Don’t you just love those two Hairy Bikers? I know I do. I was watching re-runs of Dave and Si’s Mums Know Best show the other day and I do adore how they cook up crazily calorific food and try to pass it off as good, old-fashioned family favourites. Wholesome stuff. But do ‘mams’ know best, boys? Really? Because I swear I just saw one mother deep-fry haggis wrapped in tortilla bread. (She was Scottish – say no more.) And another mum dish up a dinner consisting of nothing but baked breadcrumbs and cheese. I don’t think this bodes well for the obesity epidemic.
Still, this show makes me wonder what kind of amazing meals I’ll cook up for my future family. I see my idealised self serving up meat and two veg followed by a bracing walk in the country. I’ll pack my kids off to school with perfect lunchboxes brimming with carrot sticks, and not a Wagon Wheel in sight. An apple or a handful of goji berries will be a treat. Who knows, maybe I’ll even ban TV and make them eat mung beans when I finally morph into Gwyneth Paltrow.
Nope, I won’t be like cheese or haggis lady. Or that teen mum with the tramp-stamp I saw on the bus the other day giving her baby a bottle of Dr Pepper to drink. Not me.
I will be a model mother...
And then I realise – I’m the kind of person who’s capable of consuming an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s for lunch. Yep, lunch! Eating habits as erratic and unhealthy as mine are hardly going to set a good example for my future offspring. I couldn’t even get my ex-dog’s diet right. I spurned that special, expensive stuff they try to flog you down the vet’s in favour of, well... Any old crap, really.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of my dead dog’s eating career... Leftovers galore. Christmas dinner. A whole Christmas pudding, uncooked – including the best part of the broken Pyrex dish he’d smashed when pulling said pudding off the kitchen counter. Seventeen tea-towels. The corner of an MDF cupboard. The Vaseline and chilli powder mixture smeared on the corner of said cupboard to stop him chewing it. A feather pillow. Pondweed. Pebbles. Sand. His own vomit. The crotch out of my brother’s pants. A sparerib, whole, which then had to be extracted from his backside – whole. And, reluctantly, dog food.
He couldn’t abide cucumbers though. Go figure.
Conclusion? My kids are going to be fucked up fatties. So what the hell! I’m gonna embrace my inner irresponsible fat mam and share my equivalent of cheese lady’s family favourite. Cheese stars.
