Dia is Mhuire dióbh go léir a cairde and welcome to my Report.
Nice things are happening all the time. In a world that is so full of negativity it can be hard to find one sometimes but they do come and little things mean a lot. You know by now the love that I have for wild mushrooms and can you imagine the joy I felt during the week when I found a little bag of them hanging from the handle of my door. To double the joy it happened again two days later. I hope that the kind person who left them has some idea of the pleasure that I got from her gift. First of all the very thought of it and then the lovely breakfast that I enjoyed. Money cannot buy wild mushrooms, they either grow or they don’t and even though we can get mushrooms in any quantity in the shops they lack the taste and the mysteriousness of the ones that you happen to find in your field. I melted a little real butter in a saucepan and tossed them in before adding some milk and loads of fresh ground pepper and a dash of salt. Oh the taste when I dipped my buttered brown bread in the liquid and eat the solids, savouring every morsel. Recalling the days of old and the homemade coarse brown bread made from our own home grown wheat. The seven of us around the plain wooden kitchen table and Pete doing his best to see to us smaller ones, while the others fended for themselves. Things didn’t always go well when someone would shout out Ah Pete, you put too much bread soda in the cake or God forbid if an actual lump of the stuff happed to go into somebodies mouth. He’d spit it out and say “I can’t ate it” His reply came fast and determined “you can ate or turn your ass to it”, or “if you don’t ate it, that will leave more for the next fellow”, and the meal would continue. There were no fancy gadgets back then to make life easier. Because there was no sieve, the bread soda had to be crushed in the palm of the hand to take out the lumps and of course now a then it didn’t turn out perfect. Too much made the bread a yellowy, foxy colour which was a dead giveaway anyway. I never saw it to happen when our Dad did the baking. Another one of Pete’s faults was on Fridays which were fast days and no meat allowed. We didn’t always have fish. But he would make a pot of white sauce. I can still see the pot or warmer as we called it, aluminium, bent and broken with age, no handle. We loved the white sauce with the onions with our spuds on a Friday evening. But the trouble was that it nearly always burned and how we hated that burnt taste. Coming in the boreen from school it aroma would be out to meet us and on arriving our first words were Ah Pete you burned the sauce again today and his reply was always the same and we’d eat it. But the gentle Pete had many finer qualities which made little of his draw-backs at the end of the day.
[read more …] “Eily’s Report – 27th August”
