Long Island Iced Tea and a load of other rubbish

Greetings. Last night was cocktail night and I made Long Island Iced Tea, as above, for the first time. They were really good, extremely alcoholic. The ingredients containing five, yes five, different spirits, really shouldn’t go together at all, but they do. This drink has absolutely nothing to do with tea other than the fact it looks a bit like iced tea due to the Diet Coke used as a mixer. In case you’re wondering, the five spirits are vodka, gin, white rum, triple sec and silver tequila. If you think your liver can handle it, the recipe I used is here.

The weather has been glorious again, I hope you’ve been out and about enjoying it if you’re in the UK, or enjoying whatever weather you’ve got wherever you are in the world. Last week American Samoa was spotted on The Waffle stats for the first time. I had to google that one as I didn’t know where it was. As my sister said, it’s a VERY long way from Windsor, UK. All are welcome in The Waffle community, spreading world peace through food, thoughts, laughs, and let’s face it, one English woman’s waffle….

I also want to talk about rubbish today. We, like many parts of the UK, have been switched to fortnightly rather than weekly bin collections during the lockdown period. Our proper rubbish is collected one week and our recycling rubbish is collected the following week. Our very small food waste bin is collected every week as before. I’m just about getting the hang of this now, but what has become apparent is just what a vast amount of waste hubby and I create in the space of 7 days. David is really not that bothered about this, but I, on the other hand, just think the amount looks ridiculous and we must be such massive consumers in a capitalist society to generate so much. I feel a bit embarrassed about it and worried for the environment. So, I have made a decision to try to reuse things as much as possible that would previously have gone straight into the recycling or other bin. I do not want to fill my house with junk, so it has to be something that is really useful I can do with it. First up is this deep tray that our Beef Wellington came in from last night. The Wellington sat on top of a piece of baking parchment, so the tray is pretty much as new.

My first thought was that we could put a couple of holes in it and use it as a pot on my vertical garden wall project. Then I had an even better idea. I am going to use it as the perfect container for my rhubarb crumble ice cream going in the freezer tonight. And then afterwards I will use it as per my original thought on the vertical garden wall. Bingo! Two uses from one piece of rubbish. This is going to be very satisfying. I’ve also started reusing the plastic bags that bread comes in. I have taken little pots of milk to work in these bags to stop spillage and I’ve also used them regularly to freeze half a loaf of new bread as I’ve taken to dividing up each loaf into two as this really saves on the amount of bread we throw away.

If you want to have a quick look at your rubbish too this week, perhaps you could let me know if you find something that you can repurpose in a satisfying way and we can share our ideas on this subject. I do not mean fill your house with a clutter of things that might be useful one day. No, I definitely do not mean that. I mean things you can think of a great new use for right now.

So if I’d thought about this earlier, I probably would have saved up our old plastic containers from ice cream etc rather than buying new pots for the vertical garden. Anyway, the new pots do look rather smart and I’m loving this project with tomatoes, spinach and lettuce growing up the wall now.

Dinner’s in the oven. Roast lamb with roast potatoes, carrots, green beans, mint sauce and gravy tonight. It’s so nice to be able to eat al fresco. I am not exaggerating when I say one year (probably just after we bought some new garden furniture) we only managed to eat outside once in April, and then the whole summer was cold and a washout and we never managed it again. So sad. But so nice now. So get outside, get your Vitamin D people, soak up nature all around you, eat some lovely food and I’ll be back on Tuesday xx 😎