traditional sunday roasts

what is it about the words roast and sunday that go together and create sunday roast and before you can say pass the bread sauce your saliva ducts start saliva-ating and all you can think about are mounds of golden potatoes, perfect buttery peas and a huge sparkling fresh from the oven chicken with crispy bacon curling over its back, steam rising in the hot kitchen and a table with all your beloved's around it, waiting eagerly and patiently?
its like something out of the Darling Buds of May!
plates heaving with food and gravy and everyone laughing amiably as the red wine is passed from glass to glass.
today we had pheasant no less. not that i ate it being a vegetarian, but that was the sunday roast, no less! fresh from the woods in suffolk! a life of brambles and oak trees, a short stint in the freezer, and then a glorious debut on a happy kitchen table in Highbury.
but god! bloody hell! the LABOUR that goes into putting together a sodding "traditional English Sunday Roast" is just daft. bloody daft! to eat a pheasant by 1.15pm, we got to mother-in-laws at 11am and i basically didn't leave the kitchen until the last splat of breadsauce had been wiped off the plastic table cloth at 2pm. its bonkers!
roast potatoes (involves peeling and chopping and par boiling and fluffing and heating oil roasting);
roast parsnips (as with potatoes);
carrots (peeling and chopping with blunt knife steaming buttering thank goodness no parsley to chop for these ones - not enough manpower to spare);
bread sauce (sticking spices onto an onion in some milk about 4 weeks before lunch is due, then cubing some stale white bread saved especially for the event, then simmering for 15mins - after all that);
cauliflower cheese (cauliflower cheesey white sauce blah blah blah - honestly just make a small one I PROMISE the kids won't eat it);
pheasant (kill in a wood 85 miles away, pluck & sneeze each time pheasant fluff ventures north up a nozzie, scream like a girl when chopping off head and getting out stinky slimy twisty things, hang in London basement for 1 week, freaking out mother of house each time she goes to put a wash on downstairs; wonder how best to freeze then decide plastic bag & bottom drawer of freezer, defrost 3months later, cook in an oven whose door doesn't shut properly, complain bitterly that the oven is shit and the pheasant clearly wasn't defrosted);
OH! and the vegetarians & children all require separate menus SO if you don't mind the list continues with:
sausages (that's relatively easy you think! but NOT when the oven already has cauliflower cheese, pheasant, parsnips & potatoes already in it);
salmon for the pheasant-phobes (same problem as sausages - no room in the oven).
you see, its not so darned simple, is it?
but we got there in the end.
the kids ate their sausages first (where's the ketchup? - so insulting spoilt little brattoss-'s - mine, unfortunately);
then the vegetarians ate their salmon;
then about 1/2hour later the pheasant was finally produced golden crispy meaty smelling and attacked by three people who made out like they'd not eaten since it was actually 'taken' from its happy world in suffolk.
and Liz who had a massive tantrum before lunch - just as the cooks were getting hot under the collar about the lack of co-ordination between the three protein-sources - because ALL I WANT IS A HAM SANDWICH, to which the standard reply was shuddupbrat you must be joking you are eating what you are given YOUNG LADY etc etc - Liz then went on to eat SO much pheaz- I mean - "chicken" that I wonder if the really stinky farts that took place a few hours later were connected?
kind of meaty smelling? may be a bit like the smell outside macdonalds?
so we survived it. but for all the "yeah, lets do a sunday lunch! cool! fab! we can bond over the hob! " well, next weekend its PIZZA all round.
Open box
Turn on oven
Put in oven for 10 minutes
Eat
(possibly burp too)
Return to Cbeebies / newspaper - ignore each other happily for rest of day.
Sunday Roast MY ARSE!
(although it tastes a darn sight nicer than a tesco budget pizza with "real" mozzarella)