Minted lamb burger, criss-cross fries, salad; millionaire’s cheesecake

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that I would be having a telephone hospital appointment today, and I was accordingly awake and caffeinated at an hour I personally consider unsociable. When the hour of the scheduled call came and went I double-checked the letter I had received, just to make sure I hadn’t mistaken the time of the call, and found that I hadn’t. I had, however, mistaken the month: the appointment is next month. 🤦‍♂️

One thing that I didn’t mention yesterday was that an engineer came out to service mum’s boiler. I didn’t mention it because, despite mum’s anxiety about how it would go, the visit passed with a swiftness and ease that pleased us both immensely. I should perhaps have guessed that it was too good to be true, as today the approved-as-working-properly boiler started to drip, and drip, and drip some more and, perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not), the path that runs along the side of the house, beneath the boiler outlet pipe, is rapidly turning into a stream. (If it is a coincidence, tomorrow will see me out there on my crutches, trying to see where the water is coming from.)

The company that did the service, when called, promised to send someone back out to us; as the day wore on without any sign of anyone, I called back and they clarified that they didn’t necessarily mean someone would come out today. If tomorrow’s post comes to you from a boat, you now know why.

Dinner tonight was, according to my carefully constructed meal plan, going to be vegetable fajitas, served with some nicely fiery salsa to tailor mine to my tastes. However after all the boiler palaver I just couldn’t find the energy for cooking, so instead it was a return to things that can be put on a baking tray and shoved in the oven. It’s not cooking – or at least not what I would consider cooking – but if there’s one thing I’m learning from this whole chronic illness thing it’s that sometimes the easy option is the only option.

[The criss-cross fries, from Iceland, btw, are OK but very oily and not as flavourful as they look or smell. They’re a bit different to normal chips, though, which is about all I can ask from an emergency cba to cook meal.)

Then we each had a quarter of a not-quite-defrosted millionaire’s cheesecake, also from Iceland: I could have eaten my second quarter as well, but decided to be good for once¹.

And now, having helped mum readjust the bowl under the boiler to (hopefully) better catch the drips, I’m sitting with a cup of decaff coffee and half watching Dame Mary Berry cooking a delicious-looking mushroom tart that prompted even mum to say she “doesn’t mind mushrooms” when I said fancied making it myself. I’ll let you know if I ever do.

Tomorrow I can have a lie-in, so I’ll catch up with y’all at a suitably sociable hour. Night, all.

1. In a short while mum will settle down to watch a programme I don’t much care for (Stacey Solomon clearing out the houses of people who, imo, need a therapist rather than a camera crew – that’s not meant as any kind of insult, but a recommendation from someone who has had plenty of therapy at difficult times) so I’ll slope off to my bedroom early and crunch my way through too many fingers of shortbread. So not that good overall, really. ↩︎