Food Glorious Food

I had high hopes for myself during the last bit of the extension. I was going to manage admirably and not winge. And what's more I was still going to manage to give my family healthy varied meals despite the lack of a kitchen. Yet again a bit optimistic.

Healthy varied cooking is not exactly happening. So far we've been eating a lot of rice. Since that's pretty much the only carb you can do in a microwave. I've semi-successfully managed jambalaya and Chinese salmon (both you will notice with rice). And I can heat up a mean tin of beans or soup. We've also tried a variety of ready meals and I can confirm what you might already suspect, that they are all vile.

But my mum had thoughtfully provided me with a slow cooker and I thought Sunday was the ideal opportunity to use it. I had all the ingredients and recipe for lamb stew. Of course as it came from the charity shop I didn't have any instructions, or total confidence in it's cooking ability but went into it with a positive outlook. This was going to be an easy way to ensure a healthy dinner for everyone when we'd had a day playing in snow and painting walls. Perfect.

It takes 8 hours to cook a stew in a slow cooker. Seriously. 8 hours. This meant I had to actually get up earlier than usual on a Sunday and start chopping vegetables before I'd had my first cup of tea. Not so easy so far then.

Then I had to find somewhere to plug it in. Not ideal when you have no kitchen and the dining room is in transition mode between it's old position downstairs and it's new temporary position in an upstairs bedroom. I plumped for the currently empty new bedroom and plugged it in on an extension cable. Brilliant, now we could forget about it.

Following the snow play we returned and Paul did some decorating. In the new bedroom. For the next few hours the stew was moved about a bit while he tried not to splatter it with paint. Apparently you can't look in it as it slows down the cooking (dear lord not any slower) so we just checked that the outside was getting warm and hoped it would be fine.

Maybe it would have been. But Paul was being tidy that day and at some point in the afternoon he did some hoovering. Uplugging the stew in the process. I discovered this some time later and plugged it back in hoping that an hour out of it's 8 hour cooking schedule would still leave it edible. At 5pm I put in the weird flour and fat thickening balls and turned it up. It congealed and looked unappetising. I checked a carrot. It was practically raw.

I cried.

We had pizza. Which Paul had to collect on foot in the snow because no-one would deliver.

Since then I have arranged for the girls to eat at lots of different houses. And bought some more baked beans. We just have to get to Friday. Then my mum can fix everything.