Cornish Pasty

So, yesterday I went out with the fam (bb and his wife and daughters), to ... stuff. With bb it's always an adventure, because we go out to get gardening supplies, and instead we end up in Vienna (Virginia, although I wouldn't be surprised if it were Austria, either, knowing him) at a festival with rides and everything and end up in a little Cornish shop that sells pasties.

Pasties (not as in 'Paste' like glue, but pahst .. like ... pahsties ... I guess ... my Cornish isn't very good) are these puff pastries filled with savory stuff, like ground beef and potatoes or ground lamb and potatoes or diced chicken and curry and pees and (wait for it) potatoes.

It was ... AWESOME!

Little EM ordered the Provencial Chicken, a gravy filled goodness that we all agreed was best, but she didn't like it (too ... 'slimy'?), she liked her little sister's sausage roll.

*sigh* 'Merkins. All zey vant iz zee haut-dawg.

But the food wasn't the experience for me.

Okay, so: me, I come in with my big, crushable floppy hat that was supposed to save me from being turned into scalded lobster (do you think, for even one second, that I was spared that fate? The pasties weren't the only thing in that store that was pasty. I have nice sunburn now, as I write. ouch-ouch-ouch!).

Hair hennaed, and I come up to face this tall, towering imposing Bertha with 'Rish Red hair and Hazel eyes and a booming contralto voice, sizing me up and down for the phony that I am ('You're not Cornish. I am Cornish!'), and demanding to know what I want.

That was the first girl in there. 'Girl' meaning 'Grown woman.'

(*sigh*)

Then a guy comes along, behind the counter, and stuffs, like: 50 pasties on a cooking sheet the size of my bed into this huge oven. And he was like rail-thin (her husband?) and a big, red bushy beard, bigger than him, and a thin straw mop of red on top of his peakéd face and wanders back into the kitchen, not saying one word.

My mouth was hanging down by my feet by now.

AND THEN!

And then, we go up to pay and there's this woman half way inbetween those to shapes and sizes with long, red hair, sizing me up, contemptuously ('You're not Cornish, 'Merkin girl'), with blood, red eyes, the same color as my brothers, and, guess who's paying, having an animated conversation with the cashier with hands waving in the way, the only way, Italians can speak?

bb, himself.

And it turns out that that girl, the cashier, is 'Rish-Italian, so bb says, 'I'm Italian, too,' and they start bellowing at each other, in big friendly tones like they've know each other all their lives, trading stories about growing up in Irish-Italian neighborhoods and how their grandmothers would stuff them with food all they while gesticulating and shouting 'Eat! eat! eat!'

And I wanted to say, or did I whisper, 'I am, too!' I'm Irish-Italian too, but when it was my turn to speak, which, in an Irish-Italian conversation, it never is, unless you muscle your way into it, which I don't, so it never is, like I said, ...

... so when it was my turn to speak, I think the words got caught up in my throat when they glared at me when I said, 'um.'

The pasties were really good ... filling, too, I could only manage a few bites before I was full.