Braised chicken and vegetables with Yorkshire puddings; apple pie and custard

Someone commented online the other day that there’s more than a touch of “boy who cried wolf” in dealing with mum, and that was very much the case today.

Mum started the day with a headache, as usually happens. After a while that eased off, but her stomach started hurting and she felt sick. Then that eased off but she was constipated. Then that resolved itself but there was another problem, then another, then another. By lunchtime all mum could manage was an ill-defined “I feel lousy”, which I dismissed with an internal roll of my eyes.

Then this afternoon, while I was watching the snooker, mum suddenly remembered her hospital appointment later this week, and panic kicked in. As often happens, the panic triggered the urinary frequency, which gave her something else to worry about. The snooker proved insufficient to the task of distracting her from her worries, and things spiralled until I successfully (if belatedly) put two and two together, added in the realisation that mum took the last of her antibiotics yesterday, and reached the conclusion that her UTI might not be as gone as I had hoped.

I guess I’ll be back on the phone to the GP tomorrow morning. Again.

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You may remember that I mentioned yesterday that mum had been out for a walk with a friend. They went down by the river and, in the process, mum’s shoes got a bit muddy. This caused mum an incongruous amount of concern, so I said I’d clean them.

Every time I seemed to be relaxing today, mum gave a plaintive “shoes?”, until I took them outside and gave them a good brush off with a bit of kitchen paper. I still don’t know why mum couldn’t do that herself, but she was extravagantly grateful, and at least now the shoes are (mostly) mud free.

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For dinner I put the rest of the bag of casserole vegetables in my favourite Pyrex dish with some chicken stock, put a couple of oiled and seasoned chicken thighs on top, and put the lot in the oven for an hour. Once the chicken was cooked, I turned up the oven, put the Yorkshire puddings in to cook, then thickened the stock with some cornflour and put the dish back in the oven to cook out the flour.

I thought it was delicious. Mum wouldn’t be drawn on her thoughts, but she ate all of her (fairly small) portion so that will have to do as her verdict.

For afters I put a Tesco Bakery apple pie in the oven. I had a generous slice with custard; mum hasn’t yet had any but will probably succumb to the lure of pastry and fruit before the evening is out. I would rather she ate more proper food and less sweet stuff, if I’m honest, but I guess I have to take what I can get.

Not much of a conclusion, I know, but 🤷‍♂️