Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day in England.  It isn't in France, so even if I had wanted to buy my mum a card, they're not in the shops here yet!

Not a problem, as I rarely buy cards.  I much prefer to make them.  As my mum is an ace patchworker and quilter, I thought I would make her something appropriate.  Out came the seldom used sewing machine and the reading glasses so that I could measure the various pieces of cardstock and cut them into "inchies" - as the name suggests, these are one inch squares.  After that it was just a matter of patient sticking, stitching, and adding a couple of embellishments at the end.....

Happy Mother's Day, Mum!

Pants and Tea Parties

The thought just popped into my head that it must be about a week since I last posted anything and, as I look at the calendar, I'm stunned to find that it's actually 10 days.  Where does the time go?  I've no idea, but here are some of the things we've been up to during that time......

Kevin bought some new pants.  Not just any pants, but 3-D flexible pants, as worn by French rugby players (if the advertising is to be believed!).  I rather think he was more influenced by the brand name - DIM - when it came to the modelling session!

The mention of French rugby players (be still my beating heart!) brings to mind my favourite comment from the France v. England match on Sunday.  Commentator Brian Moore, expressing his view of a refereeing decision, declared, "I'm not impressed that the referee speaks fluent French.  That just means he's wrong in two languages."

We decanted the sloe gin that I made last October.  My first ever attempt at sloe gin has been languishing in the pantry (apart from regular shaking of the jar) since 27th October 2011.  I don't actually like gin, so I was rather interested to see how it would turn out.  It's sweet, fruity, with a hint of spice (I put a cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves in with the sloes) and absolutely delicious.  Obviously, the tasting session accounts for a couple of the days when I didn't post on the blog.....

My secateurs and I are currently engaged in the extremely uphill task of trying to clear a path through the brambles so that people can walk along the riverside to the "gouffre" (a little pool that Athos likes to swim in, currently only accessible by walking along in the river).  Whilst snipping, chopping, and raking, I unearthed this pretty little bottle.  I've no idea how long it has lain buried by the Boulzane, but it is now all clean and awaiting a bright idea!

We've had a couple of tea parties - civilized affairs allowing for the use of the Wedgwood and my grandmother's cut glass cake stand.  Top left is Saint Nigella's wonderful "Non-cake maker's Christmas Cake" - a dense, moist, fruit cake made using mincemeat (or, in my case, the quincemeat I made before Christmas).  Top right is a rather nice banana bread.  Front and centre are the now ubiquitous "Uncle Neddies".

And I managed to write a few letters, which I took to the post office yesterday.  The lovely Christelle is shy and would only pose for a photo if she was allowed to hide behind one of my homemade envelopes......

Busy, busy, busy!

Apologies, dear readers, for my absence from the blogosphere.  The reasons for a lack of posts have been two-fold.  Firstly, our friends Myriam and Yvan had to go to Barcelona for 10 days and asked us to look after their animals while they were away.

Their animals consist of seven horses (including the beautiful filly Arouane),

and a dog (Bitxu, on the right, son of Athos).

We found that having just one extra dog actually doubled the amount of time we had to devote to canine exercise.  Normally, Kevin does the morning walk and I do the afternoon, but with the two dogs we both had to go on both walks.  Phew!  Luckily, seven horses don't actually take much "looking after" for non-riders such as us.  Just checking that there are the correct number of legs on each horse and that they've all got something to eat was about the sum of our duties, to be honest.  Although when they ran out of "something to eat", our previously undiscovered hay-shifting abilities came into force.....

Kevin is the first to admit that his skills "lie mostly in PR".

Here he is in full-on management mode, watching Diane making way for the hay bale!

 It may look easy, but getting the string off one of those bales is hard work!

By the way, my single-glove look is not some bizarre rural tribute to the late Michael Jackson.  It was an attempt to protect the other reason for a lack of recent blog posts - an injured digit....

As I know that at least one of my regular readers is fantastically squeamish, I've left the bandage on!  This was the result of a slight miscalculation when slicing a "batard" for lunch guests.  A batard is a large version of a baguette.  Yes, it is French for bastard and yes, it did live up to its name!

More food!

Continuing my food theme, here are a few more "experiments" -

some of which were more successful than others!

The cheerfully coloured thing on the right wasn't an experiment, as I have made it several times before.  Sweet Potato Tagine, from a BBC Food website recipe.  I now leave out the green olives on the original recipe because, frankly, they don't add much.  I also omit the preserved lemons, because I don't like them.  And serving the tagine with the Lemon Couscous included in the recipe would be a complete no-no in a house where the couscous word is only ever pronounced with venom.  Instead we ate it with the yummy looking bread alongside, which was made with a Francine "Pain Maison" mix.  I have yet to find a French equivalent of "strong white bread flour".  All I can find in our neck of the woods is flour with all sorts of raising agents already in it, so that you just add dried yeast.  I've tried a few and this was my first real success.

Back to the sainted Nigella for a little treat for me.  Kevin isn't really a cake fan, so when I am occasionally overcome by the need for "CAKE!", the best thing to do is make something small.  (Only because if I make something big I end up eating it all anyway!).  These were Nigella's Christmas Morning Muffins, which, as you can see, I ate as suggested on the recipe, warm from the oven and spread with butter.  Like this they were gorgeous.  I must admit that I thought them less exciting once they had cooled, as I found them a bit chewy.

This is my "potato pastry thing".  The recipe was titled "Potato-pastry Leek and Mushroom Tart".  The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a lack of mushrooms on the finished product.  I didn't have any mushrooms, so used some cherry tomatoes instead.  Prettier anyway!  Despite being re-named "Leek and Fart Pie" by my Chief Taster before he had even tasted it, the tart was delicious and we polished off the whole thing for lunch!  It's a great way of using up a bit of leftover boiled or mashed potato.  You add 100g of mashed spud to your pastry mixture and it comes out light as a feather and beautifully crispy.  I'll definitely be making this one again - although next time I think I'm going to try adding some finely chopped fresh rosemary (which we have growing in the garden) to the pastry mix to make it even yummier.

No experimental cooking session would be complete without something massively sweet.  This time it was a Good Housekeeping recipe for Dark Chocolate and Coconut Fudge.  I was interested by the recipe because it only required a bit of melting of ingredients and stirring, no actual cooking.  Quite nice as an easily-made massive sugar hit, all it really did was prove that "proper" fudge has to be cooked to the right temperature or the texture isn't right.  Given that Kevin is as particular about the texture of fudge as I am about the correct use of the apostrophe, I'll be sticking to more traditional methods of fudge cooking in future!

Widening the Repertoire

I have hundreds of recipes that I haven't tried yet.  Like most people, I tend to stick with familiar things that we like.  Then suddenly I go through a phase of trying new recipes, keeping the ones we like and recycling the ones we don't.  That way the culinary repertoire at La Folie is frequently refreshed.  Some of my successes over the past couple of weeks include.....



Broccoli Clafoutis

Any foodies reading this will be thinking, "but clafoutis is sweet!"  Well, usually it is, but you can follow the same idea for savoury, replacing the sugar with grated parmesan.  The broccoli florets are cooked in a mixture of milk, eggs, and cheese and it comes out like a kind of quiche without the pastry (which, for people like me who are not particularly fond of pastry, is a bonus!).

Nigella's "Holiday Hotcake"

What a thing of great joy!  Very easy to make, once you can persuade yourself to pour boiling water over a bowl containing what essentially is a cake batter.  I have learned that when a Nigella recipe includes the words "trust me", she feels your suspicion but urges you onward.  The top comes out like a lovely moist sponge pudding with a layer of Christmassy-spiced sauce underneath.  I only wish I had had some Advocaat in the cupboard to make the "Egg Nog Cream" that was suggested on the recipe.

Potato and Banana Curry

Yes, you read that right, banana.  Sounds bizarre, tastes fabulous!  You use green (i.e. madly underripe) bananas and add them in at the end of cooking for a couple of minutes in a sauce that includes turmeric, ginger, and coconut milk.  Yummers!  This was our lunch on Valentine's Day, and was followed by....

Cherry Clafoutis

In an unusual fit of romanticism, I decided to christen the heart-shaped silicone mould that I bought in a sale at Lidl (!!!) over a year ago and hadn't yet used.  (I also had to bypass the fact that Kevin always calls clafoutis "Chlamydia Pie".  I don't know why, you'll have to ask him!).  I used up the other half of the tin of coconut milk from the curry in this, but have to confess that I couldn't really detect the coconut flavour in the finished object.  Nonetheless, it was delicious.

History in my sewing box

One good thing about being stuck indoors by lots of snow is that you have the time to get round to all those fiddly little jobs that seem to wait forever while you find five minutes to do them.  One such job was mending a hole in one of Kevin's smarty-tarty lambswool jumpers.  It has been looking accusingly at me from the wardrobe for over two weeks, so I decided to break out my extensive stock of vintage darning wool and get to work.

Of course, being probably the only person left on the planet who keeps darning wool in her sewing box means that none of the wools I had was the right colour.  Wah!!

Which proved to be less of a problem than I had thought, as the hole was in a seam, so it didn't need darning at all, just careful sewing up with tiny stitches and strong thread.  BTW, can you see that little multi-coloured cushion lurking in my sewing box?

Well, that was my Dad's pin cushion.  Stitched by him and in which he stuck his needles when he was doing needlepoint!  My Dad had always been too busy working to have any hobbies, but when he retired the fact that my Mum and I had been stitching away at things for decades obviously left its mark, as he took up needlepoint.  And very good at it he was, too!  When my Dad died in 2003, Mum gave me his pincushion.

And it now lives in my sewing box along with the beaded and embroidered needle case made for me by my Mum and a "vintage" wooden needle holder with a picture of Hastings Pier on it (!), which belonged to my Gran (Dad's Mum!).  So there really is history in my sewing box!

It's all in the timing!

In a rash moment back in December, I signed up for a swap called "31 Letter Challenge".  I hadn't properly considered how much of a challenge it would be but, I made it!!

One of the swap requirements was that each letter be enclosed in a handmade or hand decorated envelope.  These are my letters and a big chunk of an old copy of Good Housekeeping gave its life to make the envies!

On Sunday afternoon, Kevin and I wielded the shovels and cleared a path through the snow and ice that had been lying on our garden all week so that Emily could get out onto the road and we could go shopping and, more importantly, to the post office.  My little box of 31 letters is now winging its way to Georgia, USA!

It was the first time I used one of Julie's lovely return address stickers!

And our timing was perfect, as this is what was happening to next door's tree at 09.30 this morning!  Yup, there's more white stuff falling out of the sky.