I love my parents.

Parents IM me, ask how I am. I say hot, my dad says yeah, London's got the same weather as New York - I don't blame you! yada yada yada, how much is an air conditioner? I say about £250 (not that I was looking at B&Q). They say OK, we'll give you the money for your birthday! (Not all of it... but most)

Yes, I am the most spoiled child in the world. Or very spoiled, anyway.

d'oh

Yesterday the dentist called to change Neil's appointment from Wednesday to today. In the process of worrying about getting Neil to the dentist, I forgot about my hygienist appointment... which I'd already paid for, and no refunds for missed appointments.

Neil is fine, though he was very very nervous. He needs quite a bit of work done :( luckily it's all NHS, and although at first the dentist thought he might need to be referred to an oral surgeon, he can have the work done under a local so doesn't need the referral. Phew.

today's discovery

the multiquick makes a pretty good sorbet. I don't think it would work for ice cream, but it was a successful experiment. :-)

I had 2 punnets of strawberries that were at the tail end of their usefulness--a few had already gone soft. I figured I had nothing to lose by whizzing them up, adding some sugar (if you do this yourself, add a little more sugar than you think you need [I used 4 Tb to a pound of strawberries--but taste before adding to see how sweet they are] as freezing decreases the perception of sweetness], and freezing it. I've made ice cream in a machine before, and I know the idea is to keep stirring the mixture as it freezes to keep the ice crystals small. obviously I couldn't do that, but a regular freezer won't work as quickly as an ice cream machine anyway, so I reckoned that if I gave it a beating every half hour or so, it would do the trick--and it did. It's not as fine as commercial sorbet, but it's pretty good, and I think proper sorbet recipes use sugar syrup anyway while I just used caster sugar. It's not perfectly solid yet, but it's about the same consistency as ice cream that's just come out of an insert-type machine, so I think I can leave it to ripen now. Not a bad way of salvaging something that would have otherwise gone in the bin. :-)