I have ugly little aphids or something equally yucky all over my raspberry plants. No problem - I have the insecticide soap already, and a sprayer. Just have to mix the soap with an appropriate amount of water, and squirt away. Let’s see, directions for dilutions: 50 ml soap for 1 litre water. 2 tablespoons for 1 pint water. I have a 4 litre empty milk jug, no ml measuring devices, and no idea how many pints in a gallon, much less in a 4 litre milk jug. Sigh.
Most of the time I’m perfectly content to live my life going back and forth between metric and Imperial (if you 'Murkins didn’t know this already, Canadians officially are in metric, and in real life we use both. I drive my car a couple of kilometres to pick up a pound of apples - that kind of thing). Times like this, I kinda wish everything was standardized. I think I’m going to have to break down and purchase some metric cooking measuring devices, or create an equivalency table and post it in my kitchen.
I’ve got a cookbook that was written by a South Asian woman currently living in England.
There’s a recipe in there for cooking brown rice which, as we all know, is very healthy but tastes nasty. The intro to the recipe is something like “Yes, we all know brown rice is nasty. I wondered if this was maybe because of the cooking technique. So one day I sat down and tried many different proportions of rice to water, cooking time, cooking temp, etc, and can now confirm that I have come up with the way to cook brown rice so that it’s NOT nasty! I promise!”
I had just been instructed by my naturopath to eat more whole grains, and so was quite delighted to read this.
I soon found out, however, that this would be utterly impossible, due to the measurement units given.
In the recipe the rice was measured by weight, and the water by volume. Two measuring systems were given for each.
Out of these four total measurements, two I had never heard of (dl? what the hell is a dl?) let alone had the measuring equipment for. The other two I had heard of, but couldn’t measure (although I have several measuring cups marked with up to 4 different systems of measurement).
Good thing I finally figured out the secret to non-nasty brown rice: saffron, and plenty of it.
That is what I suspected. My measuring cups do have mls marked, but not in increments of 100. It was actually the process of converting the dls which were given, using my unconfirmed presumption about what that meant, into the ml marks on my measuring cup, that drove me round the bend. I’m no good at math at the best of times and this almost had me in tears!
But litres are between the two sizes of quarts, so split the difference.
For insecticidal soap it’s not too critical anyway, so if you have something that looks like a quart/quartUS/litre, use 3 tablespoons and a bit. (Google says 10.14 tsp.) If it looks like a pint/pintUS/half-litre, use nearly two tablespoons.
For baking, you do need all the volume units, and weight as well, and worst of all the provenance of the recipe! You’ll need to stock up on measuring devices, or learn to bake with your fingers crossed.
You know, I usually use U.S. recipes with no problem (I prefer them to Canadian recipes, because I don’t have any metric measuring devices), but every so often I’ll get one that calls for an 8 oz can of something - okay, I got a 291 mL can, and a 500 mL can - which one is closest to 8 oz? (And please don’t post telling me the exact conversion ratio - if I really care, I Google it. If not, I just eyeball and wing it.)
