About the Not Really 6 x 6's

Yes I can understand that you have to be right on the nose with your weights. I think in lbs for my weight as well. Although saying it in Kilos sounds so much better, and looks less as well, when you see the numbers....LOL

Goo heavens, no way are you in a muddle......Eimear.

Els

Nora, I am with you, and each and every time when I receive my squares, I love opening the parcel and share them with our guild members who are impressed with the great variety of patterns and colours. I love them all.

Thank you guys.

Els

I've never heard that! I know that _Dutch_ inches are different, because a man had a problem measuring to make a shelf - he had an English measuring tape in the workshop and a Dutch one in the house. But I always thought the American inch was the same as the English inch.

=Tamar

Never mind, I read the answer in the thread. I bet the English enlarged theirs when they enlarged their ounces and pints for the "Imperial" sizes.

=Tamar

LOL

I use metric for some things, and imperial for others. For cooking, I use both, for measuring I usually use imperial, for temperatures I use metric, for driving I use metric. It makes not difference to me. For weighing, I would like to use metric, as I would seem much smaller.

Katherine

LOL I just posted the same thing, Els!

Katherine

[snip]

That's one I can't get my head round - why do American recipes have things like "a cup of butter", or if in metric 200ml of flour? I can understand measuring liquids by volume, but solids, even ones like sugar and flour, can't be measured as accurately by volume as by weight.

FWIW, I prefer to cook in pounds and ounces, not grams, because it is easier to remember 5oz of one ingredient and 4 oz of another, then 125g and 100g. But I can do both.

I've got a vague idea what my weight is in kilos, and in pounds, but in the UK the imperial way of measuring weight is using stones and pounds. So we might talk about someone being ten stone (=140 pounds) or 8 stone 5 lbs. When you get USians talking about being 200 lbs (where lbs is the abbreviation for pounds), I mentally translate it to "heavy", and as their weights go up it gets "fat", "very fat", and "how could anyone weigh that much".

[snip]

That's my feeling as well. I do my best to get it right, and if they aren't right, well, that's OK.

(And if they really don't like them, they just won't use them, or will use them for something else.)

FWIW, I know someone who has been in charge - not from choice - of several group embroidered things as retirement gifts. She would come home from sessions, and redo the bits that weren't up to her standard.

I agree with that!

What's driving me potty at the moment is patchwork. I've always used metric for sewing, so I can picture cm and mm size seam allowances etc. But because so much stuff gets imported from the USA, even British magazines talk about using 1/4 inch seam allowances, and have quantities in imperial. But I can't icture 1/4 inch, only 6mm.

Then you go to the shop - even the specialist patchwork shop which only has imperial patchwork rulers - and then can only sell you material in 10cm increments. I suppose it does mean our "fat quarters" are bigger, because they are based on half a metre, not half a yard.

Then you have the way my Mom and her mother before her, etc, etc used to cook.... a handful of this, a pinch of that, and don't even look for a recipe because it was all in their head. I managed to pin my Mom down on a few (very few, unfortunately) recipes before her first stroke... I actually watched what she was doing and listened while she took great effort to measure what she had just grabbed, and I wrote down the measurements. Unfortunately some recipes (including some that my Dad made too) are lost forever as they were never written down. :o/

However on the upside... I did manage to come up with an almost perfect recipe for icing sugar "fudge" that my Mom used to make when I was little. I *tweaked* it a little one Christmas (the only time I've made it so far, and do you think I can find where I put the recipe that I wrote out?) by adding a bit of peppermint extract and some crushed candycanes to it.

My Mom would sometimes color the icing sugar candy/fudge light pink or light green too, and sometimes put a bit between walnut halves and date halves... the date ones were my least favorite, but I loved the rest. When it came time for the school bake sale, I would go with a bunch of little bags made up with this fudge as well as her brown sugar fudge and a cocao fudge in them (never found the recipe for these other two fudges, although I tried once and it really flopped), and they were a BIG seller. I even had one teacher tell me that if she didn't get some of that fudge at the end of the year that I wouldn't pass. Jeesh... threatening a kid! LOL My Mom grinned and made some fudge for the teacher.

I remember watching my Mom making all of these fudges from time to time, and with the brown sugar one and the cocao one after boiling it for a while she would drop a tiny bit into a glass of cold water to see if it would bead. When it did she knew it was ready (this is what she told me when I asked her one day why she did this), and poured it into lightly buttered pans to cool and harden. My Mom had a real sweet tooth and could eat a lot of this fudge with no problem. Although I loved it, I found it to be a *little* too sweet and could only manage to eat two pieces at a time. The icing sugar candy/fudge however, I could eat a little more of that at once, when it was between the walnuts as it took a little of the sweetness away.

Whoa, I just got waaaaay off the subject. That's what happens when I start remembering recipes (or lack thereof) that my parents used to make. *sigh*

Gemini

That was my big question when I moved here, Penny! How the heck *does* one measure a cup of butter, without actually melting it? I've now figured out that 1cup butter = 8oz. And I still tend to think in imperial measures for cooking too.

I have a collection of cookbooks from all over the place and it's really interesting to do the translations from one measurement system to another. Luckily, for most things, a few errors here and there don't make too much difference.

The other thing that got me was the difference in baking. When I lived in Saskatchewan nothing I made turned out right. I was used to living at sea level, but Sask is on a plateau and the height above sea level made a huge difference to the way cakes rose.

Eimear, happily back close to the sea again!

NOT so much about measurements, but.... Gemini, MY children told me that the best Christmas present they could get would be recipes from their "childhood food".

I must confess that I very seldome use recipes, and a bit more like your mother, a hand of this and some grains of that. And in addition, I don't know what food they remember, I often open my fridge and make somthing of what I can find. However I like to "cook from the bottom" as we say here, don't like use too much "premade" food or ingredientes.

My HD and children love my food, but I am not certain ALL will agree! I think we get customed to special tastes. WE , for instance use very much vegetables. I like to use spice, but I am certain that many sorts of spice will taste strange to me. Because, If we think carefully, the ones we use, if they are many, they are limeted to relatively "constant" collection.

I can "see" your mother trying to measure her cooking! It must have been VERY difficult to her!LOL!

And then to the questions(2 of them): I love fudge.

1) Am I right that Icing Sugar Fudge is used on a cake????

Searching for this, I found a recipe on (ordinary)fudge (to be cut into blocks, which I love, and should not eat! LOL!)

2) WHAT is evaporated milk????

The recipe is Irish Creamy Fudge with Irish Coffee , and if you are interested, it is here:

;-))

X-No-Archive: yes "Penny Gaines" wrote

Do you have a 1/4 inch foot for your machine, Penny? That makes it a lot easier to get the correct seam allowances.

It's the same here in Canada. And by the time you've finished buying all those metres, not yards, of fabric you have enough strips to make yourself a scrappy log cabin quilt!

Eimear

Aud, evaporated milk is UNsweetened condensed milk. Condensed milk, here in Canada (and presumably the US), is extremely sweet (about 60% sugar) because it has extra sugar added before the water is drawn off. Evaporated milk has no added sugar and so only has the natural 10% or so. It makes a big difference in recipes.

I'm not sure that European condensed milk is quite so sweet. You might want to check the label on the can.

Eimear

Or place a mark on your plate at 1/4 inch. Bright nailpolish works well. It's doesn't tend to lift like tape (tried tape my first attempt). I have two different colours on all my plates, one at 1/4 and one at 5/8 (did the 5/8 one as one of my plates has 6/8 as the last mark....and I got caught off guard assuming the last mark was

5/8).

Place a piece of tape where the fabric would be. Run a thin (as in depth, not width) line of polish along the edge of the tape. Let dry, remove the tape for a clean line to butt your fabric to.

Tara

"emerald" skrev i melding news:pOZqe.1656695$6l.229474@pd7tw2no...

OK, Eimear, I see! It is the same as we call VIKING MELK, it is unsweetened, and condensed. It is good to use in sauses and "fish meat"/ "minced fish" for instance, not only in sweet food. It has much lower fat than cream, and a rich taste.

The trouble is: I cannot stop thinking of FUDGE!!!! LOL! AUD ;-))

"Tara D" skrev i melding news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Good advice for our "metric mashines", Tara!!! AUD :-)