Salad; three bean chilli, broccoli and rice; ginger sponge and custard

Usually I like to start my lunch reviews with something about what’s going on with me, and sometimes with mum, but atm there’s not a great deal to say.

I spent my physio session today side-stepping along the side of my bed, using the rails as a support – which surprised me because I didn’t know my bed even had rails – and quietly despairing over how much concentration it takes to go sideways when I’ve barely mastered going forwards.

Meanwhile, in another part of the Island, Mum is doing well at home, to the point that she politely but with some indignation sent away the carer who came at lunchtime, because she had already done the laundry, and the washing up, and bought some stuff for lunch, and did he think she was an old lady or something?! (I was on the phone with mum when he knocked on the door, so got to hear the discussion, albeit in a distant, somewhat distorted by wifi sort of way.)

I decided not to remind mum that there are days when she barely remembers to dress, let alone put on a load of laundry, and instead simply agreed that he sounded like a nice man (all the carers seem to be exceptionally nice people – I don’t know if the agency only employs nice people or if it’s just that being a carer is a career that only attracts nice people¹) and it’s fine to let him get on if there’s nothing that needs doing.

And then it was time for lunch, which today was three bean chilli with broccoli and rice. I also asked for a side salad which, liberally dressed with salad cream (thanks again to the person who bought that for me – I’m thoroughly enjoying drowning my salads in the stuff), I ate as a starter.

Then the chilli, which, with sincere apologies to the person who spent their time preparing and cooking it, had definite baked bean juice vibes to the sauce. 😬

It was perfectly nice, if a touch lacking in chilli heat for my taste (but of course it was – I don’t find Encona Hot Pepper Sauce (my trusty, and rapidly diminishing, hot sauce) particularly spicy, to the quiet horror of one of the nurses with whom I discussed our shared love of hot sauce), but something about the slightly gloopy, orange-hued, tomato-ish tasting sauce instantly, and with every bite, screamed ‘baked beans’ at me.²

The broccoli was fine, and better than fine once I had given it a liberal grinding of pepper and two of the butter packets from my little stockpile. (And I now know you can usually tell someone who has spent any amount of time in hospital by their habit of stockpiling butter packets, sauce sachets, and those little paper things of salt and pepper that never taste of anything.) The rice was well cooked: fluffy and separate grains, not stodgy or soggy – given that rice cooking is something I really struggle with, I’m suitably impressed.

Then pudding. I decided last night that I need to cut back on my dairy intake, for, umm, intestinal reasons, and genuinely had every intention of doing so until I was asked if I wanted ginger sponge and custard for pudding today. Custard isn’t that dairy, right?

The sponge was seriously dense – it took genuine effort to get the spoon through it – and didn’t really smell or taste particularly gingery. The aftertaste was definitely ginger, though, which is a clever trick. I think the cake would have been quite dry without the moistening effect of the custard (good thing I opted to have it, huh?), but together they were quite nice.

Which could serve as a summary of the whole meal, tbh: it was quite nice.

Scores:

• Salad: 8/10 – about as good as a plain salad can get (that’s a compliment: if it hasn’t been made abundantly clear, I like my salads!).
• Chilli: 6.5/10 – I couldn’t make up my mind if it was a six or a seven, so went down the middle.
• Broccoli and rice: 7/10 – no complaints, but better with butter.
• Ginger sponge and custard: 6/10 – good enough, but mostly because of the custard.
• Overall score: 6.88/10

I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon watching Pigeon TV (a pair of feral pigeons are building a nest on the roof above my window and, as is generally the case with pigeons, they’re not very good at it) and trying to resist the lure of the box of shortbread I have put away out of sight, but sadly not out of mind.

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1. And the occasional truly evil soul, sadly, but those are fortunately few and far between. ↩︎
2. That paragraph is all one sentence. You can reliably tell if I’m having a bad pain day by the length of the sentences in my posts: something about medicinal morphine causes me to lose all control of sentence structure so they just go running off under their own steam, leaping and gambolling over commas and through pairs of brackets like font-y spring lambs (or lamps, as autocorrect would have it: I have no idea what a spring lamp might be, or why one would be leaping and gambolling through a food review) – just like this one has, in fact. 😳 ↩︎