Twenty percent off Brazilian

 When it gets hot, the dog and I usually lose our appetites. He mooches around the garden, existing on flies and anything tasty that falls from a human plate but sniffs at his bowl as if the contents are toxic. I'm pretty much the same. I can't be bothered to cook but will happily pick from a bowl of crisps or eat delicious tasty morsels cooked by someone else.  In the Summer we usually both lose a little weight and the vet is happy. We go for his boosters and the vet beams, "That's less than last time," forgetting that at the Christmas check up he sucked his teeth and said, "He's put on a bit." And so I remind him, "Yes we both lose a little bit of weight in the Summer and put it back on in the winter. I expect we walk more and eat less when the weather is good." This year the vet might not be so happy. I am unlikely to lose weight because I keep eating out.

I will still look at a large plate of hot food and sniff its toxicity before turning my nose up but restaurants have tasty morsels and salads on the menu and I seem to be able to eat loads of those when someone else has made them.

Yesterday we went to a pub with friends. As it was world Tessellation day I took a photo of the chair.

The menu included some very tasty morsels for starters and there was a salad on the main menu. I quite like to order a vegetarian tart, if it's on the menu just for the comedy value of saying, "I'm the tart," when the waitress brings the food. You can imagine my excitement when I noticed the salad.


Brazilian - Salad with orange, beetroot and pine nuts with a reduced red wine dressing served on a bed of cous cous.

"I'll have a Brazilian please!"

I should have known really. Although I've never had a Brazilian (no one is coming near my nether regions with a wax strip) I can't imagine that they are pleasant.  My grandma nearly had one a few years ago. She had a leaflet through the door from a mobile hairdresser/beauty therapist and was so excited, at ninety, to have her hair done in her own home.
"I'm going to ask for a Brazilian blow-dry," she told us.

The Brazilian salad, was grim. Poorly described as salad, it was, in fact, a large bowl of hot, over-cooked, bland cous-cous with small garnish of wilted arugula,  ten pine nuts, two segments of orange and a few slivers of beetroot.  I had ordered it with extra goat's cheese (2.50 supplement) and I have to say that the 5 pearls of goats cheese were the dish's saviour. The Long Suffering Husband had more salad on his plate of ribs and chips. I'm normally the last person to complain but I would have sent it back if anyone had asked if everything was alright.

At the end of the meal the waitress said,
"Have you finished?"
We all nodded. I, feeling slightly guilty that my poor choice had spoilt everyone else's enjoyment of their meals, which probably tasted nice (if my starter was anything to go by).
"But, it was all good?" she said, picking up my plate.
I'm not good at complaining so I said, "No, actually, I really didn't like that. It wasn't nice."
"But there wasn't anything wrong with it, was there?" she said optimistically.
"Well, it wasn't a salad, was it?" I was getting bolder. "It was described as salad but it was a large bowl of hot cous-cous. No one could eat that much cous-cous and it didn't taste nice."
"Oh," she said, "I'll have a word with Chef."
We wondered what Chef might say to that.  If I was Chef I might be wondering why the waiting staff had let it get to the end of the meal before they noticed that one diner had stuck their fork in the middle of their bowl and was wandering back and forth to the toilet to fill the time. She never told us but when the bill came we noticed that they had taken 20% off the Brazilian.

A Brazilian with 20% off.  Now is that a Hollywood or a Desert Island?