Cooked breakfast; roast dinner – pork loin; pineapple sponge and custard

There’s a fun (i.e. no fun at all) game I like to play on days like today, which goes:

Am I

1. hungry
2. thirsty
3. bored
4. tired
5. too hot / cold
6. in pain
7. some unholy combination of some or all of the above?

It’s one of those games where every answer is the wrong one, and the only possible conclusion to the game is a grumpy, borderline unreasonable Cat.

I am stating this fact here, before I start reviewing, so you know to take the following with not so much a pinch as an entire shaker-full of salt.

Breakfast

Today began for me at 4.44am¹, when pain finally roused me fully from the overheated tossing and turning I was desperately trying to pretend was actual sleep. After another hour or so of the same – and quite why it’s so hot in my room that I’m gently melting while writing this is a mystery no-one has yet been able to solve – I gave up and logged on to an internet forum of which I am a member so I could at least have some virtual company.

An hour or so after that, breakfast arrived, accompanied by the words I have since heard several times: “why is it so hot in here?!”

Because I was hot, and tired, and grumpy, the first thing that stood out was the “caramelised” side of the tomato; the second thing, once I stabbed it with my fork, was that the rest of the tomato was miraculously cold and raw.² The rest of it was fine – bacon not too salty, scrambled eggs appropriately scrambled egg-y, ditto baked beans – although I am perplexed at how the extra toast I asked for was hot on arrival but still managed to be so un-crunchy that it literally flopped away from my mouth when I picked it up to take a bite. Not, of course, that that dissuaded me at all from eating it.

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Lunch

Lunch, as I flagged with some excitement on Facebook, featured pineapple sponge.

But first was loin of pork with roast potatoes, roast parsnip, peas, and gravy, eaten in my room rather than at the shared dinner table as my fellow residents didn’t need my tired grumpiness as an accompaniment to their own meals.

I’m not sure how the pork was cooked, but it literally fell apart at the merest touch, leaving tender fragments of meat scattered throughout the glossy, thick, oddly-but-not-unpleasantly sweet (in both scent and taste) gravy, giving it the feel of a pot-roast. Which it may very well have been: I’m certainly not complaining as, whatever it was, it tasted very nice.

The single piece of roast parsnip was delicious but would have benefitted from being multiplied by two, three, or even more for my taste.

Even the best roast potatoes are going to lose their crunchy exteriors by being stuffed under a cloche with a load of gravy, and these certainly did; the first one I tried somewhat alarmingly spat out hot oil when I cut into the somewhat leathery outside, but the insides of all three were that mixture of fluffy and creamy that make roasties so very appealing (and I speak as someone who isn’t usually the hugest fan of roast potatoes).

And finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: The One! The Only! Piiiinnneapple Sponge!

Was it pineapple sponge with custard? Yes!

Was it as good as the St Mary’s Hospital pineapple sponge with custard? Sadly not.

Was it a good pineapple sponge with custard? Eh.

It wasn’t bad – cake and fruit and custard served together in a bowl can’t really be bad – but what makes the St Mary’s version special, imo, is that the pineapple is mixed in with the cake before baking, so the whole thing tastes of pineapple and there is at least the chance of a piece of pineapple in every bite.

Here, more traditionally³, pineapple rings were laid into the baking dish and the sponge poured / spooned over the top and then baked. It looks prettier, and up until a couple of months ago I would have said it makes for a really good pineapple sponge. But now I know there’s a different, better way, and I just can’t go back to how things were.

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Scores:

• Breakfast: 7/10 – a solid breakfast, shame about the tomato.
• Roast dinner: 7.5/10 (yes, I’ve reached the decimal point stage) – good meat and (sweet) gravy, decent-ish roasties, not enough parsnip.
• Pineapple sponge: 7/10 – nice enough, but it’s no St Mary’s pineapple sponge.

And with that, I’m off to make myself a note to send an email to the St Mary’s Catering Department tomorrow to beg for their recipe for pineapple sponge, before the bonus dose of strong painkiller I’ve just taken kicks in and I forget all about it, again.

1. I know the exact time as I checked my phone in the hope it might be a vaguely appropriate time to wake up, which of course it wasn’t. ↩︎
2. Yes, I know I’ve been saying I want more raw fruit and veg, but this wasn’t at all what I meant. ↩︎
3. I admit I’m guessing here – or, if it sounds better, I’m extrapolating from the available evidence here – but I’m fairly sure I’m right. ↩︎