Monday 1 December 2008

A Royal Lunching


Bit of a lapse yesterday at a lunch with friends in a very old house in the country (All paintings on the ceilings, silver candelabra, dusty stuff like that. Where's the sodding 46" plasma I was wondering). The main course was wild boar cooked in decent Barbera. This was preceded, of course, by a vast selection of antipasti, one of which was this huge and beautifully-presented jar of stuffed chili peppers. Not like the Combo version, stuffed with anchovies, but stuffed with tuna. They were sensational. Then a risotto with wild mushrooms. Then the wild piggy. Burp. I drank a couple of glasses of white and then a few* reds, reasoning that it would have been extremely rude to my host who had spent two days preparing the boar not to have helped it down with some Chianti, Barbera and finally some Barbaresco. I was then advised to drink a very old barrel-aged rum as a digestivo, which I did. God knows why, I don't even like bloody rum. Result was a thumping headache later on in the evening. Feeling a tad remorseful I have weighed back in with the veg and water today - and of course the milk thistle. Oh Ron, that it should have come to this!

* More than a few actually.

8 comments:

Affer said...

I've checked in "The Traditional Home Health Almanac" (Mengele Publishing, Munich. 1944) and I am pretty sure that your headache came from mixing tuna-stuffed chillis with wild mushrooms. Rum is the best cure apparently....so it may have been that you just didn't drink sufficient.

Peter Ashley said...

Never mind Barbaras and Burberries, what exactly is milk thistle?

Vinogirl said...

OK...you trumped my Thanksgiving Day fare!
My mother buys a lot of milk thistle when she visits me "cos it's dirt cheap in the States".

Philip Wilkinson said...

My New Year's resolution, if I made such things, would be to stuff my own chili peppers. Oh - and I like dusty old painted ceilings. (The 'word verification' messages in Blogger are becoming more and more spooky, by the way. Today's is 'dandusti'.)

Peter Ashley said...

I've noticed the word verifications are also becoming much quicker to type in, because they resemble real words. The one below, as I type, is 'haery' which is oddly how I feel this morning.

Thud said...

Considering you were at deaths door not so long ago you seem to be living rather high on the hog...you are an inspiration to us all.

Toby Savage said...

Welcome back to hangover city. I blame the rum. See what you mean chaps about the word verification. I'm faced here with 'deskisav'. Appropriate as I'm a Sav sitting at a desk.... gazing out of the window in case you're interested.

Fred Fibonacci said...

Talking of which.....

Ron, what fabulous stuffed chillies. Like M'Lord Ashley, I too ask myself: just what is milk thistle? I then refuse, on principle, to look it up and discover the answer, such is my mordant dread of what I may find. You, Ron, with your selfless devotion to the rehabilitation of your liver, are an inspiration to us all etc. and we salute you.

In anticipation of your forthcoming trip to Blighty I have approached WeWatchYou.com to install the necessary surveillance equipment to monitor your stay. Obviously, I need to protect myself from any and all accusations of anything, ever, and this is why I have taken this unusual step. They promise an edited DVD of the highlights of your trip (without the stuff they send on to the State, obviously) within two working days of your departure, complete with a voice-over by none other than Tess Daly. This can only serve us well; after all, if we've done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. Do we?