I am lucky to have family pretty close to me, which means that spending time together can be easily arranged, whether it’s a day out or a quick visit to each others’ house for a day of gardening or having a meal together. Two things I really missed when I lived overseas: the ability to pop round to friends or family and to have a Sunday roast.
The Sunday roast as an event is epic in British social history – each region will have different variations and each family will have different traditions. You could spend a fair amount of time down the pub discussing whether it is legit to have Yorkshire puddings with roast chicken or how a Sunday roast is different from Christmas dinner. And lets not even start on the lunch time/dinner time discussion.
I love cooking, I believe that cooking for others is a form of love and I enjoy very much squeezing people in to my tiny home for a good old nosh up. I mean, that’s why we have those emergency chairs right ? But, I will also admit that a roast is not the easiest thing to cook. It’s not like a tray bake where you can shove a load of stuff into a pan and it all cooks at the same time. There is an amount of prep needed and them multiple timings for all the elements, trays going in and out of the oven and shouts of “I’m putting the veg on” in a slightly panicked tone.
So, I have decided to put aside the social pressures and the weekend cookng stress to focus instead on more time with the family and less time wrangling gravy. Hence, the invention of Snorker Sunday. We use this term in my family but I have become aware that not everyone uses it. I wonder if it’s come down through the naval family members; snorker means sausage. So once a month or so, my sister and her family come over specifically for Snorker Sunday. They bring something to drink and something simple for pudding, and I provide the sausages and a million condiments. We slather French bread with butter and sit down together to eat sausages until we pop. Sometimes we have salad with them, sometimes we have crisps and dip, sometimes it’s just the basics. Snorker Sunday means we spend stressless time together round the table and most importantly, with minimal washing up. Leftovers are wrapped up to take home for the next day and crumbs easily swept up leaving plenty of time to sit soft and catch up.
Doing things outside of the norm every so often can bring relief, reduce stress, save the pennies and allow you to spend time on the most important things. Sometimes we feel the pressure to do the max all the time (and document it all on social media), which really only leads to increasing stress and pressure. The frugality of taking things right down to their essential element can be liberating in a way – this doesn’t mean that I won’t ever cook a Sunday roast for the family, just that I don’t feel I have to.
What’s your equivalent of Snorker Sunday ?
