Melon

Yep another set of melons this year and that is not right out of "Carry on Halloween". Again this year its a pumpkin-less festivity where the pumpkin is usually the main stay. My wife started it last year but I have to say I am inclined to agree. I mean apart from carving what do you do with the pumpkin? And if you don't get rid of it quickly it rots to buggery into a mush similar to mashed turnips though- and I can't believe I am saying this- less appealing.

Do people eat pumpkin? I remember when I worked up North the canteen, it was a big one for 1500 people or there abouts, used to do great breakfasts but their lunches were poor. Mind you you can't really go wrong with hot rolls though my work place after that did putting. Even the thought of it gives me the dry boak. I remember standing in the queue one day starving, the smell of cooked breakfasts always is appealing to the tum in the mornings bringing a hunger that is not usually there, and looking at a tray of square sausage. They was about 30-40 all lumped on a metal tray not given any space and just a big meaty pile swimming in a sea of artery clogging fat. And I watched a burnt sausage being placed on a roll noting that an over lapping part was actually raw. Oh no. I walked away that day because up until then I had trained myself not to look and when I had a roll not to inspect to the point where I didn't even put sauce on it for fear of seeing pinkness. So I walked away as I said and never had morning rolls again for the duration of my employment.

But back to the work place before that. As I also said they did good breakfasts cooked through and not dripping in as much fat. On that point I would like to point out that I never fry cook anything and have not done for years. Between that and tons of salt on everything else I don't know how my gran' boys grew up to be healthy young me but as she told me when she was alive people worry too much and as an example she said in hospitals staff won't digest anything left for them which is not covered and in her day everything was out in the open and no one suffered- at this I refrained from mentioning that in her day life expectancy was not great or at least down on what it is now. This was a point that always irked her. Partly from working in a hospital all her days and so finding fault in the domestics of today and partly because of her nephew. My gran took 3 bags of chocolate treats to give to the nurses looking after her sister in the hospital and returned to find them the next day not only still there but in bowls with her nephew stuffing his face to which he replied he put the out in bowls for the nurses but nobody touched them and so he didn't see the point in them going to waste. Given that he is a scammer and a cheat and an all round cad of some notoriety within our family I suspect he knew what would happen and couldn't wait to stuff his greedy face. I mean this is the guy who among other things used to buy E240 (4 hour) blank VHS tapes which he used to take home, dismantled, swap the reels with one of his old 1 hour or 2 hour tapes and then take back to the shops and get them refunded.

I have gone off on a tangent yet again. So this last but one workplace did good breakfasts but the lunches were dire. It wasn't so much they made bad food but what they made was bad rather than how it was cooked or prepared. I never went near the stuff. It was they had a stockpile of all the Heston Blumenfeld inventive dishes that didn't work and were looking to get rid of them. Experiments of gastric roulette rather than culinary delights. So I lived off chips and coleslaw in the main. If I was really hungry I added one of those things that is like a square of spam with a boiled egg in the middle and pastry around the outside- don't know what its called.

Not that I am immune from experimentation and know first hand its dangers. I remember many years ago when I stayed with my gran and I was out with my friends at the pub. I was starving but the take out place was by the late hour we left closed. So when I got home I raked about the kitchen and put two things together that I likes as an experiment and to fill me up. So as I fried the paella I oven cooked a garlic pizza. When then paella was ready I took the garlic pizza out, topped it with paella, covered it in cheese I had grated and then put it back in the oven. I felt ill for days and of course never finished it. Even in my long gone inebriated state it was too much for my stomach.

Back in the work canteen on the even of Halloween waiting in the queue for my coleslaw and chips I joked that I would not put it past the caters to serve pumpkin curry the following day. Even the thought of it brought back all the tummy gurgles of that past disaster of my own. And of course that is what they did. I came in the next morning and a couple of collegues laughing asked me to guess what he special was. Of course I didn't need to answer.   

No one I knew tried it. Maybe it was nice- though I doubt it. Someone would have though. Its a macho thing eating something no one else will eat. Someone would have stepped up to the plate. But it wasn't me.

Back at our little Halloween the kids enjoyed the pumpkin replacements. They drew the faces and my wife carved them. And as she carved they lined up for fresh melon bits enjoying every one of them. There wasn't too much more than that apart from dressing up and some treats. The customary ducking for appels but this year we used apple slices. Halloween is a non event in comparison to my own childhood. I remember my mum buying lots of monkey nuts, sweets and things for when the guisers came calling while I would be dressed up and with other friends going from door to door collecting treats. I have stayed here over a decade now and not once at Halloween have I heard the door chapped. Sad really.