Sunset from Hill House, Mount Helen. February 2024

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Absolutely knackering

The Builder and I headed in to the Pot Luck Pantry on Sunday an hour earlier than usual.  It was a long weekend, followed this week by school holidays, so many of the volunteers had gone away.  Also, there was a Food Festival in Sheffield and the Real Junk Food Project had a stall, so that was more volunteers missing.  We ended up with Freyja, The Builder and Me all day, plus a dish washer upper for three hours in the afternoon and someone who came in to help prep for a couple of hours in the morning.

Mostly, it was quite a lot of fun.  We had loads of really interesting ingredients to play with so could make some quite interesting dishes. The weather wasn't bad, so we could have tables outside.  We didn't have lots of customers - I think many of them were also away, or at the Food Festival.  But we did have a couple of largish parties who were minded to try many of the dishes we had available.  So we put together sharing platters for them.  We got lots of nice comments about the food, which was gratifying.

It's probably just as well we weren't over run with customers. I think we would have struggled to cope.  As it was we seemed to do quite nicely with the ratio of volunteers to customers.  We could definitely have done with one more pair of hands when it came to cleaning up afterwards, but you can see why people might be a bit reluctant to come in in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a long weekend just to clean for an hour or so!  We also had quite a lot of food left over.  Some of it went home with the volunteers.  Some of it was left to feed the refurbishers during the week. There is still quite a bit of painting to do in the cafe.

In the end, The Builder and I were there for about an hour and a half longer than we usually are on Sundays.  And we could definitely feel it when we got home!  Freyja felt it too, I believe.  She was in bed by 9:30.  I managed to stay awake until 10, by having a (very rare) soak in the bath with some chocolate scented bubbles and then watching a moderately interesting program about the Yeti.  The Builder was asleep in his chair almost as soon as he had put down his knife and fork after his dinner :-)

We both slept Very Well Indeed!!  (So did Freyja)

Yesterday we headed back into Sheffield, this time for a lunch which was cooked for us.  We went to The Doctor's Orders, a pub I have gone past quite regularly over the years, in its various guises.  I have, however, never been in.  You may remember that we had hoped to meet our friend Gill for lunch at the beginning of May but her death intervened and prevented that.  So we had arranged to meet instead her husband, mother and children and any plus ones who were available. Tabitha, Gareth, Cally and Flynn were also there, as was Freyja.  Simon had taken himself off to Leeds for a gig of some sort so was unavailable.  It proved to be impossible to find a date at the beginning of May which was suitable, so we moved it to yesterday's public holiday. And our meeting was none the worse for that :-)

We went to The Doctor's Orders because Gill had liked it, and our lunch meeting was to some extent organised in her memory. And I would thoroughly recommend it. I had an absolutely delicious, and beautifully cooked rib eye steak with very good chips on the side.  They coped very well with our various dietary requirements (even if they did serve butter on the side of a dish marked as vegan - but they fixed that very quickly). They coped well with children and oldies.  They were cheerful and friendly.   It was all good.

The Builder and I are still quite tired though.  It didn't help that I was woken up by the wind howling about at 3:00 this morning.  It was just starting to get light (it's only a week or so ago that I was noting that it was starting to get light at 4am!!). It proved to be very difficult to go back to sleep with the wind howling, the blackbirds singing, some geese honking and then the sparrows beginning their early morning flights.  I would be quite glad of a mid-morning nap. Instead I shall take myself into *my* kitchen and do something useful with a load of vegetables that are beginning to look a bit sorry for themselves.  It would hardly do to be volunteering at a project whose mission is to reduce food waste and then to be throwing away vegetables at home because of inattention ;-D



Dessert sharing platters

No comments:

Post a Comment