Shrimp pasta with tomato and chilli sauce; coffee cake and caramel ice cream

I had to be awake early(ish) today as I had a telephone appointment with Working Towards Wellbeing, a local charity which helps people with mental health issues or disabilities to find work or volunteering opportunities. I had already rescheduled the appointment twice, so felt I had to be on time for this one despite the early hour (well, early for me atm, anyway).

Paid work being currently beyond me (a fact that brought a slightly regretful tear to my eye, if I’m honest), we discussed volunteering opportunities and, a few web searches later, I had applied to and been accepted by a marine history-related charity to do online research on old ships, with the possibility of writing blog posts about the ships if the ones I’m given to research turn out to be interesting enough. Prepare to read a lot about ships over the coming months. Sorry in advance. 😳

Dinner wasn’t what I had planned, as mum came with me to the garage to get things out of the freezer (I need her with me as there are a couple of steps down and I’m not that steady on stairs with my crutches yet), spotted something I had intended for later in the week which she fancied more, so that’s what we had.

The shrimp in tomato and chilli sauce came in a frozen block from Iceland: once I finally managed to extract the prawns and sauce from the shrink-wrapped plastic packaging and defrosted it all in a saucepan, it became apparent that there weren’t many prawns (I got three so, assuming mum shared them out equally, there were only six in total), and I had to bulk out the sauce with some cherry tomatoes. Despite that, it was quite tasty once mixed with some freshly-cooked pasta: the sauce had a definite chilli warmth and a nice butteriness. The shrimp /prawns didn’t have much flavour and were a bit cotton-woolly in texture, so the fact there weren’t many of them wasn’t much of an issue after all. The garlic bread was what all mass-produced garlic bread is, i.e. crunchy, buttery, garlicky, and not quite enough of it for my taste.

I hadn’t planned anything for dessert, but mum asked (our mutual fondness for sweet things may be escalating the dessert stakes for both of us) so I offered a slice of coffee cake¹ with ice cream. Mum had her beloved coffee ice cream, while I had caramel swirl ice cream from the brand Grace’s, bought from Iceland. For cheap-ish ice cream, it was really very good: nice caramel ice cream, topped with caramel sauce and little cubes of fudge. It went really well with the coffee cake, and I’ll probably have the same again tomorrow.

And so, once again, it’s the end of day: I don’t know where the time goes. Tomorrow, for the first time this week, I can sleep late if I need to, and I think I will. See y’all tomorrow, hopefully at a more friendly hour.

1. Because I know “coffee cake” means something different in the US, I should clarify that this is cake flavoured with coffee, not cake for eating with coffee, although it’s good for that too. ↩︎