derekl_1963

As if last weekend wasn't amusing enough, this weekend threw even more curveballs at us.

Our plans seemed simply enough... A shopping trip into Seattle on Saturday, and the County Fair on Sunday.

Friday

Since we were going to Uwajimaya, it seemed that we should take our coolers. Rather than carrying all that ice (and possibly not needing some of it) it seemed logical to get some 'blue ice'. I picked some up at Freddie's on Friday morn and tossed it into the big freezer in the garage. Simple, easy, straightforward... and the root of all frustration.

Saturday

Got up early on Saturday morning, tossed the coolers in the van, and went into the garage to get the 'ice'.... And discovered to my horror that I had not entirely closed the freezer door. The contents, while not entirely thawed, were decidely on their way to being so. With a flash of inspiration I entered "Scarlett O'Hara' mode, shut the door and unplugged the freezer. (Calculating that it would not thaw, or even reach unsafe temperatures before our return.)

Our first stop was Westlake Center to visit the Daiso store there. When we got there, I hadn't yet had breakfast (I can't really get up and eat), so I wandered up to food court... Has anyone ever noticed that mall food courts are poorly setup for breakfast? In the end my choice was between Mickey D's and Mrs Fields, since the former appeared to have fresh brewed coffee and the latter didn't I went with the Arches. Yeah, it sucked, but it was a known level of suckage - and chocolate chip cookies are a bit much even for me for breakfast. (OK, the latter isn't completely true - but it sounds good.) It was interesting to note that the majority of the food in the food court was Asian or Asian inspired however. Something about the demographic attracted there?

As we were mostly looking for Bento stuff, we were pretty much disapointed with Daiso which had a whole two boxes. We did pick up some gift papers for use in bookbinding, some onigiri molds, and misc other stuff though. (I learned from a discussion today on LJ that we should have gone to one of the others.)

While there, I wandered outside to have a smoke, and discovered something called the 'Seattle Sand Festival' going on. I never did figure out exactly what it was, but it did consist of:

Badly made sand sculptures you were supposed to vote on.
Well made sand sculptures featuring the corporate logos of the sponsors
The same random/generic street booths that any other street festivals attracts

And...

Really, really bad music. I never could figure out what it was meant to be, as the bass was waaaay overamped and the higher notes missing entirely.

Being done there - we headed off to Uwajimaya. We had lunch in the food court there, and as usual it was pretty damm good. Fast food Asian there is light years ahead of other places. The actual shopping was, as always, pretty frustrating. All of the Miso, for example, is simply labled 'fermented bean paste' on the English labels. So I had to look at the ingredients and/or the tiny, tiny print on the shelf label to try and figure out which varietal it was. (Very few of them were labled in English with the varietal.) Among other things, I also picked up the ingredients to try and make some homemade dashi for Miso Soup this winter.

And then things went even further south...

We got on Alaskan Way at Atlantic to head towards the Ferry... Only to find traffic not noticeably moving. It took half an hour to reach Royal Brougham! (A matter of 200 yards more or less.) We hung a right and got on I5 and headed south, congratulating ourselves on being clever for avoiding whatever was holding up traffic on the waterfront. Count not your chickens! Because just a few minutes south we hit a massive traffic slowdown on entering Federal Way and averaged under 5mph all the way to the Port of Tacoma exit where we bid 5 adieu and cut across to the Bridge via Ruston (with a badly need pitstop in Fife). We left Uwajimaya at 2.45, and finally got home at 5.45! (For those of you not from around here, that 'three hour tour' should have taken just over an hour.)

Now to face the disaster in the freezer... I called my buddy Chuck to come over and help and he made a wise observation: "This stuff is too frozen to cook, too thawed to freeze. Go to bed, I'll see you in the morning". As this was patently true, that's what we did.

Sunday

Sunday was just long and tiring... It started with triaging the food in the freezer. "This can be made into stock, this is now this weeks dinner, that can be cooked and refrozen, nothing to do with this but toss it". Thankfully there was very little in the fourth category and there were a few items still frozen, which were promptly placed in the freezer section of the garage refrigerator.

The rest of the day is largely a blur... Cooking one thing after another and tending various and sundry dishes and stocks as they cooked.

Making lemons into lemonade:

Now I've got about 5 gallons of good chicken stock, and more on the way.

The first batch of stock was made by simmering the chicken directly, yielding a very nice and light stock. You don't get much of this stuff very often, so I'll treasure it. I stripped the meat from the simmered chicken and will freeze it for soups, pot pies, etc... Any underdone meat (from cooking still partially frozen) was tossed in with the bones and skin to be roasted later and made into dark stock.

The freezer needed to be defrosted anyways.
The freezer needed to be temporarily emptied to move it into the newly renovated back room of the garage anyways.

Monday

Right now I'm pretty much at 'all stop' - both the house and garage refrigerators (and their freezer compartments) are full, full, full... And the big freezer isn't down to temperature yet and won't be until late tonite/early tommorow. (It takes 36 hours according to the manual.) Happily, everything going into it tommorow will be at (or close to) refrigerator temperatures and I'll toss the blue ice (currently in the garage refrigerator freezer compartment) in there as well to help things along. I may even go get some dry ice if I have the energy.

There is still four whole chickens to process, but they are in a cooler with 'blue ice' and still have ice crystals present. I should be able to do something with them tommorow.

We never got to the Fair... But life is like that sometimes.