Corned beef pasty; apple crumble and custard

Tonight’s dinner was the sort of processed food the carer who came in earlier today warned me about – for those who expressed concern, thank you for making me realise her comments were more than just annoying, and could be a problem for the vulnerable people she sees. I contacted the council with my concerns, and they will be passed on to her manager to deal with as they think appropriate. The council rep I spoke to is going to call me back tomorrow and we can decide together if I need the carers at all or if mum and I can manage on our own (well, on our own plus mum’s carer, for now).

Tonight’s dinner was put together with minimum effort or thought from me, when mum mentioned she was hungry¹. The apple crumble, another Aunt Bessie special, took 50 minutes to cook, so in the interim mum ate a mince pie, while I had a corned beef pasty from Peter’s.

I have had these pasties before and really liked them, which turns out to be a good thing as, at some point while I was messing around with the online grocery order, some items got doubled up. On the plus side, I have two corned beef pasties to eat, and we won’t be short of milk for a while, so it’s not a disaster.

The pasty was as I remembered: slightly stodgy pastry – it would probably be better hot, which I will try with the other one – with a salty, savoury, black peppery filling. I do like these things.

Once the crumble was cooked I heated a couple of pots of ready-to-eat custard (you have to take off the foil lids first, and I wasn’t going to waste the custard on the lids (particularly when mum was in the other room and couldn’t see my lack of manners) so of course I licked them clean before putting them in the bin), then called mum to our fruity feast.

It turned out that mum only wanted a couple of spoonfuls of custard – unlike me, who likes their puddings swimming in custard – so I had most of two pots of custard to eat with my serving of crumble². An excellent crumble it was too: both mum and I were concerned it would be very sweet, but the apple part, and there was a generous quantity of it, was slightly sour, so when eaten with the crumble topping and custard it was pretty perfectly balanced. The crumble itself was also nicely balanced, between stodge and crunch, just as I like it.

Mum asked if I had ordered more than one: anything that piques mum’s scant interest in food can only be good. It’s just a shame that it isn’t one of things that got doubled up, as I wouldn’t mind eating it again either.

Oh well, next time. As mum keeps saying, it’s not like we’re short of food. Even if it’s not food a certain someone would approve of.

1. If mum doesn’t eat almost immediately when she feels hungry, she loses her appetite and doesn’t bother to eat, so I have to think / act quickly in these situations. ↩︎
2. I suppose I could have put the second one in the fridge for tomorrow, but why would I want to do that? ↩︎