Teriyaki chicken with veg sticky rice; chocolate pudding with blonde chocolate ice cream

Today I went for a walk, and did some bird watching. The comma is doing a lot of work there as the two things didn’t coincide: the walk, with support from crutches and my mum¹, took me barely 50 yards but left me so tired that this will be a quick bit of writing so I can go back to my recovery routine (i.e. eating biscuits and playing a mindless casual game on my phone: it’s not even a game I particularly enjoy, but it’s from one of those apps that pays you to play certain games and I’m too short of cash to turn down the offer of bonus points).

The bird watching, meanwhile, was in aid of the annual Great British Bird Watch, and was done from my bed and in a hurry when I heard the call of a great spotted woodpecker and grabbed the opportunity to be able to count a bird we have seen in the garden only a handful of times. Of course, all the other birds we see regularly took the opportunity to disappear from sight, so our grand total for an hour of birdwatching was seven birds. As we have been regularly getting flocks of up to 60 goldfinches this was not a great score, and I might try again tomorrow and report the results of whichever session is better. (Which I know isn’t the point of the exercise, but seven birds in an hour is seriously disappointing!)

After an afternoon of watching birds, in the evening I turned my hand to cooking them, in the form of Sainsbury’s slow cooked teriyaki chicken thighs. These turned out beautifully tender and with a nice, if not particularly teriyaki-y, flavour, but made such a mess of the baking tray that mum and I thought it was fit only for the bin. Then one of the carers turned up and turned her hand to washing up, and somehow returned it to a state so spotless I wondered for a brief moment if it was the same tray.

To accompany the chicken I did sticky rice, from a microwaveable packet that was so solid the instruction to “squeeze to separate the rice” can only have been meant as a joke. Instead I heated it in a pan with some frozen veg until it softened enough to be something other than an emergency building material, then stirred through the leftover teriyaki sauce. It wasn’t fancy, but it was nice, and mum gave it her seal of approval by eating it.

To follow I microwaved a couple of Cadbury’s sticky chocolate puddings, which were nice enough but served mostly to convince me that I really want to try making my own very soon; mum had hers with cream, while I tried the blonde chocolate ice cream I got for £1 on the latest grocery order. I haven’t tried blonde chocolate (caramelised white chocolate) before so don’t know how accurate this was in terms of flavour, but I quite like it and it’s sweet enough to knock even my sweet tooth into temporary submission.

So that’s it for another day and another review. I hope that tonight I will be able to sleep without drugging myself with morphine at 1am; let’s just hope my nerves agree to go along with that plan. What I don’t now have to aid my recovery is any biscuits, as I mindlessly ate them while writing this and now have not even a crumb left for post-writing, game accompanying purposes. The lesson, clearly, is that I should have brought more biscuits to the bedroom with me, and I will make sure to do so in future. 🍪

1. That’s a figure of speech called a zeugma, I learned this week courtesy of a daytime tv quiz show, and I’ve been trying to find a way to work it into a post ever since. ↩︎