It was a great plan

July 19, 2020

The plan for Saturday really was good, unfortunately as so often, it didn’t survive contact with the enemy. In this case the enemy was Saturday, and an elderly freezer. The idea of the new freezer was twofold. I have two elderly freezers both solidly approaching end of life, and I have a garden full of food I need to harvest and store. The plan is to have a third freezer, theoretically reliable. Then I have the extra space I need this time of the year, and hopefully when one of the others die I will have some wiggle room. I also thought this was a good time to defrost and clean. So far so good. However, the new freezer while being physically the biggest also has the least capacity, by quite a margin, so just emptying one of the other freezers was tricky. That achieved defrosting went much quicker than I expected, as did the cleaning. Refilling however was a problem. The old freezer took about nearly a day to get cold again. As you can gather from my comments about the capacity of the new freezer I didn’t have space to put the icecream had I made it. As an alternative way to fill my day (OK let’s be honest I have no clue why I suddenly decided to do this) I decided to tidy the driveway. I needed to clear weeds from both sides, it’s a tarmac drive with nice edging stones….when you can see them. Well 2 hours with a hoe and you can see them. While I was doing it it seemed like hard work but not terrible. Half an hour later I realised my hands were covered in blisters and everything hurt. That was the end of doing anything much Saturday.

Sunday morning wasn’t promising, my body hadn’t forgotten what I did to it Saturday, but a long hot bath got me moving. It allowed me to do lots of really boring household jobs, don’t I just have the most fun weekends. I did manage to get two batches of icecream made though. The first was a request, Tet wanted an apple ice cream. I actually think for just apple a sorbet is the way to go, I also saw a recipe for apple and sloe sorbet. As we have apples still from last year this is how I will be trying to use it up. For today I went for an apple pie feel, with a cinnamon and brown sugar ice cream with a little apple puree in it. Once that was churned I added a lot more people puree as a ripple. We are really enjoying our fruit ripples so hopefully this will be another winner.  The second is my take on Wacken ice cream. The festival itself cannot happen this year, but they are still having it, online. So we are having the whole event at home. I have the barbecue for cooking pig on a stick. I have the meat ordered. I have the new and differnt fruit ciders to try, and I will have a ton of ice and my sleeping bag ready. It seems to be essential to boil or freeze at some point. Another important element is icecream. The ice cream maker there is amazing and makes fantastic icecream fresh the whole event. I love the black honey one that is just called Wacken. I bought the activated charcoal a while ago, as I was sure that was the colouring used (it has no flavour and a slight texture) I just needed to get some reasonably priced runny honey. Having made it today I have learned a couple of things. Firstly, and in hindsight totally obviously, English  honey does  it taste the same as German honey. I know I know, each area has a distinctive flavour because the bees are collecting from differnt plants but for some reason I just didn’t think about it. Secondly, charcoal it REALLY hard to mix in well. I think I will need to use a very fine sieve and possibly use am immersion blender to mix it. That said, I am thrilled with what I have achieved. It’s certainly in the ballpark if not perfect, and perhaps not perfect has some merit, it means I will still be very happy when I get to have the real thing.

So not really a very productive weekend, but I am mostly happy with it. Tomorrow morning I will try to sort out the freezers and get ready for the rest of the delivery I had last Monday. I would like to get the new doorbell set up too, and maybe the driveway sensors. Busy busy, and of course the Monday mystery solo robin.