Surprise!

One fine evening, a couple days after Christmas, caught me routinely discussing what was to be prepared for dinner.

The cook of the day (a family member) was not party to it, saying that the proposed menu (rice, legumes and veggies) was not befitting for the times that we were living in! (re: the holiday season).

You know back in the day, I had those nicely organised weekly meal plans, but they slowly became obsolete for different reasons. The main one being that the people I was cooking for, didn’t always want to eat what was planned, but rather what they were ‘felt like’. And the ‘feelings’ normally evolved around platters that are delicately served in our high end restaurants. However, because Big Mama had the final say and most importantly, held the purse strings, it was either you eat or starve. But this dictatorship was finally toppled after I ate the same food for three days straight. I got the point.

So back to the dinner story. According to the cook, savoury smells of red or white meat needed to be a constant until mid-January or thereabouts, after the shine of the new year had worn off. But that wasn’t going to happen, at least not on that day. So I put the matter to rest with the famous one liner, ‘we’ll eat what is there’. The look I got is a story for another day!

That settled, I started fiddling with my phone (isn’t such a default mode nowadays?), when a call came through from a friend who lives in the neighbourhood. After going through the holiday niceties, she abruptly asked what we were having for dinner. I sat up straight. Dinner invitation loading! The story went like this: she had just finished entertaining and gone overboard with the meat stew, there was loads left over and would we be interested in some?

Let's just say that we had tender, grass fed, lip smacking, finger linking meat stew for dinner that night.

How’s that for a blessing!

May the Lord make you smile today!