Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Feelgood veg of the autumn. Oh, and HIV.

I have this theory: you cannot roast too many vegetables, and you cannot mash too many vegetables. However much you make, if you make it right, it will get eaten. There will never be enough for tomorrow's lunch.

Tonight we had sausages (veggie for me and housemate C, Freedom Food for M), and I made potato, celeriac and garlic mash and roasted carrots, courgettes and shallots. There was some celery soup left from last night, and I did something with veggie Bisto and a blender to create gravy out of it.

I made tons. I used half a big celeriac, eight potatoes, five carrots, four courgettes and a big handful of shallots. I felt sure it was enough to feed six. But no, we ate it all. And how can vegetables be bad for you? This is like intravenous V8 juice, no? We'll be winning awards if we carry on like this.

And *then* we had M's blackberry and apple crumble, in front of Stephen Fry's HIV & Me. I'd like my colleagues in South Africa, Zambia and Malawi to get the chance to see this programme. I think they think HIV is a non-issue in the UK. It's nowhere near as prevalent, but it's still having a massive impact. The young gay guy who had voluntarily had sex with five HIV+ 'gift givers', who then stuck a butt plug in him to maximise the chance of infection... now that I don't pretend to get.

But... there are lots of things I don't pretend to get about *straight* unsafe sex: I do, after all, come from the generation who saw the 1980s tombstone advert (aside: it took all my old-school, and considerable, web searching skills to track this down: you still need archives, if only for when YouTube doesn't deliver) just as we were thinking about getting down to it. I couldn't swear to the fact that I've never taken a risk, but I can definitely come closer to swearing that than most.

We had a little drink, and we shed a little tear. And we snuck into the kitchen one by one to steal the last little bits out of the roasting pan.

joella

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