Creamy spiced chicken / apple tart and ice cream

…aaand we’re back. Sorry for the lack of post yesterday: a very nice handyman came round and replaced an extension cable, and – disaster! – our internet router stopped routing.

While that was out of order, the rheumatology consultant called back and we discussed mum’s situation with her head and joint pains. He is really taking the situation seriously, and is going to rope in a colleague from another speciality to try and work out what’s causing mum’s pain. In the meantime, the dosage of steroids has been increased back up in the hope that will make mum more comfortable.

I also spoke with the ANP¹ who is overseeing mum’s care about the horribly sore mouth mum has been experiencing recently. The ANP was happy with my amateur diagnosis of oral thrush, apparently a common side-effect of taking steroids, so mum now has some ‘swish and swallow’ medication to take four times a day.

I gave mum her first dose earlier and it unfortunately tasted too nice, as it lasted only a couple of swishes before getting swallowed with a “yum”. At least I won’t have to fight to get mum to take it, I suppose.

This afternoon, the handyman came back, dragged out the desk that was blocking my access to the router plug, and tried every cable without identifying the cause of the outage. I pulled up the fault finder on my phone, and it said the issue was ‘no power’.

As we all sat around in bemusement, I belatedly realised that there was a switch on the new extension cable, and it was switched off. One click later, the router lit up in its customary disco lights, and we were back in the internet age.

This afternoon Lady Friday came round with a ‘friend’ (a new member of staff shadowing her), and they all went out for a walk. Mum encouraged the new lady to leave early, which isn’t promising as I was hoping that she would be invited back to give us another respite session every week.

By the time Lady Friday headed out, it was time for dinner. We had the tikka chicken ‘sizzle steaks’ from last week’s grocery order, but I changed my mind several times on what to serve with them.

I diced a potato, frying it with some frozen chopped onions, then adding butter and garam masala, then frozen sweetcorn. Then I realised I didn’t have a pan to fry the chicken, so I pushed the veg to the side and added the chicken.

Then I realised that mum would say it was too dry, so I added cream, seasoning, and a bit more garam masala, and ended up with a sort of lightly curried, creamy pan of chicken and veg. It was very nice: even mum couldn’t find a single thing to complain about.

For the all-important sweet course, I baked a Tesco apple tart. It refused to leave the baking tray in tart shape, though, instead disintegrating into slices of apple and chunks of pastry. It tasted just as good, but wasn’t exactly photogenic!

So now you’re mostly caught up. Mum is, as is usually the case, a bit better this evening. Tomorrow we have more ‘nice things’ coming, as it’s grocery delivery day. I have learned my lesson and ordered twice as much of mum’s favourites (tiramisu and chocolate éclairs), as well as cakes and yoghurts and ice creams.

I’m just glad our internet is back so I could finish the order: being without sweet things would truly be a disaster beyond measure.

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1. Advanced Nurse Practitioner. ↩︎