Veg pasty, mushy peas, salad, chips; cheesecake

I will start this review by expressing my sincere thanks and slightly sheepish repeat apologies to the staff members who have been carrying parcels to my room for the past couple of days: I completely underestimated the kindness and generosity of the Pineapple People! If you’re near my room and fancy a biscuit or cracker, I’m happy to share. I’m afraid the new bottle of hot sauce is mine alone, though!

Talking of hot sauce: as you can see from the headline photo, I have no concerns about being hungry after lunch today. The pasty took up half the plate, and it wasn’t a small plate!

I’m pretty sure the pasty wasn’t made here, not that I really expected it to be: the pastry reminded me a lot of the possibly genuine made-in-Cornwall Cornish pasties¹ my sister and I used to get from a small shop in Guildford, more years ago than I care to remember. [Sad sigh.]

This one was filled with vegetable glunk, a word I picked up from watching a particular YouTube channel and which is so perfectly descriptive I’m sure you know exactly what it means.

I want to be entirely clear that “glunk” is not a complaint or criticism: indeed, as here, it’s exactly what you want – kind of gloopy, kind of mushy, kind of soft – it’s glunk. And it was good glunk: you could taste the different vegetables – potato, swede, and sweetcorn for some reason, mainly – and the black pepper they were seasoned with; even the pastry tasted good (and exactly like the ones from the long-gone shop in Guildford). So of course I did just what you would expect me to do when faced with something with a good flavour all of its own, and dumped a load of hot sauce on it (the one I have carried from home to hospital to care home, not the new one, which I haven’t tried yet but which I suspect needs to be treated with far more respect).

For the rest of the plate: the chips were good: seriously crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle², and the perfect vehicle for carrying salt (from my new salt grinder³: thank you), mushy peas and West Indian hot sauce from the plate to my mouth (a combination that feels like it shouldn’t work but really does).

The salad was, as usual, beautifully fresh and crunchy, and tasted just fantastic with a dressing of salad cream (thank you) so enthusiastic I can justify it only by saying it was an accident and I didn’t expect it to come out of the bottle so fast. That would be a complete lie, but it’s a justification.

Dessert was “strawberry cheesecake” and I guess that yes, technically, this meets the brief: it’s cheesecake, and there’s a strawberry. Just one.

It was a decent enough strawberry, given that it is very much not strawberry season in the UK, but one strawberry is a garnish, not an ingredient.

And really, the cheesecake doesn’t need to be mis-sold with the inclusion of a fruit that’s barely there, like a straight-to-streaming film featuring an A-list actor whose character is killed off in the first ten minutes. This is good cheesecake – let it be its own lead character.

Oh, and I also ate one of the pears that have been lurking in the back of photos all week as I waited for them to ripen enough not to be a threat to the integrity of my teeth. It was a good pear: sweet and juicy even while still being slightly hard. (I think it needed another day, tbh.)

Scores:

• Pasty: 7/10 – decent glunk in nice pastry.
• Chips: 10/10 – for me, these chips are precisely how I want chips to be, the Platonic ideal of chips. (Long ago traces of my classical history degree may be showing there.)
• Cheesecake: 8/10 – the cheesecake is a perfect 10⁴, but calling it a “strawberry cheesecake” is pushing it.
• Overall score: 8.34/10

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I will end this review as it began, with a vote of thanks, this time to whoever was repeatedly sounding an airhorn outside my bedroom door while I was on what turned out to be a totally pointless call to my energy supplier back in Portsmouth. It’s very hard [HONK] to build up to any serious [HONK] level of frustration [HONK] when someone is going [HONK] every few minutes while you’re [HONK] talking.

Catch you all [HONK] later. 🙂

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1. Steak and ale for me, cheese and onion for Jen. I swear I can remember exactly how those pasties tasted, even after all this time. ↩︎
2. It’s an armadillo! (I think you have to be in a very particular age group to get that reference!) ↩︎
3. I did end up with two sets of salt and pepper grinders, but if you saw how liberally I apply both you’d know that this is really not a problem! ↩︎
4. 🎵 …but she wears a 12… 🎵 (Sorry – I’ve gone into song association mode again!) ↩︎