"Cobbler" is a British kind of casserole made with a topping that looks like cobblestones. It can be savoury or sweet. I grew up with savoury cobbler as a school dinner. And the topping, is, basically... scones! Stew and scones, what’s not to like?

Here’s my vegan version, a delicious mushroom and chestnut cobbler. The combination of mushroom and chestnut is a classic. The herby scones make a great complement to it, their dry scone texture soaking up the moist stew.

For the topping, I derived my version from domestic gothess’ excellent vegan scone recipe. The coconut oil and butter make good "lumpy" fats to achieve the crumbly texture. In my version, the herbs and nutritional yeast make a lovely savoury complement to the stew. You don’t need to serve this with bread, since the topping basically fulfils that role.

Serves 2. Takes 75 minutes.

Ingredients:

For the stew:

• 1 onion
• 250g mushrooms
• 100ml white wine
• 200g pre-cooked chesnuts (ours were vacuum-packed)
• 1.5 tsp flour
• 1 tsp miso
• 1 tsp italian herbs
• 2 tsp vegetable stock powder

For the scone topping:

• 175g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 25g vegan block butter
• 25g solid refined coconut oil
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tsp italian herbs
• 1 tsp salt
• 80–90 ml unsweetened vegan milk

Method:

Turn the oven on at 200 C (for a fan oven), to preheat.

For the stew:

Peel and finely dice the onions. Clean the mushrooms and chop them into nice bite-sized pieces. Chop the chestnuts to the same size (probably chopping them in halves).

In a stew pan, heat up some flavourless oil and fry the mushrooms for 3-4 minutes to give them some colour, then take them out and put them to one side for a moment. Heat up some more oil in the same pan, and fry the onions for about 5 minutes until they become soft and golden.

Add the 1.5 tsp flour and mix it through the onions. Then put the mushrooms back in, as well as the chestnuts, and stir.

Add the white wine to this pan, bring it to the boil, and scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze. Turn the heat down to medium, add the miso, herbs, and veg stock. Boil a kettle, and add enough boiling water to cover the stew contents, then let it bubble gently while you prepare the topping. Don’t cook it too hard, and try to keep it quite a "wet" stew - it’s going to thicken up more in the oven.

For the topping:

In a mixing bowl, place the flour and baking powder and mix together.

The coconut oil and the butter - both of these, you want to add them in small chunks or small blocks to the flour. Keep them cold so they don’t melt too quickly.

With the tips of your fingers, rub the flour into the cubes of fat, squishing the pieces of fat into the mixture. Keep doing this until the mixture turns into a "breadcrumb" texture.

Next sprinkle over the nutritional yeast, herbs and salt. Using the back of a knife, mix these through. Don’t over-mix.

Gradually stir in the milk, again using the back of a knife, trying to bring the mixture together without over-mixing it (that’s how you keep the crumbly texture). Bring the dough together into a loose shaggy ball.

To assemble:

Put the stew into a casserole dish - ours was about 15cm x 20cm rectangle.

Using your hands, shape the dough into 6 small "scones" and place them on top of the stew. They should be not too thick, maybe 2cm thick. When you place them onto the stew, try to keep them separate and not touching. Of course it’s not a crisis if they’re touching, you can separate them after it’s cooked - but you do want there to be at least some space between the cobbles.

Put this into the oven, uncovered, and bake for 15-18 minutes until the top of the cobbles is golden. Remove and serve in dishes, making sure to keep the cobbles on top when you spoon everything out, with a big spoon or ladle.

There’s an open letter circulating this week entitled "Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia", initiated by academics at Radboud. I agree with quite a lot of it, but their demands are quite sweeping and as a result I can’t sign this letter. My reasons, my response, are in this post. I’d be interested in your reaction too.

Here’s my comment:

One of my big concerns is that they don’t specify what it is they want to ban. We all know that "AI" is a widely-used term which is sometimes taken broadly and sometimes narrowly. I believe that the aim of the letter is to ban big-industry generative AI from the classroom (judging my the motivations they express). I sympathise with that. However, the authors have chosen to simplify this to the term "AI" without explanation, and that turns their demands into quite extreme ones.

The closest we get to a definition in this letter is AI "...such as chatbots, large language models, and related products." So is it only text generation they want to ban, ignoring image generation? Maybe, but that’s probably too narrow. Do they want to ban all use of machine learning, even the teaching of machine learning? I very much doubt it, but it’s easy to read the demands that way, since "AI" is understood by many people to include all of that.

(The title of the letter seems to exhibit nuance: "Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI" is much better than "Stop the Adoption of AI". But the letter’s demands go further.)

For myself, I’d like to

• (a) keep the Big GenAI industry out of the classroom (I’d like it to be possible to complete my course without sending data outside the country, without helping to train some VC company’s algorithm, without supporting unknown amounts of energy waste);
• (b) take seriously the threat to learning from "cognitive shortcuts" and bullshit text;
• (c) never use any AI whose energy/climate footprint cannot be measured;

while I also want to

• (d) make my course robust and fair even when some students might over-use LLMs outside my control;
• (e) take account of LLMs’ valuable use cases - most notably in programming, for code debugging and writing code to adapt data formats.

For me, the open letter’s demand to "ban AI use in the classroom for student assignments" accounts for (a,b,c) but fails at (d) and (e).

I’ve avoided LLMs so far but I don’t believe I can achieve (d) without taking some nuanced tactical alterations to the course that I teach. I might use EduGenAI or possibly an offline local LLM since it helps with points (a) and (c) (but not completely).

So, for my own personal perspective: I don’t agree with the open letter because it "throws the baby out with the bathwater": the "baby" being ML tools in the classroom, the "bathwater" being Big GenAI and LLM-induced de-skilling. I would prefer our strategy to be one that deliberately guards against both of those without banning all "AI".

I also have in mind the fatalistic voices who will comment: "Students will use ChatGPT anyway" and "But ChatGPT is better than ____". I work at Tilburg University, whose motto is "Understanding Society". Surely, this now includes understanding the societal context and implications of using LLMs, including the societal position of one LLM versus another LLM. For me, tools like GPT-NL or EduGenAI should help to make this case. (Or offline LLMs?) We can disentangle LLMs as a tool from Big GenAI as an industry, in the messaging we give to students.

I’m grateful to the letter authors for taking a stand, and for providing good food for thought.