Tag Archives: oily fish

Apples

My Plans for Senile Delinquency

7 Replies

We had oily fish with a rich white sauce tonight. I did mention to Julia that this sort of defeated the object of healthy eating, but just shrugged. I sometimes feel she isn’t as keen on healthy eating as I am. That sounds bad, as I’m not exactly a poster boy for the body beautiful. We had broccoli and carrots with it. And oven chips. It just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it? However, we are happy and mainly healthy, so why worry. Worry is a killer.

I’ve been looking at mobility scooters. Yes, this is slightly hypocritical after all I’ve said about them, bu they were advertised on TV yesterday and seem to strike a chord with me. I must be getting old. After checking the manufacturer in the advert I had a look on eBay. They are quite affordable and as they only do 8mph the 35 mile range represents four hours. I don’t know about you, but I’m not keen on the idea of sitting on one for four hours.

When I retire I am going to treat myself to one and use it for pottering about. I may well become a delinquent and start using it on cycle paths and in cycle lanes, even though this is banned. Cycles and electric scooters use footpaths all the time, so what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I’m not quite clear why electric scooters and electric cycles are allowed in cycle lanes but electric wheelchairs and mobility scooters aren’t. I’m also not clear why riders of electric cycles and scooters aren’t made to wear crash helmets. I’m happy to leave it as a free choice for cyclists, but when you start adding power it gets more dangerous. Then there is the question of insurance . . .

I think I may have found something to keep me occupied in my retirement.

First thought – organise a phalanx of mobility scooters to ride along cycle paths at 4 mph and hold cyclists up. Let’s see how they like it!

Everything a cyclist can do, a mobility scooter rider can do slower, and with worse reflexes. There are, however, some things I may not attempt.

Apples in the living room. And a couple of oranges. It was quite sunny yesterday.

Starts with Stew and Finishes with Soup

12 Replies

I note my last post was number 2,800. I always like round numbers.

Yesterday Julia did some tidying while I was out. She rang me to tell me that she was half-way through, which worried me. However, when I got back she had moved all the furniture, put down the rug that had been rolled up at the edge of the room for years after we were given it, and put everything back. The room is brighter and the floor feels warmer but I was right – it is too big to fit properly. However, considering what the next winter is going to be like I think we need warmth more than a rug that fits. OK, I say “rug” but it’s more of a carpet. It’s easy to forget that carpets weren’t always fitted.

I’m giving up on the lottery. I had four wins at the weekend – two lots of £5 and two free tickets. I think each one was probably a win and the tickets were thrown in for free. I hope so, because if not I seem to have bough too many tickets. All that luck being squandered on winning just £10. I may as well save my money and use the luck on something else. Julia says it doesn’t work like that, but we gamblers know it does. I’m just glad that I’m not given to big-time gambling. All those smoky clubs and international jet-setting are not really me.

We had vegetable stew for tea last night. Then the woefully inadequate ASDA delivery arrived. Seven substitutions. One substitution was for 2 half kilo bags of carrots for a 1 kilo bag. Fair enough. Then they substituted parsnips with more carrots and swede with ready chopped swede (which always goes off so fast) and gave me rosemary for thyme. This might be OK in a traditional folk song but it’s no good for stews and we have a gardenful of rosemary. They sent us kale in place of leeks, which would have been a disappointing quiche, and 6 Free Range Eggs in place of 15 Economy eggs (telling us they had saved us money as the 6 eggs were 15p cheaper than the 15). I used the word “rip-off” when they sent me a customer satisfaction survey. Finally we were told there would be a bag of cauliflower florets in place of a cauliflower, but there wasn’t. There was a cauliflower.

How, I ask myself, can we be short of root vegetables. They are seasonal and many of them are grown within an hour’s drive of here. Something is going seriously wrong with the world when you can’t buy parsnips, swedes and leeks in autumn.

Tea tonight was curried vegetable soup. Or vegetable stew with curry powder, extra water and a quick application of the stick blender. It was cheap, quick and nutritious. And it makes “convenience foods” look quite time consuming. We had a mackerel sandwich with it, my concession to oily fish.

And those are some of the domestic details that I missed out of the last post. Header picture is soup from an October 2014 post.

Carrot & Ginger Soup

Soup, Salmon and Cheesy Comestibles

17 Replies

More soup. Carrot and Lentil today, plus a few bits of parsnip, sweet potato and chickpea that were hanging about after being surplus to to other recipes. My favourite soups all seem to be orange.

In the evening we had salmon with stir-fried veg. I am not fond of fish, and the oily fish I am supposed to eat for health reasons is amongst the worst of the fish, well, except for rock salmon, hake, basa, sardines and kippers. And eels and pike. Actually, it’s not too bad when you think about it . . . Tuna is no longer an oily fish, according to the NHS, though it is still listed on other sites. Typical that the only palatable oily fish has been removed.

I have never particularly liked fish with bones in, like sardines and kippers, and after the incident with the fishbone in my school dinner I have always tried to avoid them.

The Winter Menu starts tomorrow, with multi-vegetable corned beef hash. This year I will not be slathering it in brown sauce as I am cutting down on pickles to reduce my salt and sugar intake. I have also ordered cheese footballs with the TESCO shopping on Saturday.  It’s more expensive and less efficient than ASDA but there are some things I specifically want from them.

Christmas cannot proceed without cheese footballs,, and once they are ordered Christmas has officially started. It’s a bit early, but they are in, and I don’t want to risk the smooth running of Christmas.