just past the solstice and nearing the sun

Happy Holidays to all!

 

I hope you have a great set of holidays with friends, family and nature and find some peaceful time for reflection and deep thought.

 

Thank you for all of the comments and suggestions for this blog.  A few very interesting conversations have taken place and some are still developing.   Any ideas, thoughts and criticisms are most welcome.

 

I've been spending a lot of time outside during the past few days.  One of the pleasures of working out of the home is that I take an hour walk every day at around noon.  After awhile the subtle changes of nature begin to dominate your thoughts and you escape the smaller issues of your own life and work.  These normally roll out over several days, but there are dramatic periods when a few hours makes an incredible different.  

 

We're nearing the quietest stage in the local woods.  The maple trees are about halfway through the period where they stopped converting sunlight into sugar and where their sap will begin to flow in mid February.  Last year the Winter was severe and the flow was delayed by nearly two weeks.  

 

The crows have been very active.  This happens around now and I don't know why, but it is welcome.  I need to track an ornithologist down one of these days, but there are so many other questions that need to be answered.

 

The divisions between night and are are particularly wonderful and focus your attention on the sky.  Sundogs, pillars and any number of wonderful things concentrate in the periods an hour or so from sunrise and sunset.

 

 

The Winter sky at night is a wonderful place and tomorrow you can watch a pretty conjunction of the Moon and Venus starting just before sunset and becoming dramatic as the sky darkens.  The other planet visible is Jupiter which is currently in Pisces.  A few days ago we had the "shortest" day - the least amount of daylight.  For most of us the earliest sunset came some days earlier and the latest sunrise is still to come  (in Basking Ridge New Jersey the earliest sunset  was on December  8 and the latest sunrise will fall on January 4) - our planet's tilt and elliptical orbit conspire to create the shift.

 

While all of this is happening, we are rushing towards our closest encounter with the Sun on January 5 at about 01 hours Universal Time (January 4th for folks in North America).  We'll get to about 147.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is elliptical will find us furthest away on July 5 at 04 hours UT (July 4 for most of us) at 152.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is nearly circular (the eccentricity is currently about 0.0167) but the  difference is significant enough to easily be measured if you are looking for a fun project.

 

Our elliptical orbit means the lengths of the seasons are not equal as our orbital velocity changes depending on where we are - we're moving fastest as we're nearest the Sun.¹  As a result Winter is shorter than Summer in the Northern Hemisphere by about 4.7 days.

 

With a bit of high school physics you can easily work out how fast we're going at our closest and furthest approaches to the Sun - 30,300 meters/sec in early January and we slow down to a mere 29,300 in early July.² 

 

There is great beauty in nature - a poetry that is much deeper than anything we can create.  While I love the arts, looking at nature and trying to understand a bit of it is so much more satisfying.  Feynman says it beautifully here:

 

 

Get out and walk with nature a bit over the holidays.  I guarantee it will beat any television you can find.

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Last night I made a simple sour cherry tart with some excellent canned pie cherries from Oregon Fruit Products.  The tart was the simple shortbread recipe presented here recently:

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

130 grams all purpose flour

35 grams powdered sugar

 a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

For the filling I just made a simple tart cherry filling.  There are many variations, but this was quick:

 

Tart Cherry Filling

1 can part pie cherries - approximately 15 ounces - drain cherries and reserve the juice

100 grams granulated white sugar

15 grams cornstarch

1/2 tsp almond extract

 

Procedure

° Cook cherry juice, sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan over medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture thickens - about ten minutes

° Remove from heat, add cherries and almond extract.  Cool to room temperature or below

 

When the tart and cherries are at room temperature sprinkle about 30 grams of finely crushed almonds on the tart and pour in the cherry mixture.

 

This is fantastic with ice cream.  I made a rich homemade vanilla with tahitian vanilla beans.  I've had some incredible cherry pies with chocolate ice cream too - so go ahead Nancy.

 

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¹ Kepler worked this out - an amazing piece of thinking

² You can easily derive the relation v = sqrt[G*M*(2/r - 1/a)] . Here G is the gravitational constant, M is the Sun's mass, r is the Earth's distance from the Sun and a is our semi-major axis - about 1.496*10¹¹meters. At perihelion our distance is a(1-e) and at aphelion it is a(1+e). 

Comments

[Nancy White]

chocolate and cherry are indeed great partners. Consider some cocoa replacing a bit of the flour in the crust. Sort of a cousin to black forest cake!

With rain through the weekend, no stargazing here but hopefully enough non-rain time for a walk to counter the caloric temptations in the kitchen. Lots of different family configurations and meals all weekend. I think naps are in order as well. Happy Holidays!