A jam session

Over more years than I can believe of providing breakfasts for guests from all over Europe (and now all over the world), I've learned that there are two sorts of jam that will always fly out of the pot almost faster than I can make them: one is strawberry, the other apricot. Sometimes, here, you'll find on the markets little pots of home-made but ponced up jams such as strawberry and mint, or apricot, lemongrass, rum and cardamom (?!), which to be honest are not really ma tasse du thé: I just want to taste fruit, big fruit and more fruit. So with a few exceptions (like courgette, which on its own is pretty boring ...) I don't add anything to my jams except sugar.

My own very most favouritest jam in the universe is apricot. I adore everything about it it: the tartness, the colour, the smell, the flavour, and at this time of year I'm like a excited hunting dog who can sense in the air the approach of the hunting season. And so when in my usual greengrocer's yesterday I spied a bunch of elderly women in flowery pinafores all jostling round some crates right at the back in the corner I knew straight away what they were up to: apricots! In spite of not wearing the trademark apron and slippers I made a beeline for their corner, and sure enough there they were: an 'arrivage' of 5 kilo crates of the biggest apricots I've ever seen - the size of small peaches, in fact - from Trouillas, in the neighbouring department of Pyrénées-Orientales where we reckon the best apricots come from. They were Pinkcots, one of the earliest varieties and a new one to me, but they tasted good, and anyway all those pinafores can't be wrong ..... so having indulged in the obligatory nods, half smiles, tastings and finally conversations, I was eventually permitted to join their number and appropriate a crate.

In my never-ending quest for flavour, I've fiddled and farted around with my methods over the last few years and now make jam quite differently from how I used to do it in England. My aim is to cook the fruit for as short a time as I can get away with, so I start by macerating it with the sugar overnight; that means I'm starting off with the sugar already liquified which cuts precious minutes off the cooking time.

Then there's the sugar. We can't buy pectin here, so I use this ...

... special jam making sugar which dissolves easily and has natural pectin added to it, which means no need to add lemon juice and adulterate the flavour of the fruit.

And then there's the thorny question of when it's done. I much prefer the French set, which is a lot lighter than the more typical stand-your-spoon-up-in-it English one, and so these days I tend to stop as soon as the jam hits 103°C (sometimes even 102°) instead of boiling it for 5 minutes at 104° as so many UK recipes would have you do. But mostly I do it by ear, by feel and and by eye: when it's ready the bubbling sound changes timbre, the spoon drags ever-so-slightly more in the fruit, and when I flip a little bit onto the granite worktop and wobble it with my finger it feels like jam. At that point I do the fridge test: I take the pan off the heat, put a teaspoon of the jam onto a cold saucer and stick it into the fridge for 5 minutes. If after that it's clearly jam, we're there. (Some books will tell you to look for wrinkles, to which I'd say 'yes, but ... too much wrinkle, too solid a set'. If that happens, no worries: add a little fruit juice to the pan, bring it back up to temperature and test again). And that's it. Whole batch done and dusted in 12 minutes.

This morning, observed by a salivating guest, I made 2 batches: one with 600g of sugar per kilo of fruit, which gives a very light, almost compôte-like jam (on the left in the photo below); the other - on the right - with 750g of sugar per kilo of fruit, which makes a more traditional jam.

It'll be on the breakfast table, along with several other flavours, tomorrow ....

PS  Oups - I nearly forgot to mention the free froth! As the fruit and sugar mixture comes up to the boil, it froths up like mad and threatens to invade the kitchen like something out of a sci-fi novel. All the books will tell you to scoop it out and discard it. I don't. Or rather, I do scoop it out, but I never discard it. I let it sit for a while; it'll separate into a light foam at the top and a syrup at the bottom. I pour the syrup into some glasses, add a little Amaretto, then mix the froth into some crème fraîche or whipped cream and spoon it over. Et voilà ... free dessert. It's a bit like a mousse or syllabub, and quite, quite delicious.

Comfort cooking: panforte

I was sorting out the food cellar and larder yesterday, as you do when it's minus 13 outside, you're snowed in, the paint you want to use is frozen solid in the workshop and it's too cold to mix up your tile cement or do any of the things marked 'desperately urgent' on your jobs list. (I even defrosted the freezer. Mad? No, not really - no worries about keeping stuff frozen - I just piled it all up on the snow outside the cellar door ...). Anyway, in the depths of the larder I came across a jar of lemon peel that I'd inadvertently (long story) candied last year and forgotten about. Idly wondering what to do with it, I switched on the laptop to check the mail and there was the latest blog post from David Lebovitz, one of my favourite food bloggers, with a recipe for panforte.

I love panforte. It's a speciality of Sienna: a kind of rich, dense, sweet and chewy dessert cake, with lots of fruit and nuts (and candied lemon peel!) and more than a hint of spices - perfect after dinner with a strong coffee and a glass of Strega. I've eaten it many times, during and after our winter trips to Tuscany in the restaurant days, but I'd never made it, nor had a clue to how to make it. The combination of David's blog, my jar of lemon peel and and sheer frustration at the way the weather here is holding up the jobs list big time propelled me into the kitchen for a spot of comfort cooking.

I discovered that panforte is not difficult to make, although you do have to work fast when you're mixing the melted chocolate and the honey syrup into the dry ingredients. This is my slightly amended version of David's recipe:

40g unsweetened cocoa powder, plus extra for dusting the tin
200g chopped nuts - I used almonds and the last of our own walnuts
100g chopped dried apricots
110g flour
200g chopped candied lemon peel
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground red chilli
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice 
85g dark chocolate, chopped
200g sugar
210g clear honey

1. Preheat the oven to 165ºC.

2. Line the bottom of a 22cm springform tin with parchment paper. Dust the inside, including the sides, with cocoa powder.

3. In a large bowl, mix together the cocoa powder, dried fruit, nuts, flour, candied peel, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, mixed spice, and red chilli.

4. Melt the chocolate in a small bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Remove from heat and stir it into the nut mixture.

5. Gently heat the sugar and honey to115ºC.

6. Pour the hot honey syrup over the nut mixture and immediately stir it all well to mix. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

7. Bake the panforte for 30-35 minutes; the centre will feel soft, like just-baked custard, and if you touch it, your finger will come away clean when it’s done. Let it cool in the tin on a wire rack for 15 minutes, then run a knife around the edge to loosen it. Remove the springform carefully, then let cool completely.

Once it's cool, remove the bottom of the springform pan and peel away the parchment paper. Then wrap it up and put it away for a few days to bring out the flavours. When you're ready to eat it, dust the top with icing sugar and rub it in with your fingers.

Here it is just out of the oven:

And how it will look when it's dusted and cut (this is David's photo: mine's not at that stage yet!):

Right now it's wrapped up, maturing ....... though for how long I'll have the willpower to leave it there I don't know! If it's good it's likely to find its way onto our winter menus ...

My favourite weather forecaster, Laurent Cabrol on Europe 1, announced this morning that we would almost certainly see a change in the weather in the middle of the month ... though probably not for the better. All the forecasts seem to agree that the 'big freeze' is likely to continue until the end of the month, possibly through into March. Minus 16 predicted for us tonight (with a 'feels like' figure of minus 19 ...). We're still snowed/iced in, though rumour has it that our neighbour may attempt a breakout tomorrow. Watch this space.

Three-times cooked chips

So, by popular request, the nuts and bolts of frites maison Grillou:


1. Cut some floury potatoes into chips - I reckon mine were somewhere between half to three quarters of a centimetre thick.

2 .Put the chips into cold water with a teaspoon of salt, and bring to the boil. Simmer for one minute until they're just tender to the point of a knife. Drain, spread them out on a tea towel to dry, then chill in the fridge.

3. Heat the oil - mine's two thirds colza (rapeseed) plus one third sunflower - to 130 degrees and cook the chips for 6 minutes. They should be slightly dry on the surface but not browned at all. The idea of this stage is to cook them inside so that they end up fluffy. Drain, and if you have time cool/chill them again  (I cooled them but didn't have time to chill them).

4. Heat the oil again to 180 degrees and cook the chips for two to three minutes, until they're golden but not brown. Drain on kitchen paper and salt while really hot.

Enjoy!

A frite on my shoulder

Yesterday I did something that I would never, in a million years, have imagined myself doing. (Yes, I will tell you what it was. But you'll have to read on ....).

Rewind - ahem - several years. Let me just say that whereas my mother may have had many good qualities, cooking was not among them. We subsisted largely on a diet of tough grey meat, soggy potatoes, greens that managed to be grey, tough and soggy at the same time, and convenience foods. It was so bad that I thought school dinners were gourmet extravaganzas; my dad, meanwhile, got his fix of food with taste by lunching every day at various Italian, Bangladeshi and Caribbean greasy spoons in London's East End. What we never had at home was anything deep-fried. Deep-fried food was deemed to be - how can I put it? - a bit common (probably a small mercy given that mum would almost certainly have set fire to the kitchen). Visiting the fish and chip shop was acceptable - once - whilst on holiday; otherwise, never.

I first encountered proper frites while working as a student in a hotel in the Swiss Alps. Every morning M. le Patron would cut - by hand - a veritable Alp of chips; he'd blanch them in boiling water, then dry and chill them before frying them at a low temperature for five minutes or so. After that they'd be drained and refrigerated, to await the lunch service when they'd be cooked again, to order, at a high temperature. They were fantastic - soft and fluffy on the inside, crisp and golden on the outside. No wonder diners came from far and wide to eat them.

A few years later my then partner had a habit of cooking up pans of late-night chips in the house we shared with our somewhat outrageous friends Bob and Mike. The house would miraculously fill up with Acton's weird and wonderful, who would stay until the early hours while John (that one, not this one) would produce bowl after bowl of frites to accompany the endless bottles of bad wine we drank while sewing women's knickers (don't ask). I was much too terrified to go anywhere near the kitchen, the idea of a saucepan full of boiling oil  - we had no mod cons like chip baskets - on a gas hob being just t o o o o far outside my comfort zone. And then with the end of that relationship came the end of my eating frites maison for 20 odd years ...

... until last night. Because what I did yesterday was ... buy a deep fryer.

It's posh. It's from Lidl. That is not a contradiction in terms. So before you - as I would have done until recently - pour scorn on my choice of shop, let me tell you that in the last couple of years I've bought from Lidl (amongst other things): an orbital sander and a detail sander, both of which clearly come out of the Bosch factory; an espresso machine that is indistinguishable from the Moulinex model; an SDS drill of indeterminate provenance but as functional and robust as anything you could find; plus various kettles, toasters, kitchen scales, bagless vacuum cleaners, hand blenders, parasols, garden chairs and other stuff, all at around a third of the price of proper 'branded' goods and all with a three year warranty. Still laughing?

I bought it with fantasies of making panisse and briks and courgette flower fritters and tempura and churros and felafel and pakora and bhajis and accras de morue and puris and whitebait et al. And I shall. But last night there was only one thing to cook.

Frites, M. le Patron style. And oh my god, they were good.

Seeing red ...

We've just spent some time exploring and chilling in the Pays Basque (yes, yes, a holiday ... what Protestant work ethic?). It's not a region that I knew well: one camping holiday many years ago (it rained), and another five years ago when we were house hunting (too expensive, and it rained). Well, guess what? It didn't rain. Not once, in 17 days. And we loved it.

Many things stand out in my memory - the ocean, the light, the green conical hills, the unpronounceable language, the food - but none more than the colour red. To explore a French Basque village is to feast on a symphony of red and white: red shutters and columbage set starkly against the white of the lime used in the facades. It doesn't do to be an individualist here.

And as if all that weren't enough, there's the red of the Espelette peppers that help make the local cuisine so distinctive and of which I've been an unconditional fan for a long time. So of course an early pilgrimage to Espelette itself was called for - that's it, in the first picture above - to worship at the feet of the piment and its growers.

As you can see, Espelette does a pretty good job of worshipping at the piment's feet all on its own. But for all that it remains a very attractive and characterful place. We went on a long walk in the hills around the village, and it was a Big Thing for me to see fields of the newly planted seedlings everywhere. I even managed to persuade one of the growers to let us have a few plants to bring home, although I'm not quite sure what to make of the way he laughed so maniacally when I told him we lived at an altitude of 500 metres ....

And then we came home.

And it rained. And rained. And rained.

And in the tiniest window between the opening of the heavens, we picked 12 kilos of red cherries.

It's our biggest, best and - erm - reddest crop since we moved here.

One weekend, several hours with the cherry stoners, ten pots of cherry jam, seven bottles of conserve, one clafoutis and a huge tray of frozen cherries later, and I'm still seeing red.

Oh, and it's still raining.

Eat your weeds

When I was ten, I would do almost anything to get out of eating greens. Mind you, in retrospect I think I was displaying precocious good taste, my mother’s use of the word ‘greens’ being very probably an offence under the Trades Descriptions Act because green they certainly were not. No, given the kind of treatment that only my mother could inflict, they were a kind of dirty grey-brown, smelly and slimy. Appetising, non? All the more bizarre, then, that my mother’s whinging, foot-stamping daughter has turned into a green freak, mad about growing them, cooking them, eating them … and, er, gathering them (come on, if nature is going to provide me with food without me slaving away over hot soil or crawling round in the soil by moonlight picking off slugs, then who am I to argue?). 

Having been somewhat preoccupied with other matters, such as fitting The Most Complicated Shower Door In The Universe, we've been neglecting the potager somewhat of late, so that its lovely, pristine, dug over and manured state has turned into a field of weeds. But as I noticed this morning as I was standing nearby painting three concrete posts (don't ask), they're not just any old weeds. They're fat hen weeds. 

Also known as Lambs Quarters or by its botanical name Chenopodium Album (but you knew that, didn't you?), fat hen is apparently one of the most ubiquitous and widely distributed plants on earth: it’s been a staple in the diets of many countries for thousands of years. And it just loves potagers and allotments and vegetable gardens of all kinds - I think it sees them as a challenge. It can be used in the same way as spinach, and is good simply cooked with butter and nutmeg, or in a gratin or tart. In the resto days when I actually (sigh) had time to cook (and people paid me ... sigh again), I used to make fat hen gnocchi; at the end of a long hot réno day though that just felt like one fiddle too far, so tonight it found its way into a frittata with some local cheese, the last of last year's crop of butternut squash, a handful of left over corn and some crème fraîche. And tomorrow it will turn itself into a fat hen risotto, made using stock from the weekend's roast chicken (aaargh - I'm beginning to sound like Nigel Slater).

And then it will meet an unhappy end under the hoe.

From Facebook to Face Feeding .....

It's been an interesting few days. Firstly, I found myself back in contact with two friends who I lost touch with 15 years ago, after we lived together in an intentional community in Dorset. Quite how we lost touch I'm not sure; one is recently back from living in Eastern Europe, which might have something to do with it, while the other has ended up back not a million miles from where we left off. It was Facebook that dunnit, one of those infernal friends of friends of friends things that I usually ignore (I'm not big on FB, though maybe I need to pay better attention ....). And so I was transported back to the days of running dance retreats and camps and living in tent and tipi circles on the land for three months in the summer and smelling of woodsmoke and trying to work out how to survive in winter in a big but beautiful draughty old Dorset thatched farmhouse on which I and another member had blagged a ninety thousand pound mortgage from Barclays (which was a fortune then, especially for a bunch of hippies with no proper income ....). Oh, and cooking for huge numbers of people.

And it was while I was ruminating on the trials and tribulations of cooking for groups that the second thing happened: I was approached to see if I'd be interested in cooking for twenty people on retreat, for 10 days. Vegan, of course. I spent - ooh, all of thirty seconds thinking about it. And then I said no. (Well, come on, haven't I got enough jobs to be going on with?). In my last-but-seventh incarnation as co-owner of a vegetarian guest house I reckon over half our guests were vegan, and it was a huge challenge, in the days before Terre a Terre and Denis Cotter and the like, to create interesting menus for them. Particularly traumatic was the annual visit, for a week at a time, of a lovely vegan family of four from Hull - they came three times altogether: that's 21 different vegan three course dinners ...... (We must have done something right though; recently my then-partner encountered, purely by chance, a woman who turned out to be one of the daughters; although she was only eight then, she still remembered eating dinner with us ....).

And it was while I was ruminating on the trials and tribulations of cooking for vegans that I had a sudden craving for something we used to cook in great quantities in our early restaurant days. So I dropped my plastering float and made it, there and then. It's just as good as ever, and I thought you might like to make it too. And so here is the recipe, reproduced shamelessly from our second cook book, which was called slowcafefood.


(very) sticky date gingerbread


Okay, here it is - the darkest, richest, stickiest thing ever. You've been badgering us for this one ever since we made the first one in our tea room days and it went within a couple of hours. Now who would have thought that a vegan cake would be so popular? Yes, this one contains absolutely no animal or animal derived products at all. No eggs, no butter, no honey … sounds gross (but, oh, it isn't). If you make no other cake from this book, make this one.


Having developed quite a repertoire of gluten free and sugar free dessert cakes, we've been working recently on coming up with some vegan ones. We know we've succeeded when most of the people eating them have no idea that what they're eating is 'different' in some way, because we really hate sidelining certain kinds of eaters, just as we hate being 'catered for' if we want to eat veggie in a restaurant or pub or hotel (in fact best not let me loose on this one - it's one of my major soapbox subjects). Vegan-cakes-I-have-known tend to be of the worthy wholefood variety, which are - er - very nice and all that, but come on - how many times have you heard the words 'vegan' and 'wicked' used in the same sentence? This cake, however, is most definitely wicked. Especially with (close your eyes, you vegans out there) a large dollop of Greek yoghurt or cream. You can eat this any time with a cup of good coffee, but it’s brilliant dressed up as a dessert in any number of ways. Try it, for instance, with slow roasted pears and ginger flavoured crème fraîche; or cut into thin fingers, arranged artfully over a rhubarb compote and drizzled with a vegan shrikand cream ...


Now we’ve never got tired of either eating or making this one just as it is, but ruminating away at the back of my mind are one or two variations. What would it be like, for instance, as a chocolate ginger cake, made by substituting some of the flour with organic cocoa?  And perhaps throwing in some roasted hazelnuts or walnuts as well? I hope some of you are tempted to do a little fiddling around if you discover you like this cake as much as we do. So I guess you’d better have the recipe:


200g white flour
150g wholemeal flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
125g dates, chopped very thinly (otherwise they'll sink)
4 or 5 round stems of preserved ginger (the kind that comes in syrup), thinly sliced
125g Demerara sugar
150g black treacle
150g golden syrup
125ml sunflower or soya oil
125ml soya milk


Sift the flours and put all the dry stuff and fruit into a big bowl. Gently warm the treacle and syrup to blend them together, then when the mixture's cooled slightly (not too much otherwise it'll be too viscous) stir in the oil and then the soya milk. Don't worry if it appears to go globby or curdly (these are technical terms, you realise): simply trust the process and keep stirring gently, and all of a sudden you'll have a nice dark glossy liquid. It's important, this bit - for some reason the cake doesn't work so well if you add the soya milk first, or if you mix the oil and milk together before you add them. Pour the liquid mixture onto the solid mixture and stir to combine. Spoon the result (which should be pretty runny - if you can do this without making a mess you were either brought up nicer than me or you've done something different) into a 1kg loaf tin, lined with baking parchment, and bake for round about 75 minutes at 150°C. You want it to be quite firm, even slightly caramelised, at the edges and squidgy inside. And don't panic when it sinks a bit in the middle. That's what it does.
Take the cake out of the tin after about 5 minutes, peel the paper away from the sides and then leave it till it's cool. Wrap it in foil, put it in an airtight tin and (this is the most difficult bit) forget all about it for at least 3 days. Put it out of sight, tie up your hands, put the tin in your safety deposit box at the bank, do whatever you have to do … but wait. You (and it) will be all the better for it.

Bean eaters anonymous

Once upon a time, we had a habit of spending a weekend somewhere in Tuscany at about this point in the year: to wander, to drink coffee, maybe to do a gallery or two ... and to eat. Well, okay, mostly to eat. But hey, come on, it was work: a lot of the inspiration for what I cooked at the resto came from Tuscany, and by that point in the year I was in need of a top up. Tiresome, huh?

The Tuscans are not called mangiafagioli (beaneaters) for nothing: beans play a huge part in the local cuisine. And they're sooooo good too: in the days when you could actually carry more than a spare pair of knickers on Ryanair we used to bring back kilos of them (beans, not knickers), along with several litres of newly pressed oil (if you once saw someone emptying a large suitcase at Stansted airport security and trying to explain convincingly why it was full of bubblewrap and not a lot else ... that was me). Lucca was our very favourite haunt; apart from being just a genuinely lovely little city, its oil and beans are second to none (Awww. I want to go, NOW!). It was in Lucca that I first ate zuppa di frantoiana - literally 'oil mill soup' - at a trattoria called Gigi. November is oil pressing time, and there are dishes featuring the new oil are on every menu. Gigi's zuppa was so good that we ate it twice, in quick succession, then I came home and did my best to recreate it.

Today being a biting Tuscan-cold type of day seemed like a perfect opportunity to spend a few hours on zuppa duty, especially given that the alternative was yet another hands-and-knees afternoon waxing the newly restored terracotta tiles in the dining room. I couldn't manage the new oil - we buy our 'good' olive oil from the Coop in Clermont l'Herault which produces several varieties, but pressing doesn't take place until December at the earliest - but for the first time (beware - crow alert) I did manage to use a lot of our own vegetables - everything but potatoes, celery and garlic in fact, none of which we grow.

Cavalo nero (black Tuscan kale) growing on the potager

Amazingly, even the tomatoes are ours: we picked them green at the beginning of the month and they're ripening nicely on the windowsill. So, in case you too have a task that you'd like to avoid, here is the (sort of) recipe.

Zuppa de frantoiana

some onions and/or leeks, diced
some green celery, including the leaves, finely chopped
some carrots, chopped into smallish pieces
a few potatoes, ditto
some garlic, minced
some fresh herbs - rosemary, thyme, parsley, basil, that sort of thing - chopped
a couple of peperoncini or small dried red chili peppers, crushed
some cavalo nero (black Tuscan kale) or Savoy cabbage, shredded
some butternut squash or pumpkin or potimarron, peeled and chopped into small-to-medium pieces
a few fresh tomatoes, skinned and chopped
some vegetable stock
some pinto or cannellini beans, cooked
a rind of Parmesan if you have one
some wheat or spelt grains
some good olive oil

So, this is what I do. In a big pan, warm some olive oil and gently fry the onions for 5 minutes. Add the celery, fry for 5 minutes. Add the carrots, fry for 5 minutes. Add the potatoes, fry for 5 minutes. Add the herbs and peperoncini, fry for 5 minutes. Add the cavalo nero, pumpkin and tomatoes, fry for 5 minutes. I know this seems a bit OTT, but I've found it to be the best way of bringing out the flavour of each ingredient - if you add them all to the pan at once it's all a little bit more indistinct and subdued.

Purée half the beans either with some of their cooking water, or with some vegetable stock, and add them to the pan, with the Parmesan rind too if you have it. Add more vegetable stock to just cover the vegetables, then simmer over the lowest possible heat for an hour.

Add the wheat and simmer for another half an hour. At that point, add the rest of the beans and simmer for another 20 minutes or so. Stir in some olive oil and let the whole thing stand for a couple of hours. Reheat gently - it should now be nicely thick - check the seasoning, ladle into bowls and serve with a glug of good olive oil poured over each one.

Make at least twice as much as you can eat, because it'll be even better tomorrow ....

Potager art

Life after sawdust, and a taste of garlic

No matter how awful you think sanding a huge floor and a half is going to be, it's always ... worse. Given that John only has to look at a sanding machine for gouges the size of a ditch to appear miraculously in the wood, his contribution was limited to collecting the machine from the hire shop, and following me around holding its power cable. It was, of course, Muggins here who had to spend a twelve-and-a-half hour day wrestling with the thing, followed by the same the next day on my hands and knees, sanding all (51 metres worth ... groan) the edges.

I'll spare you more pictures of me in tellytubby overalls and the orange Etap headgear thingie I picked up from the Tour de France caravane; suffice it to say that three days and seventeen showers later the job's finished, with 'just' the more artistic bits - as in at least seven days on my hands and knees - to come. Fortunately the weather shone on us, so to speak: after the recent long and very hot spell, it proceeded to absolutely p*%! down, without break or let up (but with thunder, lightning and the usual array of power cuts), for 48 hours, during which time it was so dark that you could be forgiven for thinking that the sun had migrated to warmer climes.

Even floor-sanding tellytubbies have to eat, though, and when you've got sawdust in every orifice the need for feelgood food that will cut through all the crap becomes paramount. And so there was nothing for it but an ag and og.

Ag and og (or spaghetti aglio e olio, to be more precise) is so much a part of me that I've just had to rack my brains to think how I first came upon it or to remember when it wasn't a part of my life. In fact, I was introduced to it by an ex-partner-turned-friend, who arrived in our relationship with a little cook book, now sadly I think out of print, called something like Lotsa Pasta and Oodles of Noodles (yes, honestly) which contained a great, if rather garlickly-challenged, ag and og. Then I went to Italy, and there was The Proper Thing, from which is derived our current version. Ag and og is the ultimate convenience food, designed for those times when you really want something with a bit of oomph and pzazz but don't know what it is. When you don't want to feel clogged with cholesterol. When you're too knackered, or just can't be bothered, to fiddle around with lots of preparation or lots of ingredients. It does it for me, always and without fail. Here it is:

For two people:

6 to 8 big, fat, juicy cloves of garlic
a decent glug - half a small cup - of really good extra virgin olive oil
2 servings of pasta of your choice - long and thin works better than short and round, and anything with egg in it is a no-no

Peel the garlic cloves and cut them in half if they're really large, removing any green shoot-y bits from the centre. Put them with the oil into a saucepan and warm gently. Now, how you do this bit is really the key to the whole dish: you don't want to fry them - what you're doing is letting the warmth of the oil draw the flavour from, and at the same time gently soften, the garlic. If you go at it like a bull in a china shop you'll end up with brown, bitter, horrible garlic and it'll end in tears, you mark my words. Reckon on it taking 20 to 25 minutes at the lowest or next-to lowest hob setting. As the cloves soften you can break them up a bit in the pan with a wooden spoon; they should end up slightly golden, lightly caramelised, meltingly soft and highly aromatic (sorry to drool, but it really is that good ...). Cook the pasta, toss it in the oil and garlic, add a tablespoon of dried crushed chilli pepper, season, and serve, sprinkled with a little parsley, and with good bread for serious mopping. And wear an apron.

Oh, and for another taste of garlic, you might like to have a look at Keith Eckstein's impressive 'blog on blogs' that someone has just pointed me to. Keith has set himself the task not just of listing, but also reviewing blogs about living in France. As it happens, he's just reviewed this one. And I like his style: he really makes an effort to get underneath each blog (and blogger) and find out what makes it tick. And even if he does seem to have an obsession with 2CV driving, lingerie wearing nuns, he knows how to use apostrophes.

Hospitality and hard cheese

As many of you know, I seem to have interspersed a life of doing Socially Useful Things - civil servant, welfare rights activist, CAB manager, citizen advocate, and latterly counsellor/psychotherapist - with various forays into the hospitality world: prototype vegetarian guest house in the 1980s, meditation and workshop centre, dance and other camps, and latterly restaurant with rooms (not to mention the unmentionable one that's running unmentionably late: Grillou!). It's a pretty big thing to me, the H word. You can have the most perfect set up in the world - the most beautiful home, the latest designer interior, the most far reaching views, the best ingredients, the most 'professional' service - but if you haven't got the deep desire to enter in to a human exchange with your guests something indefinable is always going to be lacking from what you're offering. Sounds obvious, maybe ... or maybe not, to those of us more used to hearing the phrase 'hospitality industry'. But it's the relationship between host and guest that matters, that makes the difference between simply providing others with a service, and being truly hospitable.

I had my first taste of the hospitality world when I was a green and clueless student, working the summer vac in the tiny, isolated Hotel de la Poste in Arolla, supposedly the highest village in Switzerland. At the far end of a long and precipitous valley with no way out except back, it was a most extraordinary place. Most of the older people had never been out of the valley and spoke only a very localised patois. Nobody spoke English, only an odd version of French that had me fooled for quite a while. Other than the one that took you there (eyes shut, holding tightly to the side of the postbus while invoking deities you didn’t think you believed in) there were no roads and so almost no cars - just high, high mountains and light that was so perfectly blue and clear it took your breath away.

 It was a baptism of fire for me. At home, as a pampered only child I’d never cooked, cleaned or even done my own washing. And yet suddenly there I was, the first outsider ever to have worked in this ancient family-run pension where everybody, whether eight or eighty, did everything. To begin with I was forever getting my fondues confused with my Fendants and having running battles with the coffee machine, which was the size of a Mini and even more difficult to start, but, unaccountably, I loved it almost from the word go. I learned to cook, carry four plates at a time, work 16 hour days, drink copious amounts of wine and coffee, eat spoonfuls of Ovaltine out of the jar, speak French with a pronounced Swiss accent, smoke Disque Bleue and walk up a glacier (not necessarily all at the same time).

I’m sure that I look back on that summer with slightly rose-tinted contact lenses. The hotel is long gone, sadly, but two things have stayed with me ever since. The first is the way the running of the hotel was inseparable from the owner-family's daily life. They (and I) lived and congregated in the kitchen and restaurant, decided the lunch menu over breakfast and the dinner menu over lunch, ate what the guests and customers ate and did whatever needed doing whenever it needed doing. There were no ‘private’ signs, no rotas, no job descriptions, no scheduled time or days off, no separation of ‘work’ and ‘non-work’. It was all very flexible, very organic - haphazard even. And it worked.

But maybe even more impactful (is that a word?) than that was the genuine open heartedness with which guests and diners were welcomed. For one who'd grown up going to holiday camps and, later, petit bourgeois hotels with ideas above their station this was a true revelation: guests would be made to feel instantly at home, would wander in and out of the kitchen, would sit and talk for hours after lunch or dinner and were treated as an extension to the family. There was no big thing about it; no rule that said " thou shalt enter into relationship with thine guests". But they just did, and after a while so did I. And ever since then I've aspired to that honest, easy going and above all genuine way of offering hospitality.

I've been thinking about this this week for various reasons, which will, I'm afraid, remain unblogged. But as I was doing so, I remembered one of Monsieur le Patrons's signature dishes, and a speciality of the Val d’Hérens, the valley of which Arolla forms the head. It was very often on the lunch menu, and just as often demanded when it wasn’t. After I’d been there a couple of weeks he sat me down in the kitchen with a bottle of Fendant, the local white wine, and made me this; a while later he taught me to cook it. I cooked it all the way through that summer, and I’ve been cooking it ever since, though I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t remember what it was called. I suppose it’s a kind of fondue-without-tears; it certainly gives off the same appetite-inducing aroma of cheese and wine as it’s cooking. Here's the recipe, for an impromptu supper for two people: try it first in its pure form, but experiment too – it’s exceptionally good with some thin slices of air-dried ham between the bread and the cheese …

2 thick slices of good, dense, white bread - preferably sourdough
a glass (150ml or thereabouts) of white wine
about 175g of Swiss cheeses: a mixture of Gruyere and Emmental cheeses is ideal (make sure it’s the real thing: pukka Swiss cheese has got ‘Switzerland’ printed in red through its rind, in case it forgets where it’s come from)
paprika to sprinkle

Put a slice of bread in each of two small ovenproof gratin dishes, then trickle over the wine – slowly, so that it’s thoroughly soaked. Slice the cheeses very thinly and arrange the slices over the winey bread, mixing the different cheeses as you go to get a good blend. Lightly sprinkle the cheese with paprika and bake near the top of a hot oven (around 200°C) for 20 minutes or until the cheese is melted and bubbling and you can’t wait any longer. Eat straight out of the dish, with a green salad if you like and a glass of white wine. It's not dignified, as the cheese tries to wrap your face up in its strings, so you may prefer not to make it for someone you're trying to impress ... but enjoy!

Asperges syndrome

If there's one thing that finally tells me that the earth has turned and winter has gone it's asparagus. Part of that glorious sequence of firsts that marks the transition from spring into summer, along with the first broad beans, the first peas, the first strawberries, it's a classic example of seasonal eating: something to be longed for, gorged on, and then mourned for … all in the space of a few weeks. It’s a bit like a holiday romance: all the sweeter because you know it can’t go on.

In our restaurant days asparagus was a Big Thing: Norfolk was one of the UK's prime producers, and we had several of the best within five or ten kilometres. For six or seven weeks, barely a day would go by without asparagus making an appearance somewhere on the menu; indeed, many people would travel and book specifically to eat it. Here at Grillou, at the moment it's just us, but oh, it was still a happy day when I saw the first proper asparagus at Saint Girons market last week.

The French, for some reason I just can't fathom, traditionally despise green asparagus. Ditto the Dutch, the Belgians, the Spanish, the Germans ... and for all I know the rest of the world. Except, of course, we Brits, who worship it, even if it does make our pee smell. But for everyone else it's the fat white stuff that gets them going. Heaven knows why; it's watery, slimy, tasteless and invariably overcooked (whoops, there goes another pile of street cred ...), and you have to peel it. But at this time of year the markets are stuffed with it, and every stall is besieged.

The green stuff, on the other hand, is not easy to get hold of. To be honest, it's been one of the few food disappointments since moving here. Even the green asparagus I have managed to find has been monstrously fat like its white cousin. But ... this year we have a new producer at our market. And they're selling no less than 9 varieties and grades of asparagus, including - oh deep joy - two sorts of green: the fat stuff, and real, proper thin spears. No carefully weighed, neatly trimmed bunches here: there are great mounds of it, lying loose for the picking, for only 2.80 euros a kilo. We bought some last week and it was so good we went back for more - lots more - today. As I was shovelling handfuls of it into a piece of newspaper a French woman, curious at my buying habits, asked me what it tasted like. Now that's not an easy question. In the end I broke her off a piece of try raw. Her eyes lit up. She bought four kilos. The revolution is here ...

Tonight we ate asparagus with penne, lardons, crème fraîche and parmesan. We followed it with these:

Well, maybe not quite all of them. The rest, and another 2 kilo box like them, will be transformed into jam tomorrow. The first year we moved here, I couldn't understand why I couldn't find any strawberries in June. I was too late: although there are a few varieties around later on in small (and expensive) quantities, the main crop comes at the end of April and very beginning of May. No tennis strawberries here ... But as you read this, jam will be being made in humungous quantities all over the south of France - which leads on to one of life's great unanswered questions: just what do French households do with the vast amount of jam that they all seem to make each year?

So how was your Christmas?

I don't really do Christmas. Nor, it must be said, does France, where it's a bit of a one day wonder; traditionally, a long réveillon dinner on Christmas Eve, after which presents are exchanged, followed by an only slightly less demanding Christmas Day lunch. Then it's back to work as usual on the 26th - no Boxing Day here. It's all pretty low key, marked mainly by the absence of special promos and a sudden hike in the price of oysters. Presumably because we're all used to shops not being open 24/7, there's no panic fuelled filling of chariots - while tills rattle with more euros than usual, it's quality not quantity that is the order of the day - foie gras, seafood, goose, capon, champagne, good wine (and hey - it's only a week until the food fest starts all over again with the Réveillon Saint Sylvestre - New Year's Eve ...).

This year I didn't do Christmas even more than I usually don't do it. If you see what I mean.


What I didn't do:

Go to a Christmas market. No time.
Eat and drink too much. Ditto.
Go for a Christmas Day walk. Ditto again.
Send any Christmas cards. Except online.
Buy a Christmas tree. Surrounded by them right outside the window.
Buy loadsa Christmas presents. Bah humbug.
Watch interminable quiz shows and 'best of' programmes on TV. No TV.
See anyone except John. Miserable antisocial creature that I am.


What I did:

Painted 45 square metres of ceiling in La Petite Maison's bedroom.
Played with my one Christmas present. Which was - wait for it - a new stepladder (oh, but what a ladder ...).
Ate a sandwich in the sun at lunchtime.
Prepared some pigments and a bucket of lime wash for the next day.
Paid some bills and got excited when I discovered that my stamps smelt of chocolate (how could you not love a country that produces stamps that look and smell like a chocolate bar?).
Cooked a magret for dinner, a rare treat for two infrequent meat eaters.
Looked anxiously out of the window at 5pm to see if the days are getting longer ...

And do you know what? It was a perfectly joyeuse fête.

The best laid plans ...

This afternoon was marked up for a Serious Start on the first wash of L'Atelier's walls. With pigment, that is - yellow ochre from Provence, and sienna earth from Italy, if you're interested - not with St Marc, the ubiquitous lessive that cleans everything (except plaster dust, of course) and has been a constant feature of my life over the last two weeks as we've attempted to clean up the chantier. That, however, was before John came in with 3 kilos of Rosé-des-Prés (a kind of posh field mushroom).

Now there's only so much fungus that two people can eat at any one time. Especially when they've just been munching their way through the two and a half kilos he brought home three days ago - but, hey, downshifting is downshifting, and foraging is ... fun, and free food. So while we've set aside some to cook for dinner this week, there was nothing for it but to set to and look at how to preserve the rest.

Bottling, I decided, was out. Too complicated, and seems to involve boiling oil. Hmm. Drying? Well, one of the many projects on my list is to make a drying cabinet, but that will have to wait (to use a phrase that seems to form an increasing part of my vocabulary) until all this is over and life is back to normal again ... Some of the smaller mushrooms I flash fried in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley then froze; the rest I decided to turn into a duxelle.

A duxelle is a glorious thing: while the volume reduces, the flavour and intensity increases. If you've never tried it, do - it's very simple, even if it does tie you to the stove for a while. You simply chop finely, mince or - if, like me, life's too short - pulse in the Magimix a good quantity of mushrooms and around a fifth of their weight of onions; fry the onions first in olive oil until they're transparent and start to take on a little colour; then add the mushrooms and stir it all around. At this point you find you have a pan full of wet, unappetising mush, which looks like this:

What you're aiming to do now is to gently simmer out all the liquid until the mixture starts to 'fry'. This will take - er - over two hours if the mushrooms are very fresh (well, I never said it would be fast, did I?). As time goes on, you need to stir the pan more and more often to stop the mixture sticking and burning; you're aiming to reduce the volume usually by around two thirds. Eventually you'll end up with a sort of pâté thick enough for a wooden spoon to stand up in; now season it, and you're done.

So then what? Use it for stuffing; add it to soups and stews (especially good with Puy lentils); add some chopped parsley, garlic and pangritata, then spread it on bruschetta; make beef Wellington; spread it over the pastry base of a mushroom tart before adding the rest of the filling; drape it around pasta; use it as a relish ...

We haven't, so far, done very well at finding any of the big names such as cepes or chanterelles or morilles or girolles nor sadly (and I say this at the risk of tarnishing my already somewhat ropey reputation) the more - er - magical varieties. But that's because we've not had the time to go out looking for them beyond our own back yard, so to speak. When all this is over ...

Glut gluttony

So, the rentrée has rentréed, The Perfectionist and Pink Van Man (aka the builders) are back, the sun still shines, and we're still barrowing loads of hardcore around the garden. (Was there ever a time when I didn't? Will there ever be one? Sigh). We're in the process of creating what we intended to be a car parking area. Note the past tense there, because once we'd cleared it of the inevitable toot and rubbish and old tree roots and nettles and rocks and half a metre thickness of moss and ivy, we suddenly saw it with new eyes: a lovely leafy, shady space with an equally lovely view south towards Col de la Crouzette. Much too good for a car park, methinks. So in a rare display of swift non-Libran decisiveness, I've converted it into a 'zone Zen'. More about that in due course - watch this space, as they say. Or rather, that one.

And in spite of - or maybe because of - the long, hot and dry summer we've been having here, our garden continues to throw food at us: glutting courgettes (yes, still) have been joined by aubergines and tomatoes and peppers and potimarron. The potimarron have been put to bed tucked up in straw, ready to feed us through the winter, while I exhaust every crevice of my creative brain (or at least what's left of it after yet another day shi - er, hardcore shovelling) to come up with Interesting Things To Do with all the rest.

Two stars of the dinner show have emerged this summer. We've enjoyed them both so much that we've eaten them again and again, and so thought you might like them too. Here they are.

A courgette soup ...

Actually, it's not really a soup - more like a lightweight broth, in the Italian style, which means that with some good bread it's good enough to eat for dinner and not as an entrée. For two people, you'll need:

Two or three new potatoes, in small cubes; 500 grams or so of courgette, ditto; a biggish onion, finely chopped; 2 cloves of garlic and a couple of sprigs of thyme, ditto; half a glass of white wine; 300ml vegetable stock; 200ml milk; and - erm - 4 pieces of La Vache qui Rit (Laughing Cow) cheese (I know, I know, but humour me here).

Fry the onion in butter until it's soft, then add the garlic, potato, thyme and a bit of black pepper and cook very gently, with the lid on, for a good 15 minutes or so. This is what the Italians call the soffrito stage: often skipped or skimped, it's what really draws the flavour out of the base ingredients, so don't rush it. Then add the wine, bring to the boil, reduce the heat again and cook for another 5 minutes. Add the stock and the courgette, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for around 15 minutes. Add the milk, then the cheese, stirring until it melts. Season. Don't ask how I came to have a few bits of Vache qui Rit lurking at the back of the fridge, but trust me: there's something about the lactic flavour of the cheese in this soup which is so seriously addictive that I unfailingly eat more of it than is good for me ....

... and an aubergine tart

This, for me, is pure, unadulterated summer comfort food; it contains just about every one of my to-die-for summer ingredients - olives, aubergines, tomatoes, anchovies, basil, mozzarella. And it's easy enough to put together after a hot day's shovelling. To make four good portions you'll need:

A ready-rolled flaky pastry case; 2 very fresh aubergines; 2 large tomatoes, a tablespoon of tapenade, some shavings of gruyère, a ball of mozzarella; and a dozen anchovies in oil. I'm addicted to Collioure anchovies, which are my summer treat, but anything that comes in a jar will be fine.

Cut the aubergines down their length into half-centimetre thick slices. You can, if you feel inclined and have the time, do the salting-and-rinsing thing, but to be honest I usually don't, because I haven't, and I'm not convinced it would make a blind bit of difference. Then fry them until they're golden on both sides. I suppose you could grill them if you have a thing about frying, but nice though grilled aubergines might be, they never acquire that lovely silky texture that a really good fried aubergine has and which for me is the essence of this tart. So I fry them in a mixture of olive and rape seed oil, which is the best combination I've come up with after years of experimenting (during most of which I pooh-poohed rape seed oil. Wrong).

Then simply put the tart together: lay out the pastry in a large metal flan tin - I use the type with the removable bottom, prick the base lightly, then spread the tapenade over it. Cut the aubergine slices in half across the (short) middle, and lay out half of them in circles. Slice the tomatoes thinly and lay half of them over the aubergines. Throw on some shaved gruyère and some torn up basil leaves. Then repeat the whole thing so you have another, identical, layer. Lay out the anchovies in a clock formation, then cover the whole thing with slices of the mozzarella. Bake at 220 degrees Celsius (200 degrees in a fan oven) for around 25 minutes, until the mozzarella is golden.

Here it is before ...

and after ...

And that, gentle reader, was my 100th post on Blogger! Thank you to all of you for your presence, your support, your comments, your emails, your humour. None of which I expected when I set out eighteen months ago just to write for the sheer pleasure of writing, whether anyone read it or not. So here's raising a glass of Minervois with you all to the next 100 ...

Why did the imam faint?

Once upon a time, an imam married the beautiful daughter of an olive oil merchant, whose dowry contained twelve jugs of the best, richest olive oil. She had a talent for cooking, and prepared many special dishes for her new husband. One night, she cooked a special dish of aubergines cooked in olive oil, and the imam enjoyed it so much that he asked her to cook it every night. For twelve days they feasted on the dish, but on the thirteenth night it didn't appear on the table. "Wife!" said the imam. "Where is the dish you usually cook for me?" "I couldn't make it tonight," said his wife, "because we ran out of olive oil. The imam fainted.

It's a great story, and like all great stories has endless variations. In one, the imam fainted with pleasure when he tasted the dish; in another, he fainted when he realised how costly it was in olive oil. According to a fascinating conversation I came across on LanguageHat, this last would fit with a popular stereotype of village imams, who are often seen as stingy killjoys, as in this wonderful Turkish expression: "You won't get food out of an imam's house, nor tears out of a corpse's eyes".

My own inclination though, having tasted various versions of this dish, is that he did indeed swoon with pleasure. There's a word for it in French, too: se pâmer, which according to Le Robert Micro means 'to faint right away; to be almost paralysed by a strong emotion or sensation'. Hmm. Shall have to find a suitable occasion to try that one out ... But anyway, back to aubergines. Ours have been fruiting for two or three weeks now, but yesterday was the first time they had deigned to produce more than two at the same time. So, demands of the pickaxe notwithstanding, it was time to make the imam faint.

For me, Turkey is right up there as one of the most enticing cuisines in the world, along with Italy and South India. What they all have in common is the ability to draw big flavour from the simplest of ingredients, together with a respect for vegetables as diva in their own right, not just as part of the chorus (are you listening here, France?). One of the most used (and oiliest) cook books on my shelves is Classic Turkish Cooking, by Ghillie Bhasan, who is the only person I know with the ability to make me yearn to eat bulls' testicles. But although she does have an Imam Bayeldi recipe, it's not, exactly, the one I use. I spent years on a quest to replicate the version I ate at a small restaurant in Akyaka, where if you're lucky it will turn up on the counter (no menu here) as one of mamma's specials. This is as close as I can get without actually wearing the headscarf. Here it is: Slow Food in action.

Imam Bayeldi

4 very fresh aubergines, cut in half lengthways

3 large onions, quartered and thinly sliced

8 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

three dessertspoons demerara sugar

5 large tomatoes, chopped

2 tablespoons dried currants

a teaspoon of allspice

sea salt

juice of a lemon

rather a lot of olive oil

This makes enough for four people, or two people for two days. It's really not worth doing less, as it's, frankly, a bit of a faff (but worth it).

Sprinkle the cut side of the aubergine with salt and set aside for half an hour or so to extract any bitter juices. Rinse and dry, make three horizontal cuts in the flesh (don't go through the skin), then drizzle very generously with olive oil and bake in a ceramic baking dish at about 180 degrees Celsius for half an hour.

Meanwhile, prepare the stuffing: fry the onions and garlic in a decent amount of oil, slowly, until they're completely transparent. Add the currants, allspice and a dessertspoon of the sugar and continue to fry until they are just starting to caramelise slightly. At this point, add the tomatoes and another dessertspoon of the sugar, turn the heat up a bit and cook for 10 minutes until all the juices have been released - it should all look a bit soup like at this point. Sprinkle the mixture with a good half teaspoon of salt, and simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated - around 40 minutes, maybe longer depending on the tomatoes, but keep an eye on it - it can burn. It should now look dark and rich. Attempt to avoid eating it all; instead, spoon it onto the aubergines, stuffing as much as you can down into the slits.

Pour over half a cup of water mixed with more olive oil (see?) and the remaining dessertspoon of sugar, cover the dish with foil, then bake for two hours at around 170 degrees Celsius, basting every half an hour or so with the liquid. Remove the foil for the last half hour or so of cooking. Squeeze some lemon juice over it and then let it cool for at least half an hour before eating it (I know, I know, but it is possible, honestly ...). Actually, it's even better the next day ...

This version would be found more often in eastern Turkey; in the Mediterranean west it would more often be cooked with a mixture of herbs (parsley, basil and dill) instead of the currants and allspice. We ate ours last night with some fried halloumi, courtesy of - wait for it - Lidl in Saint Girons, which also keeps us well supplied with 2 year old Parmesan, prosciutto, feta, stuffed vine leaves, marinated anchovies and all sorts of other odd delights, and a salad of courgette (what else!), mint and our first yellow cherry tomatoes. I'm still standing, but only just.

Losing the plot

One of the consequences of spending so much time Being A Builder is that we're fast losing control of the potager. It doesn't take much: I've come to the conclusion that one of Grillou's mottos is "if it can grow, it will": turn your back for five minutes et voilà - ten new ash trees. It's fair to say that we'd never win the village prize for the most orderly vegetable garden, unlike many of those we see around here that have been hoed to within a centimetre of their lives; I rather like weeds, which after all are just plants that happen to be growing in the 'wrong' place, and I seem for some reason this year to have lost the art of sowing in anything approaching a straight line. And anyway, life's too short. But when you need jungle gear and a machete to cut the courgettes (sigh), and you've completely lost your red onions, all the justifications about working organically (which we do) and taking the permaculture approach (which we also do) cease to be convincing. Even to me.

So today's promised afternoon swim at Lac Mondély was deferred in favour of a few hours on the end of a mattock. Not quite as life-enhancing, especially given the afternoon's bizarre and extreme heat. (It's pre-storm heat: we, like half of France, are on a dire storm warning for this evening - flying toads, iron girders falling out of the sky, that sort of thing. Can't come too soon. Candles are at the ready ...). But necessary.



I wouldn't go so far as to say that the plot has been conquered, but I have found earth. And (so far) fifteen potimarrons, five aubergines, another 18 kilos of courgettes (what's the matter with them? Don't they read blogs?), forty or so peppers of various kinds and a few lingering mangetout. Oh, and a row of beetroot I'd quite forgotten about, and - yay! - the red onions.

I also found this little thing:



It's a pasteque - a water melon - but a particular variety for jamming (er - that would be making jam, not playing music ...). I'm inordinately proud of it, as it's the first one I've ever grown. I'm hoping it's going to have a mate or two ...

And look at these:



How many plants do you think there are? Nope. Try again. No, lower, lower.






There are two.

Last year I was so upset by the loss of all our tomato plants to blight that I swore I would never grow them again. But, well, that was then. And so I succumbed to buying five plants. This magnificent pair are Cornue des Andes, an heirloom variety which produces long, pepper shaped fruits. I also have two Green Zebra, and one Cerise. All of them have been planted, on the advice of the local paysans, on raised trenches; inside each trench is a deep layer of fresh nettles, followed by a layer of fumier, then a layer of earth, and finally a 12cm deep mulch of wood shreddings. I have everything - and I mean everything - crossed.

Courgettes R Us

Last year, you may remember, it was plums. This year it's courgettes. For heaven's sake, it's still only June and we're drowning in the things: I must have picked at least 12 kilos just in the last 10 days, all from six plants. Actually I blame Benjamin, our neighbours' donkey. Or at least his fumier. But what on earth is the matter with courgette plants? Why can't they be - well, a bit more restrained? Then we'd all like them better, and friends wouldn't hide behind the sofa when they see you coming with the tell-tale basket.




Having said all that, I do love home grown courgettes. They bear about as much resemblance to the floppy woolly things you find in supermarkets as a fresh crab does to a crabstick. In fact you could be forgiven for believing that they're actually different vegetables (are you reading this, you potager-less friends? You see, you can come out now ...). And of course you get the flowers to stuff as well, as if you didn't have enough to do being creative with the courgettes themselves.

It's not an uncommon problem - people have even written books about it - and there's certainly no shortage of Interesting Things to Do with courgettes: we've already had pasta sauces and grilled courgettes and stuffed courgettes and baked courgettes and risottos and muffins and briam and ragu and ciambotta and fritters and flowers stuffed with brousse, and I can feel the first courgette cake of the season coming on any minute now. And then there's always soup, and chutney, and jam, when things get desperate. It's just that - are you listening to this, you plants? - there are only two of us, and just occasionally - once a week would do, honest - it would be quite nice to eat something else ...

Good things 1

Any of you who knew me in my previous (restaurant owning and food writing) incarnation may perhaps be a little perplexed to find that plumbing appears to have overtaken produce in my affections. Indeed I'm a little perplexed myself. So, on a chilly and dreary Sunday afternoon, with only the songs of the birds to remind me that it's spring, I think it's time to indulge in a bit of unashamed glorification of our local food.




Like much of France, Ariège is blessed with some wonderful local products. To take a trip to Saint Girons market, 20 minutes down the road, on Saturday morning is to be faced with a near paralysing choice of what to bring home: fruits and vegetables, for sure, but also mountain cheeses (from cows, sheep and goats), an endless variety of duck goodies, ham, charcuterie, conserves of all kinds, beans, wine, nuts and nut oils, honey, breads and croustades, millas, donkeys' milk soap ...



We buy unpasteurised whole milk, yoghurt and crème fraîche from a farm in next-door village Lescure, or sometimes from another farm at Castelnau Durban, next-door in the other direction. Castelnau Durban also has a summer-only echoppe (Gascon for shop, apparently) which sells only Séronais produce and is cooperatively run by the producers. Our third neighbouring village, Clermont, has a bakery which is known far and wide for its croustades. And Rimont itself now has an artisan charcuterie, Le Grenier à Jambons, which raises, butchers and - er - charcutes its own pigs.



Our most local produce, however, is the organic honey from our neighbouring farm, Saurine. My out-and-out favourite is the acacia: it's an extraordinarily pretty light, clear golden colour and has a very delicate flowery, vanilla-y flavour: great with yoghurt, or on sourdough toast. If, like me, you grew up on Gales, you probably take honey for granted. But it really is an amazing thing, worthy of a little wonderment ...

So what is it, exactly? Well, it's the sugary nectar of flowers gathered, modified and stored in a honeycomb by honeybees. As far as the plant is concerned, the function of nectar is to attract insects, which pick up pollen and transfer it from flower to flower. As the bee swallows the nectar, its saliva splits the sucrose into the two simple sugars, dextrose and fructose. It stores the nectar in a special 'stomach' and takes a little for its own nourishment; the rest is given up when the bee returns to the hive, where it regurgitates it into one of the cells of the honeycomb (don't you wish you didn't know that?). Each honeycomb cell is an incubator for young bees, which feed on the honey as they grow.

Nectar turns into honey by evaporation, and the composition of the honey depends on the type of flowers visited by the bees (which is why different honeys taste so - well, different). Now, you'll like this bit. As each bee returns to the hive it performs a kind of wriggling dance at the entrance. The angle at which it moves shows the direction of flight to the flower in relation to the current position of the sun; the enthusiasm with which it wriggles shows how good a source of nectar it is. That, I promise you, is absolutely true. And so are these three amazing pieces of trivia:

1. The bee is so well designed that it can carry its own bodyweight in nectar (whereas a jet plane is limited to 25%).

2. It's been estimated that the bee is efficient enough to fly nearly seven million kilometres at a steady 12 kilometres an hour on a gallon of nectar.

3. Apparently it takes bees 10 million trips (or 300 bees around one month) to collect the nectar for one jar of honey. It's the females that do most of the work. The males just hang around waiting to mate with the queen. Hmm …

Produce tyranny

What is it with Metéo Chance - sorry, Metéo France? The forecast for today showed us being gradually 'squeezed' between two mega-depressions until all hell/rain/giant flying lizards broke loose this afternoon. So given that we still had one enormous pile of wood from our beheaded ash tree to saw up and stash before the weather finally broke, we were out there at the crack of dawn. (And guess who got to operate the chainsaw today? I'll give you a clue. There are two of us, and it wasn't me. No, I was the one sweating with the nineteenth century wood saw ...). By lunchtime it was so incredibly hot and sunny that I was forced to strip right down to - no, too much information. And it stayed that way, until it got dark.

On the other hand, and I never thought I'd say this, but Thank Goddess It's (Nearly) Winter. Don't get me wrong: I'm not about to go and live in an inner city high-rise, but there comes a point when the sight of naked fruit tree branches, wilting courgette plants and the odd patch of bare earth in the potager starts to fill me with relief simply because I don't have to deal with any more produce. The walnuts are shelled (and my hands are finally losing their Gauloise-addict look); the plums and figs and cherries are bottled, compôted, jammed and chutneyed for the winter; and we've got onions and potiron and potimarron in store, and broad beans and French beans in the freezer, to see us through the hungry gap. John is, as I write, juicing the last of our strange gnome-like apples, and our pitiful (my fault - I forgot to remove the rotting fruit from around the trees last year and so they lost most of this year's blossoms to rot) harvest of quinces is staring pointedly at me from the rack daring me to get on and turn them into membrillo (oh God. Another two hours at the jam pan ...). I've got a box full of aubergines, and I've just picked what will surely be the last peppers of the year:



Phew. It's a tyranny. this produce business. Bring on the Big Macs ...