Confessions of an Author

Diary of a Lunch Club As you know (if you follow my blog) I help with a senior’s lunch every week, and as we only have two cooks, I have to cook on alternate weeks. There are usually some disasters (not always my fault). I thought I’d write a diary for you this week. I can’t include photos of the other workers, as most are ‘vulnerable adults’ (or else shy!) When I was at school, one of our lessons – Food and Nutrition – involved writing a time-plan each week. We had to start at the end (serve dinner) and work backwards, working out timings. It wasn’t a favourite activity, but I still do it today whenever I’m planning an event or big meal. To be honest, I really hate cooking dinners, but don’t tell anyone that, because it seems to be one of the main things I have to do. In case you ever are called upon to cook lunch for 40 people, here is the diary, complete with quantities, which you might find helpful. The main thing to remember is that although cooking times are the...

Surviving Easter Weekend and a Post Post Script Hello, and I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend. I am actually writing this on Good Friday, in a snatched few minutes before the next onslaught of jobs. No idea if I will actually make it past tomorrow. It has been a stressful week, but I will try hard to not apportion blame. It began badly, when the painter arrived on Monday. For some reason, somebody had booked a man to decorate the entire house, beginning the week before Easter. This is generally a busy time, as all the family, including my mother, come to stay, and then on Easter Monday we invite the whole church and anyone else who wants to come, and we all go for a country walk and have a cream tea. Last year we had about 80 people, so it involves baking quite a lot of scones. And having the house tidy. And is not helped by having a bloke painting random rooms the week before. But we survived. The painter man turned out to be relatively low-impact, though hav...

Harvest Thoughts (yep, I do know it’s only March!) 1 I have some ideas for Harvest. Yes, I know it’s ages away, but things in churches move very slowly, and unless I start making noises now, it will suddenly be upon us. My reason for wanting to do something stems from last Harvest, when I arrived at church, saw someone had made a pretty display of fruit and branches, and thought, “Oh, it’s Harvest!” And that was it. Harvest meant nothing to me any more, and I’m not sure it’s meant to be like that. Harvest used to be quite exciting. When I was in infant school, we all took in tins and packets of food, and the teachers decorated shoe boxes. We had a special service, which I remember nothing about except that there was this heap of food in front of us, and we sang the same songs each year – you know, the ones about farmers, and hunter’s moons, and fields being ploughed. I’m not sure I had ever seen a field being ploughed, and I had no idea what a ‘hunter’s moon’ was. But t...

Life has been busy… Life has been busy since we arrived home from India. We had barely unpacked before Husband set off again, for Germany. I’m sure this was an essential work trip, and not because I am very irritable when I’m jet-lagged. It took me a few days to readjust my clock, which was fine because waking before the rest of the country is not unpleasant, though I did have a tendency to collapse at about 7pm. I was cooking at lunch club on Friday, so the first couple of days were busy with shopping and making ginger sponges for pudding. I cooked my default meal: roast gammon, roast potatoes, carrots, cauliflower cheese, and sweetcorn. It went okay, and we served 36 dinners. The following day, we were organising a church social. Well, to be precise, Husband was organising a church social, as when it was planned way back in October, I told him that after Christmas and new year and a trip to India, I would  NOT  be helping to then arrange an evening of entertai...