Those happy endings

I’m fine with the fact that I am not logical. I know I have oddities. The Boy probably calls them absurdities. But that’s fine. Making sense and being predictable and logical is completely over-rated. I have to be methodical in the workplace. In fact, I seem to have to be methodical for everyone around me in the work place. So in anything else, I reserve the right to be precisely what I want to be, regardless of whether or not there is a sensible reason behind it. To hell with rationale. Living by the seat of my bloomers, I know.

When something is good, by and large, you don’t want it to end or stop. On Monday night, for example, I took The Boy to St John’s Restaurant for his birthday, and that was a meal which I didn’t want to stop. The more I ate, the hungrier I became. (Remember, my appetite is great.) And when it was gone, I was sad. I wanted to order it all and start again.

However, there are certain food-stuffs that, when eating the end, I am over-joyed and make pleased chuntering sounds. Some examples that spring to mind are:

Cereal.

Bread (not the pre-sliced monstrosities. Proper bread).

Crackers.

An ice-cream cone (previously having contained ice-cream).

A crêpe, folded, as is traditional, into a triangle. The point of that triangle.

Food from the pan or serving dish.

For each of the above, I revel, like a pig would in mud, when munching away on their ends. The Boy and I eat different cereals, and I get to have his ends. That’s love, isn’t it? He calls them ‘dust’, retracts his head slightly and wrinkles his nose. I call them WONDER-dust, stick my head forward enthusiastically and open my gob.

With bread, again, The Boy doesn’t do the ends, the crust.  And yes, his love stretches to giving me his crusts. But, I’m no sponge. I give. He gets the squidgy, doughy pillow from my bread. I can’t deny that when alone, I scoff that part too, but, tit for tat, crust for dough. His reasoning here is that he doesn’t like chewing (this holds true for all food. A preference which I will never be able to comprehend, me with my penchant for anything raw and crunchy). My reasoning is that I love chewing, and that the crust, when off a decent loaf, has a wonderful brown taste to it. I can almost smell the flour-dusty oven and taste the hot baking trays as I gnaw away.

Cracker packets are a veritable treasure trove. Much like the cereal wonder-dust, particularly if they are seeded crackers, the corners of their packet hold all manner of blissful fragments. Sprinkle them over a salad, on top of a soup, or just straight onto a spoon.

Now the ice-cream cone and crêpe are one and the same idea. Actually wraps too. I would like to add wraps to this list. (I dislike burritos because they are flabby and stick to the roof of my mouth, so that I look like a cat summoning forth a hair ball as I use my tongue to unstick said pappy covering. So when I say “wrap”, I mean the type made from Lebanese flatbreads.)

Essentially I am referring to anything that is an edible container, with a bottom. As you eat your way down, the juices or remnants and smaller parts of the filling work their way to the bottom. By the time you come to the end, behold - there is a delightful pot of edible gold waiting for you. You eye each other up, lovingly, for a brief moment, and then, with a beatific smile, you both know what comes next. Eyes closed, head back, down in one. Oh. Yes.

As for food, from the pan in which it was cooked or dish in which it was served, that confuses me more. I enjoy cooking, so the idea that the leftovers from a pan taste better because they haven’t been immediately preceded by slaving away over the stove doesn’t fit. Even when I have had a plate of the food in question, and enjoyed that plate, a schpoonful from the pan ultimately tastes better. I know if you left the food over-night, the flavours may have developed and so taste better for that reason. But, otherwise I can’t quite put my finger on why I enjoy food from the pan or dish so much.

I suppose it’s similar to baked beans in the tin, straight from the fridge. Or is that just me?

This pan/ dish scenario is a conundrum to me. I’m sure some psycho-expert could tell me why. To be completely honest, I don’t really care. I like schpoonfuls from pans, tins and serving dishes. No need for a reason why. When I worked in a small B&B in Umbria, where dinner usually comprised of 4 courses, and at least 8 side dishes with the mains, all taken from their vegetable garden that day, we used to wait for the guests to have finished their meals before picking odds and ends off the serving dishes. The type of satisfaction that gave rise to is different to that gleaned from eating a whole plate of eye-crossingly delicious food (because it was), but I would say it is just as powerful.

In short, an eternally happy ending for this here schpoon and her ends.