Let me put that another way. She doesn't feel that I am paying her a great deal of respect in these blogs.
In other words she thinks I'm taking the pee too much. Are you with her in this? I could of course remove her from future blogs and relegate her to being my other half.
I thought about that for a couple of seconds and then held up my hands, pleaded guilty as charged but vowed to carry on.
*. *. *
So let's talk about food confusion and I don't mean mixing vegetables up. I mean the name of meal times.
Breakfast speaks for itself, but then somebody invented the word brunch to stand for a mix of breakfast and lunch. It used to be called elevenses but now that's something completely different. Elevenses is a mid morning cup of tea/ coffee and biscuit/piece of cake which can be had anytime from 10 which is all confusing. But here is a warning. It's all going to get a lot more confusing.
So brunch isn't elevenses. It's a mix of breakfast and lunch and just an excuse to have a mid morning waist busting fry up. But a brunch fry up is different to a breakfast fry up. At Hethersett Queen's Head brunch is the same as an English breakfast but with chips.
And how about that contradiction in terms - the all day breakfast? At the Queen's you can have brunch all day as well. Now let's move on an hour or so to what some people call lunch and others call dinner. Here in good old Norfolk it was always dinner as in it's dinnertime.
I don't know quite when dinner became tea ( now I'm getting confused) but tea implies a light meal whereas dinner implies something more substantial something like a brunch.
As a boy I had breakfast, dinner and tea as opposed to breakfast, lunch and dinner. But then there was supper - something that I no longer have as you can go to work on an egg but it's bad form to go to bed on an egg in case it lays (see the pun there?) heavy in the stomach all night.
As a boy, my mother would often cook fritters before bed. These heavenly things were large wedges of potato coated in batter and then fried and smothered with salt and vinegar. Not the kind of thing you should go to bed on but they were very very good. I often wondered why I sometimes woke up in the night with stomach ache and had to have a spoonful of milk of magnesia which usually did the trick.
The problem about my growing up food-wise was my father. He seemed to hate any decent food. No onions in gravy, no salad, no dressings or sauces, everything totally plain and my mother would follow this regime of ordinariness. As a result I was in my early 20s before I sampled the delights of sauces etc. Now I will pretty much eat anything including silk worms and crickets in Cambodia.
The only thing I don't like is sprouts. They actually make me feel sick. Growing up I had a problem with bananas which was very strange. It wasn't that I didn't like bananas - I actually loved them but eating one gave me stomach ache at best and made me throw up at worst. A few weeks ago I was talking to my third cousin Jo and she has the same problem with bananas so perhaps it's something that runs back a few generations in the family.
But the whole thing gets sillier. If my mother cut a banana up and put it in a bowl of custard I was fine. I loved banana and custard. Now you could say this was all psychological but I can't see how it could be as I loved bananas. It was just eating one made me Ill. Made into a milk shake I was fine. So can anyone explain that one? Perhaps I would get to love sprouts if I put them in a bowl of custard. That's not something I'm going to try though.
Two other things give me problems. Real champagne gives me a headache and I seemed to be allergic to crab. I haven't eaten crab for half a century. It used to make me sick and I'm not going to take the risk, although I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem now.
So let's talk about Yorkshires. The other threequarters comes from the land of the white rose and so shares something that I grew up with in Norfolk.
Yorkshire puddings or batter puddings as I knew them could be served at any point in a meal. I've actually had them for all of a three course meal.
For first course I had them with salt and vinegar and mint. For second course they were part of a roast with gravy (always gravy and never never never jus) and then for sweet or pudding it would be batter pudding with apple sauce (always sauce and never never never jus).
Batter - the sauce of the Gods. It makes Yorkshire puddings, pancakes and late night fritters amongst many other things and I haven't even mentioned fish.
There are lots of restaurants that serve giant Yorkshire's filled with meat and vegetables and other things and smothered in jus (sorry gravy).
The problem with all this talk about food is it is making me hungry. It's just before 6 am as I'm writing this. Is that too early for brunch ? Hell no.
Have a nice day everyone.