Pimping my nuts….

It’s so easy to lose control. I am bitterly aware that one can have enough of a good thing, and it was clear that my nuts were starting to play too big a part in my life. There is a moment when a halt has to be called, although I cannot remember a previous moment of voluntary halt calling. That might be due to failing memory, curtain drawing or the fact that it was an agency outside of myself that had rung the bell and called “time, drink up please”. However, I had reached the point were I needed to know when almonds ceased to be a super food and transmogrified into a surfeit, less slippery than lampreys, but a surfeit nonetheless. There being no resident agony aunt in La Moussiere, I was reduced to imitating the birds in our roof by tweeting. Having tweeted I received an answer in a twinkling of tweetime : less of an answer, more of a recipe. The question of surfeit was ignored. It appears that giving the almonds a short soaking in soy and sugar, and then roasting them for 10 minutes or so, would give me something to chew on whilst I continued to cast about for a solution to my “knutty” problem.  They are very good, but in the end the unpimped version rules. 

My twitter agony aunt is @shotbykim who is linked to a brilliant site http://beerlens.com/ for those amongst you who would like to see how the renaissance of the traditional English pub is faring, together with other bars.

Ca me donne la peche….just peachy.

Peaches are forever associated with superlatives, be it with regard to a ravishingly  beautiful person, an exotic vehicle or a perfect uppercut. The expression of  this perfection is often quantified in terms of “peachiness”. Having skin like a peach is a compliment that oozes “peachiness” in its allusion to perfection, as does the suggestion that a pair, of whatever they may be go, together like” peaches and cream”. When I hear my neighbour say, “dis donc, Roger, t’as la pêche aujourd’hui!”, it’s clear that my beaming smile has overwhelmed them or, as is the usual case, it’s clear that they’re being ironic. I love peaches and they haven’t arrived yet; well, not in France. The peaches that have arrived, in the shops here,  are from Spain and don’t have the unmistakeable scent and colour of the perfect peach as they’ve been dragged into ripeness by man rather than by mother nature. Still, there was no resisting them for this pillar of weakness. Even an “unpeachy” peach can be made ambrosial by the addition of sugar, lemon juice, honey and heat. These peaches were split and pitted: the hollows were filled with lemon juice and demerara sugar and the whole thing napped with good honey before being put under a very hot grill until they looked “peachy” enough to eat.

These latish things remind me of you…

” A bowl of peaches that are slowly ripening,

A simple salad on a summer evening….” These and other equally delicious things remind me of you, Summer. I’m impatiently awaiting your arrival; my mind is filled with memories of our last meeting that I daily embellish with tiny, delicious details that add another layer of longing, and even a frisson of excitement, to the promise of the first blush of your warm front. It all seems so long ago, our last tryst; probably because it was. An unreasonably and, more to the point, unseasonably long time ago. To you, the beating heart of the careless changing seasons, nothing but an  unrecognisable, infinitesimal blip, but for us mortals, a good slice out of the three score and ten summers predicted by the Good Book. Will the picnic become as rare an event as the sighting of a snow leopard knitting? Will ” le dejeuner sur l’herbe” become “le dejeuner sur la moquette devant la cheminée”?

As sure as politics are pointless, and game shows are bollocks, we will once again find ourselves biting into sand filled sandwiches, sipping warm rosé from a plastic cup and thinking that “These lumpfish things remind me of caviar”. And then it’ll be Christmas again.

Panning for gold….

“I break some good eggs into a bowl, I beat them well, I put in a good piece of butter in the pan. I throw the eggs into it and I shake it constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you.” This was the ground breaking secret recipe that the Mere Poulard revealed after  endless enquiries into the secret of her world  renowned omelettes. Painstaking experiments have led me to the conclusion that if you don’t “beat them well” first, the same system makes a fine fried egg. Being greeted by the sun this morning was as good a reason as any to enjoy a substantial breakfast, and with an egg looking as good as this one, there was no time for the niceties of the table. This is a wonderful way of eating as the food stays at the right temperature and there is less washing up. Apart from such practicalities, there is the opportunity for the eyes to feast on the beauty of a golden egg in a well used, delicately patinated copper pan whilst the palate is getting on with its own fun.  As with so many good things, as hard as one tries to spin it out, it’s over too soon. But in the end I got a good picture as did Gustave Courbet.

Kiss and Make up……

Being nearly June, I’m surprised to still be lighting the fire at the end of each day. As the nights are still cold I find that we are continuing the winter ritual of watching television, in the warm glow of the fire,  whereas I would be expecting to be enjoying long evenings in the garden. It seems the programmers have the same view or why else would they be offering such a paucity of worthwhile shows to watch. Because of this seasonal aberration I’ve been finding out about stuff that I didn’t need to know. Hotels that offer accommodation at £15,ooo per night, a boxer (worth $200 ooo,ooo) being offered an amnesty on a prison sentence for assaulting his wife because he’s worth more to Las Vegas free and fighting, the editor in chief of a well known glossy magazine demanding that hotels, worldwide, are aware her slightest whims, with regard to her arrogant self importance, in advance, to save her those two or three extra minutes at the reception desk on arrival, the fact that a self satisfied lump has sold himself and his chums as a multi million dollar brand does not make me want to Kiss and Makeup: it  makes me want to take a piss and throw up. Time for a walk in the country As I walked up the lane I fell into step with Marie-Therese, the wife of one of our neighbours, who was heading up the hill to fetch a tractor back to the farm. Her husband, Patrick, was spreading shit on the fields and I couldn’t help thinking that I knew of far better places for it.

” What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Risotto rice being turned in oil with shallots

..and it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again!” I knew from an early age what was the matter with Mary Jane. She, very wisely, fucking hated rice pudding from the first moment that her misguided English mother served her a particularly vile version of this shining example of what is laughingly known as “English nursery food”. Nursery food is the San Andreas fault in the privileged classes of English society. It might well account for the “asses” in “classes”. Overcooked, barely seasoned food was the staple diet of the poor, because that is all they had, and it was also the chosen diet of the rich, because that is what they liked. Poor children were bullied and beaten as a matter of survival in the rough environment into which they had unwillingly been thrust, whereas the wealthy had to pay a great deal of money to recreate a similar scenario for their offspring in vastly expensive private institutions where buggery, bullying and privilege walked hand in hand: it’s not a far cry for the imagination to work out a possible origin for the name of the Bullingdon. The battle of Waterloo may well have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but the experiences in the showers afterwards probably led quite a few alumni to the public conveniences of Waterloo Station to relive those stimulating moments.

the oil coated rice is slowly cooked in hot stock and white wine

Back to rice. We were not immediate bedfellows, unlike those victors of Waterloo. Foil containers littered with half eaten takeaways and dead cigarette ends are amongst  my clearest youthful memories of rice. Rice was a sustainer, a substance to pack out the highly coloured MSG flavoured gloop that no indigenous Chinese would have recognised as part of his national cuisine. It took me a long time to recognise the glamour in rice and I can clearly remember when I found it and where. It was, of course, in Italy. I was offered a dish of Risi e Bisi at which I couldn’t turn my nose up because it was offered by friends. Risi e Bisi needs to be soupy, a fact of which I, the ingénue,  was unaware. The visual attributes of sloppy, soupy rice and peas do not immediately make the heart strings go “zing”, but the first mouthful did the business. I realised that I had badly misjudged rice.  It’s taken a while, but rice and I are good now. This is a simple risotto of prawn, lemon, peas and white wine.

Soft centred Sundae…..

There is such a silence this Sunday morning. Even the birds are in quiet contemplation. The soft hum of the computer and the click clack of the keyboard  is all that breaks the hush. Once it would have been the scratching of a pen nib on paper. That times have changed is confirmed by the swiftly passing roar of jet engines  from an empty blue sky. Les Saintes Glaces have made their exit for another year which means, according to mediaeval beliefs still strongly held, that clouts can be cast off: a little earlier than English clout casting, which attends the end of May, but that’s the French for you. Can’t wait to take them off. This day should herald the arrival of summerish things, if not summer itself, but there is still a chill in the air. More firewood was delivered yesterday as the wood burner is still lit each night. In part for “convivialité” but mostly for warmth which, at this juncture of the year, I don’t remember happening before. It might just be that I feel the cold more and nothing has changed.

But, in the wake of the Saintes Glaces, the sun was shining to lure the unwary into casting their clouts. I decided on cake and coffee in the sunshine, but remained fully clouted. The cake looks good, but looks alone, as we all  know to our cost, can deceive. Born of the most complicated and time consuming recipe, this confection emerged from the oven looking as it should. Being by nature an upside down cake, this means to say that it emerged as in a breach birth, bottom first. The perfection of a bottom is not the ideal yardstick by which to measure perfection: tell that to the roués in a Parisian café as they watch the derrières go by. I made this fatal error. Even when cooled and turned over, the cake looked right – rightish. The layer of of orange slices that I had candied, so patiently, in syrup ( I somehow used a kilo of sugar in the making of this cake, and only used half of the recommended ingredients) but the centre slice did seem to be lurching to one  side. As I carefully laid the glaze onto the top of the candied citrus slices, bubbles appeared around the centre slice. Like a pilot ignoring all the alarms in the cockpit, I ploughed on relentlessly, even though the inkling of suspicion had turned into an inkblot. The truth of the matter was: the middle of the cake remained uncooked – what a total bastard that sweet new born was turning out to be. No backbone whatsoever, a soft centred, lily livered excuse for a cake. But, as the Curate’s Egg, this cake was good in parts. I dug out the offending centre and spooned it into muffin cases, and put them into a very hot oven for 20 minutes. The cake now had two tiny twin siblings, that not only looked good, but were sticky and delicious. Now didn’t I hear that someone once took a rib from someone in order to create…..

Making sense of it all….a recipe

The problem – Arrange the above into a well loved phrase or breakfast

Hours spent carving my name, into the already scarred, wooden lid of my desk, during mathematics lessons, instilled in me the belief that there is no more sense in the answer than there is in the question. “Problems” were the problem. My problem lay in an underwhelming disinterest in divining the answer to the mathematical “problem” set before me. The authors of my mathematical text book had attempted to inject interest and excitement by including trains and fat men into the fabric of the questions.  Which of two trains would emerge first from a tunnel, or how much water a fat man would displace from a bath were, in my mind, just a matter for conjecture rather than calculation. I could imagine the colour, shape and noise of the trains and have a vividly clear view of the countryside through which the two engines were racing headlong towards a tunnel entrance with but a single track for the two trains. The dreadful explosion as the blackboard cleaner hit the back of my head for the third time that morning meant that I missed the denouement, but there would always be another problem, another train, another story.  I just did not give a fig as my mind was already gainfully occupied day dreaming in a question free world of fantasy where trains did my bidding and fat men in baths were not part of the equation. As each mathematical problem appeared to me as a senseless, random set of words and numbers, guess work was my only route to an answer. If there was one benefit from this fruitless exercise, it was to warn me off gambling, as I patently had no ability at picking the winner. Forswearing gambling has allowed me to devote much more time than I would otherwise have had to a more catholic variety of misbehaviours, for which I will be eternally grateful.

Q.E.D

Nobody hears an apple scream…..

Had the Swiss version of apple ducking taken place in the present “caring” climate, William Tell’s son would have been whisked away by Social Services before you could say “Please, Daddy, stop firing arrows at my head”. The Swiss, with that irrepressible sense of humour for which they are so well known, preferred to call it “arrow ducking”: more precise, more funny. Precision gives the Swiss a hard on, whereas smiling or laughing just wastes time and there’s certainly no money in it. As so often happens, the sport was adopted by the good ole US of A who, with the memory of General Custer’s inept display of “arrow ducking” during the contretemps at the Little Big Horn still fresh in the common memory,  decided to rename it “apple” ducking. As the Constitution allows, and Moses (that’s Charlton Heston) demands, that they carry assault rifles, it is now more commonly known as “apple fucking”. There is another version of the game that doesn’t involve weapons, but it’s quite dull unless someone drowns.

apple puff pastry tart

I recently did three things with apples that didn’t involve anyone getting hurt. The apples didn’t like it, but nobody hears an apple scream. ( Is that a good name for an apple dish, or is that a good name?) This is the simplest of apple confections on a puff pastry base. What makes it so delicious, if not handsome, is the cooking of the apples before they find their way on to the pastry. Sweet apples are peeled, cored and sliced before being slowly cooked in a great deal of butter. Several heaped tablespoons of dense, dark sucre vergeoise are added, followed by a good teaspoon of vanilla paste. This mixture bubbles on a low heat until the apples have softened, at which time the heat is turned up until the sauce reduces t0 a stickiness and the apples start to catch. The apples are then put on the pastry base and cooked for 25 in an oven at 190C.

baked Granny Smiths with molasses

Baked apples in my experience have on occasion, on quite a few occasions, been a dreadful let down. They’ve looked the part, but not tasted as good as the tart.These apples were traditional large, green, Granny Smiths: the ne ultra plus of apples for baking. On this occasion they were cored, and stuffed with sultanas, raisins, walnuts and tamped down, like naval cannons, with crumbly demerara sugar. A bag of hardened molasses, reminiscent of a bag of concrete that had been left out in the rain, was beaten into pieces and the shards and lumps showered over the tightly packed apples. More molasses were melted and poured over the waiting fruit, I think, and maybe some other ingredients, but that’s all in the past. I do remember cooking them for a good 50 mins in an oven at 190C. They were unbelievably good with some Ginger Pig Vanilla ice cream which my son, Sam, had wisely invested in.

apple crumble

Finally there’s a simple apple crumble. I made this from an often used recipe in Caroline Conran’s 70′s classic “Poor Cook”. I still treasure a battered copy of this gem on my book shelves, and never was a book more appositely titled.I made my crumble with dessert apples, as I didn’t have any Granny Smiths, or should it be Mamet Smiths, as we’re in France.  When you have prepared the dry ingredient mix for the topping, it is worth splashing on some drops of cold water and mixing it in with a spoon. This creates lumps in the mix that are delicious when cooked.

Having a breakdown….

My specialist subject is not “The Workings of the Internal Combustion Engine”. This became apparent when, after pushing all the knobs and turning all the keys marked “Start”, nothing happened save the creation of a telling noise that had heads in the car park turning in sympathy, but mainly in derision. Sitting inside a upholstered, metal box that has lost its only worthwhile quality, that of locomotion, is a signal moment. Whether the inanimate invalid is equipped with Xenon lights and triple boost go very fast stuff or with one broken headlight and a tiny lawn mower engine, it is rendered a piece of shit by not moving. Staring knowledgeably at the buttons and dials is the first move, followed by lifting the bonnet ( “hood” to you Transatlantic gangstas, while we effete sons of Albion stick with Little Bo Peep’s headgear) and staring at the meaningless conjunction of pipes, cylinders and wires that lies beneath this protective carapace. Praying, shouting and physically assaulting the pneumatically supported shitheap is another regularly chosen option in amateur, emergency vehicle repairs. Thank God we’ve been taught that there is a recovery position for humans, or the casualty list caused by amateur vehicle repairers turned first aider would be attritional.

Mental breakdowns are more acceptable than those of a  mechanical nature in France. Mental breakdowns are to be expected, given the insanity of the prevailing bureaucracy, but mechanical breakdowns are taken as a direct insult by the offended insurance company who had accepted your premium as a deserved gift rather than as a bartering chip for services that would only serve to inconvenience their employees and subcontractors. A person enjoying the life afforded by la belle France soon becomes inured to the torture of the hoops to be jumped through when faced with any form of bureaucracy. A point is quickly reached where the law of do as you would be done by falls with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who do not care how you are done by and are safe in the knowledge that you cannot do by them as you so very much would like to do. I spent many hours in this Kafkaesque scenario of phone calls, dossier numbers, approvals and strange waiting places to gain the services of the driver of a towing truck, in what little time he had available for work between meals and drinks, so that I could  be deposited in another empty hall where I awaited a taxi, called from the farthest limits of the Hexagon, to eventually return me home. I will be there for a while as there is now no car, and the last bus went many years ago.

If Tolkien or J.K.Rowling had written Owners Manuals, instead of wasting their talent on magic and myth, we would all be as capable of changing a cam belt as easily as saying our ACB: this is written to synchronise with current state of the R’s, or is that spelt Arse. The little known, and little read, Korean author who writes all user manuals for the world is sadly misunderstood. This might be because he writes in a dialect, so rarefied that in comparison Esperanto could be considered as the unifying international lingua franca, in which he is the only fluent writer and speaker. God knows, he has been consistent, and his international employers could not have been more supportive. They know that in the end the world will understand, and at last recognise the deeply hidden talents of Abso Lutebo Lox.