Subconscious sabotage?

I’ve come to the conclusion than our trip to Italy seems too far away to write with any freshness. I had thought I’d tell you about our pleasant stroll along the River Adige in Verona on our final morning there but that will remain something to share between the Fox & me.

The weekend is now upon us. The Fox is feeling more uncomfortable than ever. I’m coming to the conclusion they like him to have a couple of days off treatment in order to recover a bit from the previous week’s treatment. He’s now got up to 53 seconds. We’re just hoping it will work well at the end of the day. There certainly isn’t much sign of it so far.

Yesterday I prepared some diced potatoes for dinner. However, by the evening, we felt too tired & decided to eat out. I hastily put the salmon we’d just bought for today’s meal into the freezer for some time next week & put the thawed leftover roast gammon for yesterday’s dinner in the fridge for today. Then we went off & had some excellent fish & chips at our local village pub.

When we got back the Fox had a look at the potatoes I’d prepared in the morning.

“There’s something wrong with the potatoes. They’ve gone black,” an alarmed Fox cried.  I got up & had a look. Sure enough some of them had black centres.

I could guess what had gone wrong. I’d had a mishap when preparing the potatoes in the morning. Normally for a Ham & Egg Sauté I peel some old potatoes, dice them fairly small, then parboil for 2 minutes, drain them & put them on one side for the evening. This time I had peeled them, put them on to parboil whole for 2 minutes, and drained them. When I did I suddenly realised I hadn’t diced them, so I hastily diced them. As I cut them I was aware they seemed a bit peculiar. The 2 minutes cooking hadn’t been long enough to cook through to the centre of the potatoes. The centre seemed raw. Even more peculiar a starchy goo, which I could well believe would make a wonderful glue, came out of the cut edges.  I then put the potatoes on one side to go cold. Clearly this blackening is what happens if the potatoes aren’t cooked sufficiently before being left. Certainly the black rings seem to go where the raw potato divided from the par-cooked potato. We’ll soon find out whether I’m right. I’ve just pre-prepared another batch of potatoes for tonight. This time I diced before boiling so hopefully all should be well. If not, it’s something to do with the variety of potato. The old batch has gone in the bin. We’re not going to try eating them!

There is a bit of me that wonders if I wasn’t trying a bit of subconscious sabotage. I’ve been feeling really tired with all these trips into Lancaster. So has the Fox. I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have a day off cooking & washing up. Even if we’d felt like cooking last night, one look at those blackening potatoes would have made us think of eating out instead.