Chicken baked with chorizo, tomato, and mozzarella, with garlic ciabatta; mixed berry crumble with custard

Here follows another post which is a race between finishing writing and falling asleep. I have my PIP assessment on Tuesday and must remember to tell them that, while I can go outside the house, it leaves me completely exhausted for several days afterwards.

The high point of physical activity for me today, therefore, was negotiating the step down into the conservatory to fetch the clippings bucket mum forgot to take into the garden with her, and that left me breathless and shaking for several minutes afterwards. If you haven’t gathered by now, this chronic illness thing seriously sucks.

Or socks, as my phone insists on auto-correcting the word to. It’s annoying, but gives me a vaguely plausible excuse to show off my new slippers.

I ordered these online shortly before I went into hospital, but not unreasonably forgot all about them until my old ones lost most of their fluffy lining and started becoming uncomfortable even to my dodgily-sensing feet. Then I had a vague memory of ordering new ones and, like magic, these emerged from the plastic postage bag that has been under my bed since I got home back in December.

But this isn’t a blog about shoes¹, so here’s a quick bit about cooking dinner, before Dancing On Ice (which mum loves, which is why it’s on) sends me even closer to sleep.

Dinner was something that was not planned, as my meal plan for this week has already fallen into disarray, and was actually a “clear out things that need using” dish: the end of a chorizo ring, the last three chicken thighs in a bag from the freezer, the end of a jar of pasta sauce from yesterday’s parmigiana. It was very simple (cook chopped chorizo in a dry pan until it releases its fat, remove it and brown the chicken in the same pan, put both in a baking vessel (I don’t know what I would do without mum’s collection of Pyrex dishes of various sizes), pour over the pasta sauce, top with a generous handful of grated cheese and some cracked black pepper², and bake until cooked through and golden on top) but took all my concentration and energy in my exhausted state.

After all that effort, you can understand my frustration when mum pronounced it “OK”, even though, objectively, she was quite right: it tasted like the clear the fridge dish it was. The main flavour was jarred pasta sauce, with a few bits of chorizo popping up to add a hit of salty savouriness. The garlic ciabatta, from Tesco’s Finest range, was delicious, dripping with garlicky butter but still excellent at mopping up sauce, as it always is. There’s a reason I keep buying it.

Dessert was the latest iteration of my ongoing attempt to master the fine art of the fruit crumble. This one contained oats and flaked almonds in the topping, and went on top of (mostly) defrosted fruit in hopes that that would help stop the crumble dissolving into the fruit.

It worked to an extent, and mum really enjoyed hers, but it’s still not perfect: there was a certain amount of crunch, but not as much as I would like – I think it needed a little longer in the oven, but mum was getting impatient. The crumble mix was still dissolving into the fruit in a somewhat unappealing manner, and I don’t know how to stop it doing that without cooking the topping separately, which to me defeats the whole point of a fruit crumble. As always, more experimentation is needed, which I’m pretty sure mum won’t be sorry about as she always eats the product of my experiments with great enthusiasm.

And so into my usual conclusion, as ungracefully as Sir Steve Redgrave on ice skates (I may have paid more attention to Dancing On Ice than I like to pretend). Tomorrow I’m going out for afternoon coffee and cake with mum and a family friend: the place we’re going posts regular photos of its extensive range of homemade cakes on its social media, so I’m hoping they offer a takeaway service, and apologise in advance if all I have to write about as tomorrow’s dinner is a handful of grapes and a glass of water because I’ve eaten far too much cake during the afternoon. At least all the sugar might help keep me awake long enough to write the evening post, even if I have nothing to write about. Oh well. 🤷‍♂️

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1. Although I’m hard-pressed yo remember what it is about most of the time. ↩︎
2. The kind people who sent me salt and pepper grinders while I was in the care home might be glad to know they’re still in daily use. ↩︎