Domestic Goddess, of sorts

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With reassuring regularity my nearly-30-year-old son phones me with a domestic query. He, in the age of googling anything and everything, still prefers me as the prime domestic search engine.

These questions vary from gardens to stain-removal, from cooking to mending. He is also wont to dropping his mending in my lap from time to time.

‘Can you fix this, mum?’ 

Part of me is glad that he asks me and not his girlfriend. It is a mother-thing, not a woman-thing. Part of me is glad that I am still relevant in his life.

The first of these calls was when he was just living in the student halls.

‘Mam, how do you defrost meat balls?’  He had a little, handwritten cookbook with him, with tried and tested recipes written down in his own hand. Meatballs, spaghetti cannelloni (for years pronounced by him as candeloni) and brownies.  Student fare: things we had practised. However, we never practised defrosting.

Another good one was:

‘Mam, I lost a contact lens, how do I find it?' That wasn't an easy one, seeing that he is blind as a bat and was living 50 miles away.

He has asked for a recipe for garlic -tomato bread (to impress the girlfriend), several stain removing queries (my gym bag is mouldy, what do I do?), some consumer legal issues and garden issues.  We advised him against feeding the foxes.

My daughter only once called upon me for advice. Fiercely independent, she'll ask her twitter followers before asking me or her dad.  The only time she did was when she asked for a simple recipe to make bread. Since then, she's baked an amazing array of different breads.
 

Last week's plea from Liam was about the slow cooker.  This time it wasn't just a query about cooking, I noticed. Him and the girlfriend had put chicken in the slow cooker. I am proud to say that I have taught him to cook from scratch and that they are actually doing that.  It helps that he is a skinflint.  The meat had been on the go for over nine hours. To find out whether it was cooked and safe to eat, the girlfriend had stuck in a thermometer in the beast and declared that because the temperature inside had not been above whatever it needs to be, they couldn't eat it yet. 

 Liam phoned.

‘Mum, what do I do? It is falling off the bone, is really tender and I'm hungry!’
Oops, I recognised that tone of voice.  It sounded like the one used during long journeys in the car, from Ventry to Dublin, or Acharacle to the Crook. It sounded like he was hangry (now an official syndrome).

 I assured him they could eat the chicken.  I just hope I haven’t caused a rift in the relationship.

 




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Thank you! Be your nose a pointer for your brain! (OED)

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