Cheese and onion pasty, chips, and baked beans; strawberry jelly and cream

I apologise for the somewhat poor quality headline photo, and for that matter the probable less than stellar quality of the forthcoming review: I am feeling like I could be used as an illustration of how the word ‘meh’ appears irl, and I am just starting to accept that it’s going to be one of those days where nothing much gets done, and what does get done doesn’t get done well¹.

I have already done my physio session for today, walking all the way across the room, doing four or five side-steps along a banister rail four times, then walking back across the room to my chair².

Total distance covered: about 10 yards (if I’m being generous to myself).

Exhaustion level: 7/10, maybe 6/10 after a restorative cup of coffee.

Learning to walk again³ just takes so much effort, particularly as my natural way of walking is apparently at odds with how the physios want me to walk: feet further apart, turn your toes out more, put your heel down first… It all makes me feel like I’m doing a bad duck impression⁴ and on my way back to my chair I started quacking with every step. The physio laughed: I’m not sure if it was with me or at me, although I’m going with the former for the sake of my pride.

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Lunch was, as the headline suggests, a bit of a return to childhood for me. Mum has never enjoyed cooking so, on days when she felt like I feel today, a pasty, oven chips, and either baked beans or what we called (and I still call) ‘peacorn’ (frozen peas and frozen sweetcorn in equal quantities, zapped in the microwave with a small amount of butter) was a regular meal for me and my sister.

(Which isn’t to say my mum is a bad cook: she’s perfectly competent. She just doesn’t enjoy it, unless she’s making a cake or something similarly sweet and un-meal-like. It’s one of the reasons me and mum living together works so well: I have someone else to cook for, and mum has someone to make sure she eats, which she often forgets or doesn’t bother to do when she’s on her own.)

I was hoping the pasty would be the same Cornish-type pasty I had last week, but it was more like a very elevated version of a Greggs cheese and onion pasty, in that it was square, dropped bits of flaky pastry everywhere, and had a cheesy filling that was roughly the temperature of the surface of the sun.

I don’t know if the pasty was homemade – I think it probably was – but the filling was definitely better than the Greggs version, fine though that is: this was incredibly cheesy in a way that might have been too much if eaten alone but was just right with beans and ketchup. (Told you I was eating like a child!) If it wasn’t homemade, it was an extremely good bought-in pasty.

Child me would have enjoyed the size of the chip portion; adult me would have liked a few more, at least until I remembered how many chips I ate last night and decided the number was probably about right! Again, they were good chips, fluffy on the inside, crisp on the outside, with proper crunchy ends to the broken ones. (You know the ones I mean, I hope: you can see one in my photo above.)

The childhood theme continued with a dessert of strawberry jelly – something I haven’t eaten since I was 6 or 7 – and cream. I don’t have a proper photo of it because I decided to take one after I had eaten my main course, neglecting to engage my brain for long enough to realise that the pretty, airy spike of cream on top of the jelly would slowly but surely deflate. By the time I came to take the photo, it frankly just looked a mess, and I wasn’t going to share a picture of it like that when the kitchen sent it out looking so nice.

Having eaten the strawberry jelly (jello, if you’re in the US, and possibly in other countries), I can see why I haven’t eaten it in nearly 40 years. It tasted like an edible version of weak berry fruit squash (cordial), which I suppose makes sense as that’s pretty much what it is. If it’s another 40-odd years until I try it again, I won’t be too upset.

Scores:

• Pasty: 8/10 – a very nice pasty, would eat again, preferably outside where birds can tidy up all the dropped bits of pastry. (Something I have done in the past with friends – it’s surprisingly satisfying to share your lunch with little birds hopping expectantly around your feet.)
• Chips and beans: 7/10 – decently cooked chips, and it’s hard to mess up baked beans.
• Jelly and cream: 4/10 – nothing wrong with it, just not for me.
• Overall score: 6.34/10

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Right, that’s that review done: as often happens on days like today, I have to force myself to start writing then, two or three paragraphs in, realise I’m enjoying myself. And maybe didn’t do such a bad job with the writing as I thought I was going to: my photography still pretty much sucks, though!

1. That’s another of those paragraph-long sentences, isn’t it? No Oramorph involved this time, just an ever-increasing level of “it’ll do”. Which isn’t in itself a bad thing for someone like me with perfectionist tendencies: I need to learn (for the n’th time) that good enough sometimes really is good enough. ↩︎
2. Which I would totally be stealing when I leave the care home if only I could figure out a way to fit it in my pocket without anyone noticing. ↩︎
3. Apologies (not really 😜) if you’re a Foo Fighters fan and now have that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. ↩︎
4. So that’s where yesterday’s duck came from! ↩︎