After Grandma passed away Grampy carried on the her amazing tradition of making a stew on Thursday so all the hungry family members could come over for a bowl throughout the evening and then the leftovers would become a delicious pie on Friday. I used to love Thursday, they were my favourite day of the week! As time went on, Grampy’s stews became more daring with obscure spices in them and random veggies here and then. Then they just got bigger, and bigger and …well … by the time he hung up his stew pan for good (or rather his stew vat!), he would start them on a Wednesday to feed the hungry masses (and we were many freeloading mouths) and then keep on topping up well into the weekend so Uncle Dai would still be eating stew sandwiches on Monday!

As I was reminiscing this with Mum, she told me a marvellous story regarding the family stew – back in the 70’s when Grandma walked into the kitchen to check on the stew , she saw Grampy pouring a brown liquid into the pan and she screeched ‘what are you doing Dennis’, to which he replied ‘putting the gravy mix into the stew’ and Grandma (or Granny as he used to love calling her, to wind her up) despaired ‘that’s not gravy, it’s baby bio!’