Driven to drink

Diary of a homebird
Ciara Galvin

THE finer things in life make me happy. To me, there’s nothing better than a thoroughly indulgent meal accompanied by a delicious full-bodied red wine. It’s no wonder so that January is, quite frankly, no craic.
Like everyone in the country I’ve taken to persecuting myself for my Christmas piggery. Instead of a sleep in and a turkey sambo, it’s now 6.30am wakeup calls for the gym and ‘berry boost smoothies’. Even the drink has been banished. I’ve been attempting to do ‘Dry January’.
Recently myself and the Boyf invited the roomies for dinner. Very grown up, I know. I saw it as an occasion to have a little ‘cheat meal’. Something uber rich and calorific. But alcohol would be a no no. I would be the gracious host, offer the roomies wine, but abstain myself.
I had planned to cook a Beef Stroganoff, a dish I always liked but had never actually cooked myself, so good old Google was hit repeatedly.
I picked a recipe that seemed pretty straight forward, like a ‘Stroganoff for dummies’. What could go wrong?
I bought all the ingredients, quality beef from the local butcher, sour cream etc. On my way home I popped into the male roomie at work to say hello. Of course he had his colleagues, Mary et al, filled in on that evening’s planned dining soiree. The soiree that was ever approaching and, as the female roomie, would say ‘not a child in the house washed’ … or an onion peeled for that matter.
When asked what was on the menu, I replied ‘You’ll be lucky if you get a bowl of soup’, and warned that while I cooked, he and madre could be on hoovering duty, such was the current state of the house.
On arriving home, I headed straight for the drinks cabinet. No, I wasn’t hitting the bottle just yet – my recipe required a slosh of brandy. I thought, ‘Of course we had brandy, at Christmas we were inundated with Hennessy’s finest’. But alas, not a bottle in sight. Dejected, I quickly began Googling once more. ‘Can you use whiskey instead of brandy in Beef Stroganoff?’.  I was out of luck, and time was ticking.
I improvised, using white wine instead, as another recipe suggested. The pressure was on. I resembled a chemist in a lab. The Boyf hoovered around my feet. The music from ‘Countdown’ buzzed in my head. I texted madre to urge them to take their time. ‘No need to rush’.
Finally, with the brown ‘slop’ ready in the pan, I broke. Telling myself that it would be rude to let our guests drink alone, I picked a nice bottle of red. ‘Would one glass even count?’.
Then, like a sign from the gods (or a sign of my complete incompetency), the cork broke.
Naturally, I chose to ignore ‘the sign’, and opened another bottle of red and tucked in, waiting for the roomies to arrive.
Roll on February.

In her fortnightly Diary of a Home Bird column, Ciara Galvin reveals the trials and tribulations of a twenty-something year old trying to get used to living away from her parents.