Why? Just... Why?

You can't get proper sausages in Moscow. Not British sausages, at any rate. I know it's not just in Russia that this is the case since I'm not alone in this particular expat lament: I have a girlfriend who left the UK for the US a few years ago and who comes back with her family every summer, not only to reconnect with her roots and family, but at least in part to gorge on home-grown sausages.

And frankly, who wouldn't? They're all the things one shouldn't eat; fatty, full of god-knows-what, cholesterol-raising little bites of heaven. And for some crazy reason, they don't seem to be available over here.

Oh, there is talk of sausages, yes. But they're either frankfurters or salami-type creations, not crispy-on-the-outside-melting-on-the-inside-deliciousness occasions of culinary sin like they are back home. And whilst I would hate to give you the wrong impression of our usually healthy diet consisting only of processed food and convenience snacks (who, me?) I do believe in moderation in all things so in the UK, once every few weeks, sausages would show up on the menu at Restaurant Potty.

Since we've been in Moscow, however? Just the once. Let me tell you why.

In the absence of our beloved British sausages I decided to give frankfurters a try. Well, the Boys had eaten them at a friend's in the UK, and from what I could see they were quite easy to cook. Just grill or boil them, right? Not ever having cooked them at home I had no experience here so it was by pure chance that I decided to go with the boiling approach rather than grilling them. If I had done the latter I think the first time I would have realised they were encased in a coat you are supposed to remove before eating would have been when the hot plastic hit the roof of my mouth (or, even worse, the Boys'). Don't panic though - for the speed readers amongst you who didn't follow that sentence completely, I did not grill them. No, I boiled them, and luckily spotted - and removed - their plastic jackets (which I'm afraid to say reminded me unfortunately of - well - you know) before the sausages made it onto a serving plate.

But no, it's not the plastic coating that inspired the title of this post. That comes from the moment I cut the frankfurters open before giving them to the Boys, just to check that eyes and teeth weren't too much in evidence. (What? What do you think goes into these things?). And, no, I didn't find any visible identifiable remains. But what I did find was mayonnaise.

Inside the frankfurter. Speckled through it, actually, like little lumps of fat.

I dry-heaved - and you have my permission to do the same.

(In fact, you'll be in good company if you do, as if Footballer's Knees is reading this I know she will already have done so because she did exactly that when I told her this sorry tale at our family lunch last weekend).

This being zero-hour, however, and having no other dinner options for Boys #1 and #2, I'm ashamed to say that I did serve these abominations up - de-jacketed, obviously - along with steamed veggies and baked potatoes.

And in the usual way of things, these frankfurters being hideously 'wrong' and just about as revolting a thing as I have ever cooked, the Boys loved them.

What it is to have a discerning audience, eh?