Today
Recently, I heard tell of someone who spent £1400 (forcing her husband to do double shifts to pay for it) to feed a total of eight guests each day on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Now. I'll defend anyone's right to spend as much as they want, wisely or unwisely; but what shocked me was to learn that she threw out all unfinished food after Christmas Day and started again with new on Boxing day.
In My Day
As I have described in previous blogs, our Christmas lunch when we were children was pretty unvarying: tomato soup, turkey, stuffing, boiled bacon, red cabbage, roast potatoes, sprouts, chestnuts, Christmas pudding with custard.
There was always plenty left over, and for the rest of Christmas Day and Boxing Day we could pick at the food at will. After that the left overs continued to be used up. Red cabbage reheats well and lasted a long time. The meat went on for several days, appearing in a number of forms, usually finishing with a fricassee that I didn't much like as it seemed to have all the chewiest, gristly bits of the turkey concealed within. Once the carcass was stripped of meat. Mamma would boil up the bones to make stock for soup.
I don't think we questioned any of this; it was perfectly logical that uneaten food was eaten at another time; anything else was wasteful. We didn't have to be regaled with stories of starving children in Africa - we ate up everything and not just at Christmas. While I rebelled at eating dripping (the type made with goose fat was the nastiest) I accepted the rest.
I don't quite know what happened to the "joint-on-Sunday-cold-on-Monday-pie-on-Tuesday" sort of housekeeping; in some ways it's easier today as we all have freezers so left overs don't have to follow on day after day relentlessly.
This year I overbought rather, in anticipation of our "Secret Santa" event, and the girls bought even more for New Year. But I've ploughed on through it all, though I don't want to eat Ratatouille for some time to come (and I've frozen quite a lot too), and have given two unopened bags of potatoes to my cleaning lady.
The saddest thing about the whole story was that her husband said he'd give it all up so that he could spend more time with his children.
1 comment:
We ended up with leftovers from our leftovers, and it all continued well into January. In fact, I think Evie and Max finished the last of the brie YESTERDAY. I hate wasted food so much. That's why I tend to search for abandoned roast potatoes on my children's plates....
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