Thread by @AlexandraErin

Literally eating berries and cream like a little lad for breakfast today.

We're paring down frozen stuff from the freezer for a much-needed defrost and there were some ancient frozen mixed berries in there.

I started making panna cotta as my new pandemic skill and I had planned on topping some with jam for a Valentine's dessert...

...but panna cotta isn't terribly firm and the likely difficulty of spreading jam across the top of the custard without just wrecking it had me thinking about other alternatives, and I remembered we had frozen berries from Whenever in the deep freeze.

But it was a great big bag of berries, all frozen together into one solid block so just thawing out what I needed would have been tricky, and also we're trying to winnow down the freezer for a safe defrost, so I've got a whole bunch of slightly freezer-burned berry topping left.

This is a new freezer, replaced a dead/dying one that came with the house just a couple of years ago. Would have liked to get one that self-defrosts but the setup of our old house is we had to prioritize for the largest freezer small enough to fit where we needed to put it.

Anyway, it turns out that panna cotta is a really easy dessert to make, particularly if you're not doing the thing at the end where you invert and plate it. And that part might not be that hard but I'm not actually interested in finding out.

My first exposure to panna cotta and the reason I'm nostalgic for it was it being served as a hotel cocktail hour dessert in little ramekins so I have no interest in seeing it naked and wibbling gelatinously on a little plate.

Also, one member of our three-person household who was not in on the planning mistook all discussions of "panna cotta" that happened in front of her for references to the pandemic until I started serving the test batch.