Chicken fricassee, mixed veg, potatoes; bread and butter pudding and custard
I start my post with big news: the Occupational Therapy team have started looking at what equipment I will need to live at home safely, which obviously means they’re thinking about getting me home. Personally I feel this is a little premature – even with my trusty walking frame I can only get to the door of my care home room if I start from halfway and have a REALLY good reason to do so (such as another resident having a fall while out of reach of her emergency alarm and calling for help, and I was the only person who heard her, and I wanted her to know I had heard and had used my own emergency alarm to get someone’s attention so needed to get to the door to ensure she heard me calling back to her… So that was a thing that happened this morning but isn’t exactly something that happens every day, thankfully).
But plans are being made, and will involve a trip to mum’s house to do some measuring to make sure the proposed equipment will fit in the house. Of course I need to be there, even if only because I haven’t seen mum in weeks and really want to. This will be by way of a flying visit – in, measure, out and back to the other side of the Island – but it will pave the way for something more permanent.
Suddenly my thoughts of being home by Christmas1 look less like vague hopes and more like actual possibilities. And when I get there, the second thing I will do – the first, of course, being to give mum weeks’ worth of hugs in one go – will be to order a takeaway from the Indian place in the village. 🤤
Today’s lunch was a choice of turkey2 fricassee or cauliflower cheese. As I may have mentioned, just once or twice, I’m not a fan of cauliflower (in much the same way that cats aren’t generally fans of baths), so fricassee it was, an official New Thing for me to try. What is a fricassee? One of these:
It’s a traditional French method of cooking lighter meats such as chicken (or possibly turkey), where the meat and vegetables – usually including mushrooms – are cooked without browning and finished in a sauce made of stock from the meat, cream, and herbs (thank you Wikipedia!). It smelled very good – of garlic, mostly – and tasted even better than the description might lead you to expect. I didn’t have those expectations, because I didn’t get round to looking up ‘fricassee’ until after I had eaten it and wondered what I had just had.
It was served with boiled potatoes with some sort of herb that looked nice but didn’t really taste of anything, and frozen3 mixed vegetables, featuring, as always, a single broadbean.
The only real criticism I could make, and it’s one that I make fairly regularly, is that it wasn’t a huge amount of food given that this is the main meal of the day4. I sense a plate of cheese and biscuits in my not-too-distant future.
Pudding was bread and butter pudding, and I think I’m going to put this under “trying something new” too: I did try it at St Mary’s but it was, most unusually, not very good, so I decided even while eating it that I wasn’t going to make a decision based on that version.
This pudding was clearly much better, even if just on the basis that my bowl contained more than the single, sad sultana that graced the hospital’s version. It smelled of Christmas – mixed spice, citrus peel, sweet vanilla from the custard – and all those flavours were there, just tragically overwhelmed by the bitterness from where the outside had… I’ll be kind and say “caramelised”5.
Caramelised edges aside, I can see why people like bread and butter pudding – the seasonal flavours, the creamy, custardy inside with a golden, slightly crispy top – but I think I can now conclude it’s not for me. Which is fine: I’m not going to like everything I try. It’s the trying which is the point.
Scores:
- Fricassee: 7/10 – nice. I think all my words above can be reduced down to that one word of mild praise.
- Potatoes and veg: 6/10 – not exciting but not at all objectionable.
- Bread and butter pudding: 5/10 – it might have got maybe a point more if it hadn’t been for the charred outside edge, but I just don’t think this is ever going to be one of my favourite puddings.
- Overall: 6/10
So just above average, which feels about right.
Now I’m off to track down an old Travis song which I have been absent-mindedly humming since writing this post’s title. If you know which one, be afraid because we’re obviously on the same wavelength, at least as far as music is concerned! 😱
- Yes, I used the C word. Sorry. ↩︎
- Or possibly chicken – the menu said turkey, the staff member who took my lunch order said chicken, I couldn’t tell you for sure one way or the other. ↩︎
- Not frozen by the time they were served, obviously. I mean they came from the freezer. ↩︎
- I will say that, being a Wednesday, there was a cooked breakfast this morning, so the portion of lunch isn’t entirely unreasonable. As I’m still miffed that said breakfast included only one rasher of bacon, though – who eats only one rasher of bacon?! – I’m not inclined to be forgiving. ↩︎
- Less kindly and more honestly, it was burnt. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 