A geriatric cook reaches out

For almost my entire adult life I have had both my breakfast and dinner made for me.  If there was not a lady on hand to do the honours, I would eat out -- for both breakfast and dinner. Some time around when I turned 70, however I decided that eating out twice a day was a bit gross -- and night-time traffic was a bit hairy.  So I decided that I would cook my dinner myself.  I have no background in cooking however so have bungled a few dinners along the way.  There are a few simple dinners I make that regularly turn out well, however, so I even cook for other people on occasions.

And last night I cooked for Ken.  It was for his birthday. As Maureen is quite ill these days, I surmised that there would not be much happening for his birthday -- so I offered to make him a home-made dinner to mark the occasion.

So I made him my "best" dinner, one that is routinely complimented -- a version of savoury mince.  And I even trotted out my best tablecloth for the occasion -- a pretty embroidered one from China that Anne gave me recently.  I seem to have accumulated rather a lot of tablecloths over the years

I don't think Ken noticed the tablecloth but he complimented the food and the champagne so all was well.  For canapes I offered salty biscuits plus a choice of three cheeses.  Quite to my surprise, however, he said he doesn't much like cheese these days.   I thought everybody liked cheese.  Maybe it was a polite way of saying that he didn't like the cheeses I offered. English politeness can be extreme. You have to know the English to decipher it accurately, as Kate Fox has shown us. He also said however that he didn't like tea or coffee very much these days and rarely drinks either.  So maybe he is just generally gloomy in his old age.

Ken and I always enjoy conversations and that is rather helped these days by the fact that Ken and I seem to agree a lot. We have known one-another for over 30 years so our conversations also  can be rather frank at times. We have many shared memories.

We talked a fair bit about real estate as Ken is selling his warehouse in order to invest in upscale retirement living.  I hope the vendors don't rip him off.  There is a history of it. The price you buy at can be critical for investments.

One topic that we disagreed on last night was the concept of "healthy" food.  I go against the almost universal concept that there is such a thing as "healthy" food.  I doubt that there is much difference in the goodness of various foods and if there is I don't think we know which ones are healthier than others. So Ken cannot be blamed for being unconvinced by such a radical view.

It is however a well-informed view.  I have been reading the medical journals for years and have even had a few things published in them. And I still read JAMA almost daily.  And from a statistical point of view it is mostly crap.  I used to teach research methods and statistics at the University of NSW so see the sleight of hand that underlies an awful lot of the statistics in medical journals.  Most of the "findings" they report are not significant in any important sense and may even  be totally wrong.

Despite his earlier disavowal of it Ken accepted my offer of coffee. My brain seems to have short-circuited at that point however as I gave him some instant coffee I had which turned out rather badly.

I should have given him the coffee that I usually drink as I recollect him once speaking well of it.  It is however the most unprestigous form of coffee: Bushell's coffee and chicory essence. It was the first coffee that the British and Australians  got to know. My father used to drink it.  So perhaps  I thought it was too humble to offer last night.  So that was sad note on which to end a generally pleasant occasion

Update:  I mentioned above that articles in even the most prestigious medical journals often report conclusions that are  poorly supported by the underlying statistics.  As it happens, the very next day I put up commentaries on two such articles -- here and here