Heart Attack on a Platter

Eeu! We opened the chicken mince and the air around us died and wilted with the putrid reek of chicken mince past its best. Why does it happen so often with chicken? And this at 6:30 in the evening when there is very little time to get to shops for more fresh stuff! Anyway, Son and Boet dashed down to our local Spar just before it closed to return the offending matter and get some cream, rocket and a yellow pepper so that we could make Thursdays dinner instead tonight. A dish Son refers to as “heart attack on a platter” – creamy bacon on penne! Yum!

We had to chop off a chunk of frozen bacon we have stashed away, expending more energy doing that than we consumed later (I wish). But we realised just how good the inexpensive little Victorinox knife is that we bought at the Boys favourite fishing shop, The Kingfisher in the Durban City Centre. It is a little plastic handled job that will cut through anything. We tried the cleaver and a carving knife to get a wedge through the frozen block, but nothing happened. The red handled little demon cut through and we were able to break the whole piece off eventually. After our paying off our Family Frying Pan investment, our next investment will be in a few more of these little helpers and some bigger ones too.

Our Family Frying Pan is still wowing us! I get to wash it every time and after each wash it still looks like it did when we took it off the shelf in the shop. It still gets complimented every time it is hauled out of the pot drawer to work and lovingly dried and swaddled in its own dish cloth when put to bed again. We will be getting a couple of Green saucepans as soon as we have some good knives. That’s for sure.

Tonight’s dinner involved frying onions and yellow pepper until tender, adding bacon bits and then cream with a little flour to thicken the sauce. Not Weight Watcher friendly at all! This is tossed over penne with some rocket, but the shops had no rocket and our rocket in the garden is still too juvenile to use yet. So Boet made a green salad to go with the pasta. He ripped lettuce, threw in some rosa tomatoes, feta and olives that my cousin Bron brought back for me from her trip through the Karroo over Christmas. I found some stuff called pesto salad at the Pick n Pay near Kelso on the South Coast. I think it is just pesto really with a rougher texture. Boet used some of that as a dressing and it was superb! He said he could eat this kind of dinner every night of his life, giving a score of 9/10. Son said t was OK, scoring the dish without the rocket at 8/10. He doesn’t like things completely when we cannot get them 100% like they say in the recipe. I can so see myself in him sometimes!