Learning about Buttermilk

I've never used buttermilk for baking before (it's not very common in the UK, although I believe it was in the past), but I found this great recipe for chocolate brownie cake for my brother's 15th birthday (pics here)- and it had buttermilk it (it also had sour cream, which is like buttermilk made from cream which I substituted with 3/4 buttermilk and 1/4 butter), previously I have just used milk with a little lemon juice left for 15 mins 'til it sours, but I thought that as it was such a crucial part of the cake. It's not too hard to find in where I live - I just picked some up in Tescos.

I had a little bit of buttermilk left over and when looking up what to do with it, I found out that modern 'buttermilk' is not really buttermilk at all (as in the slightly sour milk left over from churning butter), but it is a cultured product similar to yogurt. Even better was that you can 'make' your own buttermilk using a bit of bought buttermilk as a starter, I just put the leftover buttermilk in a container, topped it up with milk and left it in a cupboard for about 15 hours, until it thickened and smelled a bit like yogurt. Not sure why it doesn't go bad, like milk usually would being left on the side, but it didn't!

My buttermilk didn't come out as thick as the store-bought kind that I used as a starter, but that may be because they used something else to help thicken it, next time I'll add a little powdered milk, as I have read online that people use this to make homemade yogurt thicker. I am a bit confused tho' as PrayzGod says on her blog that homemade buttermilk generally comes out thicker than the stuff from the store, so I don't know where I went wrong! The white 'blobs' on the side of the container and left on the spoon are where the lactic acid in the milk has caused it to clabber, which is what makes it into buttermilk.

Of course once I'd made it I wanted to make something with it - I made some super yummy buttermilk oat scones and added dried cranberries and sultanas to the mixture - so yummy. I'd recommend making scones with buttermilk, it really does make them lighter.

Finding an essay planner / outlining / notecard program!

Having problems writing an essay (on moral panics + crime) for my Open University social science course, whilst I have written many essays before, tiny word limits and strict restrictions mean that I have to really pick and choose what to put in it. As I was (attempting) to write my plan I found myself drawing arrows all over the place and thought this would be easier if I wrote each idea of a piece of paper (or index card) and re-arranged until satisfied. Then I thought there must be some software for doing this without having to use lots of silly bits of paper.

I already use KeyNote to organise ideas and forum posts/e-mail correspondence that I may need to use again and I use mindjet mindmanager for notetaking and brainstorming, but neither of these do exactly what I want, although mindmanager is probably closest to what I want.

I tried TheLiteraryMachine, which I have tried for other writing tasks before, but it is still so ridiculously complicated - so that was a non-starter. I also found a couple of commercial software, but none of them seem to do what I want either;

• SuperNotecard looks a bit advanced and more geared towards fiction writers, although I may check out the trial.
• NoteWorthy Virtual Notecards looks interesting, but doesn't appear to have a way of eventually arranging your virtual 'cards' into an outline / essay plan.

I found a freeware program Text Block Writer, which looks interesting and will probably do the job, it will let me re-arrange my 'notecards' and will produce an outline that can be imported into word (yeay!); however it is a bit rough around the edges, it has an unusual layout and some bizarre quirks, such as columns for placing cards into and lots of different editing spaces. It also doesn't have a search or a way of grouping/linking cards (e.g. these card must always stay with this card or this card must always come after that card). There appears to be a new paid for version of this software called Text Block Author, but this appears to be basically the same, but it does have a search facility (which is a big plus!).
Text Block Writer is basically a digalisation of re-arranging notecards manually, obviously without any extra features this is still useful, after all for paper notecards you need;

• lots of space to rearrange the cards,
• have lots of crossing out when you want to reword a point
• land up losing a crucial card
• have to type it all out into your word processor when you're done.

Perhaps I am just being greedy, but it seems silly just to replicate notecards when computers can do so much more.

After some more searching I found out I was basically looking for something called an outliner (Wikipedia: outliner + why the outliner tool is the essential tool for everybody), of which keynote is one and mindmaps are similar to (and apparently evernote, another program I use (essentially as a never-ending notebook) also counts as an outliner). This yielded a whole lot more results that before, there seem to be a wide variety of outlining programs each with different feature-sets and many programs are customised for specific uses (e.g. programming, writing etc). Not sure if I will find one that does what I want, think I'll probably land up using text block writer for this assignment, what with it being due on Tuesday and all!