lecture rooms. Yes, the new semester has started, and that’s why I have been accidentally AWOL from here. It’s not that I haven’t been cooking; I just haven’t had time to write about it, and plus I tidied my camera charger away so efficiently when we had some friends with young children to visit last weekend that I couldn’t lay hands on it for several days.


I've got several things to post about, but firstly I am ashamed to admit that I am almost a week late posting about my dearly beloved's birthday last weekend. He's not too fussed about birthdays so I'm sure he will forgive me, especially as I did come up with his favourite dessert to celebrate. He was actually slightly more excited about this birthday than usual because he and I are now both binary numbers old, which apparently won't happen again for 32 years. Plus we've been together for a binary number of years and the cats are a prime number in both age and number. We are geektastically numerate in this house. His birthday cake wasn't prime or binary but it was lemony and meringuey, and since none of our birthday guests was too keen on lemon meringue pie, The Scientist got to scoff the lot. I've used various recipes and he's happy with all of them so I won't write out any one in particular. It's surprisingly easy really given how many components it has, and you just need to allow some time for the lemon curd to cool and to make and bake the pastry. We had a proper roast dinner to precede it (baked squash filo parcels for Eco Sis and I), and some all American cake mix brownies for us non-lemon pie lovers, courtesy of Eco Bro's baked goods courier service. It was good though the pre-mixed in chocolate chips surprised me.

Happy binary birthday, my love!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any age is equivalent to a binary number. You must be saying instead that your age is a power of two. And since it won't happen again for 32 years, you're both 32.

Lysy said...

You are absolutely right about our ages, anonymous reader, and I suppose to be strictly correct I should have said that our ages are a *round* number in binary, which is the same as being a power of two. Believe me, my resident Scientist keeps me honest on these things!

Anonymous said...

I had never heard the term. I googled "round binary number" and "round number in binary". They returned 231 hits and 104 hits, respectively. This means some people have used the terms, but they're not widespread by any means.

I don't like the term because the analog doesn't work in decimal. Are 10, 100, 1000 the only "round decimal numbers?" No. 20, 50, 500, etc. can be viewed as round numbers.

Even for binary I'm not that happy with it. 20 in binary is 10100. That's round in some sense.

I'm a binary fanatic so nevermind me ;)

Johanna GGG said...

hope the Scientist had a great birthday - sounds like he was spoilt with the food - do you cook roast meat for the dinner? (now if so I think that dedication) I would pass on the lemon meringue pie and sample the brownies too!