Living With Mother.

My Dic-Tater-Ship Starts Here. Day 20.

- January 12 -

WARNING, THIS POST CONTAINS TATER TOTS.  

Or as they are known in england ” Potato Crunchies”

I think I was supposed to have more of the potato crunchies (I feel like a kids TV presenter who cant use brand names in case of being sued. “use your long crisp tube like this”) but my little brother got a bit hungry and decided to help himself. I hope they tasted like oily bits left over in the dishwasher as they did for me.

Yet another D.I.Y dinner. My mother is lucky I’m the smart child, or it could all end with broken teeth,  baked bean tins in my mouth and a late night trip to A&E.

So, minus the can of beans (which we will get back to later) the dinner looks a little like this:

Here we can see, both ‘Potato Crunchies’ and what I think is chicken. Really really brown chicken. What did I do in a past life to deserve this? I can only imagine that I was someone high up in German politics circa 1944.

It is supposed to be some sort of BBQ sauce smothered over the chicken to give it that authentic Texan taste. It however tasted like it had been left in the ashes of a fire since before the start of time. I believe it to be one of the first artefacts ever found that can be carbon dated all the way back to the Big Bang.

Anyway, this is a D.I.Y special so on with the doing it myself bit.

In my defence, it was late, I was tired and other such excuses. 

I may have used slightly too many beans.

Hmmm, maybe many many many too many beans.  Here is a birds eye view so you can get a better handle on just how swamped my plate was:

Sorry its a bit blurry, its hard to get a good shot when you are in a helicopter hovering over the disaster zone.

If you wish to donate to the recently set up Baked Bean Flood charity drive please call 0800 MANY BEAN, thank you in advance for helping to make a difference. 

I Do Not Feel Like. Day 19.

First up, let me apologise for the massive lack of posting. Won’t go on about it too much, but I have had alot on my plate (unfortunately none of it good food) so this blog had to take a bit of a back seat.

Anyway, onwards.

What a bowl. 

I mean, I can’t knock the bread. It was good bread, some sort of tomato based wheat treat. So for once, Good move mother. Have one high five on me for the bread. *BREAD HIGH FIVE*

I can’t be so kind on the rest of it. I don’t want to say it reminds me of a plate of sick, but it has all the classic attributes :

 Funny little orange bits [tick]

 No resemblance to anything edible [tick]

 An indescribable texture [tick]

 And a smell that can only be described as

 ’burny’. [tick]

I believe it was chicken tonight at one point, although I don’t remember the adverts mentioning it being previously eaten by someone else. Chicken Last Night is perhaps a more apt name.

Here is another angle so you can appreciate its perplexing hold upon the bowl.

Iv’e also just thought about how odd it is to just have this and bread for dinner, like a ration at a homeless shelter, or a Victorian orphanage.

Unlike Oliver Twist, I don’t think I will be requesting more.

Forget The Chicken. Day 18.

- September 8 -

Cooking instructions :

1. Remove all moisture from everything on plate

2. Ensure that meal is at a ratio of 2 orange to 1 brown.

3. Serve and Enjoy.

Thought I would let you into my mothers secret recipe for this particular dish, make sure that you try out this popular home cooked speciality.

As you can see, it is Waffles, Two sausages and four chicken nuggets. Any other human would question why both chicken nuggets and sausages are on the plate seemingly randomly, I however know not to question the mothers logic and just to give in and accept what is put in front of me. Here is another angle : 

and an EXTREME CLOSE UP!!!

My only question is this: What came first?

Did she make it with just waffles and sausages and then decide that it wasn’t enough and add the chicken nuggets?

Did she start with just chicken nuggets and sausages and then realise I wouldn’t get my daily intake of pressed potato shapes so she added the waffles?

I think this is going to become one of the most pressing issues of the next decade with scientists and philosophers arguing about the evolution of this dinner.

Maybe one day we will have an answer we all agree on and the world can once again be at peace.

Into the pink. Day 17.

- August 23 -

We had a BBQ, I say we, I wasn’t actually present for it as I was at work, but I was saved some BBQ food to reheat after work.

It was all going swimmingly until the last item on the plate, the sausages. They looked ok from the outside but little did I know that they held within them a terrible secret.

As you can see (unless you are blind and are accessing this on a brail enabled computer) they were pretty much raw, not even slightly cooked. Several questions immediately sprung to mind, like :  Was this BBQ cooked using only a lighter? Is the mother attempting to kill me? Is this what my appendix was for? (sadly I am without my appendix). I fear that I will never know the truth in full.

As I was really hungry, and tired, and wanted to go straight to bed I took a fairly big bite out of it before I realised it was completely raw. Meaning I spent quite a lot of time ,when I should have been sleeping, worrying I would get food poisoning from it. Nothing like a night of cold uncooked meat sweats to really hammer home how tired you are! (I was ok though, Huzzah! Take that attempted murder plot #1,829,572!)

My main point of concern here is that I was the last person to eat this BBQ food, meaning that no one at the BBQ bit into a sausage and thought “this could probably do with a few more minutes over the zippo” yet another dinner goes by with me questioning the rest of my families sanity, an all to regular occurrence I feel.

One Boy One Bowl. Day 16.

“Its curry” - The Mother.

Honestly, what more can I say? What possible description can I give this mess?

Pre cut cubes of chicken served in the brightest curry sauce ever witnessed on this earth, thrown into a bowl from about 30,000ft and then served up to me. Awesome, just what I needed to cap off my day.

Just to clarify, I don’t eat rice. So normally when we have curry the mother just serves me noodles (the ASDA ones that cost 6p or something like that). Even that appears to have been too much effort today, so instead we just have a bowl of this delicious curry. What a treat.

Here is a close up, for those of you who have some sadistic need to hurt yourselves: 

Even the cameras focus didn’t want to look at it for that long, which explains why the bottom of the picture is so blurry. Here is one more angle, just so you really know what you are missing out on by not eating at my house:

I think this sauce came out of a jar, although god knows which supermarket is selling this offensive jar, and what other mentalists are buying it. It tasted sort of like aeroplane food, plastic and smooth to the touch. I think the red and green blobs are peppers, it was hard to tell. All I know for sure is that it must have been a pretty depressing sight watching me slowly spoon this into my mouth. Im glad no one was there to witness it, more for their sake than mine.

In other news, I have created a hotmail account so that anyone who doesn’t know me can go ahead and ask me any questions they have about this blog, you never know I might even answer them.

Livingwithmother@hotmail.co.uk.

The Letters That Spell. Day 15.

- August 14 -

Potato letters.

I feel a new low has been hit in the pressed potato shape market. First smiley faces and stars, then Tweenie shapes (honest to god I’ve had them) and now potato letters. At least these ones are slightly educational, because lets face it if you didn’t know your alphabet the first place you would think to look is in the frozen section at Iceland.

Also in attendance today are two staple orange and brown foods. A piece of breaded fish (most certainly not cod) and beans. 

Good old beans, Im pretty sure my mother is sponsored by Heinz, considering how many of my dinners include baked beans. I must admit though she has always refused to buy anything but Heinz. For this I am thankful, if you are going to overindulge in baked beans you might as well go all out and get the good ones.

This dinner was pretty standard. It gets a C+ overall, could do better.

I Shall Be A Wise Man. Day 14.

- July 29 -

Its shepherd’s pie. Obviously. 

Im not sure if this is how yours looks when you have it, but this is a pretty standard Shepherds pie in this household. Now with beans! Lucky us.

It tastes sort of like I imagine a shepherds pie should. With meat. And mash (lumpy). And cheese on top.

My brother will only eat shepherds pie if all the ingredients are separated on the plate. So he will have a pile of meat, a pile of mash, and whatever else goes into this mess of a meal all in separate piles on the plate. I’ve always asked him why but he cant come up with an answer, he just says it tastes better.

Yet another young mind my mothers cooking has ruined. Poor boy.

Drain The Colour. Day 13.

Now, im going to warn you before you see this picture. That way you have ample time to ready your sick bags. Ready?

Good, here goes.

I warned you, didn’t I?

Now then, the question is “what the hell is that?” and truthfully, if I had not asked the mother I too would not know. Apparently, according to the jar of sauce, it is creamy potato gratin. I presume the potatoes were added to the sauce and then cooked (then dropped, then scraped off the back of the oven) before finding their way onto this sorry looking plate.

I mean honestly, if I had not told you I don’t think anyone would have guessed. In a million years. Anyway, as you’d expect it tasted revolting, really revolting. Like gone off cream and soil mixed in with the old dry herbs your grandmother keeps in her “pantry”.

Here is another angle, so you can visualise it better.

Also on the plate (although slightly over shadowed in awfulness by the gratin) is maybe the most colourless piece of meat ever to exist. I think its albino, or its scared of the gratin. Who knows. It was pretty dry, so its lucky I had that creamy potato gratin to go with it. Mmmmmmmm.

Sometimes I wonder where my mother shops, surely it cant be legal to sell half of the food I am given. Maybe she shops in back alleys and deals in black market dry meat, buying off of shady men in hoodies. She might of course just shop at a supermarket, although I cant imagine how this stuff gets past quality control.

Here is one last angle so you can really take in the whole plate:

On a mildly related note, I’ve had a few people ask me why I don’t cook for myself. Good question. I am actually quite a good cook, I got an A in GCSE cookery and all. However, I work quite late at a bar and my mother says I cant turn the oven on when I get in as it has already been on and it would be too expensive to run it twice in one night unnecessarily. She once charged my friend £5 to use the oven to cook a lasagne he had bought over for himself to eat as we had already eaten that night. No joke. So to be honest, Yes, I could cook for myself but as im not Bill Gates I cant really afford to in this house.

Behold, The Brown God. Day 12.

- July 21 -

Sorry all these updates are taking me so long, I keep meaning to update more often but always find myself strapped for time. Anyway, onto this feast!

What can I say? It looks like a plate of ingredients. No longer is my mother even bothering to prepare the food, she just gives me the basics and lets me work with it. How thoughtful of her. I suppose at least this way I also foot some of the blame.

For maybe the billionth time in a row we have my arch nemesis New Potatoes. I await the day that we face each other for our final battle, where good will conquer evil and children and women will cry in the street as I walk away triumphant. 

Also on offer we have some unpeeled carrots, boiled until they are still the wrong side of soft and arranged in a slapdash manner on the plate.

Let us not forget the pie! A pie exactly like this was featured a few days back, albeit slightly more burnt than this one. Pretty standard pie, virtually no meat or gravy inside, with pastry that is made almost entirely of sawdust.

Since this plate was possibly the most boring and dry thing ever, I decided to knock up some gravy (god knows why no one else had not already done this, I worry for my families sanity sometimes).

So here goes. As you can see we are using only the best gravy granules, and I have chosen the Onion Gravy to complement my meal, mmmm! So one long wait for the kettle to boil later and hey presto………….

Behold! The brown god that is gravy! Also accompanied by two slices of bread, not cheese as some people seem to think when they see the picture. Although to be honest, I doubt my mother would see anything wrong with adding two slices of cheese to the meal.

When it was placed over the ingredients it looked like this: 

I may have made a bit too much, but too much gravy is better than none at all.

Or at least in this house it is.

Getting the Sweats. Day 11.

- July 9 -

SURPRISE QUIZ!

Are A) the burgers huge? or B) the waffles tiny?

The correct answer is B. Tiny Waffles.

(Well done to anyone that got that answer, you win a collectable shoe horn, Hazzah!)

So yes, Tiny cheese flavoured waffles, except they tasted nothing like cheese. Got to love those Lie Flavoured waffles. Mmmm Mmmm! Anyway, moving on from the tiny squares of deceit we also have two seemingly normal looking burgers.

But not all was as it seemed.

Firstly, there was no salad, at all. No green in this house, not even in burgers. Secondly there was no ketchup. The mother had gone shopping during the day and had forgotten to actually bring the ketchup home after buying it. As if this wasn’t already bad enough these sweaty, sweaty burgers held within them one last dark secret…

Unbeknownst to me they were filled with scalding hot cheese. Supposedly saving you the time and effort of actually putting cheese in your burgers. The main problem with this was that the cheese had spent about half an hour in the oven, so was burning hot and melted.

This resulted in some pretty serious cheese related burns to my hand as I attempted to eat. Just what I need, more danger in my food. Take that Bear Grylls!

So aside from being the most sweaty burgers that have ever been eaten, they were also dangerous to my health, and tasted terrible.

A tick in every box really.