Probably a bit crass to blog about food right after I’ve blogged about hungry children, but I’ve had one of those weeks when everything else has gone wrong so why not my sensitivity and PR nous?
But before the food, the week.
Still feeling a bit crabby for firing off a, er, crabby email when I shouldn’t have done (another story), I was faced early Thursday morning with receipt of an (unrelated) email that made me think that if I didn’t resign from this particular organisation tout de suite (I should really say sofort as I’m learning German at the mo, not French) I’d be party to being negligent and reckless. Let me give you a hint: if a safety organisation said Do This, would you Do That instead, because it was much much cheaper? Course you wouldn’t, but this lot did and I wasn’t consulted first, so off went the resignation e-mail before I’d had my second strong coffee.
Then I went shopping with Mum. I let her go round Waitrose on her own because a) she’s too slow for me – I’m a zipper, she’s a browser; b) she won’t socially distance and I get fed up pulling her away from other people. When I’d finished and eventually found her, she had three pies in her trolley. She hadn’t realised and asked me to put two back. So I did. By the time I found her again, she again had three pies in her trolley, plus four jars of coffee and two venison burgers. She doesn’t like venison.
When I got home, my sweet South African neighbour who obviously didn’t know I had reverted to crabbiness, dashed out to meet me before I’d got out of my car, to tell me that the complex legal agreement I’d been working on with a very expensive solicitor for the past two years had come to nought because two people were refusing to sign.
The rest of us decided to sign in case the other two changed their minds, and I arranged for everyone to pop round to our house on the Friday evening for a mega signing and witnessing session. Of course, some were concerned about Covid and lockdown, so I made sure masks, gloves, sprays and wine were in good supply.
As soon as people began to arrive and I was just beginning to enjoy what could be construed (if you don’t tell the Great British Stasi that is) as my first social gathering since March, the phone rang. It was my mother. She was in tears because the garage door was open. Again. After she’d shut it. Several times. She had no idea what was going on. I had an inkling so wasn’t going to go round that evening and told her to have a whisky and go to bed early.
Sure enough, the next day, I popped round and, what with one thing and another, had my inkling confirmed that she had been trying to turn the Telly on with the garage remote control. So I found the TV remote (under her chair), reminded her of the one button she had to press, found the garage remote (in the fridge) and put it back where it should be. While in the fridge by the way, I grabbed the out-of-date pork pie and furry tomatoes.
On Sunday, the weather being glorious, I went for a brisk walk across the fields as a great stress-reliever. But life isn’t that cooperative. I stepped in one muddy, splodgy goo too many, splashed yukky stuff up my clean jeans, ripped my coat while trying to retrieve some litter from a hedge, and put my back out as well, less than a week after my chiropractor had repaired the previous damage.
So when I got home, as another attempt to relieve the stress, I locked myself in the kitchen (which is a figure of speech because the kitchen is open-plan to most of the rest of the house). And there I shone. I made flapjacks. I made quince cake. I made chicken liver pate. I made banana bread and, for dinner that evening, I made seared duck breasts with home-made, own-recipe plum sauce and roasted home-grown parsnips.
When you get the crispy skin just right, and the medium-rare flesh just so, and the plum sauce is better than anything you’ve ever had from Waitrose or Fortnum’s, then the rest of the world can go boil its head.
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