A Visit from my Mother - with good local food!

I've been neglecting the blog for a while because my mum has been staying with me - and we had ten years' worth of talking to catch up on!
I waved her off for the next part of her Grand Tour around the family this morning, so now I'm as back to normal as I ever get.

So we've been eating very well while she was here.
On the first evening we went up to the Blue Boar and had a lovely chilli.
We've eaten Welsh Dragon sausages from Gibbons on Castle Street, and gorgeous lamb chops from the Small Farm butcher on Broad Street, with veg from Stuart the greengrocer.
We got chips to go with our meal from Terri's Takeaway, and Mum was very complementary about how good they were.
There was delicious boiled ham and roast beef from Londis. I had mentioned getting sausage rolls, so Mum was looking at the sausage rolls there (they're nice, but nothing unusual). I steered her away. "We're not getting sausage rolls," I said. "We're getting Sausage Rolls!" The ones at the Wholefood shop are a meal in themselves. We had the leek and sage ones, which I suggested was a "gateway drug" and Derek preferred to describe as the "gateway sausage roll", to encourage people to try the other varieties. Sadly, there were no black pudding sausage rolls (my favourite) - but this week Mum will be going to Bury Market in Lancashire, the home of black puddings. We've checked - the black pudding stall is still there!
Mum had a special meal she wanted to cook, something she cooks in Cyprus where she lives now, so I set foot in Waitrose in Hereford for the very first time to find the broad, flat spaghetti she needed to go with the mince (local, organic) and bechemel sauce.
There is now a Patisserie Valerie in Hereford. In the corner of Debenhams, to be precise. I couldn't just walk past it! And there we found a very superior double-decker vanilla slice - something that Mum had been really looking forward to eating again, because she can't get them in Cyprus!
On Wednesday night, we had chips at the Baskerville acoustic evening.
We had sticky cakes from the stall in the Cheesemarket.
On Saturday night we went to Yak-y-da, the Gurkha restaurant just outside Hay. Glasbury taxis took us there and back in a minibus because their car had broken down - though that was better for Mum, because she has a bit of difficulty climbing into, and out of, a car these days. She had a Thai chicken curry, and I had the Mountain Lamb curry because I always enjoy that. Both were delicious, and the ice cream we had for dessert was really rich and creamy.
And the final evening meal of her stay was a venison casserole with meat from the Broad Street butcher again, with leek and mushroom and the special sauce that the Young Man brought with him when he came on holiday last.

It's not really surprising that she had a bit of trouble fitting into clothes that she thought were her size when we went shopping!