I picked some more broad beans for lunch, cooked them briefly, chilled them, and served them with garlic flavoured yogurt and mint. The Systems Administrator remarked spontaneously that the beans were nice. I'll convert the SA to broad beans yet. Actually, I think they would have been better if I'd cooked them slightly earlier instead of suddenly looking at my watch and realising it was quarter to one, so that I could have given them longer to drain. As it was the yogurt dressing ended up rather liquid. There is a Claudia Roden recipe involving a cooked yogurt based sauce made with an egg and some cooked rice, but that sounded altogether too much like work for the middle of the day.
After lunch I jarred up a bucket of honey, so that I could take some for sale at the Tendring Show. I've never sold honey at the show in the past. It seemed like such a faff getting it there, and in my less successful years with the bees I hadn't had any ready at show time, but it occurred to me as I filled my only empty bucket at the last extraction that before ordering more buckets maybe I should try and sell some of the honey I'd got. The rule of the local beekeepers is that if you want to sell honey, you have to enter the honey show, and I've never done that either. Again, it sounded like such a lot of trouble, and as a complete non games player I wasn't fussed about competing.
I don't do games. Card games, board games, competitive sport, the lot, all bore me to idiocy either watching or competing. Under the SA's influence I've learned to make a slight exception for cricket, as long as it's played in cricket whites and not coloured pyjamas, but I only watch for the aesthetics. I don't mind who wins. As far as I'm concerned the key thing about honey is what it tastes like, that and the fact that it has been correctly handled and isn't contaminated with antibiotics, pesticides or anything else. I'd rather it didn't have large pieces of dead bees or wax floating about in it, and beyond that I don't mind. Entering a competition which is partly judged on my ability to drive a jar of honey for ten miles and carry it for a quarter of a mile across the show ground without splashing any up on to the inside of the lid would not normally be in the list of my top five hundred things to do.
A friend who was keen that I show honey, because she did and she wanted me to join in, once gave me some step by step instructions, and a special jug from Lakeland with three filters of increasing fineness. I dug the jug out of the cupboard, dusted it down, and after I'd cleared the fine froth of floating debris from my bucket of honey with cling film and about nine teaspoons, I experimentally spooned some honey on to the finest filter. It sat there. After ten minutes nothing had happened, not a single drop passing through the filter, so I scraped what I could back into the bucket, licked the filter (shame to waste it) and tried again with the next finest filter. After several minutes the tiniest dribble of honey had dripped through.
It was a ridiculous enterprise. At that rate I was going to be up until midnight trying to produce the two pounds of extra filtered honey I needed for my two entries (novice class, any colour and gift class, any colour). The show entries would jolly well have to be picked out of the batch of jars I was hoping to sell, end of. I filled sixteen jars, managing not to drip much honey down the outsides, screwed the lids on, and looked through them to see if any looked conspicuously better than the others. All seemed full of tiny floating specks. I hope most are air bubbles which will dissipate before Saturday, but they'll probably leave marks on the surface. Probably I should have done this a week ago, and then had another session with cling film, but honestly life is too short. I am not overly hopeful of picking up a prize in this Show. At least my two entries will help fill the Show bench, and the eventual winner needs somebody to beat.
I thought I'd assemble the floats as well, but discovered I hadn't managed to accumulate nearly as many five pound notes as I thought I had, and nor had the SA. I shall have to go around the local shops tomorrow breaking twenty pound notes.
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