The Saturday column: Disgusting food
Pointless stories about my life
“So what time are you going?” My wife asks, one Monday morning.
“My train’s about five,” I say.
“Okay…” she says.
We have, broadly speaking, a cooking routine in our house - I do Monday, Thursday and Saturday, my wife does Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday, and we take Friday in turns. Pretty much.
But all that goes to pot if I’m ‘on a jaunt’.
“I’ll just have a jacket potato then,” my wife says, breezily. Beneath her outward nonchalance, though, I sense dissatisfaction at a breach of our unwritten meal code.
I, however, have a plan.
I decide not to say anything about the plan in order to circumvent lengthy discussions and negotiations, I will simply enact my plan and all will, I think, be well.
With just under an hour to go before I need to leave I begin meal prep - chopping onion, garlic and ginger and cooking them lightly before adding spices and other ingredients to make up a red lentil and chick pea dahl which I leave on a slow cooker.
Normally I enjoy cooking, taking a batch of, to my mind, fairly unpromising ingredients and turning them into something I want more of. I like, on Monday nights in particular, to create elaborate spiced vegetable dishes, or indeed other inventions which my children used to call ‘Daddy specials’.
“What are we having?” One would ask.
“It’s a Daddy special…” the other would reply, a look of scepticism playing across their face.
This sceptical approach was, I admit, reasonable given some of the experiments in cooking I’ve carried out over the last couple of decades - not infrequently they would both refuse to eat anything before I gave a run down of the ingredients.
“Definitely no Stilton?” One of the kids asked on a now legendary occasion.
“None,” I lied.
“So why does it taste of Stilton then?”
“There’s definitely Stilton in this.”
“Is there Stilton in it?” My wife asked.
“Well… there’s a bit of Stilton in it…”
“Seriously? Why have you made something with Stilton in? You know they hate Stilton!”
“He didn’t just make something with Stilton in, he made something with Stilton in and then outright lied about it.”
“Is that bad?” I said, “I just thought you might like it if you didn’t know it was there.”
“It’s obvious it’s there, because it tastes of Stilton.”
“And of course its bad, because you LIED!”
“We live in a post-truth world,” I said.
“No we don’t,” they replied.
No kids at home means nothing is called a ‘Daddy special’ any more - which is quite sad. It does mean, though, that I no longer feel it necessary to underplay the Stilton content of any particular meal.
But there’s no Stilton in dahl, not even in my version.
I head out, leaving the concoction to do its thing in the slow cooker and go to Leeds to meet the eldest and watch a band. When I get back it’s about one in the morning. My wife and I share a brief, whispered conversation before going to sleep.
“Was that meal ok?”
“Yeah… it had quite a strong… what did you put in it, actually?”
“Usual things, nothing special, why?”
“It just… I mean it was nice, but it definitely had a strong flavour, I couldn’t say quite what it was.”
In the morning, while making some tea, I decide to do a taste test of the left-overs.
“That dahl,” I say, taking my wife a hot drink, “is disgusting.”
“It certainly has a strong flavour,” she says.
“Did you actually eat it?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, “I had a portion - I added some yoghurt though, to sort of mellow it.”
“I wouldn’t have eaten that, it was vile,” I say, the taste is still on my tongue and makes me feel sick.
“What did you put in it?” She asks.
“Honestly - nothing unusual, just the normal things I’d put in it.”
“No Stilton?”
“Definitely no Stilton,” I say.
“Because, you know, you do have form in that area.”
“I promise, absolutely, that there’s no Stilton in there,” I say. As I do so, a cloud passes through my mind, I didn’t put any Stilton in there did I?
“I know,” says my wife, “because we don’t have any Stilton.”
“There’s really no point in having it,” I say, “now that the kids have left home.”
Post script: The culprit, it turned out, was the coconut milk. Rancid doesn’t even begin to describe it.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.