The plan for today was to re-felt the shed roofs. However, when I woke up it was still raining, and quite windy, so while I waited for the Systems Administrator to surface I thought I might as well make a start on the meringues I promised to do for my mother's party on Sunday.
The party is in celebration of her birthday, last Monday, and mine, last month. I offered to make some meringues because various family members like them, especially the younger ones who have no inhibitions against eating what is basically a great inflated spoonful of neat sugar. Also the simmer oven of a four door Aga naturally runs at exactly the right temperature to cook meringues, so I can bask in a glow of culinary accomplishment for practically no effort.
I started off with four eggs' worth, which will nicely fit on the largest baking sheet, and decided I'd better double up and make two batches to be on the safe side, which left eight egg yolks to use up somehow. Egg custard based ice cream accounted for three, and used up a bag of 2010 frozen blackcurrants at the same time. Anything involving blackcurrants more complicated than putting them in a dish with sliced apple and covering them quickly with crumble topping is apt to be messy, and the recipe for blackcurrant ice cream made more than would churn in one go, so by the time I'd finished I'd got purple mixture on the kitchen table, the outside of the ice cream machine, the floor, the drawers of the deep freeze, and (after I'd licked the utensils) my face.
The SA returned from shopping and said that the Colchester B&Q had run out of roofing felt. I do wish they wouldn't do that. I go there because it's cheap, and relatively convenient, but they regularly and randomly let basic items go out of stock, and really one shouldn't encourage them. As it was still windy, though no longer raining, we agreed to try and get felt tomorrow at the Clacton branch. The wind was forecast to have dropped back by then, and the whole job will be much easier on a calm day anyway.
I settled into full domestic goddess mode, and excavated the laundry basket to find my outstanding hand washing, two pairs of alpaca socks, a linen and cotton sweater and a wool one. The woollen jumper is a much loved old favourite, now so shabby it has been demoted to domestic wear only. I used to have it dry cleaned, but it's really not worth it now. The alpaca socks are an experiment. They got a very favourable write-up in one of the garden magazines, so I bought two pairs, a compromise between buying loads of socks that turned out to be rubbish, and paying the full delivery charge for just one pair, which seemed silly. One of the selling points for alpaca was that it was naturally antiseptic, and I could allegedly wear my socks for a week without washing them with no ill effects, but they do still need washing, and they didn't come with any instructions. I'll let you know how it goes.
I'm very glad to live in the age of the washing machine. Washing everything by hand, even the sheets, would be ghastly, and incredibly time consuming, but I don't grudge the odd little bit, being rather keen on natural fibres. I listened to a fascinating programme about the flower fields of west Cornwall and the Scillies on Radio 4 which is well worth catching if you have a spare half hour. Under the latest BBC system you have over a year left to listen, so you should be able to fit it in.
Three egg yolks were destined for the filling of a flan for supper. I thought wistfully that the other two could have been turned into lemon curd, if only I'd asked the SA to buy some unwaxed lemons, but couldn't be bothered to go out just to buy lemons, and decided they could be cheese straws for the party instead. A friend of ours makes wonderful cheese straws, but when I asked her how she did it, all she would say was that they were really easy. I thought she was protecting her recipe, which was fair enough, until I had to learn to do them for the music society and discovered that they were really easy. I use a recipe out of the good housekeeper's cookery book I've had since I was a teenager. It looks stingy with the cheese, but makes really nice short pastry.
The SA volunteered to do the vacuuming, so I got off the boring domestic task. If I were a full-time housewife and had to do this stuff seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, I would be screaming with boredom and demanding an office I could escape to, but it's good fun to spend the odd day pottering about in the kitchen when it's windy outside. Tomorrow we really will re-roof the sheds, assuming that the Clacton B&Q has any felt.
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