In a Pickle

I was going to call this post 'I don't believe it!' in the Victor Meldrew stylee, but Trev is always telling me off for not using titles with keywords so that the search engines, and more importantly, you, can find what I have written.

'What don't you believe Rosie?' I hear you ask. Well, I don't believe I stood - uncomplaining - in  a queue for around five hours yesterday. I know. Mother in Law had turned out some bits and pieces from the family that were quite old and were, she believed, 'worth something. 'Ooh', we said 'Antiques Roadshow is coming to Belton House near us in July - we'll take them if you like.'

Hence the queue. If we had known the wait was going to be that long I am certain we would not have stayed. You get sucked in though, edging forward, jollied along by the stewards, chatting amongst ourselves. The nearer we got to where the action was, there was plenty to be watching, the television crew, the experts, who very gamely came to chat to the queue, Fi-ona doing her stuff, other people's 'valuables'. Trev went to get us something to eat, and bottles of water, but you don't want to be drinking too much if you know what I mean.

Eventually, we made the Reception area, your stuff is given a cursory glance by someone with antiques expertise, and you are given the appropriate ticket to - yes - join another queue.

That was 'only' going to be about 1 hour - well, it seemed daft to give up at that point. So, we amused ourselves with watching all of the great British public asking Fi-ona 'if she would mind' having her photograph taken with them. Why do people do this? I don't understand the point of it at all. She agreed with good grace - I don't think her teeth were gritted! At long last we were sat with an expert who valued our 'heirlooms' at very modest amounts ( which wasn't unexpected) and we were finally released to go home. Just as we shut the car doors the heavens opened!

That's 'our' queue going right round the edge of the filming!  ( I don't know who this lady is . . . )

In other news, I have been trialling a couple of new recipes - on of them is mine 'Rainbow pickled carrots with ginger, lime and coriander' and the other is 'Pickled Pears' - a pretty standard recipe for this old favourite. I'll see how the carrots work out and then I will post both of them onto the recipe site. We had way too many carrots recently, including some of those lovely purple ones, and some lime green ones, in our veg box. So I made up the recipe to pickle them and so far they taste pretty good.

The second lot of new pickles is Pickled Pears - they have lots of spices cinnamon, mixed spice, nutmeg and lots of lemon zest. They look yummy and I can't wait to taste them once they have been in with all of those spices for a while. I'll post the recipes shortly.

I also use my dehydrator to dry some apple rings - again we had loads of eating apples, far beyond what we can eat, and I don't use the dehydrator nearly enough. They look really good in the packs, and taste great too. It's all preserving after all . . . .