Tag: salad

Vegetables, Anyone?

Good evening, faithful followers and beloved believers. Tonight, a tale with a moral.

I had a most excellent lunch today with a couple of good friends, marred only by the lack of awareness of one of the party of how many vegetables should be taken from the dishes placed in the middle of the table. I shall refer to the friends as Mr and Mrs Marzipan, to spare their blushes (the name comes from the fact that are both members of a quiz team called ‘Marzipan’), although they aren’t married. Actually, they ARE married, just not to each other; but, before you sit in judgement on them, I hasten to add that they are happily married to other people who hadn’t come to the lunch – one was working and the other was trying on some lederhosen (but more of that later).

We were a jolly trio, chatting gaily about anything and everything. We ordered our food and continued chatting and, when the main course arrived, the plates were placed in front of us, with the vegetables in separate dishes in the middle (although the LSG had a salad – not for any reason of feeling virtuous but because I didn’t feel that French fries or potatoes and vegetables would go with risotto). I tucked into my risotto with gusto (a bit like pesto, but nicer) when, suddenly, Mrs Marzipan said to Mr Marzipan, ‘Do you especially like carrots?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, heaping the rest of the carrots onto his plate as well as dropping one or two on the table.
Mr M then realised there was a point to this question and looked up. ‘Ah,’ he said with dawning comprehension, looking at the vegetable dishes (now denuded of carrots) in the middle, ‘they’re meant to be between us, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ replied Mrs M. ‘but that’s ok.’
‘No, no,’ he said anxiously, ‘have some of these off my plate – and there’s a couple that have fallen on the table. Will they do? And what about some extra broccoli? And you can have all the potatoes if you want!’ (I clung on to my risotto for dear life, I can tell you, in case he started on that as well!)
By this time Mrs M and I were in hysterics, wiping our eyes at the stricken look on Mr M’s face – even the stern-looking lady at a table across from us couldn’t help smiling as we squealed with laughter! What larks, what japes!

And the lederhosen? That was Mrs Marzipan’s husband, who waved to Mr Marzipan through the kitchen window when he came to collect Mrs M for lunch.
‘Why is your husband wearing lederhosen?’ asked Mr M as Mrs M got in the car.
‘Lederhosen?’
‘Yes, I could see the straps across his chest through the window.’
‘They weren’t lederhosen straps – that was the harness for his saxophone which he’d been practising before you arrived.’ When I heard this story, picturing Mrs M’s tall husband in lederhosen, it sent me into gales of laughter, once more bringing a smile to the stern-looking woman’s face! At least she left the restaurant happier than when she came in!

And the moral? Get stuck into the vegetables before anyone else does! Enjoy your weekend, whatever you may be wearing! (I couldn’t find a lederhosen emoji, so you’ll have to make do with a carrot, some broccoli and a laughing face!)

The Cost Of Being Single

A very good evening from the Lifestyle Support Guru.

I decided to write this after reading an article in that esteemed, if just the teensiest bit left-wing, newspaper, The Grauniad (not to be confused with its sister paper, The Guardian), about the TRUE cost of being single.

‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘someone else who has wondered why M&S doesn’t do a ‘Dine in for One for £5 with free bottle of wine’, instead of assuming that everyone has someone with whom they wish to share their Gastropub Fish Pie or Gastropub Steak Lasagne with a side of Wild Rocket (that’s a SIDE dish?? That’s just a few pieces of grass which stick in your teeth and tickle your throat, making you cough and choke!)

He Doesn’t Like Vegetables!

In fact, come to think of it, there are probably people who are NOT single who would not wish to share their Gastropub Fish Pie or Gastropub Steak Lasagne, but they are called ‘greedy’ (and they’d probably go for the side dish of Chunky Chips rather than the Wild Rocket, and the other person in their life wouldn’t even get a look in at the Profiterole Stack).

https://www.lifestylesupportguru.com/But I digress. How disappointed I was when I read the article in full and found that it was just a whiney piece by some woman who was bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t found her rock, her soulmate, her ‘yang’ to her ‘yin’, her Andy Pandy to her Looby Loo, her Simon to her Garfunkel, her Thelma to her Louise (I’m being fully inclusive here), and how the government is bleeding her dry because of that. She came up with one or two interesting facts, I have to say – there are more unmarried women alive today than at any point in history, apparently, although I’m not sure if this will still be the same tomorrow or the day after…

However, on the plus side, I find I’ve saved money because she says, on average, women spend £1,280 a year on dates. The obvious answer is – just don’t go on dates, you stupid woman!
Hah! Bet some of you thought I was going to make some obvious, sexist remark about how women shouldn’t pay on dates anyway – believe me, I learned my lesson on that a long time ago in Redditch (where I was working at the time) when my date paid for the meal but said I could choose the wine since I spoke French (logic?) then said he only drank Liebfraumilch (not my favourite tipple, as Beloved Believers will know). Not only that, when he drove me back to my flat and I politely asked him if he wanted a coffee – hoping he’d say no – he produced a LITRE bottle of Liebfraumilch from the back seat and said we could drink that instead. He got coffee.

https://www.lifestylesupportguru.com/To compound matters, as he was leaving shortly after (I made him drink his coffee very quickly), he gave me a goodnight kiss and said I was a very sweet person. SWEET? SWEET?? SWEET??? The LSG may be many things – all-seeing, all-knowing, all over the place, but SWEET??? Reader, I did not marry him…

But I have strayed from the subject again. There are times when I feel aggrieved because I have to pay a supplement for being single (hotels, holidays, that sort of thing) but they have not yet started charging a premium on single women drinking wine, and that is something for which I am eternally grateful… unless someone from the government reads this and thinks, ‘What a jolly wheeze! Let’s start a new tax for all those people drinking on their own, even if they’re happy doing that. In fact, let’s tax them even more simply because they’re happy being on their own!’ They’d make a fortune from at least three people in my family!
Have a good weekend, dear LSG followers. I shall spend it avoiding anywhere and anyone that offers me a glass of Liebfraumilch…
… and paying for my own meal.