Polly Poisoned

After a long time away from my Vinca's In Tha Kitchen blog, I find that I am at a bit of a loss regarding content. For a change it's not that I have had blogger's block, more a case of a working holiday in the sun with ten scouts and three other scout leader's. To say the least I am shattered...

While the experience was undoubtedly fun; with a capital F, it was also exhausting on a physical and on an emotional level too. One of the high lights of the trip was the time spent in the kitchen, or rather feeling like a spare part while our Camp Chief took over kitchen duties with the help of two scouts for each day.

Some of what they produced was without a doubt delicious. Take the national dish of Bacon & Cabbage which they whipped up for the International Night last Wednesday (we stayed at an international Scout centre). I never thought I'd be so grateful for such an intrinsically boring dish; don't get me wrong, I do like it - occasionally!

Transporting the main ingredients was well worth the suffering. At Dublin airport two of our leaders having paid extra for a second bag were pronounced to be over weight by fifteen kilo's apiece. The entire contents of their second bags had to be redistributed amongst our hand baggage and the hold baggage of the last four scouts to check in.

I have to say this was some feat of ingenuity and luck. Thirty kilo's into so few made for an interesting story; including that split second when Bridgie's starkly white and somewhat enormous brassier went flying across the marble floor of the airport! Oh, how we laughed...

Bridgie suffered a second boob at Stansted airport as her bag was searched by airport security. His sniffer dog; taking the form of a piece of gauze on the end of a stick became very excited on finding one of the six sides of Irish bacon.

Surrounded by children; marvelling at these events, and one heckling leader all the poor woman could do was laugh and thank God that this was England and not Saudi Arabia! It appears that the saltpetre used in the curing of the bacon had confused the testing machine...

Still; all's well that ends well, eh? Despite carrying numerous packages of sausages, bacon rashers, brown scones, tubs of parsley sauce mix, sachets of knorr instant soups, curry sauces, etc I survived to tell the story. I am getting pretty good at disguising the look of abject disgust when presented with such delights and have also learned how to bite my tongue so as to offend nobody.

Give me the raw ingredients any time. For soup I would rather have boiled up the bones of the previous nights chicken, purchased a tub of butter and some flour for a white sauce, chopped up delicious locally produced vegetables and added my own spices for the curry. Still, I am thankful that I was given a well deserved rest from kitchen duties and a full belly and yes; we had a fabulous time...

I'm off to one of the Scout Mom's houses for coffee and no doubt there will also be some delicious home baking too; which is a far cry from bought confectionery and instant meals!

Polly Pierce
Purveyor of Irish Hand Made Greeting Cards and Wedding Stationary