Ginger vegetable and cashew noodles / king prawn, green bean and coconut curry with garlic naan

Yesterday started far earlier than I liked when I woke to go to the loo and discovered the boiler was depressingly silent except for the steady drip of leaking water. I spent a chilly twenty minutes pushing buttons and reading articles online which suggested potential problems without mentioning solutions, before finally giving up and turning to make a cup of coffee. As soon as my back was turned the boiler sprang into action: don’t ever tell me inanimate objects don’t have a sense of humour.

I don’t remember much of what I did for the rest of the day, only that I was tired and in pain, and spent some time mentally debating at what point pain becomes “severe” and therefore within scope of my trusty bottle of morphine.

I do remember that at some point during the afternoon I decided that I wanted a hot sponge pudding, and not one of the syrup ones from the cupboard that mum likes so much, so I dragged my weary and pained body to the kitchen to make my signature “put all the stuff in the blender and press go” cake. Poured it over some frozen berries mixed with sugar, put the dish in the oven to bake, then cleared up (or licked the remaining mix off the spoon, if you insist on looking at it like that).

The main course was a meal I fondly remember from late childhood / teenage-hood, but I obviously don’t fully remember the recipe because what I remember as delicious was barely OK. I won’t be sharing the recipe until I work out where I went wrong, but here’s a photo that I took for yesterday’s post that I never got around to writing.

Today has been mostly taken up by a series of conversations about the clock change tonight: if you’ve never tried to explain time changes to someone with dementia, I can only advise that you don’t. I have also spent some time with a book, having recently rediscovered my love of reading, albeit interspersed with “so what’s 10am today will be 11am tomorrow, so you’ll need to be up earlier according to the kitchen clock … No, it’s still 10am today, or rather it’s 11am now, but it will be 10am tomorrow. No, I mean it will be 10am when your lift to church arrives, but 11am will be 10… no, sorry 12. I think. I’m confused too, now.”

Clock woes aside, I finally got around to making the long-awaited prawn and coconut curry, which earned a coveted two Mum-chelin stars¹ and was therefore worth the (admittedly fairly small) effort needed to make it. The recipe will be part of the cookbook I really am going to start writing while mum’s at church tomorrow, honest.

Now, after at two hour break to watch 23 people run ineffectually around a rectangle of grass before eventually deciding the result on penalties (mum said “well, that was pointless, wasn’t it?”, and I couldn’t really argue), I have finished this post, and will now try to remember what I had planned for dinner tomorrow, given that it’s Mother’s Day and I must have accordingly planned something nice for mum.

Hmm, sticky chicken “and something”. How nice of me to be so precise for myself when writing the mealplan. I’ll update you tomorrow on what it ends up being.

1. “That was good, wasn’t it?” ↩︎