Hello. This is Molly phoning from your Bank. You have been selected at random to take part in giving feedback on our service. From 1 to 10 how would you rate our service?
One!
Why one?
Because Zero wasn’t an option.
Tamzin was sure of one thing: her husband Trevor had been unfaithful. She had hired a detective. The detective was very expensive but in the long run it paid off. Trevor had a number of alliances with a good number of women.
Tamzin said nothing. She bided her time.
She arranged their annual vacation. “I’ve never been to Yellowstone National Park,” she said. “It would be terrible if it exploded in a gigantic volcanic eruption and we hadn’t seen it!”
These little jokes were precisely the things that Trevor had grown to despise. Off they went to Yellowstone National Park.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, Trevor got too close to a roaring vent. He wanted to take a close-up photograph on his phone. Tamzin gave him a push and down he went. It wasn’t Old Faithful but it was fatally scalding nonetheless.
Which goes to show that revenge can come in many geysers*.
*Footnote: I’ve suddenly got this suspicion that regional dialects in English might differ on this word. In New Zealand geysers is pronounced exactly the same as guises!
Julie was generous to a fault. She was forever helping out others, usually working with her church’s Friend-In-Need Committee. Her confinement in a wheelchair didn’t stop her; after all, the church had a wheelchair ramp which Julie herself had paid for.
Julie had only one leg and one arm. “It makes me appreciate how useful a hand is,” said Julie. “I used to take things like that for granted. Not so any more.”
Ironically the loss of her two limbs had resulted from the very generosity for which she was renowned. Someone had said in a church committee meeting that Julie would give an arm and a leg to help out, and she did. Generous to a fault indeed!
And now a new emergency had cropped up. Julie was there to help instantly. “Did they want a hand?”
Ivan was a weedy little man and Sheila was buxom. After seventeen years marriage Sheila decided that enough was enough and wanted a divorce.
“Enough is enough,” she said.
“Enough of what?” asked Ivan.
“Enough,” said Sheila.
There was no reason for a divorce except Sheila wanted change. After seventeen years the humdrum-ity of life was calling for a change in direction. Ivan was at first mystified and then angry. All papers and things were filed. The divorce came through. Sheila moved down the street in search of the great tomorrow.
The next day Ivan won a hundred and twenty-four million in the lottery.
Letitia’s nine-year-old son, Jason, was a brat. It was a quality he had inherited from his mother. Jason’s teacher (currently on strike) had described Letitia as “the meanest, nastiest mother I have ever encountered in my thirty-two years of teaching.”
Indeed, Jason had inherited every inch of his mother’s nastiness, and not an ounce of his father’s niceness. His father visited once a month, for an hour only. That was all that Letitia allowed. The father was there, said Letitia, to “pay the bills and stay out of our life.”
How the tables turned when Paddy came into a considerable fortune! The ink had hardly dried on Paddy’s newly-created will, leaving all to Jason, when Letitia conceived a plot. Next time Paddy visited she would poison him.
Letitia shared her plan with Jason. “You want to be rich? Let’s not hang around. Let’s get rid of him. Here’s the plan…”
Jason was to offer his father a cup of coffee. He was to put the poisonous powder into his father’s mug along with the sugar.
Jason took after his mother – the meanest, nastiest mother ever encountered. When his father visited Jason prepared the coffee as instructed. He gave his mother the special mug.
Thanks so much, Kitchen Cheffie, for yesterday’s fabulous recipe on your website. I used it for dinner last night and everyone loved it, including hubby who doesn’t always eat everything I cook. He’s such a fussy eater! I have never tried Chicken Stew with Duck Confit and Cabbage before. It’s a winner.
As I have said many times before in the comments on your blog, we like to eat healthy. So I omitted everything except for the water and cabbage. Besides, I didn’t have any chicken in the house. Your recommended cooking time was far, far too long and I ended up having to puree the cabbage into a soup because it had disintegrated too much. Seven hours at a low temperature is way too much. Also the yellowing outer leaves of the cabbage discoloured the finished product a little.
Another reason for adapting your recipe was that I didn’t know what Duck Comfort was. You need to explain things sometimes for your readers. I presume it’s some sort of “comfort food” so that was another reason for omitting that ingredient because of unhealthy overtones!!!!!!
I likewise wondered why you cooked it in the oven when the stove top would have been sufficient?
All in all, a wonderful recipe. It’s a keeper. One funny thing happened which I shouldn’t really tell but I simply must! The cabbage was home-grown, so when I took it out of the oven after seven hours there had been a good twenty or so earwigs hiding in the cabbage. They were cooked along with the cabbage! Let’s hope there were no slugs. Next time I’ll cut the cabbage up first – maybe into quarters. The earwigs didn’t matter in the long run because after I pureed everything no one noticed them.
I’m not sure if the huge international following of this blog uses the term “Peggy Squares”. In New Zealand the term goes back to the early 1930s when a six-year-old girl called Peggy started knitting squares (6” by 6”) and getting her mother to darn them together to make blankets for the poor during the Great Depression. It caught on. Every girl and boy in the country began using mother’s unused wool to knit Peggy Squares.
I grew up knitting Peggy Squares. Most boys of my generation did. Boys knitting was commonplace until it was associated with girls only. Sexists.
I THINK that Peggy Squares are different from Granny Squares which I believe came later and are crocheted. Is this right?
Anyway – Peggy and Peggy Squares true or not… every country claims the origin of most things except viruses.
It was 1932. Tommy was seven. He had knitted three Peggy Squares and was taking them to school to go on the pile intended for blanket making. An old spinster aunt called into Tommy’s house. “What are you doing knitting? It’s woman’s stuff,” said the aunt.
Tommy never knitted again. Funny how one little comment can force the whole world into a box.
Lucas had never been popular. At primary school he had tried to buy friends by giving them sweets and cookies; all without much success. At secondary school his attempts at friendship became more expensive; it was sodas and cigarettes. Later he resorted to drugs – not big time drugs – but bits of stuff here and there.
These days he’s rather rich. He’s twice divorced. He drives a fancy car and lives in a fancy house. The house has a tennis court and pool. He neither plays tennis nor swims but who cares? Who cares when you have a gardener and a couple of servants? No one knows exactly where his money comes from.
He still doesn’t have any friends. He says he doesn’t need them. His favourite saying, as he gads about in torn shirt and comfy jeans, is: When you’re as rich as I am you dress how you like.
All that was last week.
This week he got shot in the head. Police said they thought he had mafia connections. They’re not doing much about it because nobody cares. Few attended his funeral. Who would want their name taken down by an undercover agent?
When Bridie went shopping for stuff for the evening meal she had no idea it was all a waste of time. She would be dead as a doornail when the time came for her to peel a potato. She’d be sprawled on the kitchen floor, potato peeler in hand, and surrounded by four uncooked chicken drumsticks haphazardly lying on the kitchen linoleum.
Luckily the cat would spend the next few days enjoying the drumsticks, because Bridie and her medical event weren’t discovered until Wednesday and she had dropped dead on the Monday.
Dora from next door had made the discovery when she noticed that Bridie’s kitchen window had not been shut for the last two days. Bridie had always been careful with security. One had to take special care when one lived alone. Rather foolishly, when Dora discovered the two-day dead corpse she phoned for an ambulance! As if the ambulance people could work a miracle and bring a completely dead (as a doornail) corpse back to life!
Dora had been just about ready to go into town when she thought she had better check on the open kitchen window next door. The discovery of course threw a spanner in the works. It was now late afternoon and Dora still hadn’t got anything for the evening meal.
When Dora went shopping for stuff for the evening meal she had no idea it was all a waste of time. She would be dead as a doornail when the time came for her to crush a couple of garlic cloves. She’d be sprawled on the kitchen floor, garlic press in hand, and surrounded by three unchopped carrots haphazardly lying on the kitchen linoleum.
Fortunately Dora didn’t have a cat; fortunate because cats don’t eat carrots.
Betty got a Valentine’s card in the mail. It was the sweetest card. It read “Will you be my Valentine?” Betty had never received a Valentine’s card before.
Betty was forty-six years old. She had always regarded herself as a bit of wallflower. Spinsterhood, she had determined, was going to be her lot in life. And now this…
She sat in her corner armchair (next to the canary cage) and glowed as she read, and re-read, the card. Who was it from? The canary sang its heart out. There was a knock on the door.
There at the door were twelve red roses. There was no delivery person. Clearly the anonymous admirer had left the roses there himself. How wonderful is that? He must live nearby if he is able to deliver and disappear. But who was it?
There were only two “eligible” bachelors she knew of who lived nearby. There was Hermon Vociferich and Julian McDougall. Both rather handsome. Both rather rich. They lived together. She had always thought they were gay, but she had no reason to think that really. And now, clearly, one of them thought she was worth looking at twice.
Valentine’s Day passed. The next day came and went, and the next day, and the next. Nothing happened. Betty felt sad. The years passed. Betty’s canary was long dead.
Tomorrow the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is springing a surprise afternoon tea for Betty’s sixtieth birthday. It’s a charity she has volunteered a lot for over the years. Betty has always been wonderful! No one knows that she volunteers to help fill a big gap in her heart.
Weave a Web 