The Yolk’s On You

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It’s Ann here today. Andy is in OurLittleCorner trying not to be a party pooper.

So it’s no yolk. I was going write this blog with the title “I’m in Love with the Pope and Bernie and Bruce.” But once again the bloggers’ gods have smiled sweetly upon me and reminded me that BigLittleMeals is mostly a food blog. Those gods must have also been behind the weird coincidence that resulted in my final choice for today’s blog…which is, thankfully, about food.

Andy and I eat lots of eggs (usually purchased from local folks and neighborhood friends); when I have a choice, I always covet the yolks and leave some of the whites. Consequently, I was delighted with a recent report which indicates yolks shouldn’t carry any health stigma.

Right after reading the article about the healthy quality of yolks, I was getting my daily update on the news and saw a headline fromThe Guardian entitled, “I’d smoke Biscoff if I could.” After reminding myself what Biscoff are, I remembered getting them on a Delta flight – and thinking how delicious they were. According to the article,”Biscoff is a modern version of the traditional Belgian speculoos, spiced biscuits that have been around since the middle ages, when they were eaten to celebrate December’s feast of Saint Nicholas.”The Guardian article reveals that Biscoffs are so trendy online and with GenZ that a recent TikTok video describing how to make a 2-ingredient cheesecake with Biscoff has received over 5 million views – and a video for 3-ingredient cookies using Biscoff Cookie Butter received over 4 million views!

I didn’t figure that we’d get even 1000 views if I posted a Biscoff recipe (surely because the majority of our readers aren’t Gen Z? :), so instead I started searching for a recipe for BigLittleMeals that has lots of egg yolks. About the second one that came up was from Serious Eats and was a yummy-sounding ice cream recipe …with multiple egg yolks and cookie crumbs. Biscoff cookie crumbs.

My blog was set.

If I can’t express adoration of the Pope and Bernie and Bruce in a blog, I will say I’m pretty much in love with this ice cream. And if you want to fall in love too but don’t happen to have an ice cream maker, try the Speculoos Cookie Butter Ice Cream from Trader Joes!

See a few comments from Reddit fans below:

Even though Speculoos Ice Cream from Trader Joe’s has an especially devoted following, Ben&Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs and others make it too.

If you do have an ice cream maker and love homemade ice cream as much as we do, try today’s recipe.

Biscoff Ice Cream

Biscoff Ice Cream

  • Servings: a generous quart
  • Print

Inspired by a SeriousEats recipe.

  • 2 c heavy cream 
  • 1 c whole milk
  • 1/2 tsp Diamond kosher salt
  • 2/3 c (lightly packed) light or dark brown sugar
  • 7 large egg yolks
  • 1/2 T bourbon or brandy (optional)
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 1 1/2 c finely crumbled Biscoff cookies

Combine the cream, milk, salt, and sugar in a saucepan. Stir until they’re blended.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Warm the cream mixture until it’s just about to simmer, then take a measuring cup and gradually pour about 1 c of the cream mixture into the yolks, whisking constantly as you pour. Pour the the warmed yolks and cream back into the pan and mix again. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until the custard thickens enough to coat a spatula (you should be able to take your finger and draw a line through the coated spatula). Do not allow it to boil!

Remove the cream mixture from the heat and stir in the bourbon and vanilla. Cool.

After the mixture has cooled, place it covered in the refrigerator for at least 6 hours – or, better yet, overnight. Then freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. Immediately after you remove the just-frozen ice cream from the machine, fold in the crumbled Biscoff, then place in freezer. Serve with a Biscoff cookie on the side – or make a Biscoff ice cream sandwich, layering the ice cream between 2 cookies.

Recipe brought to you by BigLittleMeals.com and Andy and Ann.

Why Wynn Would Be a Great Shortstop (and Suck as a Goalie). It’s All How You Look at It.

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It’s Andy here today. Ann is in OurLittleCorner focusing on big white hats.

Wynn with one of her “baseballs” during a fetching session.

If you’ve followed our blog at all you’ve learned a few things about Wynn, our Cardigan Welsh Corgi.  We’ve blogged about her ”Jurassic bark,” her gluttonous eating style, her love of bully sticks, how her brain works, her political preferences, her food-theft capers, why she’s into butt-sniffing, and her opossum herding skills (to name just a few things).   For today’s blog I’m going to share my thoughts on why I am convinced that she would make a dynamite shortstop (and a not-so-dynamite goalie).

My assessment of her baseball potential is based on four years of observing her fetch balls. I did the math and calculated that four years of twice-a-day play sessions each with a minimum of ten ball throws per session adds up to 29,200 fetches — ample data for assessing her potential. Her speed, agility, and long, low-slung body (that is ideal for trapping fast grounders) are definitely shortstop-worthy attributes.

I’m not alone in imagining how a dog would fare on the baseball field. I found a number of references to dogs as either mascots or “bat dogs” (like “Rookie” the bat dog for the Trenton Thunder, an AA affiliate of the New York Yankees ). But given Wynn’s skill level, I’m sure she would find such froufrou jobs demeaning.

Rookie the “bat dog” of the Trenton Thunder, an AA affiliate of the New York Yankees. Wynn would be insulted if she were asked to do this job. ( Photo source: American Kennel Club)

I did come across one promising blog post title: “Batter Up,Pups! Matching Dog Breeds to Baseball Positions.” However, I was disappointed to find that Cardigan Corgis were nowhere in the lineup. Worse yet, Border Collies were designated “the shortstops of the dog world” because they are “agile, quick, and always on the move.” The blog failed to mention that border collies are high strung and have no sense of humor whatsoever. Who has ever heard of a good shortstop with no sense of humor?

So where’s the Cardigan Corgi? (source: Petsetc.com)

But to fully appreciate Wynn’s baseball potential you need to know how she visually processes fast-moving objects (think baseballs) relative to her ball-catching muzzle — what I will call “muzzle-eye coordination.” It’s important to note that dogs do not see movement like we do. According to PetMD.com

Dogs have more rods in the retina than humans do. Rods are sensitive to shape, movement, and dim light. Dogs can see moving objects much better than stationary objects, and they have 10-20 times greater motion sensitivity than humans. (emphasis added)


I’m not sure I understand how this all works, but a Scientific American article explains that the “flicker rate” (the speed which the nervous system processes sensory information) is higher in dogs than humans. This means that a line drive hit toward Wynn would approach in “slow motion” from her point of view. To help visualize this I have produced the following educational video:

A BigLittleMeals Educational Video: Why Wynn Would Be A Great Shortstop

If Wynn is so good at dealing with fast-moving balls, you must be wondering why I think that she would suck as a goalie . The reason has to do with another aspect of how she sees the world: Like all other dogs, she’s color blind.

Dogvision.com, a fascinating website devoted to canine vision, explains that dogs have “dichromatic vision.” This means that they see primarily blue and yellow shades and can’t distinguish between red and green. Wynn as a goalie may be able to field bullet shots on goal, but when putting the ball back in play would she be able to distinguish between the jerseys of her teammates and those worn by opponents? Very likely not.

Although I didn’t produce an educational video to illustrate how color blindness would affect her fitness to be a goalie, the Dogvision.com web site has a “dog vision simulator“which allows one to upload any photo and compare it to how a dog would see it. [Editor’s note: I found several sites that use this conversion technology and from what I can gather the conversion, although not perfect, is pretty accurate]. To give you an example of how this works I uploaded a photo of some of the balls Wynn plays with daily.

This is how Wynn sees the balls that she has chased 29,200 times.

I assume that if Wynn were on a soccer team it most likely would be on a women’s team, so I selected a couple of random photos of women in soccer matches to illustrate how Wynn would see the other players. It’s pretty clear how difficult it would be for her to pick out her teammates in the heat of a match. I see no soccer fame in Wynn’s future.

Comparative photos created with the “dog vision simulator” (at Dogvision.com).

I’m going to close with one more observation. If you think that how a dog sees things is interesting, consider that a common housefly’s vision is roughly 3 to 4 times faster than a dog’s, allowing it to perceive the world in even slower motion. Can you imagine what a line drive would look like to a fly? Or (I can’t help myself here) what a fly ball must look like?

Enough of this; it’s time for Wynn’s afternoon play session.

Stout?

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It‘s Ann here today. Andy is in OurLittleCorner with a stamp of approval.

My interest in “stout” began a few weeks ago when our food-writer daughter said I should make a sticky toffee pudding recipe with a “Stout Caramel” sauce for a dinner party we were having. She had written an article for The SF Standard raving about the delicious food at San Francisco’s new Dingles Public House. I was supposed to figure out how to replicate this dessert she’d been served. I knew from her article that it had Guinness Stout in the sauce and Earl Grey tea in the pudding.

Rather than tackle the challenging sauce and pudding project and do some friction maxxing (remember Andy’s last blog?), I took the easy way out and sat and day-dreamed about other things, such as…

What does the word “STOUT” really mean?

STOUT: A dark, full-bodied ale?

Clearly a stout – from St James Gate, Ireland

STOUT: having physical strength and vigor?

These three women seem pretty stout. Photo from Netflix and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, a series we just enjoyed.

STOUT: Someone who is brave, bold, resolute, full of courage?

(note here to all my CC Gamma Phi Besties: didn’t we used to sing, “With our crescent of pearls, we are stouthearted girls”?). Below is a statue of a woman who was really stouthearted, probably more so than me and my Besties! 🙂

Statue of Grainne Mhaol Ni Mhaille , Grace O’Malley, 1530-1603), the Irish Pirate, located at Westport House, Co. Mayo, Ireland

In case you’re unfamiliar with Grace O’Malley, here’s what Anne Chambers, author of the biography about O’Malley (entitled Granuaile ) writes: O’Malley was a “fearless leader by land and by sea, political pragmatist and tactician, rebel, pirate and matriarch, the ’most notorious woman in all the coasts of Ireland’ GRACE O’MALLEY challenges and manipulates the turbulent politics of the 16th century. Breaching boundaries of gender imbalance and bias, she re-wrote the rules to become one of the world’s first documented feminist trail-blazers.” You can read more about this Irish Pirate here.

STOUT: A person who has a thick body?

Is one of them stout?

When I finally got up the nerve to try to develop a recipe, I was a little anxious about the potential calorie content…after all, at my age it’s easy to get a little stout. So I looked up some exercises…the kind I might actually do. Please turn the sound on so you can fully appreciate why I think this fits today’s blog.

Sea shanties came along probably 200+ years after the Irish Pirate Grace O’Malley lived – but I think she would have liked this song, “The Wellerman,”even though the lyrics refer to whaling ships in New Zealand in the mid-1800’s and the singer, Nathan Evans, is Scottish, not Irish, and didn’t record it until 2021, 418 years after her death. Would she have been happy that it became a huge TikTok hit?

Facebook reel by Doc H.

After picking and choosing ingredients and measurements and instructions from about eight online Sticky Toffee Pudding recipes, I’m pleased with the way my recipes turned out – even if it was a struggle. Whew.

Hope you have a happy and fun St. Patrick’s Day next Tuesday. We suggest you enjoy a Guinness, watch the How to Get to Heaven from Belfast series, read up on pirates (especially Irish women pirates), and have a (small) piece of Sticky Toffee Pudding – served on top of a big spoonful of Guinness STOUT Caramel Sauce and topped with vanilla gelato. Then do a wee bit of exercise.

Guinness Stout Caramel Sauce

This is adapted from a Food52 recipe.

  • 1 12-ounce bottle of Guinness extra stout
  • 3/4 c light brown sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 T butter
  • 1 c cream
  • 1/4 tsp Diamond kosher salt

Pour the stout into a medium saucepan and heat to boiling. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook until the stout is reduced by about half.

Stir in the brown sugar and vanilla. Heat to boiling, reduce heat to a simmer and let mixture cook for 8-10 minutes without stirring.

Remove from heat, add the butter, cream and salt and gently stir. Put into a glass container and let cool. Refrigerate – and use within 2 weeks.

Recipe brought to you by BigLittleMeals.com and Andy and Ann.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

The cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, and ginger can be omitted – and the cake may actually be more traditional and just as delicious…but I like the flavor they add.

  • 1/2 lb (about 8 oz) pitted dates , roughly chopped
  • 1  1/3 c boiling water (optional: add 3 bags of Earl Grey tea to the boiling water and steep for 4 minutes before pouring over dates)
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 8 T butter, softened
  • 3/4 c light brown sugar , loosely packed
  • 3 eggs 
  • 1 T golden syrup (optional but delicious)
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 3/4 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp cardamon
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • 1 tsp Diamond kosher salt
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 3/4 c flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9″x12″ baking pan.

Place dates in a medium bowl and add the boiling water. Stir in the baking soda (it will fizz).

Put the flour in a medium bowl, then whisk in the cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, ginger, salt and baking powder.

Place butter and brown sugar in a bowl or food processor. Beat or process until smooth. Add eggs, syrup and vanilla and beat until well-blended. Add the flour mixture and mix until just incorporated. Then add the date mixture and mix or process until combined well – but don’t over mix.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30-35 minutes – or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool the pudding in the pan on a wire rack. To serve – cut into small squares, ideally while it’s still slightly warm and place each square on top of a generous spoonful of Guinness Stout Caramel Sauce, then top it all with with a little vanilla gelato.

Recipe brought to you by BigLittleMeals.com and Andy and Ann.

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