N.H.S. Soup and other Culinary Delights

After N.H.S. custard, how about N.H.S. soup? Well, no thanks, not surprisingly. When you're suck in a hospital bed and rely on being fed the food they dish up, your appetite isn't up to much, you've just had an operation and you feel like throwing up every half hour or so, what can be worse when you've ordered food form the list they send round each day, you order soup and when it eventually arrives (by which time you may well have completely forgotten what it was you ticked on the menu-form) and soup turns up, and you look at it in it's bowl, it's a thick gloop, thicker than the average sauce you cook your chicken in, one of those ready-made sauces such as Chicken Tonight, this soup doesn't exactly help your appetite. Like the custard I've already mentioned in a previous post, it just doesn't move or if you turn the bowl upside down, it doesn't fall out of the bowl. You could use it to fill in the gaps in your bathroom grouting or down the edge of the bath. Just plain disgusting.

Hey, another thing. If you order omelette, it can come with gravy! If you so wish. But, please, who on earth eats GRAVY with omelette? What sort of culinary genius came up with THAT! I know if I mention such delights as mushy peas I'll no doubt be shot down in flames, but they are so disgusting and unpleasant to the taste, and usually a totally unnatural green-colour (not sure that peas are bright green like that, they must put artificial colour in to give it that awful colour.) Well, what else is on the menu for the next day? I'll have a look this morning when I'm with Carol on the ward and give you an idea. I might even take a photo with my iPhone and post it on here.

Does all this hark back to the dark days of World War 2, when people were on rationing, and food was difficult to come by, what with dried egg, Wilton Pie, shortages of virtually every food staple you could think off, and perhaps all this carried on afterwards and the N.H.S. was set up so the food had to be the same as army or any other service, regulation menus, all manner of nasty things such as lumpy custard and tepid soup, thin watery dinners (such as I had when I was at Rushmoor School) and you weren't allowed to complain. Over-cooked cabbage. Liver that tasted bitter and had the consistency of rubber (not that I've eaten rubber.) Watered-down custard, as well as treacle and jam.  Well, that's a failing of the British, 'make do and mend,' 'put up or shut up' and of course, queuing like it was going out of fashion and DEFINITELY never complaining (but moaning continuously about all these things but not doing anything about it.) Rather in the fashion of characters in an Alan Bennet television play. Why do we put up with poor service and food in motorway service areas, school dinners, tea made with teabags on bits of string that you have to dunk in hot (not boiled) water (a rather cheap importation from America, I fear.) An insult when most British people know how to make a proper brew, always boil fresh water, never reuse water that's already in the kettle and then let the pot stand for a while to 'mash.' And generally very sloppy service.

An update

This lunch time I had to walk all the way to the main entrance to get something for my lunch. I got a baguette from the small shop, which turned out to be only reasonable for taste. The bread was like eating cotton wool, a mouthful of mush which I didn't exactly enjoy, but, hey, why complain? I had to get the wretched Hospicom card topped up and got a £10 note out of the A.T.M. and then went to the shops to try and get it changed into 10 £1 coins (a repetition of a few day's previously, as recorded on here a couple of posts ago.) The Hospital Friends shop in the Out-Patients department couldn't change the note and by now I was getting a bit annoyed. If they insist on having this television service, they could at least make sure the vending machines that you use to top up the cards work properly and most of all take the new notes which have come out recently. In the end I managed to discover that there was another Friends shop near Ward 20, but on the lower level, right next to the hospital restaurant. The lady on the till was reluctant to give me the change, saying that she wasn't supposed to change people's notes as she had done for me, but nevertheless less she did and I was glad she was able to and eventually get the card topped up. All I can say is- what a performance and how many miles did I have to walk to get the confounded card topped up?

By the time I got back to Carol on the ward she had been served her lunch. It had been eaten, but there was a lot of it left. It was supposed to be either chicken or beef pie, but it didn't look in the least like any pie I've ever seen. Just a load of brown mush and the pastry looked almost raw. What ever is it about hospital food? Why does it have to be so awful?