Food for thought rosie green on her household’s culinary challenges
Sausages going MIA, a packet of ham that costs more than the GDP of Luxembourg, and a limited recipe repertoire – Rosie Green on culinary challenges
After a discussion about unfair division of household labour, Alpha Male has been assigned the weekly shop. This is good and this is bad. Good in that it is a major job ticked off my to-do list. Bad in that we will soon be bankrupt.
Oh, not for him the £1 pack of tomatoes, instead he buys the ones that look like they’ve been picked on the Italian hills by a singing signorina. He goes to the fish counter and the girl serves him some cod for £18.50. £18.50!! At the deli section, he watches mesmerised as they do slice after (thick) slice of ham.
When he finally snaps out of his catatonic state, he’s spent the GDP of Luxembourg. He “Tastes The Difference”. He experiences the “Finest”. And when he returns home we might have nothing to make meals with, but we do have an extremely good selection of wines and olives.
When choosing your partner you look for complementary skills. He brings DIY abilities, calmness in a crisis and the ability to listen to directions. I bring, er, aesthetics.
But, sadly, neither of us are any good at cooking. This is OK when it’s just us. Cereal dinners. Jacket potato, beans and cheese. But having people round is problematic. In our household, dinner parties are basic. It’s mainly lasagne.
And Eton mess. We can only dream of status salads with pomegranate molasses.
I also have another problem. It is hard to keep any food in the fridge. Last week I cooked sausages on their sell-by date thinking I could create two meals from them. AM ate 11 of the 12 of them while they were cooling and I was upstairs in the bath. He left one. This is so he can proclaim that he did not eat “all” of the sausages. He thinks he can get off on a technicality.
AM is like a cross between a starved Labrador and Winnie-the-Pooh. One Christmas he ate a whole jar of raw mincemeat (the kind you put in mince pies).
He once, when we were students, ate my friend Hilary’s carefully stored hot cross buns after a night out. Six of them, straight from the packet. When she found the wrapping in the bin the next morning and accused him he denied it all, his face the picture of innocence. It was only later he had a “flashback” and remembered wolfing them down. Another time he ate all the Matchmaker “spines” of his mate’s hedgehog birthday cake. He tried to smooth things over by saying it was now a birthday mole.
I am no better. For me chocolate cravings erode all moral codes. Once I have exhausted the supply of normal chocolate, eaten the cooking chocolate and toyed with swallowing a spoonful of powdered cocoa, I am faced with my daughter’s reward bar of chocolate from her teacher. I eat it, then replace it, then eat that one.
Pre-dinner party, AM’s Guinness Book of World Records level of consumption take on serious significance. Last week, when we hit minus two hours on guest arrival time, I was about to arrange our charcuterie starter. I opened the fridge to find… the Parma ham, salami and pepperoni had all been consumed (apart from one sad slice of each, obvs).
After an ear-splitting outburst, I was forced to make an emergency dash to the local One Stop.
As you can imagine, the choice there was less outdoor-reared, more Mattessons vs Peperami.
Anyway, when are you free for dinner?
He comes home with no meals… but with lots of wine and olives