Dal makani, chicken nuggets and ketchup, sandwiches, Marmite Crunch, apple, yoghurt

I’m afraid the pun in the title might be the best, most creative thing in this review. After five weeks of daily sandwich suppers, I’m pretty much out of interesting ways to write about them, although I will note that standard practice for cheese and pickle sandwiches is to have pickle on the whole sandwich, not just a small dot in the middle so each triangle has a tiny amount of pickle ‘sauce’ and one (1) small chunk of pickle veg at the very top of the sandwich. I admire the creativity in trying to reinvent a classic sandwich, but I’m not sure it really worked, sorry.

There was no soup tonight, or rather there was soup but I didn’t get any. I asked for some soup, the person in charge of the supper trolley went to get it, there was some back-and-forth about other options on the trolley, and only after they had gone did I realise that I never did get my soup, or the banana they also offered, or the drinking water they were going to get me. (That my room doesn’t have its own source of drinking water and I have to ask someone to get me some from downstairs every time I finish what’s in my water jug – at least four times a day, as I drink a lot of water – is probably my sole real complaint about this care home. I know and understand why – it’s an old building (early 20th century) and a big one, and re-plumbing all the rooms would take an immense amount of time and faff – but I don’t have to like it!)

Instead of soup I poured myself a bowl of heat-to-eat dal makani, but didn’t bother with the heating bit as my previous attempt to do so in the bathroom sink with hot water from the tap was a bit of a fail.

If you’ve never come across dal makani, it’s a Punjabi dish of black lentils in a tomato sauce heavy with butter and cream: it’s very rich, and very delicious, and even cold from a packet is totally worth the price I pay for overdoing the dairy products!

As I was preparing to take the photo for this review, there was a knock at my door and the HCA I will refer to as H (and that actually is their initial, as they’re one of the few HCAs that my brain has managed to hold on to the name of) came in with a plate of five chicken nuggets and a little bowl of ketchup, and asked if I wanted it. I wasn’t going to refuse after they’d made the effort to ask, so I can report that the nuggets were impressively crispy despite being cold, and tasted of not very much until I dunked them in the ketchup, and then they tasted of ketchup.

Everything else I’ve already reviewed so I’m not going over them again, although I will note that my post-care home grocery shopping list includes yoghurts, as I’ve developed an uncomfortably co-dependent relationship with the little pots of sweet dairy goodness.

I never know quite how to end these reviews: the conclusion should draw everything together, preferably with some humour or cleverness that sends the reader away with a smile, or at least a smirk and an internal eye-roll. Sometimes I manage it quite nicely if I do say so myself, but other times the best I can manage is to just kind of… stop.