Eating for a Waistland

Why does your partner deserve elevation to sainthood?

Because when I start a conversation with the words: 'I'm not being horrible about your sister...', and then proceed to spend three hours on a thorough character assassination based around two sentences that she wrote in an email and then complete the diatribe with, 'I probably sound like I'm being mean...' - he never, ever, ever tells me that not only am I being both horrible and mean but I'm also sounding like a miserable old boot into the bargain.  This, of course, lends absolute support to the fact that I am being neither mean nor horrible and am mentioning these things merely for the good of both my sister-in-law and my husband. 

What volunteer activities do you help out with in your community?
Submitted by Emu with a Clue.

I make sure people are fed by working for an organisation in our town that collects food from supermarkets, bakeries and school kitchens and then distributes it to people who are in need.  It's a great big nationwide organisation which survives through supermarkets being prepared to donate food that is going out of date rather than throwing it away.  We also survive through the generosity of local garages providing vehicles at cost and doing all our servicing for free.  There are only 2 paid members of staff - the rest of us are unpaid.

Many of our customers are refugees or they're people who have moved out of the eastern countries since the break up of the Soviet Union.  There is a lot of bureaucracy surrounding what we do but I try and cut through it as much as possible and will never refuse someone food even if they haven't got the correct piece of paper.  There are a couple of Russian guys who call me Lady Madonna - from the Beatles song rather than in homage to Madge - and each week they serenade me which is one of the things that makes sorting through slimy lettuce worthwhile.  Last week, an old man kissed my hand because I gave him a bar of chocolate.  

If I'm honest, I probably get at least as much from working for this organisation as I give.  It's not selfless.

shoes blah blah blah, who cares?  What they really meant was: Porkette, have you a story that you wish to relate to the internet about shoes?  And indeed I do.

Many years ago I managed to fool an interview panel into giving me a job that involved some sort of responsibility and part of this meant that I had to attend the direst, most boring monthly management meeting which mostly revolved around keeping awake long enough to make sure that when the budget was being divied up you had your begging bowl stretched out in front of you.  There was an element of 'singing for your supper' in that you were expected to come up with highlights from the previous month and glamourise how you were saving the organisation huge amounts of money. 

My department was seen as being nothing more than a sponge that sucked most of the other departments resources and didn't actually bring any money into the organisation.  Actually, when I say it was seen as that, that is exactly what it did do, but that's not the point.  The monthly management meeting was fundamentally an opportunity for the rest of the university to harrumph loudly about what we cost and how there would probably be at least three Nobel prize winners every week if the other departments weren't subsidising us.  This was my first meeting and I'd spent hours on my presentation and imagined all the various questions I'd be asked to justify my existence and was pretty confident that I was going to change attitudes regarding what we did.  Which is why after a silence that went on for about 3 weeks I realised that I was expected to say something so I told them all that I'd just noticed that Carol and I were wearing the same shoes. 

You'd think that this was really embarrassing for me but it wasn't because the person who ended up looking even more stupid than me was the guy who was chairing it and told us all that he'd already noticed that.  Then he realised that that wasn't what he was expected to say.

I am supposed to be responsible for this today.  Just look at that face and decide who is in charge.  I think I'm too old for puppies.

Despite having been pretty busy these last few weeks I've still managed to fit in some stalking time around belly
but decided not to do the tooth or back thing but did the feeding and illness thing.  Where Belly and I differ is that I haven't weighed myself but I have bought some new clothes.  I didn't buy as many new clothes as I would have liked partly because of my bank manager having some rather conservative notions about how much money one should have in their bank account before going off on a spend.  The other reason that I didn't buy as many new clothes as I would have liked is because a lot of size 12s are too big but the size 10 is just a bit tight.  This is from the person who struggled to get into anything in size 14 at Xmas.  I am much slimmer and I am wearing a pair of rather fetching raspberry pink linen trousers in a size 10 - incidentally, that is a real size 10 rather than the pretend size 10s that some shops try to fool you with.  Had I worn raspberry pink linen trousers in the past it would have been for a bet or in order to illustrate some article in a journal of psychology about the madness of the menopause or some such thing. My belly seems to have gone.

The best, and most entertaining comments came from my lovely niece who may need some development in the tact department but she meant well:

Niece:  Auntie Pork, you've lost LOADS of weight haven't you?

Niece's Mum: I don't think LOADS dear.

Niece: Oh yeah, Mum - she's lost LOADS - she was really fat before.

At the moment I feel very tired and weary and can't seem to settle to anything.  I've been away for a while and had quite a stressful time but it was also very busy and I was with people so I think I'm finding it hard to getting back to being a little quieter.  My brain feels as if bits of it are numb and I keep forgetting what it is that I'm supposed to be doing.

Oh,  I appear to be blogging,  so that's what I came in here for. 
 

After sending an email to a friend telling her what I was cooking for dinner I realised that I may have reached a point where I could enter the competition for 'dullest and most pointless email in the world' and win it. 

(Chicken cassserole, new potatoes and salad.)

Never let it be said that I can't be boring in two mediums. 

Now, if I phoned someone then it would be a hat trick......

This time last week I was reading through a copy of the Radiation Cookbook.  This isn't something meant for when the bomb drops, but was produced for the Regulo cooker in 1924.  After lots of checking and discussion we worked out that it had originally belonged to Mr Pork's great grandmother who died a few years before Mr Pork was born.  By all accounts great granny Pork was a formidable woman and although there is no one now left who remembers her she has left her mark in this cookery book.  Apart from the heavy annotations to many of the recipes (made Gertie sick, but that might just have been Gertie being annoying) there were some blank pages in the back where one could copy out  recipes collected along the way.  There's a recipe for 'war time butter' which involves margarine, cornflour, milk and an egg; great granny Pork's note is: 'hardly worth the stirring - use meat paste on sandwiches then no need for butter'. 

One of the recipes is for a set custard to be served with bananas.  Great granny pork has scored out the sugar in the list of ingredients and stated; no one needs bananas AND sugar.  The recipe for coconut biscuits has 2 heavy lines drawn through it with NO GOOD  scrawled above it.  The mixed grill in granny Pork's book has been heavily filleted - scored through kidney, bacon and liver - because it encourages greed!.  She is a woman who loved the exclamation mark.  Having read this book from cover to cover I'm struck by two things; the first being that I'm glad that I don't live in time where I'd have been expected to boil calves feet in order to make a jelly for an invalid and the second thought is that I think she'd have been a woman who would have made a fantastic mark in blogland. If only for her comments:

Fish Stock - 'Why would you bother?'
Dundee Cake - 'is Dundee near Glasgow?  PD lives close by.'
Do not boil a pudding for 2 hours and expect the windows not to suffer!!
Raisins and sugar is  EXTRAVAGANCE!
Sprouts not especially good for soup.

For those of you who knew that I wasn't here,  I'm back and I'll be writing in the next few days.

Back in the dark days of the previous century we went to the Algarve for our honeymoon.  It cost £99 each - it was a late booking and all we knew was that we would go to somewhere in Portugal but until we arrived we didn't have a clue what our accommodation would be like or where exactly we would be.  We struck lucky and had a villa that was meant for 6 people, there was a pool, a view over Albufeira and it was just fab.  Whilst there we went to the harbour in Portimao (I think) and ate sardines by the harbour while watching the fishermen unloading their catches.  It was the most basic of cooking and eating; a few shacks lining the harbour, in front of each shack there was a barbecue and the fish were cooked on the coals whilst potatoes and salad were put together in the huts.   You ate with an audience of gulls and cats grudging you each mouthful.  Before you got to your plastic table by the quayside you had to navigate coils of ropes, lobster pots and bits and pieces of boats - It's the sort of thing that I like to imagine was put on the earth purely to distress the Health and Safety committee that the world seems to be turning into.  And it seems that H&S are winning here now.  'The old traditional restaurants have been recently transformed by a huge and successful redevelopment of the quayside area, bringing new walkways and fountains to complement the existing character of the harbour.'  Bah.
 
So, shunning progress, this time around, we took ourselves off to Ferragudo where we annoyed the owner of the posh fish restaurant by eating cheap sardines while occupying one of his better tables.  Well, if he doesn't want people eating cheap food then he shouldn't put it on the menu.