Another Tropical Dinner
Lasagne, salad, garlic bread and two leftover onion bhajis from a Friday night takeaway. Mounjaro had made me forget to eat lunch, so the bhajis had one remaining window, and it was Saturday dinner.
Many years ago, my wife made what we still laughingly call the Tropical Dinner.
I can’t remember exactly what was in it. Sausages, definitely. Some sort of tropical rice. Peas, probably. Possibly peppers, possibly pineapple. What I do remember is that it was served with sausages, and that it was an unusual combination, and that the name has stuck ever since. Whenever we hit a particularly random pairing on a plate, someone says “Tropical Dinner” and that’s that.
Saturday’s was another one.
Technically my wife made the dinner. I just assembled the evidence.
It was lasagne, salad and two pieces of garlic bread. Good, sensible, a proper dinner. And on the side, two onion bhajis left over from a Friday night takeaway.
Those bhajis had a shelf life, and I’d been keeping an eye on it. Like the yellow-label doughnuts before them, they weren’t going to last forever, and the window to eat them properly was closing. I’d actually planned to have one for lunch on Saturday. Then lunch came and went and I simply forgot to eat. That’s the Mounjaro for you. Appetite turned down so far that I’d completely missed the middle of the day.
So the only window left was Saturday dinner.
The alternative was the bin, and I’m genuinely incapable of putting perfectly good food in the bin. It’s a character flaw. I’m working on it, one unfinished plate at a time.
It’s also not quite the same as the stuff in the fridge. Everything in our kitchen came out of the same bank account, but takeaway feels different. Something in the fridge is just food we bought at some point. A takeaway is food I specifically ordered and paid for on a Friday night. I bought it. I paid for it. Throwing it away feels like throwing away a decision I already made, and I’m not having that.
So onto the plate they went, next to the lasagne.
Lasagne and onion bhaji. Another Tropical Dinner.
There was no grand plan behind it. Nobody sat down and designed a fusion menu. The bhajis were there, they were edible, and wasting them felt wrong.
I did briefly consider the alternatives.
Sunday breakfast was out. Nobody should be eating bhajis before the coffee has even been made, and I have some standards.
Sunday dinner was also out, and that one would have been genuinely sacrilegious. My wife’s Sunday dinner is not a vehicle for the leftovers of a Friday takeaway. It’s an occasion. Bringing bhajis to the table next to a proper roast would have been a sin against the cooking, and I’m not sure I’d have been forgiven.
So Saturday dinner it was, with lasagne, which I’m told is a legitimate combination for those who lack imagination.
This is the bit that’s changed since starting Mounjaro. I’m eating less, so leftovers don’t disappear the way they used to. Food sits in the fridge waiting for its fate, and my old instinct, I don’t like wasting food, is still very much alive and well. The two don’t always fit together neatly.
Sometimes that gives you something conventional.
Sometimes it gives you lasagne with onion bhaji.
I’m not sure what nationality that makes the meal. But it was good, and it was eaten rather than binned, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it.
I’m also not going to pretend that forgetting lunch is a plan. Skipping meals isn’t the goal. It’s just a side effect I’m still getting used to, and it happens to have collided with an old habit in a way that produced a Saturday dinner nobody would have chosen on purpose.
The Tropical Dinner lives on.