Thank you to my daughter Samantha for this excellent report on our cooking endeavours last night:
Girls weekend was going fabulously right up until dinner time when we both realised dad wasn’t there to cook for us. Fortunately, over the past week we’d been receiving those bougie food packages with all the ingredients to make a couple of meals for yourself. After two somewhat successful meals (the only downfall being the meat which no matter what I did always turned out dry and flavourless), mother and I were ready to take it to the next level. So mum rummages through the freezer and finds some ready made chicken curry and spinach dal and we both decided to heat those up on the stove. Surely an easy task to simply reheat slop. After mum almost set herself on fire while I was cooking rice for the first time EVER, dinner was ready. It was only a few mouthfuls into the meal we realised something was off. What we thought were lentils all turned out to be peppercorns. It turned out that instead of pulling out the container of spinach dal, mum had unintentionally grabbed and reheated dad’s homemade steak pepper sauce. We came to the conclusion that this was obviously dad’s fault for not having labeled the steak sauce more clearly and silently agreed to order out next time.
Eds note:
1) Thank you for not mentioning that the “dhal” also got burnt and stuck to the bottom of the saucepan, adding insult to injury.
2) I would not recommend a combination merino and possum poncho for cooking, exceedingly comfortable though it may be, for the reason noted above. In addition, isn’t it interesting that the odour of burning animal fibres smells very similar to any other source of combustion?
3) no one tell Simon what happened. On the other hand, we still have some frozen spinach dhal set aside for the future, so it’s not all bad.