It is not raining, and I could be outside. The Systems Administrator is in the garden, finding out whether copious quantities of Easystart will persuade the lawn tractor to splutter into life, that has been parked on the top lawn with a trailer full of herbaceous prunings bound for the compost heap for rather too long, since the SA's tooth went into meltdown, and then it seemed as though the Mayans might have been right after all, only the end of the world was to come gradually by flooding rather than being instantaneous.
I am not in the garden, because my parents are coming to lunch, and there isn't time to do anything useful and get cleaned up again in the hour and twenty minutes before they arrive. I don't mind that. It's quite restful, once a year, to have an excuse not to charge about doing things all the time.
As they are my parents and I invited them, I volunteered to do the cooking. Cooking for them and the Systems Administrator is not the easiest thing, since we all have our own personal preferences for things that we can't or won't eat. The SA and I seem to find enough in common to enjoy a reasonably varied diet, and I eat quite a lot of the same food as my parents. After all, they brought me up. Put all four of us together and the central intersection in the Venn diagram of everybody's chosen foods is alarmingly small.
I often do chicken. Chicken is safe and uncontentious and it goes with mushrooms and leeks and carrots and other vegetables that everybody likes. It is also the only kind of meat I know how to roast. The SA is normally in charge of roasts in our house, while I mainly do baking and boiled things. But it is too close to Christmas to have chicken, since in two days time everybody will be having chicken again, or turkey. So we can't have roast chicken, or my standby chicken stew with bacon and shallots vaguely based on a reading of the Penguin Cordon Bleu cookery book over three decades ago.
It's partly a clash over seasonings. The SA and I both like garlic, curry spices and chilli, and eat accordingly, but my mother dislikes all of them. My parents eat fish, including anchovies, which are a standard modern cookery book flavouring if you're not going down the garlic route, but the SA is allergic to fish. I'd be quite happy to head towards Eastern Europe and cook with dried fruit, if I can't have garlic, but the SA isn't keen on fruit with meat, except for apple sauce with pork. So many recipes in modern cookery books include spinach that you'd think the stuff was a food staple, but the SA is allergic to spinach, which rules out all sorts of Italian inspired feta parcels and suchlike. The SA said helpfully that I could do my pork with the olives, but I'm afraid I did that last time. Otherwise I seem to end up feeding them from a menu that rotates between seasoning with thyme, or a couple of sprigs of rosemary, or goulash. Today is a rosemary and bay leaf day, a Diana Henry recipe for lamb which includes some chorizo and smoked paprika by way of a change. In the book she includes garlic, but I had to leave that out.
Puddings are almost as tricky. I don't want anything that needs last minute preparation, demanding to be eaten immediately, which means either something that can be cooked in advance and kept in the simmer oven without spoiling, or a cold pudding. It's tempting just to go for fruit crumble, which has the great merit that it will sit happily keeping warm for a long time, and still be worth eating at the end of it. I love home made fruit crumble, but I don't want to overdo it. My mother loves chocolate but will eat fruit, my father loves fruit and is indifferent to chocolate, the SA is indifferent to pudding. Modern trendy books, like Diana Henry's, seem to include an awful lot of puddings where the instruction is to Eat Immediately or Rest for ten minutes before serving. Even if I could time cooking the pudding so precisely that I knew when it was going to be ready to Eat Immediately, I couldn't tell you how long my family are going to take to finish their main course and be ready for pudding. My old fashioned and completely un-trendy copy of the Good Housekeepers Cookery Book has a section on Cold Puddings, which sounds unromantic but is very sensible of it. Most of them are made with large amounts of cream, which my father is not supposed to eat because of his high cholesterol, or raw eggs. Raw eggs are a no-no for anyone whose had cancer treatment, and probably not a brilliant idea for anyone in their seventies or eighties, given that age depresses the immune system even in people who are otherwise thoroughly healthy.
I settled for a choice between lemon syllabub (more or less pure cream, but hell, it's Christmas, and at least it contains some vitamin C), mince pies, and a bowl of tangerines and clementines as a healthy eating option, so sorry Mum, no chocolate. I'm sure there'll be plenty of that to eat over Christmas anyway. I haven't finished the syllabub yet, since when I read the recipe more carefully I was supposed to soak the grated peel in the lemon juice for two to three hours. Two hours puts me on course for final assembly 11.30, which is tight, but do-able. I have washed the Moroccan tea glasses in readiness.
The SA is doing the last minute vacuum. We are going to have to fix the flap on the bottom of the dust box. The central heating has been churning away since half past nine, the fire is burning, and three balls have descended in the Galilean thermometer. My parents know to wear warm clothes, when they come to our house.
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