Dexway English Magazine: C1 – Edition 7
Banana and cinnamon cup cakes
COOKING UP A STORM
Ingredients
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup of sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup of unsalted butter
1 ½ cups mashed bananas, about four ripe bananas
2 large eggs
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Honey and cinnamon icing/Frosting
Method
Preheat oven to 176 degrees centigrade then Line standard muffin tin with paper liners and in a medium bowl whisk together flour sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Mash ripe bananas and add to dry ingredients along with the butter, eggs and vanilla extract. Divide into the paper cake cases and cook in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. They are ready when a tooth pick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Cool the cupcakes on a wire rack and then make your frosting by combining 50z of butter, 100z of icing sugar and 1-2 tablespoons of milk, plus cinnamon to taste beat together. You can also add food colouring to change the colour of the frosting.
Spread frosting over cakes and add a slice of bananas
Information overload
Some would say that we live in an increasingly hectic world; advertising is on every street, we have and the internet is ready to offer as much information as we want on a mind-boggling array of subjects.
Our email accounts are likely to get filled up with spam messages so that on opening our inbox after a short breaks there can be hundreds of messages to trawl through in order to identify the relevant or important information that we want to see.
The best way to deal with this overload is surely to select the exposure we have; we don’t have to have our phones switched on all the time, we aren’t obliged to use the internet or watch television. Can you even remember a time when buses and walls were bus and wall colour rather than rainbow-coloured advertising hoardings? But what about at work? do we really think about who we’re emailing?
How can companies avoid this ‘over-informing’ or ‘over-sharing’? What would you suggest? Do you think that colleagues should always copy team members in on a mail, even if that particular email has nothing to do with them? After all, it’s free and doesn’t take any extra effort on the part of the sender and in a paper-free office there’s no environmental objection to an extra name on the list. Or would you say that this thoughtless sharing makes the work place more impersonal and systematic? Does it encourage people to forget about the reality and instead focus on the formality?
Out sourcing, off-shoring and following the sun
Outsourcing, off-shoring and following the sun, these key words are becoming more and more relevant in today’s business climate, as companies and large organisation search for a cheaper way to do business, switching between countries to find cheaper labour or a cheaper manufacturing process or only to stream-line their current activities.
Outsourcing is probably the easiest to stomach when it comes to job creation and loss. When a company outsources they will give certain services to a company from outside, the typical services include clearing, catering and security but recently company have started to outsource parts of their manufacturing process. Car manufacturers will outsource the buildings of engines to another company which speeds up the manufacturing process.
Following the sun is something that has happened as a direct result of the world becoming smaller, a project starts in Spain and at 6.30pm when the office closes the project is passed to the other side of the world, China or Australia or America, and then at the end of their working day the project is passed back. This way the project works 24 hours but the workers do not.
Off-shoring is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow; a company relocating its production to another country can harm the local economy of the ex-host country and cause shock waves within a community. But companies have the right to keep costs low providing they are producing the same product at the expected high standards, does this matter if they do this in Japan, Africa or Britain?
Vertical Farming
In other editions of the dexway magazine we are talked about farming and discussed how we have gone from farming for ourselves to watching our local farms grow and grow. I wanted to introduce a new idea that maybe is the middle ground between farming between ourselves and farming on a mass scale.
The term vertical farming was coined by Gilbert Ellis Bailey in 1915 in his book Vertical Farming, in his book Gilbert Ellis Bailey was talking about the various layers of the farming , air, plants, roots and soil however the term is now being used to refer the idea that growing food could be done vertically. According to the model, vertical farming takes place in a glass skyscraper sealed from the outside with all light, nutrients and water supplied by life support systems within the skyscraper.
Several authors agree that vertical farming holds the key to feeding the worlds rising population and, some might argue, is a natural progression in much the same way as our buildings have began to reach for the sky so not our farms too!
It is suggested that these skyscrapers would be additional buildings within our cities which are used to feed individual city populations, at first the skyscrapers would be used by communities to produce food for them locally before being up scaled or expanded to supply food for a village, town or city.
The technology already exists, small scale vertical green houses can be bought easily from the garden centre, more and more plants are being growing using Aeroponics (growing crops in air) and Hydroponics (growing crops without soil) so the technology already exists we just need to upscale these systems into a full building.
One of the major concerns about vertical farming is that a lot of energy would be used to power and heat the vertical greenhouses; we would need to conduct a little analysis. When you take into account the amount of energy used in the complete growth process from seed to crop to supermarket it probably arrives to a much higher amount then a single vertical green-house, we would also see less traffic because distribution would be local, higher wages for farmers because there would be no risk of losing the crop and less chance of accidents resulting from the use of heavy farm machinery. The numbers really do add up to suggest that vertical farming is the future.
Spring cleaning
We find ourselves in spring already, how fast winter passed! In a short time we will be thinking about changing our wardrobes from our thick winter clothes to our colourful and cool summer clothes. But maybe while our wardrobe demands attention so does our house or apartment. In the United Kingdom when the earth starts to crack with spring flower we start cleaning, we call it “The spring clean”, we open the windows and the doors and clean every cabinet and surface in our houses.
With the movement towards green we have started to consider how much damage our cleaning can do the environment, what happens to that bleach or other strong chemicals that we pour down the drain? I have included some green alternatives to popular cleaning products, notice how the measurements use the American standard of cups which is about 16 tablespoons
Here are a few basic “recipes” and techniques to get you started:
Glass:
Mix ¼ vinegar with 1 quart water and spray onto windows, use old newspaper to clean off
Floor:
mix 4 cups vinegar with 1 gallon hot water. You add peppermint oil or lemon oil to make the water smell nice. Wash the floor as you normally would
Wood furniture:
Mix equal parts lemon juice and olive oil and apply to furniture with a cloth.
Globalisation
Globalisation means a higher level of interconnectedness and a move towards a world economy. Now when we spend money in our local shops we are helping the local economy, the national economy and the world economy, we may also be able to call ourselves culturally enriched by globalisation.
How did globalisation come about?
Things like improved transports, being able to move goods on a monster scale means those goods are cheaper, the removal or reducing of barriers to trade, countries quickly recognise that trade is good for business, as mentioned before interconnectedness, the power of the internet and mobile phones are bringing us together, and finally because of new open boarder policies people often move between countries taking their skills with them or companies often move looking for the cheaper option.
Companies are happy to set up shop in other countries; they can be given a number of benefits for doing this; cheaper labour, cheaper raw materials and friendly governments.
It is true that this inward investment is good for the country; these countries often fall into the category of less economically developed and enjoy the benefits which can sometimes include a better transport network and access to medical and dental care. Globalisation is often termed as the “Sameness”, each town having a McDonald´s, Starbucks, Toys` R´ Us and Shell petrol station just to name a few.
