Sweet and hot prawns, chips, salad, sour cream dip; toffee apple sponge and caramel ice cream

As you may have gathered from my lack of mum-related complaining recently, mum has been doing quite well over the past few weeks: she may fuss and panic a little at the idea of leaving the house, but it does wonders for her mental capacity to be with other people. That said, yesterday she several times pointed to a photo of my sister and asked me to remind her how that “lovely lady” passed (“lovely lady” meaning that mum has sadly once again forgotten her younger daughter’s name). That was about as hard a conversation for me as you would imagine.

On a more positive note, she has remembered how to use her online bank account and transferred a very generous amount of money to my account. I have a fair number of bills to pay, having been out of work since late August last year and still awaiting a decision on my applications for the benefits to which I’m entitled, so the first thing I bought was of course some sweet treats.

Yes, I finally got my fancy millionaire’s shortbread from The Millionaire Baker, with my heartfelt thanks again to the Pineapple who introduced me to this wonderful small company and their delicious products. I can’t wait to have a quiet time to get stuck in: probably Friday afternoon, when mum goes off to choir practice for the first time in over a year, if I can wait that long.

As I have been having a bad pain day today, dinner was once again a product of the freezer section, this time mostly from Tesco (I hate their slow, glitchy website, but only Tesco’s Ecuadorian dark chocolate and their Columbian coffee ice cream will do for mum, so once or twice a month I settle in for a fight with it).

I had the sweet and hot prawns, which I have had and reviewed before: I didn’t think they were very spicy last time, but this time they were even milder so that the couple that mum had “to try them” were eaten without any comment. (Mum has of course tried them before, when she managed half of one before being over-chillied, but she didn’t remember that.) For mum were tempura prawns, in batter that went decently crunchy after 15 minutes or so in the oven. Both types had really good prawns, plump and firm to the bite, with a nice sweet, fresh flavour.

The chips (fries) from Iceland were fine, as they have been every time I have cooked them, the salad was fresh and probably tasted good, not that I could really taste it under the amount of sour cream I dumped on top.

Mum did the thing that annoys parents everywhere when their kids do it, announcing she was too full to finish her main course but reacting with enthusiasm when I mentioned pudding. This wasn’t the homemade chocolate pudding I had on my meal plan – that will have to wait until I have more spoons¹ – but a toffee apple sponge pudding from Tesco’s chilled range, with the last of the caramel ice cream. Both were as nice as they were last time: consider them part of my virtual “would recommend” list. (Which I could make into a real list if anyone would like me to?)

So that’s that, just in time for The Repair Shop which, as mum has happily discovered multiple times over the past few days, is on tonight. If / when I eventually get back to Portsmouth, I somewhere have my late father’s childhood teddy bear, which is in precisely the sad sort of state that the programme’s experts specialise in rectifying. If I was to get on the programme, I would of course take mum with me, and just hope she remembers to keep her Will Kirk fan-girling in her head. 🤭

1. The metaphorical chronic illness kind, not the real metal ones, although they’re useful too, of course. ↩︎