Maybe It's a Goat

Fiona, Myles and I are visiting John’s mom this week in Clonbur, county Galway,while John spends most of the week working in Dublin. Grassy, rural and sparsely populated, Clonbur is our favorite place to play outside. But today’s icy rain and hail combined with a north wind makes playing outside rather dismal. Playing inside is fun, as long you move around the house enough to stay warm and oxygenated. The front two rooms of the house are filled with smoke from the smoldering peat and wood fire. I hang out long enough to get warm, which is about how long my eyes can tolerate the smoke. Once tears flow, I know it’s time to wander to the other end of the house to breathe. Lungs refilled with bracing cold air, I dance with the kids to the ABBA cd that they’ve been playing for 2 days. This helps keep us all warm. We used to not be able to play music in Granny’s house because she said she was tone deaf and didn’t like it. Now that she’s becoming just plain deaf she doesn’t seem to notice it. Fiona and Myles have spent the day making up games, including one that involved figuring out which small toys would stick to their cheeks after they licked them. I spend a lot of time staring out the window at the two sheep that have declared squatters’ rights in the yard. Out of sheer boredom, I find myself trying to convince my mother-in-law that one of them is actually a goat. She takes the bait. We’re both strong willed, and spend a lot of our time together subtly trying to prove the other wrong about unimportant things. It’s part of our dynamic. She’s far more stubborn and smarter than I am, so I usually lose the spar. I’m getting a total kick out the fact that I am really convincing her that this ugly old sheep is a goat. She pauses play to make dinner. She rarely accepts my help in cooking or grocery shopping because she says she likes to do these things for us when we visit, which is very sweet of her. But I do feel guilty. She makes us leftovers for dinner – cold ham and last night’s boiled cabbage and potatoes fried together and renamed “bubble and squeak.” This suits us very nicely, as my kids love debating which is the bubble and which is the squeak. As a leftovers queen myself, I love this tradition in English cookery. You mix up what you cooked last night and rebrand it with a charming name, such as Shepherd’s Pie. I think only English cuisine can withstand this second cooking without any change in flavor and texture. It’s a purely lateral move, culinary speaking. Dessert -- or “pudding” as it’s called in these isles -- is a different story. My mother-in-law says it doesn’t keep until the next day, so she never tolerates leftover dessert. She enforces this rule by making sure that everyone stays at the table and continues to eat the dessert she’s made until it’s gone. This sounds like delicious fun until you taste the dessert. Tonight it’s ‘steamed chocolate pudding,’ a soft greasy lump of smooth, slightly salty, wet brown dough. It’s entirely inedible. I later try to figure out how anything can taste so bad. Hard to say what precisely went wrong, but I discover that she used three different sorts of fat in the baking – lard, suet and margarine -- any of which could be rancid. Or perhaps the 23 year old cocoa powder is the culprit. I can’t date the cocoa powder exactly, since it was manufactured before expiration dates became mandatory. But based on the two clues I find on the can, it was purchased sometime in the eighties. It has a price tag in Irish pounds, so it pre-dates the euro. More tellingly, it has a recipe contest with a June 1987 entry deadline. I’m confident that the saltiness was imparted from the plastic tub it was steamed in, since the tub was recently used for steaming steak and kidney pudding. Luckily, the kids and I quickly realize we can hide the pudding in our bowls under the cream we’ve splashed on it. A few strategic smashes with our spoons make it look eaten enough. I can tell the kids share my stress about the forced finish-off-the-pudding rule, because I see them shifting their worried eyes between their grandmother and the remaining wet brown lump on the serving plate. She stands up, hand approaching the lump. Our throats tighten. “I don’t think this was one of my greater successes,” she says. “I think I’ll chuck the rest.” Whew. “If that animal out there were really a goat, I’d throw it outside, since goats will eat just about anything,” she says. She shoots me a hard stare. “But I realize you’re wrong,” she declares, through her wise half-smile. “It can’t be a goat, or else it would have rooted around in the compost. It’s a sheep.” Aarrgghh! She wins, again.