In my attempt to be a responsible adult and learn to feed myself I said my friend could come over and help me buy food and make a meal. This was pretty huge; the first time I've allowed someone into my house who isn't family or someone picking me up to take me somewhere else. I have some sort of supermarket phobia so I've only bought food about four times this year. That's less than once a month and one of those times I only bought cordial and choc chip cookies.
I woke up late but still wanted to have a shower. I answered the door in a towel. My friend had brought a friend. Meeting someone while dripping water on the floor would have been embarrassing if I didn't have previous experience of waking up late and answering the door in a towel. That in itself is pretty embarrassing. I had to leave my guests to forage for tea and coffee while I got dressed.
Next, there was a flurry of activity. A crazy whirlwind. Within a couple of hours I was left with evidence that shopping and cooking had occurred but little idea how it had happened.
I remember my friend had a Food Ideas magazine, she was using a fluorescent pink pencil to cross things off a list and that I really wanted a box of Cheerios. We ran rather than walked through the supermarket aisles. I probably only have that perception because alone in a supermarket I would normally wade slowly through the rows and rows of brightly coloured products, my eyes and brain being assaulted by the intense visual stimulation. With my friend and her friend there were no prolonged anxiety filled decisions of what to buy as they grabbed things off the shelves and moved on.
My friend's friend disapproved of my purchase of a block of chocolate, labelling it as "naughty". Apparently if you eat "naughty" foods you have to repent of your sins and seek forgiveness from your body by going to the gym. I had never thought of it that way. If I was to label chocolate, I would call it "yummy", then I would eat it.
I chose some apples. It was hard because there were three different types to chose from and I chose the unlabelled ones. When they got scanned at the checkout the sales assistant had to guess what type they were.
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| Fruit! In my Fruit Bowl! |
I definitely recall saying something about how my friend's friend should get a horse to hold his boot open because it was broken. I meant one of the toy horse heads on a pole (my old housemate had one for her boot) but my friend thought I meant a real horse. I doubt a real horse would want to stand behind a car holding the boot open.
When we got home, I cut up chicken. I dislike cutting meat because I find it tough to get through and I also become more and more vegetarian the closer I get to seeing meat as part of an animal. I also felt like I was taking a really long time to wrestle my way through the slippery chicken globs and it was as though I was tearing it apart with my fingers as well as cutting it with a knife.
Then suddenly we were eating delicious Butter Chicken which along with the chicken had green beans, onion and rice. There's an opened jar of butter chicken paste and an opened tub of cream and I believe some oil went in too.
Before I'd finished eating, my friend was onto making a pie. I was exhausted and could hardly lift my arms and all I wanted to do was lie down. I was of absolutely no use but I forced myself to stand up instead of collapsing in the hallway. Meanwhile, my friend's friend was washing dishes at the same rate
that my friend was using them, then he was drying them and washing more.
Then there was a pie and my friend asked me what pattern I wanted on it. I tried to think back to when I was little and I saw my Grandma make a pie but I couldn't figure out what was meant by 'pattern'. When my parents heated up pies I guess the patterns were hidden by the words written on the plastic like 'Balfours', 'Vilis' or 'Foodland'. My friend started cutting triangles out of the puff pastry sheet and then she made a letter 'A' because my name starts with 'A'. I was so close to tears.
Then they were gone.
I fell asleep for a few hours before looking after my nephews then felt a bit hungry so I went to the fridge.
Far out, there was food in there!
I managed to heat up the pie without burning it despite having no idea for how long or at what temperature to cook it. I ate half of it for dinner then noticed there was also a green salad. I had already eaten green beans in the curry for lunch and green peas in the pie, and a crunchy greeen pear as a snack. I might have overdosed on green if I'd eaten the salad too. Luckily I combatted it by eating a whole block of chocolate.
I was dismayed because I didn't have any salad dressing then I found a mug containing a mystery salad dressing that smelled like lemon. Then I found half a lemon. By my powers of deduction I believe that a major ingredient in the salad dressing is lemon.
I didn't have the salad until the night after but whatever was in the salad dressing tasted incredible. The cucumber in the salad had little slits around the edges which made
it pretty exciting but I can't figure out how you would cut them.
