Poor girls, changing coffee and UPF pastry!

 Sister has the RSV virus and also a bacterial infection which the hospital doctor said could easily become pneumonia without quick and effective intervention.  She was given a couple of doses of strong antibiotics via cannula in hospital, then sent home after a few hours with more strong antibiotics.  Husband's daughter had a burst cyst in her bile duct, causing a lot of pain and sickness.  Also given antibiotics and painkillers, allowed home but has to have further tests.  Poor ladies, hopefully on the mend soon, they're both still feeling like crap although glad to be home and in their own beds.

I've fallen out of love with my cappuccino and latte coffee sachets that I've been having for years, they just seem to taste very chemically and artificial now, they even seem to have a slightly odd smell.  Perhaps my taste buds have changed....after I lost my sense of smell and taste following the covid or flu thing I had back in October, it's only recently started coming back - or maybe it's my tastes changing as I get older.  Anyhow, I've decided to go back to ground coffee in a cafetiere - which is a good thing, as I won't be buying the UPF cappuccino sachets anymore.  Husband doesn't like ground coffee, but then he hardly ever drinks any kind of coffee, he's a tea man.

Still working my way through the current stock of UPF foods - yesterday I made a potato, cheese & onion pie using readymade frozen pastry and half a jar of bought lasagne white sauce, I added mustard, sage and thyme to the sauce to make it more palatable and interesting, as on tasting a spoonful out of the jar the sauce was very bland.  The other half of the sauce we'll have with filled tortelloni today, I'll add some (bought) pesto to the sauce to perk it up.  Frozen veg on the side.  Upon reading the ingredients list on the pastry pack yesterday, which I'd never actually done before, I was quite shocked to see it contained quite a long list of suspect ingredients, such as palm oil, emulsifiers, sugar (it wasn't even sweet pastry, just ordinary shortcrust, so why does it need sugar?), flavourings (again why?) and colour - erm, why?  It's just pastry!  I think I'll go back to making my own.

I guess I'm realising that all of these UPF things I've got into the bad habit of buying over the past few months are just for the sake of convenience - and laziness, if I'm honest.  It's not like I don't really have the time to make things like pastry and sauces from scratch - I just need to organise my time better.