Thought For Food

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I’ve had so much fun chatting with you all about favourite movies and books.  Thanks for your comments and please, keep ’em comin’.  I think I’m going to have to write a separate list for Christmas films, because I left so many out: Home Alone, Home Alone 2, White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Elf….  Check your shelves, folks, because this discussion ain’t over yet.

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I don’t know why I come over all apostrophied and colloquial at times.  Must be summat in t’water.

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All of this fillum and boo-k talk has allowed me time to recover from my weekend, which was horrendous, in a food sense.  No, ‘horrendous’ is the wrong word, because that implies an out-of-the-ordinary food disaster, and you must know by know that my food disasters are so far from being out-of-the-ordinary that ‘mundane’ is too strong a word for them.

The Hub is a great cook.  His mother was a great cook.  The Hub has taught me many of his mother’s recipes.  Unfortunately for our family, the Hub isn’t well enough to cook anymore; I do it all.  The Hub is still the family’s chief hunter-gatherer, however, and on Saturday he came home with a bag full of raw meat slung across his back (Lidl had 400g of diced beef for £1.49 – bargain!).  I had celery and leeks in my humungous fridge, so I decided to make Ma Hub’s famous Potato Hash. 

We make the hash in a pressure cooker.  That causes a bit of a problem for me, because I’m scared of the pressure cooker.  Once it’s bubbling on the stove I don’t go in the kitchen: I stand at the kitchen door to check the little red lines are not indicating EXPLODE! EXPLODE! EVACUATE THE PREMISES!  Or better yet, I shove one of the kids in and shut the door behind them.  Don’t bother calling child services: Tory Boy ran away two years ago and Spud is stronger than me these days; though I was able to use the most beautiful baby in the world (who is now the most beautiful toddler in the world, his parents being in the family way again).

I was standing at my new sink, peeling potatoes and blotting up water spots, when I spotted through my window TMBTITW bringing his parents for a visit.  They spotted me, too, before I had time to remove my Yentl costume – that’s what the Hub calls me whenever I wear a pinny and head scarf to cook.  So that’s what he calls me every day, really.  It’s either, ‘Oi! Yentl! No disaster today; well done,’ or ‘Oi! You!  Why’ve I got a hair in my soup/sandwich/tin of beans?’  I don’t know why he calls me that, now I come to think of it: Barbra wore a hat and suit.  What a weird bloke my husband is.

I like to consider myself a good hostess, by which I mean that if you come to my house I won’t spill coffee on you and I’ll get out the good biscuits if I like your kids.  TMBTITW and his parents count as best guests – they bring their own entertainment in the form of this little cutie pie:

I'm laughing because I know how beautiful I am

 

This is him now:

Photo to follow when I remember to ask the Hub to upload one.

Flustered by their unexpected arrival and panicked by their possible ‘yes’ to my ‘Would you like to stay for dinner?’ (I don’t mind serving inedible food to adults but I always try to impress TMBTITW), I bunged everything in the pot and slung it on the stove.  Thank goodness they declined my invite because, instead of Ma Hub’s delicious Potato Hash, what they would have eaten was Ma Dontbake’s unsalted because I forgot to put it in Potato Soup: too much liquid, too little veg.  We had chicken that night.

Next day, in an effort to rescue it, I added boiled potatoes to thicken.  I forgot the salt again but the burned bits add a flavour all their own.  Now I have four reproachful tubs sitting in my freezer knowing they will never be eaten but won’t be thrown away because we don’t waste food in this house.  Anyone hungry?