One cuckoo doesn't make a - erm - spring (but then again it just might)

Last weekend, at St Girons market, we bought some of these:

and a great big bunch of this:

Then we made the first batch of this for your breakfasts this year:

and heard the first one of these:

and admired the new carpet in the garden:

and got up early to hear the dawn chorus

and had our first apéro outside

and got sunburned digging the potager (the thermometer was reading 39 degrees in the sun :-D).

Spring comes early here in the lush green foothills of our part of the Ariège. Wish you were here? Well, you could be, in 6 days, 5 hours and 13 minutes. (Actually you couldn't because we're reserved until the beginning of May. But May is wonderful too!).

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 ...