cucurbitacae

about a week ago i was visiting a poorly friend. there was a knock on the door and when i opened it the prof, who readers of joker the lurcher's blog will recall, stood on the doorstep. i should explain that the prof is the father of the friend in question, not some random door knocker.

"can i tempt you with a large courgette, madam?" he asked. i made a mental note of this wonderful opening gambit before replying, in a very poor approximation of the accent of a southern belle,

"lordy, i do declare, its a gentleman caller proffering interesting vegetables!"

the courgette turned out to be rather larger than anticipated, and to have two colleagues. i was persuaded by the prof's charm to relieve him of all three, and decided to pass two of them on to some friends who cook for a large group of people. the remaining one sat in the kitchen for a few days, looking reproachful.

eventually i braved matters and attacked the beast with a large knife. the blade merely bounced off. it was fairly obvious nothing short of a chainsaw was going to penetrate its hide. i decided to cook it whole and then cut it afterwards which proved to be a good method.

fast forward to yesterday, when i was forced to tackle the ever-growing pile of spaghetti squashes in the kitchen. the spaghetti squash is a fascinating vegetable. it contains what looks like spaghetti but which is in fact marrowy stuff. having experienced some success with the marrow i resolved to use the same cooking method with the squash.

my son was in the middle of regaling the Ageing Rockstar and me about the difficulties of purchasing a laptop while remaining anonymous (he is paranoid about the authorities being interested in his decidedly uninteresting online existence) when a loud bang emanated from the kitchen. my nerves are not what they were and i leapt up in the air.

"what was that?" asked the Ageing Rockstar.

"sounds like something exploded," said my son.

further investigation established that something had indeed exploded, in the oven. the insides of the oven were coated with the middle of one of the spaghetti squashes, including all the little seeds. fortunately the Ageing Rockstar had the forethought to cover his chicken curry, which was sharing the oven, with silver foil, thus preventing it suffering an incursion of vegetable matter.

"i forgot you were supposed to make a hole in them first," i muttered.

the Ageing Rockstar had to be chivvied out of the kitchen before i tackled the carnage inside the oven. eventually order was restored.

"there's something really nice about eating vegetables you have grown yourself," i mused.

"eating them, not blowing them up," muttered the Ageing Rockstar, bringing to mind Michael Caine's masterly line in the Italian Job...