No point in asking you to guess what today's lunch is... you'd never get it in a thousand years. The mashed potato and the water-logged vegetables are easy enough to guess, but that brown lump of soft tissue covered in something purporting to be gravy would never yield up its secret. This I can reveal is a Vienna Steak. I can only imagine it takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683 when the Ottoman Turks surrounded the Austrian capital and tried to starve the citizens out. I imagine rats, cats and dogs were all put to good use in feeding the population. This particular steak is supposed to be pork and beef mince mixed with onion and formed into a tasty steak. Mince is a euphemism for fat and gristle and I can honestly say it is the most unpalatable thing that I've ever put in my mouth. In fact, it was so bad I even took a close-up shot of it to show you.
Looks good, doesn't it? The menu awarded it a smiley face symbol which means it's high in calories (fat is, of course, high in energy) and it also had an S next to it which means it's soft enough to cut with a fork. That's how meat should be, isn't it?
Thank goodness for the tinned pineapple chunks for dessert, otherwise this meal would have been inedible. Actually, I'd forgotten how much I hate tinned pineapple. I thought it might have been fresh. You'd think I would have learned after all this time, wouldn't you?
Hmm so a "steak" is more of a mixed floor-scrapings burger. Someone there is definitely in charge of sexing up the menu! Nothing meets its description!
ReplyDelete*Waves indiscreetly with her dark chocolate bar*
ReplyDeleteOh that is gross TM, I thought it was roast beef on first inspection, then you showed the reality of what it is, or was, or perhaps might have been, think that piece of fat/gristle has seen better days.
ReplyDeleteMy dogs, who would eat a scabby donkey, would turn their noses up at this, what, I have no idea what to call it, answers on a postcard please.
Hi TM,
ReplyDeleteImmediately identified as Chefs Revenge Against Patients - Easy!
Linda Tenerife x
I did some checking up on the internet and Vienna Steak is basically a posh name for a burger. It should be made of beef - and, in the case of the Vienna Steak, good quality beef. Pork does not come into it. So I think you may be able to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority over this one. Well, it's worth a try!
ReplyDeleteYe gods ...
ReplyDeleteI don't know where they think they got the beef ingredient from but it certainly wasn't from anything resembling cattle.
And, as usual, soft enough to be sucked down by the entirely toothless, or poured down a nasogastric feeding tube. I expect there is no flavour and that it smells like old socks (old warmed up hospital gravy does smell like old socks. Or unwashed bodies.)
Keep thinking it might be real pineapple one day.
ReplyDeleteAs Don Quixote said: Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.
Eeew - that looks really unappealing.
ReplyDelete....And there was me thinking things were looking for you. If your weekly food parcels from Mrs TM aren't enough, get in touch. I am close by.....
ReplyDeleteDP
Hmm... Has my location been leake?. Interesting. Email
ReplyDeleteme, I'm intrigued.
Hi TM! I'm back again - this dish you had resembles a Faschiertes Laibchen gone wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt's true the dough for them is made from about a pound of minced pork and minced beef in about equal parts, but then there are added a stale roll bathed in milk oder water (and the liquid squeezed away from it before adding it in), an egg, an onion cut into small cubes, 2 or 3 compartments of garlic crushed into a pulp, marjoran, rosemary, parsley, pepper and salt; the dough is made into balls about the size of a small apple and these have to be slightly flattenend (about as high as a bagel actually), then they are rolled in breadcrumbs mixed with flour and fried in hot oil on the downside and the upside till they are done. Recipe with picture here:
http://rezepte.nit.at/rezepte/faschierte_laibchen.html
You can of course change some spices, e.g I use nutmeg, paprika, hint of chili, and leave out marjoran. But never leave out the spices completely, especially not the garlic, pepper and salt. My mother sometimes left out the bread roll and added rolled oats instead.
The important part is: never serve Faschierte Laibchen with gravy. They'd loose their crunchyness!! Of course there exist a myriad of other recipes containing minced meat, e.g. the small Italian meatballs that are stewed in tomato sugo. There exists a dish that involves making a loaf of spiced minced meat dough and slowly baking it in an oven with carrots and potatoes next to it, and in that case a gravy forms by way of some broth that is frequently versed over it during cooking. I think they make this sometimes in our hospitals and they serve it with potato mash and fried onions. If spiced properly with garlic and so on, these minced meat dishes can be very savoury and good, even if they seem pale when you cut them; and as they come from genuine everyday workpeople's kitchen they do not involve costly parts of meat and are fairly cheap to make.
Best wishes, I hope the Hairy Bikers will put some spice into your food soon!!! Glad to hear you're healing along nicely. Barbara from Styria.
^ A friend of yours [JB] has commented in your defence on the Mail website, giving his location as the City where old hippies go to fade away man, but with good personal hygiene too one has to assume.
ReplyDeleteThat being so, it's not too hard to narrow down your location though I'm not aware the precise hospital has been made public knowledge.
Good work, Holmes. However I have been uprooted from my home town and whisked off to another hospital some distance away. If I were close to home (and I do live 5 minutes from the place you're thinking of) I could have care packages three times a day. Alas I am not. Even so, I'm bearing up very well apart from the tedium.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the now discredited NHS recipe book created by LG's 'Better Hospital Food', a Vienna Steak [ref: B035] is allegedly a beef dish.
ReplyDeleteAs best I can find, the original 'Vienna Steak' was precisely that - a steak. The clue, after all, is in the name.
Rib steak would be pounded, seasoned, floured then quickly fried in butter and served with sauteed onions. (Wiener Rostbraten.)
Its degeneration into a type of mince pattie or burger began in the Sixties it seems; though one could imagine any time post-War it would be a handy way to make the most of any meat bits available.
Have to say that the heavy sweat emanating from yours has an actual air of wilful malice. Sort of a cross between Nicholson in The Shining and Brando in Apocalypse Now.
http://www.ichkoche.at/Faschierte-Laibchen/rezepte/rezeptsuche/index/html/159001
ReplyDeleteOh I just realised there was no picture at the other recipe site. Ok. Hopefully you got your salmon bagle todey, TM?! Greetings from Styria. Barbara
^ ....of course, the wifely pilgrimage!
ReplyDeleteSo an x hour journey from a place of good personal hygiene could, for example, take one to E in D, the birthplace of the singer with a not warm band.
But that's just pure supposition on my part. ;)
yesalmonYes, Barbara, I had salmon bagel and I swear there was some fizzy grape juice to go with it. As for E in D, I'm afraid not.
ReplyDeleteit looked at first as a piece of meatloaf , but the close up denys that , i think instead of asking what is it , we start asking what is it made out of , or who it is made out of , cause if thats beef , i am the queen of siam
ReplyDeletei will be thinking of you as i make my braised shortribs for dinner and wishing i could share with you .
rhonda , usa
The close up does look like the monster from a cheap B-movie...
ReplyDeleteIt's moments like these, when I am confronted by what can only be described as what you would get if the Antichrist were unfortunate enough to ground up by the NHS and jammed into a burger patty, that I remember the following words of a nicely sarcastic friend of mine; "You call this a steak? I call it a mistake, now take it away."
ReplyDeleteI am afraid to comment on this as it, well, what can I say????
ReplyDeleteIt looked okay. mash, veg and a meat with gravy. But the close up pic was revolting!!! Absolutely revolting!
Have you ever read 'Fungus the Bogeyman'? I think he may be the 'chef du jour' in your hospital!!!
OMG !
ReplyDeleteI was going to suggest the "lasagne" last night was false advertising, but this is pretty bad too. Steak? Where?
Sending more hugs and well wishes from Aus. I could send you a cryovac pack of Kangaroo steak if you like LOL even that would taste better. Probably.
;)
(WV: monat - nope the NHS food is not even an impression of real food - FAIL.
I've never understood why caterers feel the need to chop up perfectly pleasantly shaped vegetables into minilego bricks. Well, OK, corn kernals are that size naturally, so are peas. But carrots should at best be batons or at worst cylinder slices, and onions naturally make pretty rings.
ReplyDeleteAnd what they have done to the green beans is positively freudian.
There were mud slides in Italy earlier in the week, I don't know why I'm telling you this.
Vegetables are diced and boiled to buggery for the sake of the dentally challenged.
ReplyDeleteOh. Dear. God.
ReplyDeleteTell me. Did you eat it?
And WHERE is the salmon bagel?
Will send food parcels immediately.
Of course I didn't eat it! I'm trying to get better, not prolong my stay in here. I heard gunshots this afternoon. Either someone shot the chef or else the chef shot the steak!
ReplyDeleteWhat are the white square vegetables? I wasn't aware there were any white square vegetables?!
ReplyDeleteFor the chef to have shot the steak you are assuming it was once alive... and from looking at the picture I kinda doubt that...
ReplyDeleteunless it was put down as a kindness.
;)
TM, check your email......
ReplyDeleteDP
Uff, I am so empathic. I had three operations last year and had to undergo so-called "food" at the hospital three whole times!
ReplyDeleteThe "chicken broth" had to be one of the worst things I'd ever tasted in my life. But later I discovered this site and realised that my hospital "food" experiences were not as bad as some...
http://hospitalfood.tumblr.com/
Love your blog. A friend sent me a link to it.
The white vegetable suares could be kohlrabi pieces (German turnips), they are quite tasty usually (but maybe less so when boiled to extinction).
ReplyDeleteLooks like the mixed veg is from Lidle, dont eat it as it is bad for your eye sight, you strain your eyes looking for the sweet corn..!
ReplyDeleteThe white bits are potato in the veg, so you had mash and cubed, swede is usually off white in colour and is not included in mixed veg, as the smell overpowers the rest of the veg.
As for the steak, it must have come from an aneamic cow on prozac, could it have been Daisy on the Magic Roundabout I wonder??
Ness..xx