166. What a Surprise

I was preparing our evening meal recently when something unexpected happened.  It gave me a mild shock and brought back memories of similar experiences.

The first time it happened was when I was about seven years old.  I can’t remember the details but my parents must have been expecting friends over for the evening and they were getting things ready.  Part of their preparations was getting my brother and me into bed and out of the way.

As I was on my way to the bathroom, I saw a bowl of grapes on the dining room table and I surreptitiously grabbed a few.  In order to dispose of the evidence quickly, I shoved them all into my mouth at once and it was DISGUSTING!!!!!  They were olives!

Ramble 1:

I had never seen or tasted olives before and I don’t think I saw them again until I moved to live in London, eighteen years later. That was when I first came across other mysterious foods that were previously unknown to me such as fennel, shallots, garlic, avocado, aubergine, mango and peppers.  

I have no idea how my parents managed to have olives in Lowestoft in the mid 50s. 

Incidentally, what’s the point of shallots?  They are like onions but smaller, fiddly and milder in taste and so, if you want a mild taste of onion, just use less onion.

Many years after my experience with the olives, I was at Roger and Sandy’s house one evening when Roger offered me a drink.  I told him that I’d like a Scotch and he asked me to help myself, directing me to the adjoining room where his Scotch was in a decanter.  

A couple of hours later, after I’d had a couple more ‘large ones’, we all moved into the room where the drinks were kept and Roger once more invited me to help myself.  As I started to pour, he interrupted:

“I thought you were drinking Scotch?  That’s sherry.”  

That was embarrassing but as I tried to explain, I was expecting Scotch and so I tasted Scotch.  

That principle doesn't always work, however, because I once took a big bite of what I thought was pain au chocolat but was in fact, olive tapenade swirl bread.  Instead of the sweet taste of chocolate that I was expecting, it was bitter and shockingly unpleasant.

It has happened again.  Our food stocks were fairly low and because of “Lockdown”, we are reliant on supermarket deliveries.  I rummaged through the freezer to use up what I could in order to make room for the supplies we were looking forward to getting the next day.

I found a frost encrusted, clear plastic bag that contained a caliginous, reddish-brown, lumpy mass.  I had written the date on the bag but not what was in it.  We decided it was some kind of beef stew and probably, judging from the colour, boeuf bourguignon.  We also agreed that it must be pretty good or we wouldn’t have kept it.

We had a choice of rice or potato to accompany the beef.  As the potatoes were old and were starting to sprout, they needed to be eaten.  There were pieces of cheddar and gruyere cheese that also needed to be used soon and so I made a dish of cheesy, scalloped potato. 

To the potato, I added some mushrooms and ham that were close to their "going mouldy" dates and I made even more space in the freezer by adding the last of the frozen peas.  It was almost a meal in itself.

Ramble 2:

While I was growing up, there was always long grained and arborio rice in the house but we never had rice with our main course.  The main courses we had were always complemented by boiled, mashed or roasted potato.  

My mother never cooked “exotic foreign muck” like risotto or paella and certainly, never a curry.  The only time we ate rice was as a pudding and not only ‘rice pudding’.  (“Pudding” was whatever followed the main course.  Even an Arctic Roll was pudding to us.  We weren’t posh enough to distinguish between pudding and dessert.)

We sometimes had the conventional, milky rice pudding or occasionally, boiled long grained rice with warmed golden syrup poured over it.  It was lovely but I haven’t had it for nearly 60 years.

After I had put the potato into the oven, I started to defrost the beef in the microwave.  An hour later, the potato was cooked with a perfect golden-brown, crispy top and the defrosted stew had received a three-minute blast on full power.  We were ready to eat.  Caroline poured herself a glass of Château Siran and I began to serve.

The potato was on the plates when I took the bag from the microwave and tipped the contents into a bowl and…. oh dear…. disaster!

It was stewed rhubarb.   

For Caroline though, all was not lost.  With great presence of mind, she opened a bottle of Moscato d'Asti to replace her red wine and so it wasn’t a complete disaster as far as she was concerned.

To my less sophisticated palate, chilled tap water goes just as well with boeuf bourguignon as it does with rhubarb.