Four Chops Five People

Image by naotakem via Flickr

So a good friend of ours, who is just one of the world’s loveliest people, was telling us recently about how she had forgotten she had invited her friend around for Sunday tea. Her guest turned up on the doorstep, with dessert and a bottle of wine looking forward to a Sunday roast. Our friend already had four pork chops in the oven, for herself, her husband and her two kids… the guest commented how lovely the chops smelled and had arrived just in the knick of time as dinner was about to be served. Not wishing to embarrass herself or her friend by owning up to the fact that she had forgotten she was coming, nor having anything else in to eat, came up with a plan so cunning… etc. She took some slices of white bread, broke them up, then moulded the crumbs into a pork chop shape and poured gravy over this fake chop. Once it was on the plate, covered in gravy it looked exactly like the others, a little too exactly, because instead of keeping the fake-chop for herself, she inadvertently ended up with a real chop. Of course once at the table she couldn’t say anything to the rest of the family, like ‘which one of you has the chop made from bread crumbs?’ so just hoped that they wouldn’t say anything in front of her guest. The meal passed without further incident and the guest left some time late in the evening. Our friend then questioned her family, ‘which one of you had the fake chop made from bread crumbs’ when they’d all stopped laughing it transpired that none of them had, they’d all had real chops. Which meant that the guest had ended up with the fake one made from bread. And you know what? The friend has never said a thing. She must think that, that was the weirdest pork chop she ever had, or that they’d suddenly gone vegetarian and it was made from quorn or nuts or something. Either way, the moral is, that if you are going to fake pork chops using white bread and gravy, be sure to mark the plate someway, because like so much in life, until you bite down, you never can really tell what it is.