Breakfast! The most unexpectedly time-consuming meal of the day. Back in a previous life, when I was the size of a house, breakfast was indistinguishable from lunch and/or dinner. The silver lining of posessing only a small fridge is that you can't prepare a huge amount of food, and consume the same unhealthy fare, in excessive quantity, for three meals a day until you run out, and then rinse and repeat. However, what I have since done is work out how to make a bowl of "Wheat Biscuits" (other generic equivalents are available) unnecessarily complicated. My meals expand in complexity to fill the available preparation time.
So it's a shame that the visual impact of the end result is so underwhelming. What appears a rather ordinary bowl of rolled oats (or "European poha", if you prefer) is actually a subtle, finely-tuned harmony. On top of two bricks of wheat, sprinkle a generous amount of ground psyllium husk (a miraculous digestive panacea for elderfolk of an increasingly sensitive disposition; I will spare you the details). Add another generous dash of ground cinnamon to temper the flavour. Then slice some banana and arrange on top in an obsessively geometrically regular pattern, and do likewise with some tinned fruit. Any tinned fruit will do, so alternate with each tin for the sake of variety. Now add a sprinkle of some "cluster" type cereal which, being mostly sugar as far as I can tell, acts as a sweetener while also providing crunch. Finally top with the aforementioned oats and dried fruit mix. At least it's not undifferentiated mush.
From my self-care package, I retrieve a tin of lower-case 's' spam for the first of several engagements over coming evenings. Tonight it's pasta. I would normally make a sauce of sorts from a tin of diced tomatoes, but convenience sauce was half price at the supermarket. Again I make two meals worth, and store the second half in one of my trusty Pyrex bowls. You may be able to detect a pattern emerging.
Add some crushed garlic (fresh is impractical), baby capers, dried chilli flakes and oregano, spring onion and the omnipresent thawing/decaying peas, and… I really regret the convenience pasta sauce. It doesn't taste of tomato; it just tastes of red. Fortunately, given enough chilli, the most egregious sins (and here there are several) can be overlooked.
The next day, things are looking up. I stop by the supermarket and find that lamb forequarter chops are on special at the crazy low price that was the regular price about a year ago. Cabbage, carrot, spring onion, aioli, and a splash of box wine (as a remarkably close vinegar analogue) make a coleslaw of sorts. I thought better of adding capers to the coleslaw. Sound judgement, at last! Not pictured is a dry Cajun seasoning mix to coat the lamb chop.
I slice a Turkish bread roll lengthways, toast the bottom half in a frying pan, and slather it with garlic butter, serving the lamb chop on top, and also add garlic butter to the last of the bag of peas immediately after serving. There were far more peas left in the bag than I thought, but using them all emptied the freezer so that four of the five remaining chops in the pack could lie flat and be more or less frozen. I made twice as much coleslaw as needed, and stored the rest in the fridge in one of the little garlic butter tubs, washed for reuse. They're a rather handy size.
An absurd overindulgence I'd regret when stepping on the bathroom scales tomorrow.