Roasted Mediterranean veg, double-cooked chicken, bread

Firstly, welcome to the new-look Pineapple Sponge website! With the first anniversary of the start of my hospital stay rapidly approaching, I thought it was high time I did something about the ‘temporary’ website I built to house my blog. This was created on my rickety old phone, in under an hour, and was never intended to be in use for more than a couple of months tops. 😳

I hope the refreshed site meets everyone’s approval: if it does, or doesn’t, or if you need to tell me anything else, there’s now a form that goes straight to the support team. Which is also me.

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As a reward for all that hard work – and it genuinely was difficult, as my shiny new laptop kept losing its connection to the internet, usually just as I reached a critical point – I got an ice cream Snickers bar out of the freezer. Unfortunately mum saw me, and decided she wanted ice cream too. After a bit of negotiating, we agreed that mum would eat the few mouthfuls and see what happened.

Of course what happened was a recurrence of the stomach pain, and I had to explain all over again that the pain is being caused by milk products (“but I don’t drink milk”) and that’s why I’m saying she can’t have ice cream. “Ohhh,” said mum, “that makes sense now.”

So for now we have an agreement that mum won’t have anything else containing dairy products for the next few days, after which we can think about trying again. Or at least I thought we did: we’re currently back to sulking that there’s “nothing to eat”, despite having run several times through all the many things there are to eat that aren’t coffee ice cream. 🙄

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As autumn has most definitely now arrived. I thought a nice chicken and mushroom pie would be a perfect dinner. After 40 minutes or so of chopping, simmering, and stirring, I had a sauce that looked and smelled good, but tasted too sweet to be entirely right.

What followed was a minor nightmare of tasting, adding something to correct the flavour, tasting, adding something to adjust it back the other way, tasting, adding, tasting, adding… Until at last I ended up with a pie filling that was entirely inedible.

I was utterly furious, all my pent-up frustration and irritation boiling over to rest on the metaphorical shoulders of some hapless chicken and mushrooms.

Remembering that supremely irritating advert for an AI assistant that magically turned pasta sauce into cookies just by adding butter, I asked my phone’s AI for help. Its unmagical but accurate advice was that nothing could be done to save my pie filling.

Once I had simmered down (pun entirely intended), I put some Mediterranean veg in to roast, fished the chicken out of the spoiled sauce, rinsed it off, and fried it in a bit of olive oil. It actually made for a pretty nice bit of chicken: succulent from its initial simmering in the sauce, with a golden brown outside from being fried.

The sauce, sadly, went into the food waste bin.

Now it’s tv, mobile phone games, and the plan of an early exit to my bedroom where I can eat chocolate without triggering the “but what CAN I eat?!” mum routine again.