In lieu of my husband’s presence, who is in lockdown with an old classmate of his instead of us (long story), I have had to become the family’s chief food provider. I haven’t been in charge of meals since my husband and I first moved in together many years ago, and he soon afterwards asked me to please stop cooking. It’s been a very satisfactory arrangement, until now. I don’t have to figure out meals from scratch, thank goodness – my husband’s club has a sort of old fashioned and less helpful My Food Bag type arrangement, which we’ve ordered. The last two meals were toad in the hole, and chops, and the recipes will often come with little surprises like “serve with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy” as the last sentence, when they haven’t actually given you any of the relevant ingredients.
Still, the meals have been surprisingly successful. Here’s the aforementioned toad in the hole:
And here’s chicken wrapped in bacon from the night before:
I’ve really been quite astounded at how well they’ve turned out. There seem to be some culinary skills hidden away far back in my lizard brain that are suddenly coming to the fore. Of course I did do cooking way back in intermediate school, and in fact I was the teacher’s pet, if I remember rightly. I have no idea why, but I do remember the exact moment when I fell from grace. It was when they were reading over the loudspeaker the list of all those students who had detention that day (those were harsh times), and my name was on the list. I’d been late to school. The cooking teacher never spoke to me again. The shame! Anyway, she must have imparted some knowledge to me in those classes because some of those old skills have come back to me quite gratifyingly in the past couple of weeks, just when they were needed.
On a completely unrelated topic, the jeans I wear when I walk the dogs in the evening have rather disquietingly become somewhat shrunken over the last fortnight, which is odd as I haven’t washed them. A mystery. Could be extra muscle mass from all the walking?