Poppalina

Watermelon Ice

Today I started making sweet pickled watermelon rind, to give as a Christmas present to a few people. It's so pretty, and pretty yum, too. The recipe is from Stephanie Alexander's first book, Menus for Food Lovers. I was then faced with the prospect of eating all the flesh of an entire watermelon.

Hmm. What to do? My husband doesn't like watermelon very much, and I can only eat so much of it myself. But he says he does like watermelon granita on a very hot day. (Which today isn't.) So I decided to make a watermelon ice, which we can keep in the freezer for any time we want it.

I whizzed the flesh of one (seedless) watermelon in a food processor, and added a scant teaspoon of rose water and a capful of dark rum (we didn't have any white rum, which I would have used if we had).

I put 250 g of castor sugar in a pan with 1/2 cup of water, and brought it to the boil, stirring so it would dissolve. I let it boil for a few minutes, then turned off the heat and let it cool.

Then I stirred the sugar syrup into the watermelon juice, and churned the mixture in an ice-cream maker. (You could do it by semi-freezing, flaking with a fork and re-freezing, if you don't have one of those).

Holy moly! It was fabulous!

In with the new (and out with the old)

On Friday, I went to pick up a new machine: woo hoo!

It's what I call a babylocker, but since the brand name is, in fact, Baby Lock, this could get confusing. (My Baby Lock babylocker?) Basically, it's a domestic overlocker that is versatile enough to do 4 thread overlocking, 3 thread overlocking, a tiny, rolled hem—or babylocking—and almost anything in between.

It's always exciting to unpack a new machine. This one comes with a dinky little zippered plastic pouch containing extra and spare bits and pieces.

One of the nice things about this machine is the way the whole front opens up, for ease of access.

People can get a bit overwrought over the complicatedness of threading overlockers, but I find that most domestic machines are pretty intuitive. (By which I mean you can pretty much tell where the thread is supposed to go to from one point to the next.)  Plus they tend to have a little diagram inside the front panel if you get lost.

I've been wanting a machine that can do a babylock finish since forever.

So now that I have one, in addition to my industrial five thread overlocker (Brother), my industrial straight stitch (Consew) and my domestic zigzag machine (Husqvarna), I really don't need the three thread domestic overlocker that I haven't used in years.

Which means that if there's anyone in the Sydney area (local pick up only) who'd like to own a simple little Husqvarna Huskylock 435 three thread overlocker, I have one available.

I bought it second hand in the '90s, so it's old, but it still works beautifully, and there's nothing wrong with it.

One of the particularly good things about it (that I'm really going to miss when using the new machine) is that the lever to raise and lower the presser foot is on the right hand side of the machine, rather than on the left at the back.

That means that when you've got your work all lined up and ready to sew, and you're holding the work steady with your left, as is natural, you don't have to stretch your right hand across to the other side of the machine and around the back in order to lower the foot. Why in God's name they design them any other way is beyond me.

And yet they do.