Mince pies did indeed contain meat once upon a time. Back in the middle ages, when fashions moved more slowly, meat dishes were frequently flavoured with fruit, and minced or processed food was always popular.

I have eaten fruit mince from a jar, and it was fine. But making your own fruit mince is very simple, and takes about half an hour. If you want to give a home made gift, but don't have the time and energy for the full fruit mince pie, why not fill some clean, sanitised jars with fruit mince and put a really nice label on them?

I recommend keeping this fruit mince in the fridge for up to a week before use. If you plan on keeping it longer, bake it into a pie or put it in the freezer. There is a bit of grating and chopping, so exercise your common sense when cooking with children. It is a very flexible recipe: measure by guesswork, substitute what you have to hand, switch in things you like, and see what happens. This recipe makes about 2 cups of fruit mince.

Nouns

In clinic a person asks me about the dose of the statin he is on.

"I don't think we know."

"What do you mean, we don't know."

He is on a statin for a TIA. Transient ischemic attack. I try to explain. We are trying to reduce the risk of a stroke.

I've been in medicine for thirty years and it is changing fast. So the dose of statin is unknown for TIAs. The dose of statin has more evidence for heart disease and heart attacks and sudden death. The last…

Normally when I work at night I flip to a cooking show and start watching that. There are only so many work related things to read, and everyone knows that I am more into footwear than technology anyways. Sometimes I watch a game, the Milwaukee Bucks have been on a hot streak lately, the Bradley Center of my youth has been replaced by the Fiserv Forum (few things smach of North American hubris as the naming of ballparks and convention centers after companies with more money than good taste in naming…