Sweet chilli chicken thighs with veg noodle stirfry; summer berry and pear almond flapjack pudding with vanilla ice cream

Just want the food? Now you can skip my rambling by tapping here.

Another day of doing not very much, although with mum at church this morning I had the chance to catch up on a couple of episodes from my favourite YouTube channel (Tasting History: if you’re interested in food, or history, or both, I would strongly recommend checking it out) which I haven’t watched since I got home as for some reason I feel awkward watching something that takes most of my attention when mum’s here.

I will feel even more awkward doing it tomorrow while sitting around at the hospital, which I almost certainly will be doing as, unless I and/or the hospital have messed things up¹, I have an appointment in the late morning and another mid-afternoon, and Patient Transport could be with me as early as 8.30, as that’s when they’re going to be in my part of the Island. At least I will have plenty of time to read this month’s book club book².

[Back when I was posting regularly on Rate My Hospital Plate, someone said they worked in the St Mary’s branch of Costa, and suggested we meet up. If you’re a reader of my blog and still want to meet, please DM me and I’ll see if our timings coincide. (This invitation is only for that one person, and isn’t an open invitation to anyone, particularly anyone who’s going to be creepy about it.)]

After all that doing nothing, making dinner should have been a nice change of pace, but it started with a minor oil slick when I picked up the bottle of cooking oil by its top, only to find that someone (me, obviously, as the only one who uses it) hadn’t put the lid on properly and promptly did a neat juggling act which sloshed oil across me, the counter top, and the floor. Thank you mum for the clean up operation!

And so to food…

The main part of the meal was (deep breath) Blue Dragon Sweet Chilli Chicken Thigh Bites, which is a long name for what are basically fancy chicken nuggets with a sachet of sweet chilli sauce. We didn’t try the sauce as we weren’t going to use it all and didn’t have a clip to fasten it shut (where do those things go? They’re too big to be of use to a Borrower, surely) so we used the last of the bottle of sweet chilli sauce that was in the cupboard instead. The nuggets were nice – thigh (dark) meat is always better than breast (white) meat, imo – but I’m not sure they were worth the cost, even at half price as I got them.

The noodle stirfry was disappointingly flavourless, which is largely on me – I thought soy sauce and black pepper would be enough flavouring, but apparently I was wrong – but was partly down to the frozen stirfry veg, which give off a lot of water in the pan so the veg doesn’t so much fry as boil, which doesn’t make for a good flavour.

Maybe a higher heat would help: I’ll try it once I’ve acquired some more pans, so it’s not as much of a big deal if I burn it as it would be if I do so to our only pan. (You can tell that mum’s not a cook by the lack of equipment in the kitchen: I suspect a lot of the money mum so generously gave me will be spent on knives, pans, and other kitchen basics, including a new bowl or two so I’m not eating out of the same one – my favourite one with the blue rings, as seen in today’s headline photo, and many others – multiple times a day.)

For dessert was a pudding of my own creation: the base was last of the frozen mixed berries (must put those on my shopping list – they’re really good. Tesco “Perfectly Imperfect”, I think, if you want to try them) with a chopped up pear, sweetened with a bit of golden syrup (as I couldn’t be bothered to walk the three steps to the cupboard to get the sugar). The topping was 100g (ish) syrup, two very large tbsp butter, and a bit of brown sugar melted together, then ground almonds, flaked almonds, and oats stirred in in sufficient quantity to make a spoonable mix (sorry, except when baking something very finicky, I don’t do precise quantities), which I spooned over the fruit and smoothed it down before baking at gas mark 5 until golden and bubbling around the edges.

With hindsight, I didn’t need the syrup on the fruit, or the extra sugar in the topping – I added it as I thought I had the butter to sweet stuff ratio wrong, but apparently I didn’t – as the end result was verging on too sweet even for me, which is something that rarely happens these days. It tasted really good, though, and both mum and I finished our portions and literally scraped our bowls clean.

There’s enough left for one portion, which I will probably leave for mum as, assuming I do end up at the hospital tomorrow, I will get either rhubarb crumble or sticky toffee pudding (depending on whether it’s week one or week two of the menu rotation) from the hospital restaurant for lunch. Yes, I still have the hospital menus saved on my phone: when you’re a foodie, and neurodivergent, and have to visit hospital semi-regularly, it’s essential to know what goodies await you at meal time. I will just have to live with it not being in my beloved white and blue bowl, just for one meal. 😥

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1. I’m not entirely sure as I tried to rearrange one of the appointments so I wasn’t at the hospital all day, but something may have gone wrong as they called on Friday to confirm the appointment that I thought I had rearranged, so now I’m not sure what’s happening. That makes it difficult for me to answer mum’s usual repeated questions about what’s happening when, as I don’t know either. 🤷‍♂️ ↩︎
2. It’s an online group, run by a Facebook group for people with chronic illnesses, in case you’re wondering how I was getting to a physical group. ↩︎