Tuesday stats:

• Tesco:  Mostly successful, although someone with a very full trolley beat us to the ‘nice’ cashier so we ended up with a man.  Luckily Mum approved of him.
• Celebratory ‘we did the shopping’ cake choice: Belgium bun (did you know they have lemon curd in the swirl?  Nope, we didn’t either.  They either need more or none in my opinion as it was a bit ‘neither here nor there’ for my liking…)
• Cooked: A variation on moussaka – see below for details – x3 (one for dinner, two for the freezer)
• Tuesday blanket squares completed since last week: eight and a bit,
• Tuesday blanket square grand total: 21.

I have some seriously exciting news:  If you’ve been reading for a few weeks, you’ll know that I have been attempting to get a few words back into Mums head.  I’ve agreed that she can forget ‘Pog’ is my name if she calls me ‘my favourite daughter’ instead.  This makes her laugh a lot.  (Sorry Sister 1 and 2 😂).  But one word I’ve become slightly obsessive about re-teaching her is ‘wooden spoon’.  Every week I hold it up and random times in the day and mum shouts entirely random words at it.

‘fork!’

‘duck!’

‘sausage!’

I mean, it’s quite funny on one level…

But this week while cooking, I nonchalantly asked her to get out the wooden spoon, expecting her to wave a fork / knife / scissors / potato masher at me, and without even pausing she picked it right out the drawer, first time.  I cheered.  Mum jumped.  It probably wasn’t the best reaction, but seriously – WOO HOO!

And we made moussaka.  Well, that may be a slight exaggeration.  Tesco had no aubergines (I imagine the people standing by when the Tesco man broke this news must have labelled me as ‘a little dramatic’ as I’m pretty sure I did a rather loud ‘oh no…the moussaka will never work now!’ followed by a bit of a gulp), but I pulled myself together and thought courgettes would probably work just as well and all seemed ok.

Until – post Belgium bun – we started getting the ingredients out to discover that there were no onions in the house.  Who has no onions in their house?  And if you have no onions, don’t you get some at the next shop…which we had just come back from? 🤷‍♀️ Anyhoo, I jumped back in the car and popped to the village shop for a particularly extortionate onion and got back to ingredient collecting, only to discover that there was also no garlic.  Luckily, as I’d noticed we were running low at home I’d grabbed some for myself in Tesco and retrieved a bulb from my car. (And now I’m wondering if I’m actually the odd one needing reserves of onions and garlic in my cupboards…)

That had to be all the chaos done though, right?  Wrong.  We peeled sliced and cooked the potato, we sliced and cooked the courgettes, we cooked the mince and added all the herbs, spices and wine and assembled two moussakas ready for the white sauce.  I turned over the recipe and realised…the ingredients listed tinned tomatoes and puree, but apparently you had to guess where to add them as they were never mentioned again.  We un-assembled the moussakas, put the mince back in the pan and added them in.  Mum giggling like a little girl all the time.  Me too if I’m honest.  I’m not sure at this point if we were edging towards hysteria.  We reassembled.  Only now there was more of the stuff, so we ended up making three.  Only now there wasn’t enough potato, so that was a bit sparse, but hey ho…

And then we thought bechamel sauce was a bit boring and mum fancied a bit of cheese to nibble on anyway, so she grated cheese – which a surprising number of lumps fell off that were ‘too small to grate’ so had to be eaten –  and finally popped it all in the oven.

And Dad came to investigate our progress just as it dawned on me that I should not have put even a teeny bit of lamb fat down their sensitive plug hole as I’d totally blocked the sink.

(Dad: if you’re reading this, I didn’t really…. I just needed you to sit down a bit longer in the lounge for no particular reason at all.  And the photo of the plunger is just there because I thought it would…add a bit of colour.  Yes.  No plunging was needed.  At all. 😬)

Anyway, we decided that ‘moussaka’ didn’t describe what we’d created.  With a few missing bits, a few added extras and the construction, destruction and reconstruction that had gone on, plus a fair bit of chaos it seemed more appropriate to call is a ‘Mumssaka’ 😀

And in Tuesday blanket news, Mum has started to freestyle her squares and they have additional rows of different stitches scattered in them.  They look great and the blanket is growing…although I am not allowed to sew the squares together as it created a bit of a muddle.  There has been a bit of grumping and some undoing of half-finished work and possibly a bit of knitting needle throwing in the last week, I’m told, but I think we all do those things occasionally, don’t we? 🙂

Mum, around 1984 with my sisters.