Mince and Peas

Mince dishes, well specifically mince in sauce, do very little for me.  Recipes that many hold in high regard, old favourites like spag bol, cottage pie or lasagne, send shivers down my spine. This is all down to my mum's cooking.  My mum is by no means a bad cook, pretty much everything was cooked from scratch and there was always lots of veg, and her willingness for foreign foods has played a big part in my broadness of taste now.  She loved cooking with mince though and she would happily serve lasagne, spag bol and chili in the same week, and the week after, and the week after, and so on and so forth.  And so whilst the stir fries, fajitas and kebabs have left me loving all foods foreign I've got no time for mince.

Mince and peas holds fond memories for me though.  I've only had it a couple of times too, at about age 15 when working as a labourer on a Wolverhampton high rise council estate.  I was doing a couple of weeks work for a friend of my dad and every morning I'd leave my house in the Buckinghamshire countryside and make the hour journey up the motorway to the kind of estate I'd never seen before.  I'd spend a morning lifting and cutting blocks for block paving and then at lunch head to the chip shop where, alongside the various battered delicacies, you could pay 70p for a polystyrene plate of chips with a ladle of rich, beefy, salty mince and peas poured on top.  Whether it was the chips or the flavour enhancer laden gravy, something about that mince and peas didn't have the usual effect.