Tag Archives: baked beans

Hurdy Gurdy, Bork Bork Bork …

hurdy gurdyI am teaching The Teenager how to cook.

He’s quite possibly flying the nest next year and bit by bit, I’m teaching him valuable life skills, such as:

  • If you hang your towel up after a shower rather than leaving it in a heap on the floor, it will dry!
  • If you lock the door after coming in late, we might not be burgled!
  • If you bring the tower of bowls and plates down from your bedroom, you’ll make your long-suffering mum very happy!

It’s taking a while and we still haven’t cracked the loo-roll dilemma (i.e. replace an empty one) or the milk carton angst (when it’s finished, it doesn’t go back in the fridge, d’uh).

But I live in eternal hope.

Today, he was deep in thought, sprawled out on the sofa, fingers flying across his iphone keypad as I was trying to type up some uni notes for my first dissertation meeting.

‘Mum. Muuum. Mum. How many calories in an egg?’ he asked.

‘Dunno.’

‘Four eggs?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Three eggs?’

‘I. Don’t. Know. Why?’

‘Well, I went to the gym this morning – see, look, muscles (obligatory muscle flex), I’ve got 1367 calories left to eat. Minus the protein shake. Plus the jelly snake I ate on the way home from school.’

‘That’s nice dear.’

‘Muuuuum?’

‘What?’

‘You busy?’

Noooooo, why?’

‘It says here on my app that I should cook scrambled eggs with four slices of brown bread, no butter. How do I make it?’

I talked him through it. Twice.

‘I hate cracking eggs.’

‘Most people do.’

‘Can you help? Pwwwweeeaaassse?’

I abandoned my not-going-anywhere proposal, sighed deeply for dramatic effect and joined him in the kitchen. A carton of eggs lay decimated on the counter. There were four left un-bashed.

I demonstrated what he had to do and he massacred the remaining ones into a bowl.

‘Now whisk.’

‘Am whisking.’

‘Put your bread in the toaster. Heat your frying pan up, put in a drop of oil and wait for it to get warm. There. Now!’

‘Use the spatula. Spatula! Not the ladle. No, and not that one, that’s a potato masher.’

‘Mum, spatula is a funny word, isn’t it?’

‘Erm, yes, I guess so.’

I showed him how to sweep the eggs gently around the pan, then handed control to him. The eggs were pummelled into submission, not daring to become anything else but scrambled eggs.

Finally, all was assembled. He splattered the resulting meal with tomato sauce, grabbed a drink and ate it all within two minutes.

‘Mum! Mum. That was ace (a surprising, new word in his vocabulary). And it only took two minutes! Result.’

And with that, he tapped his food stats into his app, put his empty plate in the kitchen and sauntered upstairs.

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The Day Baked Beans Made Me Cry

bakedYou know that whispered word, beginning with an ‘R’ and ending in ‘elapse’?

Well, I’m not sure if it’s a flare up or the dreaded ‘R’-word. Whatever it is, it’s awful.

It started over a week ago with the usual brutal, gatecrash-entry that MS specialises in.

A sudden, total collapse in energy, not seen since 2011. Garbled speech, crazy balance and a sense of being utterly spaced out; so much so that I have now nicknamed myself The Space Cadet.

Just to make things even more interesting, I’m having weird jolts of vertigo. Not continuous (I can just about cope with that), but sudden, horrible shifts in my vision, like a camera-shutter adjusting itself rapidly (younger readers, you may have to google this).

And if that wasn’t bad enough, I’m now feeling nauseous every evening.

Oh, and one more thing. The bizarre crying. I cry at everything. A piece of music, a random comment, the cat running up my curtains. And baked beans.

That was the final straw. Who on earth cries when they make baked beans on toast?

The Teenager had requested this particular meal choice when I was writing the shopping list for the week, a monumental task. So, great. Easy, fairly healthy, quick.

On the fateful evening, I assembled everything and served it up. I looked at the plate and burst into tears. The beans just looked so … sad. So vulnerable and innocent and somehow, a little bit lonely, even though they were surrounded by other beans. It was then that I realised I needed professional help.

So I called the MS team this morning and left a rambling message. I had a call back soon after and blurted out my tales of woe, capping it off at the end with, ‘and apart from that, I’m fine!’.

The Teenager is away in London this weekend, so maybe I will have some time to gather myself together before I go back to hospital with my Baked Bean Saga. How embarrassing. Kittens, babies, parcels tied up with string I can understand, but baked beans? I have a feeling I’ll never live this one down.

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