home brew | organised castle

It is nearly 2 weeks since the family came to visit and we celebrated a milestone birthday for our younger daughter. Thank you for your patience while I get back into the swing of regular blog posts.

There was afternoon tea and socialising with friends and family. Of course, there was cake!!

Dinner with the extended family. It was so good to be together.

So, now it is back to regular transmission.

Today was a busy one in the kitchen.

GMan bottled the latest batch of home brew.

He also started 2 more loaves of sourdough bread. These will be baked tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I had a large bunch of celery and a leek which I had bought earlier in the week with a plan to make soup. I ended up with 14 serves of celery soup and 12 of leek, poato and broccoli soup. It is really just leek and potato with the addition of whatever broccoli stalk I have in the freezer. Today there were 5 large stalks.

I also retrieved a bag of frozen cherry tomatoes from the freezer and made another batch of tomato sauce.

The links to the recipes for all of these can be found in the recipe index.

Here is the result of my handiwork.

All of this was done between 11am and 2pm to make use of the free electricity offer from our energy retailer.

Today we went to the Wood Expo and unfortunately I did not find anyone who was doing the type of restoration work that my cabinet will need. That is OK as I have plenty of time and no particular deadline. I took more photos and printed them before I went so I have a complete pictorial record of the unit as well as all of the dimensions. My next job will be to see if I can find someone who can give me an estimate of what my idea is likely to cost. I did see a slab of silky oak for sale today – $150 and it was more than what I imagine will be required for the job. I will let you know of any further developments. In the meantime, it functions perfectly well as a stand for the television and storage of other items.

I decided to outsource the restoration of the cabinet as the skills required are beyond that which we have. However, there are lots of things we can do and make for ourselves. We have managed to fill the rest of the day with doing things for ourselves.

The Duke makes our bread in the breadmaker and today was fruit loaf with sultanas, chopped raisins and chopped dried apricots.

He also bottled his latest home brew and then started a new one today.

I made some fresh pasta. Here is some of it cut into lasagne sheets and ready to go in the freezer. I used some to make chicken and mushroom canneloni for dinner. We had a serve each and here are the 2 leftover serves ready to be frozen for lunches later in the week.