What the eye doesn't see, the stomach doesn't get upset over (Jerome K Jerome)

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Two friends, Chloe and Malcolm, have come to stay. They arrived yesterday and they were in the kitchen chatting to me and to Antonio and Paola (who I had invited to join us for dinner) and at the same time everyone was trying to help with the food preparation. I was making baked, stuffed avocados (which were delicious by the way) and Chloe was preparing the avocados while I made the stuffing. But then when I looked around for the shells to stuff, they were nowhere to be found. It turned out she had misunderstood the plan and thrown them all in the compost bin! Well they were still on the top, and anyway the other things in there were just vegetable peelings. There was nothing else for it. We picked them out, rinsed and dried them, then carried on with the recipe. Antonio missed all this drama because he had gone to look for a bottle of wine at the time. We were enjoying our meal and Antonio was making appreciative noises when somehow the truth came out. He's usually quite fussy about food. There was a discernible pause in the movement of knife and fork… But the rest of us were eating happily and after all, the skins did get washed and they had been cooked; he decided to carry on and had a second helping. That’s probably the kind of thing that makes you want a kitchen that’s out of sight! As usual we had eaten almost everything before I thought to take a photo of the last one! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2026.