I made some delicious, vegan Pear-Cardamom Oat Scones on Sunday using this recipe from Power Hungry.
These scones are a breakfast treat I've made regularly since Christmastime 2015. (That link goes to Hawleyblog, my personal blog. If you want the log-in and password, please let me know.) The flavor is wonderfully spicy, and I love the heartiness that comes from both oat flour and rolled oats.
I highly recommend making one addition to an otherwise totally awesome recipe: 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum whisked in with the rest of the dry ingredients will make the scones less crumbly. In that Hawleyblog post, I wrote that I must have underworked the dough because the scones didn't hold together. I had to make the scones a couple more times before I came to the conclusion the vegan egg needed some help in binding the ingredients together into a cohesive baked good.
I've found that 3/4 teaspoon of dried cardamom seeds ...
... yields almost exactly 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom, the amount called for in the recipe:
And grinding your own cardamom really is worth the extra effort. The smell of the freshly ground spice is amazing.
For my flax egg, I used the 1 1/2 tablespoons of ground flax-seed meal (and 3 tablespoons of water) called for in the Power Hungry recipe, not the 1 tablespoon of meal used in the Bonzai Aphrodite recipe I linked to in this post from last summer. And the "egg" turned out nice and thick after the refrigeration recommended by BA.
You'll need 2 ever-so-slightly heaped teaspoons of whole flax seeds to make the 1 1/2 tablespoons of ground meal. My attempt using 2 1/8 teaspoon of whole seeds resulted in a little too much meal, so when I say "ever-so-slightly," I mean "less than 1/8 teaspoon altogether."
Here's my freshly ground flax-seed meal:
Two rather-modest-sized pears will yield at least 1 1/4 cups of chopped pear.
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Prepositions are one of the trickiest parts of speech to learn in any language, and there's sometimes disagreement regionally here in the U.S. about which preposition is correct in a given sentence.
I found two examples of what I would argue are "wrong" uses of prepositions in Amy Tan's terrific novel The Hundred Secret Senses, though I acknowledge you may feel differently, especially if you grew up in a place like, say, Appalachia or the Rocky Mountain states or anywhere else other than far-southwestern New Jersey, where you might have been taught something different.
The following sentence appears on page 199: "And then we're in the outskirts of town, both sides of the road lined with mile after mile of identical one-room restaurants."
I've only ever heard of being "on the outskirts," never "in." I like the second answer (to the question of on versus in) on this English Language & Usage page: The now-always-plural word outskirts comes from the singular word meaning outer border, and you would logically speak of being on, not in, a border. I'm also personally fond of giving the first answer on that page: It's the idiom. Which is to say, we say that series of words in that context because (almost) everyone says that series of words in that context.
Vocabulary.com takes no position as to which is more or less correct; it has separate examples that use on and in.
It's also entirely possible, of course, that this was a straight-up typo that never got fixed.
The following passage is on page 205: "Around the corner we'll stumble on reality: the fast-food market, the tire junkyard, the signs indicating this village is really a Chinese fantasyland for tourists: Buy your tickets here! See the China of your dreams! Unspoiled by progress, mired in the past!"
I would argue "stumble onto" is preferable to "stumble on," but a Google search isn't helping me make the case I'm correct. A contemporary-Christian song called "Arms of Jesus" contains the phrase "stumble on reality," so there are many hits for that iteration but precious few for "stumble onto reality."
This Cambridge Dictionary page suggests stumble across or stumble upon as alternatives to the also correct stumble on, and they both sound good to me. In fact, I'm going to change my mind and endorse stumble across as my favorite stumble option. And I'll belatedly recognize that, as Cambridge Dictionary states in that entry, these stumble combos are better identified as verb phrases (or phrasal verbs) followed by a noun (such as reality) rather than the verb stumble followed by a prepositional phrase.
Other classic examples of verb phrases that look like a verb and a preposition (and that are sometimes followed by a true prepositional phrase) are catch up (with an old friend), break up (with my boyfriend), turn off (the lights), fill out (this form), fill up (the gas tank), and hold on (for one more day).