Springing back from a gout attack

Dad has been out of order concerning weird food due to an attack of gout which has prevented him having his usual flair for weird meals. Luckily for me ( and him) he has slowly but surely come right and started to add in weirdness once more. First it was a rice salad that he made using white rice and all the normal salad ingredients, lettuce, big chunks of tomato, cucumber etc. Not OVERLY weird by his standards, but just a strange combination of textures. Then there was the other day when he put mint in the bolognaise, again only slightly off. But then he was back in full force with a lunch of microwaved potatoes, yogurt, peaches and sage. I ate all the olives and asked jokingly if he wanted to keep the brine, and he said yes! Then later he made another meal of soggy briny bread, canned spaghetti, peaches, cheese and beetroot. I have been trying to get pictures, but he refuses, so I'll have to take covert ones.

It was his birthday yesterday and I got him a range of condiments, which will hopefully be put to some very strange uses soon. I live in hope for the sake of this blog!

A new innovative sauce!

I noticed my father doing something very strange today. In all his meals, ( excepting the dinner I made him) he utilised an unknown ingredient. It was kind of like watching Iron Chef America, except that there was no dessert ( thank god!) Dad's new 'secret' ingredient is gerkin juice. I noticed this first when he had a snack at about 11am. This consisted of two corn thins, cottage cheese, pickled onion, corn, tomato and gerkin juice. Yum soggy crackers! Next at lunch he made red pasta which I originally thought might be coloured with beetroot, when it was in fact powdered tomato soup. He then poured in gerkin juice and ate it up. Then later in the day he had toast, cheese, corn, ham and gerkin juice. None of these 'meals' involve the actual application of gerkins, only their pickling liquid. I asked him about it, but all he said was 'it tastes nice!'.

I will have to keep an eye on the other pickles in the fridge to see if any of the liquid drops significantly. What next I wonder, tuna oil?

My father has slipped back into a semi-normal diet today. I peered at his lunch, but saw only toast, pickled onions and tomato, which is extremely conservative for him. In light of this disappointing result, I have decided to opt for a trip down memory lane to the days of school lunches. Like most of my peers in Ponsonby ( there was something in the water I bet!) I came from a 'broken' home. As this was a fairly recent experience, I could excuse my father for his interesting sandwiches, but I doubt that a passage of years would have had much effect.

Thus, when lunchtime came, I dreaded opening the soggy, white wrap that enclosed my lunch. Dad had a thing about food that "needs eating", which translated to two pieces of bread wrapped around whatever was left of last night's dinner. Sometimes it was potatoes and carrot( yes JUST that with a bit of margarine if I was lucky!) or peas and pasta (with onion on occasion), or pasta and salad ( ie : soggy tomato and lettuce). Usually I just scraped off the filling and ate the bread, then headed off to the tuck shop for a chocolate bar. I never could bring myself to complain to my dad. It seemed sort of sweet that he would make the effort in the first place. After all, he didn't know that his taste buds were any different to the rest of us. The only time I enjoyed my sandwiches if they contained mince, that's alright isn't it?

A new day, a new tastebud explosion

My father is a true eccentric. He picked up the violin ten years ago, and he's still going with it, despite the stiffness in his fingers. He likes to build boats from scratch, and he has been trying to perfect a revolutionary new airplane wing for quite a while too. As some of you are aware, my father eats the most ridiculous combinations of things. His current favourite is to add fish sauce to everything that he consumes. I started this blog in order to catalogue his daily weirdness that I am sometimes subjected to.

Today was a classic example. I watched him build up an odd dish, starting by microwaving penne pasta flavoured with an oxo cube and garlic. To that he added tinned tomatoes and mushrooms, which doesn't sound so bad. Then he added olives, vinegar and of course fish sauce. When I complain at him, or try to curb his weird ways he calls me 'conservative.' Today's lunch was a variety on yesterday's, although yesterday he added corn and tinned spaghetti to the mix and subtracted the mushrooms. And yes he does enjoy fish sauce with peaches, often with marmite and toast. More weirdness to come!