My Mum's dinners...

Obviously I grew up eating my mum's dinners.  Pictured is a plate of stew - which looks more appetising than my mum's but which does at least have that brownness about it which marks out the old fashioned type of cooking.  Wartime cooking I calls it.


I still have dinner at my mum's a few times a week and I do like the family atmosphere and I suppose I kind of like the food in a love / hate way.  I never quite understand why, and indeed how, she manages to produce carbon copies of exactly the same set of dinners every time.  There are about five dinners which she does again and again - always the same.


Everything has to have thick gravy with it.  She makes the gravy with water from the vegetables rather than in any way utilising the meat juices, so we end up with a kind of featureless goo.


You also have to have every kind of vegetable know to humanity - but all cooked till they are mushy so they basically end up tasting the same.  My mum deeply resents having to use her teeth in any way.  If the green beans are about right (al dente) she invariably grumbles that they're too hard.


No Mum!  That's how they should be!


One of the vegetables featured is cabbage which of course reduces to baby food consistency if you do any more than show it some hot water.  My mum calls cabbage 'greeeen' for some reason.  With that many 'e's.


Then there is bacon and onion pudding.  It's hard to describe really - kind of a lump of stodge with, well, bacon and onions in it.  Actually at the time of eating it's kind of nice in an odd way - but then afterwards you can taste it for about three weeks.


Meat pie is another perennial.  Mince.  In a pie.  That's basically it - a thin piece of meat pie.  'Meat' isn't a specific enough description for me of something I'm going to eat.  It's like 'meat' and chips isn't it?   hmmm


Anyway, let's not forget the most important ingredient in my mum's dinners - and one we all appreciate.  


Love.


Ahhhhhhh - blessington bless blessy bless.


As a postscript may I add that her lasagne is strangely awesome and the best I've ever had.