Fish goujons, mash, baked beans; pear crumble and cream

Please excuse any loud rumblings you can hear: it’s just my stomach making its objections known.

Today’s lunch was a choice of fish goujons or “Old English Sausages” with baked beans¹ and mash. I like sausages really quite a lot so of course ordered them when a staff member stuck her head round my door to ask what I wanted for lunch while I was doing my daily(ish)² supervised physio session.

I was looking forward to them, too, so was most disappointed when the cover came off my plate to reveal three small pieces of breaded fish and not a sausage in sight.

In any other situation I would have sent the plate back to the kitchen, but today’s HCA (one of the favourites that I definitely don’t have, honest) has a cold and clearly looks, behind her medical face mask, like the only place she should be sent is home to bed. I couldn’t bring myself to make her go all the way to the kitchen and back when I could just eat what I’d been given, so I let it go with no more than snarking the title of this review.

As fish goujons went, they were OK – nicely crunchy breading, not too fishy fish. The problem was that a) there was a lot of breading and not much fish, b) they were pretty small – three polite bites (two if I wasn’t feeling polite) and they were gone – and c) there were only three of them, as the main meal of the day for an adult doing daily physio to rebuild muscle from practically nothing.

The accompanying mash was decent, if not quite as good as the last time it was served (made by a different member of staff, maybe – if so, and they happen to see this, please be assured it was still a good bit of mashed potato!), and the baked beans were exactly what it said on the tin they came in.

As a main meal, though, it took me longer to take photos than it did to eat my meal. And as you can tell from the quality of the photos, I wasn’t exactly doing a Vogue cover shoot here!

At least there was going to be pudding: red cherry and pear crumble with cream. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

I have now (hopefully) fixed in my mind that, while this kitchen can do a lot of things well, fruit crumble isn’t one if them. The crumble topping was thick…

…and very dry, disintegrating into something not dissimilar to dust when prodded with the spoon. There were maybe eight or nine pieces of pear, tasting as cooked pear generally does (i.e. of nothing much), and no sign of the promised cherries. The cream was nice, but cream is always nice. I ate it and scraped the bowl clean, but only because there was cream, and I was still hungry, and (sorry, whoever made it) it was a fairly small portion of dry dust to eat.

I plaintively³ asked the nice person bringing post-prandial coffee if there was a chance of something else to eat, and she offered biscuits.

She brought biscuits. I ate the biscuits. They were biscuity. 🤷‍♂️

Scores:

• Fish goujons: 5/10 – they were fine.
• Mash: 8/10 – it was good mash.
• Portion size (something I don’t usually rate, but really, care home?): 2/10 – if a hungry toddler could clear what you’re offering grown adults, something has gone wrong.
• Crumble: 4/10 – and one of those points is for the cream.
• Overall: 4.75

For the first time since learning that staff here read my blog I am having to leave things on a bad note. At least everyone knows now that I can still be brutally honest when required, particularly when I’m underfed and grumpy. And haven’t had any sausages.

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1. It’s a baked bean sort of day here today, as we have them again for supper, on toast. I’m looking forward to it already, but that’s jumping ahead a bit. ↩︎
2. I’m meant to have at least one, usually two, supervised sessions a day, plus unsupervised seated exercises, and I had to commit to that in order to be offered a place in a rehab centre. In practice, I get one session four, sometimes five, days a week, and have never had two in a day. It’s not that I mind doing less physical activity – any excuse not to is fine with me – it’s just the mismatch between what I committed to and what I get that bugs me. ↩︎
3. Or at least I was aiming for ‘plaintive’. It might gave come across as sulky, which also wouldn’t have been inaccurate. ↩︎