Sausage, tomato and mozzarella pasta

Today I had my PIP assessment, at the less than friendly time of 9am. 🥱 I think it went OK: the assessor was really very pleasant, asked intelligent questions and didn’t try to hurry me or trip me up with tricky questions, and when she wished me the best at the end of our call I felt like she really meant it. Now I just need to wait 8 weeks or so for the DWP to make a decision on my case: as mum keeps saying, it’s a good thing she has enough money to pay for things.

One of the things mum pays for are groceries: she has given me her card details and trusts me to use it appropriately in things like ordering food and… hang on, brb.

Sorry, I just remembered that mum asked me to add sponge scourers to our next grocery order, which is due to be delivered tomorrow. This meant a bit of creativity in producing a meal for tonight, once I decided that my intended meal was going to take far more time and energy than I had available.

(One thing I mentioned to the PIP assessor was that everything now takes a little more effort and energy than I expect: I’m still worn out from yesterday’s café trip. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything in the grocery order in my exhausted state, but know I almost certainly have.)

What I ended up making was pasta with a sauce of chopped up chipolatas, the last of the cherry tomatoes which were starting to wrinkle¹, some chopped frozen onion, and a generous tsp of chopped garlic. When the pasta was cooked I added it and a bit of its cooking water to the sauce, then stirred through the last of a bag of grated mozzarella and a generous grinding of black pepper.

The end result was pretty tasty, although I admit I’ve been having a hungry day and would probably have eaten just about anything. I certainly ate the remaining chipolatas which I had intended to have for lunch tomorrow. Oh well, the new batch of groceries should have been delivered by then.

After dinner, mum did the washing up and was rather disgruntled to find I might finally have killed the baking tray by cooking chipolatas that welded themselves to it: I rescued the sausages, but the tray may be beyond saving. I asked, a little sheepishly, if I could help with anything, and the response was one word: “pudding”.

So I microwaved a couple of syrup sponge puddings from the store cupboard, and served them with the last of the blonde chocolate ice cream, which neither mum nor I could quite decide if we liked or not, but apparently we liked it enough to eat it all!

And so to the end of another day. As usual, I have nothing pithy or amusing with which to conclude this post. I will get the hang of writing conclusions eventually, I’m sure, but today is not that day. Sorry.

1. Thrown in whole with just a small hole pierced in each one to stop them exploding. When they’re softened you can squish them with your cooking spoon, which is oddly satisfying. ↩︎