Andy Jones and Robert Bryndza
Andy Jones – Andy is the author of the bestselling novel The Two Of Us.
I’m sure we ate on Sundays. I mean, we must have done, right? I grew up in North Wales, and both my parents are from Liverpool, so we spent approximately 48 Sundays a year heading up and down the M53. Me and my brother fighting on the back seat for the full hour and fifteen minutes each way. In Liverpool we would visit two sets of grandparents and possibly an aunt and uncle for good measure, the sequence and duration of each appointment giving my parents plenty of ammunition for their own front-seat squabbling. As for food, my recollections are a little vague. My gran would occasionally make what she referred to as pizzas, but which were, in fact, slices of stale white bread smeared with tomato puree and layered with rubbery cheese. She was pretty much blind at the time, so these distant relatives of the Italian classic were ugly, uneven articles – more reminiscent of a violent collision than a culinary process. I didn’t even like tomato puree. So Sunday dinners didn’t feature prominently in my youth.
Now, I’m father to two little girls, and we travel fewer miles on a Sunday. The girls’ grandparents live at the opposite end of the country, giving me an ironclad excuse for not visiting them every bloody weekend. We try and eat around the table as a family a few times a week, but the girls are still young and more inclined to wear their food rather than eat it. So it’s not often we go the whole hog, or cow, or chicken. We save the traditional roast for occasions when friends come over for Sunday dinner. And maybe this is just my experience, but this seem to have become the new tradition – the way we do Sundays when work and life removes us from our immediate families. No-one, of course, can replace your parents (trust me, I’ve asked around), but I’m lucky to have a very special group of friends who are happy to fill on a Sunday. Close friends in every sense of the word; love, trust and proximity. Better still, they’re all much better cooks than my gran.
Robert Bryndza – Robert is the author of the bestselling romantic comedy ‘Coco Pinchard’ series.
Growing up in our house. It was all about the gravy. It had to be thick, it had to be rich, and there HAD to be gallons of it. A Sunday lunch without gravy didn’t – and still doesn’t – bear thinking about.
Bookaholic Confessions 