Savour high-flying meals

 Mercifully, I didn’t know that when breakfast was served at 10 am.
There was a choice of scrambled eggs or sausages with beans, tomatoes and potatoes. Also on the tray were two white bread rolls, one dyed brown, jam, butter, and a fruit salad. The sausage option was good as airline food goes.
Up the posh end, where I’m sure most of The Financial Gazette readers travel, they had fruit juice, cereal and a choice of scrambled egg wrapped in a pancake, sausage and tomato or a vegetable quiche with a beef sausage, baked beans and potatoes.
Lunch came at 3.15 pm with a salad starter and a main course choice of beef and potatoes or chicken breast and rice both with vegetables. The beef was good and there was an unexpectedly nice Swiss roll for pudding.
Three choices in business class: Fish and potatoes, chicken and pasta and beefsteak and potatoes. The dessert was the same but included fruit and cheese.
Below a row of croissant shaped barchans announced the Sahara and for over an hour there was no sign of humans, just astonishing foodie sand shapes. There were pasta ribbons, bowls, icing sugar slapped on with a spatula, scallops and even an octopus, all mind blowing in their beauty.
As the sun set it tinged pink the tops of the last of the meringue hills, forlorn islands, in a sea of nothing.
Day flights are soon over and as the seat belt lights came on two young women sitting in front of me decided to go to the loo. “I can’t be saying you can’t go when you are pressing!” said a rather funny steward.
At Gatwick en route back we had a very late lunch at Frankie and Bennys. Avoid the side dish of vegetables (2.15.) unless you like lukewarm frozen carrots and broccoli, which tasted as though it had been lightly boiled in sugar water. The most unappetising thing I’ve tasted in years.
The tender salmon fish cakes were bread crumbed and deep-fried and served with an oily tartar sauce and the herb potatoes were chips (9.55.) My friend’s BBQ chicken pizza appeared garnished with bits of chicken biltong. He said it was fine but he’s English. We shared a sticky toffee pudding, which was good.
Dinner was served on the plane at 7.45 pm. The potatoes in the Bombay salad starter were so undercooked that I wondered if it was something else, christophene perhaps. However, the blend of spices was so delicious after the disappointing lunch that I ate it.
It was followed by a choice of chicken tamarind and rice or Mauritian beef curry and rice. The beef curry was good; curry lends itself to aeroplane food as it improves with age. The dessert called itself a white chocolate profiterole. The writing on the lid was so suspiciously small that I brought it home to read with a magnifying glass. It contained sixty ingredients most of them scary.
In business class, they had a chicken and asparagus starter and a main course choice of lamb, chicken or salmon followed by apple and blackberry crumble, fruit and cheese. I did not appreciate being poked in the ribs at 3am to receive a hand wipe when I’d left my tray down, but otherwise the staff was excellent, and the ladies in wedding hats cheered the pilot when we landed in Harare.
Air Zimbabwe
The Travel Centre (opposite Meikles Hotel.)
Telephone 705175 / 6
g.jeke@yahoo.com