Pumpkins and kippers for soup, and a bombastic bloater.

Got a couple of collages done for Alphabet Soup today.  I think I'm probably on course to get perhaps a half-dozen completed, with ideas for the rest which might or might not come to fruition once the deadline heat is off.

So here is P for pumpkin:

That thing in the middle of the right-hand pumpkin flower is a messed-up scribble, which I meant to do something to correct but forgot to.  But the good thing about this technique is you can stick stuff on top!  So I think I'll make it a bumble bee.

The next one proved to be somewhat topical:

Kippers.  I have mixed feelings about these smoked members of the herring tribe, indeed about most smoked fish really. We used to get them in England that were boil-in-the-bag, from a man with a van who came round.  His stuff was so expensive the kippers were all we could really bring ourselves to buy, and I know that b-i-t-b is shameful and Not Proper Food but these were just so good and so easy and didn't stink the place out.   Now I often swear I will not buy kippers here again, but then Tom looks at them with such longing I give in, knowing the ordeal I have in store in the preparation of them, often for a dry, salty, disappointing result.  Those vacuum packed Breton smoked herrings in oil are not much better, but at least you don't have to wrestle with fins and bones and stuff, and they don't smell quite so bad.

So when we were at a low ebb in the supermarket the other day and my dear one's eyes fell upon a bloater, or un bouffi, as it is known hereabouts in pleasingly transparent translation (and as an adjective it seems that also means 'bombastic' according to the dictionary), instead of saying 'put it down it's disgusting' as I might have had I been feeling stronger, I allowed him to put it in the trolley.

I have never actually handled a bloater before; it took me a couple of days, until today, to square up to the thing and only then did I realise it was whole, all it's innards still contained within its plump form - hence its puffiness and its name, I suppose.  Fortunately it was in a sealed pack and well within it's eat-by date, as the well-documented 'gaminess' and it's bloating tendencies might have been really unmanageable.  I was by this time feeling slightly stronger and less self-sacrificing, and picking over it's smoky, slimy guts, jaundiced eyes, intact gills and hairy bones I felt little compunction in saying that 'I am only putting myself through this because I love you and because I'm still feeling mortified about smashing up the car, so yes I am largely doing it out of guilt.' He ventured to say he might not in fact enjoy it much under those terms but I said he'd bloody better do so.

But then something happened when I looked at the generous and firm portion of roe that emerged from it, which one source described as the cook's treat, I couldn't help myself thinking, and saying aloud: 'That looks good!'.  The bronze, gold and silver skin with its delicate criss-cross patterning was also rather exquisite, and by the time I'd cleaned up the fillets and put them, with the roe, under the grill, and having eaten a good portion of Jean-Paul's crisp and cleansing scarole salad, I was coming round to the idea that I might have some after all.

It really was very good indeed, much better than any kippers we've had here, and it was very inexpensive.  The roe was saltier than the flesh, but spread on a piece of bread was very interesting too.  So I will buy them again, now I know what I'm letting myself in for, or else find a way to persuade Tom that dissecting and preparing a bloater for consumption is a project that he really needs to engage with for his moral, intellectual and spiritual betterment.

(Kedgeree is also a good smoked fish option, and also begins with a 'K'. Kippers don't in fact make one's breath smell, so kissing is not completely out of the question.)

Low light and camera shake

Left it late to get out on a glorious ormolu autumn day.  Thought I'd take the camera anyway and see what inadvertent effects might be achieved.  Not much editing involved beyond wilful ineptitude and a bit of cropping.  

 

Three good things for today

We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette.  The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed.  They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift.  On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him.  There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant.  Well it's only an imitation, he said.

~

Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home.  The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)

~

Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup.  The girl is seriously gifted.

More spicy goings-on in the kitchen

Reached out for the black peppercorns, the lid came off the jar!

It reminded me of once when I saw a woman drop a punnet of blueberries in the supermarket.  They fell through the mesh of her trolley and dispersed across the smooth floor like an explosion of lapis marbles, a fruity super-nova.  She looked around as if she wished she could flee, but there was nowhere to run, the berries were everywhere, and if she had wheeled the trolley over them, the carnage would have been terrible.

On dropping the peppercorns, I exclaimed, gasped, nay squealed. The area of impact seemed far greater than the consequent inch or so of vacant space in the jar would seem to indicate, in the same way that it seemed like far more than a mere punnet of blueberries that spread across the supermarket floor.  Tom came running to the rescue.  Knowing it wasn't as bad as he must have expected from the noise I made, I let him find out for himself and experience the relief that there were no actual breakages, no lacerating shards (it was a plastic jar), no chemicals hazardous to health, involved.

Yet the clear-up was no simple matter, each time one tried to gather any up, further dispersal seemed to result.

Finally he disappeared upstairsand came down with the right tool for the job, a hogs-hair fan-brush, which accomplished the task admirably.

Phew!

( The upside-down pink plastic beaker in the first photo is the Spider Cup.  It usually has a postcard beside it, I use those which people send me from various global locations when they start looking a bit tired on the shelf or pinboard, considering it a useful way for old postcards to end their lives. Arachnid appears, oop-la, pink beaker over the top, postcard underneath, out of the door with her...)

And that piece of inconsequentiality really is my post for today! 

Sniffing the spice rack

The bay leaves reminded me to do this.  I can recommend it, as pure immediate pleasure but also as a mnemonic way down at the limbic level.  Some draw surprise memories, yet some draw blanks, are simply what they are, among these were some of my favourites, coriander, cumin and cardomon.  With others it's hard to know whether the smell is genuinely provoking the response or if a more complex and intellectual series of associations is taking place.  Not that it matters too much, it's just fun.

Open each jar, place nose over, inhale deeply, catch the memory. If you've forgotten what was in the jar already, so much the better. This is more or less the order mine come in.

• Garam masala: R's house, winter afternoons, c. 1984, her cauliflower curry and sweet rice. Having no idea how to teach English.
• Ground ginger: one year, my mum made some home-made ginger beer.  She used ground ginger and yeast. It fermented wildly - it wasn't meant to - and was fairly horrid.  Many of the bottles exploded violently at the top of the cellar stairs, we kept finding bits of the broken glass for ages after.
• Juniper berries:  (You have to crush one) Gin, of course. It's hard to separate it from the associated flavour of tonic.  I had my first sip from my sister-in-law's tumbler on the banks of Llangorse Lake in Wales, when I was maybe eleven or twelve and my brother was sailing there.  It was sunny and the glass was pretty. I've never been a great gin enthusiast, and went off it later; I could probably drink it again now, but don't, preferring to macerate sloes in it .  Now it reminds me of Doug, who died last year, and his dry Martinis.
• Paprika - oddly reminds me of big pans of chilli at the veggie restaurant in Cardiff. This is good stuff, warm and fruity, which B the German doctor brings back for me when she visits her sister in Hungary.
• Turmeric - again, the veggie restaurant, sesame potatoes, sautéed in the big iron woks, served with yoghurt and cucumber.
• Almond essence - marzipan, which in turn reminds me of Tom, who loves it. The smell creates the sensation of the ground almonds in the mouth, in the same way that a convincing peach aroma provokes the feel of peach-fuzz on the lips.
• Caraway - seed cake, my dad's funeral.
• Cinnamon - cinnamon toast, visiting my GI bride auntie in Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen.  Also a strange red translucent toothpaste also from my teen years, I forget its name, when there was a notion that toothpaste could taste of anything but mint.
• Fennel - Greece.  Ouzo, perhaps, but also the smell of the warm air when you got off the plane.
• Five spice - simply of stir fries.
• Nutmeg - old larders, twilighty and cool, somewhat fusty.
• Oregano - pizzas, of course.  Perhaps the the take-away in Belsize Park where Fire Bird sometimes worked when we were students. Or is that just an association with the idea of pizzas? Perhaps the oregano just reminds me of pizza-flavoured things...
• Sumac - a relatively recent acquisition, and elusive in cooking; unexpectedly, the smell makes me think of some kind of powdered drink mix from childhood.
• Tarragon - Bearnaise sauce, steak restaurants.
• Vanilla pods - every ice cream ever. 
• White pepper - as a child, white pepper was the only kind I knew, on the table with school dinner.  I didn't like it, and though I have come to appreciate it as different from black but of quite serviceable flavour, it still smells a bit yuk.
• Black pepper (in a large pot in the corner) - this is such a commonplace that I didn't really expect it to have any particular associations, yet it was one of the most vivid surprises, as it took me back to the summer of the cabbages. When I was sixteen, my parents moved to a house in Brighton with a pretty and productive garden around it.  The old boy who had lived there before had planted a number of magnificent, heraldic cabbages.  They were full of juicy green cabbage white caterpillars, but were so substantial that there seemed to be plenty left for us, but you had to pick them over really carefully. This was my job and I took pride in it.  Lightly boiled, with butter and a good twist of black pepper, it was the first time I realised quite how good both cabbage and black pepper could be.  Once we were out and asked my dad to prepare the cabbage, he simply quartered, rinsed and boiled it.  I lifted the lid of the pan and saw a shoal of fat caterpillars bobbing and bubbling on the surface of the water.

Try it yourselves, see what comes up.  It's a whole world of travel without leaving your kitchen.

A bunch of bayleaves

The hedge cutter man is savaging the garden.  It's really no bad thing, everything will look better for it in the end, but it's kind of brutal and rather stressful, and we feel he goes a bit far sometimes. I'm sure he thinks we're daft English and too soft on our shrubs.

Tom brought a branch of bayleaves up which he felt needed sparing from the bonfire, did I want it for the kitchen?  I like the flavour of bay, one of the first things I learned to cook after I'd left home was a very simple potato soup, from Diet for a Small Planet I think, and the bayleaf was the making of it.  The smell of the leaves reminds me of a family holiday we took at an old house somewhere in mid-Wales called Gwynfryn, it was just before my siblings embarked on their first wave of emigration, so I was six.  There were gardens with lawns and tall bay hedges, and a sheepdog called Fly.  My sister Alison took the varnish off one of the dressing tables with nail-polish remover, my other sister was pregnant and cried when our sister-in-law got cross with her little boy, our nephew.  He and I shared a bath and some rude words.  We were happy and sad.  For the rest of her life I could crush a bay leaf in my hand and hold it out to my mum and one of us would say 'Gwynfryn'. Some of these memories may be slightly muddled but all of them are real.

The hedge man said he had a brother living in the country near us somewhere.  I questioned that he didn't know quite where.  He said he had fallen out with his family fifteen years or so ago.  I made the conventional noises about these things happen, sometimes it's easier to get on with some family members than others...

It was about his children, he said.  He and his wife adopted two Vietnamese children as babies, a girl and a boy.  I met his daughter, who is now seventeen, briefly once when she was working with him next door, perhaps a year ago.  She's beautiful, and so bright and open and grown-up, and clearly had such a good co-operative relationship with him, that I thought briefly that she was older than that and might be his younger wife, before I understood she was his daughter.  He speaks of her with great admiration, for her drive and hard-work and ambition, and it amuses him that the famous King Charles spaniel sleeps on her bed. His son he speaks of with a more rueful but equally genuine love and affection.

But when they told his parents about the adoption plans, which presumably came about because they couldn't have children of their own, and showed them a photo of their future baby daughter, the naked, cruel racism of both of their reactions was shocking, and much of  it unrepeatable.  His father said he would be ashamed to be seen holding the hand of such a child.  His brothers were less offensive but gave them no support.  A couple of years ago he did attend the christening of one of his brother's children, with his now-teenage daughter, the first time anyone in the family had seen her.  His brother commented, quite seriously, on how well she spoke French.

When his father died a few years ago, other family members exhorted him to build bridges, make an effort, resume relations with his mother and the rest of the family. No, he said, it's too late, finished; they made no efforts for him, and why risk being hurt again and hurting his children too?

When they go on holiday, they leave the King Charles spaniel with his wife's mother. Do they get on all right, I ask, the dog and the mother-in-law?  Oh yes, he said, she's a good mother-in-law.

He left earlier today to take his son to ping-pong and his daughter to her driving lesson.  He puts in a fairly short day but works non-stop, his armoury of machinery is formidable and nothing is too hard for him, he's a hard man.  He's working elsewhere tomorrow, so we can at least have a bit of a lie-in and a day without the whirr of the hedge-trimmer.

Scanning the leaves

Working outside, raking up was a wholesome and soothing activity.  But again, I missed the light to take any pictures, and it was mostly rather gloomy today anyway.  So I grabbed a handful of the fallen liquidambar leaves just before dark, which falls quickly these nights, and brought them in to play with.  I never sweep these up anyway, as I think the vivid patch of litter on the ground around the tree is as good a part of its display as anything, and let them blow away or get mowed up in their own good time.

My printer doesn't do those amazing sharp, deep scans with the black background that Marja-Leena's does.  I did it with the lid up, then messed about with some Picasa editing:

this one (above) simply has the contrast and saturation turned up a little,

this is with 'cross process' effect,

posterised,

black and white,

'pencil sketch',

and with inverted colours.

~

And that must be all for tonight.  What is frustrating me rather, so that I don't feel I'm keeping up very well, is not so much the daily posting but not getting around other people's blogs, when I know so many of you are also upping your posting rate and doing lovely things, and still finding the time to get here and offer me succour and encouragement. It just seems as if the odd five minutes or half-hour that I can snatch here I'm using for putting up a daily post, or sometimes trying to do justice to the comments you leave by replying.  However, we're two-thirds through the month and I've kept it up so far, so I'm resolved to finish.  Thanks for staying with it too!

How the universe will try to titillate my weary appetite for life with sweetmeats.

The damp wall proved to be a sprung leak under the sink and seemed to have grown even worse overnight.  Plumbing problems are the pits, second only to car smashes, maybe.  I did everything I could to help, emptied the cupboard, carried the ruined sponge-wet floor of it outside, found cloths to mop up, containers to catch the continuing drips and the small fan heater to help dry it out.  Then there wasn't too much else I could do.  I laced on my walking boots, told Mol firmly she must stay and look after Tom, the house and herself, and set off to yoga, giving myself a good hour to cover the ground. My loved ones despondent faces at the window were mortifying.

I met the goat on the old rail track, and since I was dog-less, she condescended to talk to me, and once I'd pricked my fingers on some brambles to feed to her, allowed me to stroke her.

~

In the woods going down to E's my mobile went, it wasn't Tom, and I didn't recognise the number, which was that of another mobile.  I got no connection when I answered, but thinking it must be something important to do with our ongoing troubles, I called back.

'Vous venez de me rappeler?'
'Eh, sorry, who's that?'  a man's voice sounding familiar 'Lucy?'
'Yes...'

It was my brother in Australia.

'Did I just ring you?'
'You must have, but it's my mobile. I didn't know you had the number.'
'Neither did I. I must have pressed the wrong thing.'

I didn't even know my ancient Nokia and never upgraded Breizh Mobile tarif even reached to Australia.

'I'm in the out in the countryside, in the woods, in a kind of sunken lane.  I can't hear you very well.'

But it wasn't true, he sounded as though he were only just down in Moncontour.  We realised we needed to get off rather hastily.  I suppose in an instinct to grab at the salient point I told him I loved him, which I don't think I normally do, not on the 'phone anyway.  And in the way that things happen when part of one's awareness is suddenly displaced, the translucent yellow of the overarching beeches was stamped with finality into my memory.

~

Tom came to E's door to meet me as we're dispersing. He hung over her half door, kissed her dog Moos on the nose when the latter jumped up to greet him.  Everybody seemed suddenly rather jollier.

'Tom,' said E 'get a plumber!'
'Can't do that, he'd rip all the walls apart.'

But now he has seen his way through, and we headed down to the local hardware store, which hasn't been open in that location for all that long but is proving useful of late, and now a preparatory construction of a new tap tap and flexible tubes is sprawling across the table like a metallic squid.

~

The very large man who comes to cut the hedges is ripping through them with his fearsome equipment. He is somewhat macho but adores his King Charles spaniel.  He has rather over-quoted for the job, but we get half of it off our taxes, and he keeps looking round for extra jobs he can do, so I've decided to try to take him up on it and find him some.  He says he'll come and plant us a wildflower lawn on the difficult side area in the spring, having first treated it for weeds - spare us the frowning about chemicals, it's really the only way to ensure a decent take of the wildflower seed.  Tom is embarrassed that I go out and rake up the cuttings while he is indoors, and makes clear that it is a plumbing crisis keeping him away.

'Has the plumber been then?' asks Monsieur the Hedgecutter

'There is the plumber,' say I, pointing at Tom.

Honour is satisfied.

~

We have a kind of kedgeree for dinner made with brown rice, a smoked mackerel fillet, coriander, cumin, cardomon and turmeric, with a salad of some pak choi that the flea beetles and late cabbage white caterpillars haven't managed to ravage, some land cress and a bit of lamb's lettuce, coriander seeds sprouted like mustard-and-cress on the windowsill (cheffy sorts call it micro-coriander), and a handful of toasted pumpkin seeds I shelled while watching Pointless. Oh, and a poached egg on top.

Tom's eating pink and white marshmallows from a chipped white ramekin, while drinking red wine. He has an unorthodox palate.

I keep meaning to try to take some photos in this strange sepia, gamboge and buttermilk light, but then it gets too dark.

I haven't heard from either the insurance agent or the girl with the car.  Sufficient unto the day.

From the dark end of the street, to the right side of the road.

Spent quite a bit of time looking up defensive driving.  That mostly seems to be the US term for it, where the awareness of it and courses in it figure quite prominently, it seems.  And the Institute for Advanced Motoring in the UK do a fantastic offer where you can more or less get all the help you need for as long as you like to pass their Advanced Driving Test, with lots of other goodies and benefits thrown in for very little money, since they are a charity.  It might almost be worth going over there to do it, except of course it would be on the wrong side of the road again.

However, we are not so well served here. Someone on a well-known expat site here asked if there were defensive driving courses here, for her son to take, and she only received a somewhat flippant reply to the effect that wasn't defensive driving something of a contradiction in Brittany? There are various courses for road safety awareness, mostly attended under duress by those who have accumulated the limit of points on their licence; photographs showed groups of predominantly youngish, stubble-headed and tattooed males sitting recalcitrantly around tables looking at severe but fatherly men with Powerpoint displays.  I didn't really fancy those (the courses, not the men, well, not anything about it really).  There was in fact a free course for young people who have only recently acquired their licences provided at the Chambre de Commerce  with the aim of reducing the number of them who die on the roads here and especially to equip them for the hazards of winter driving, using simulators, which looked like it might have been interesting, but it has been and gone already, and I don't suppose a middle-aged English lady with a crisis of nerves and no experience of left hand drive would have qualified to attend anyway. Otherwise there were day courses, with tracks and skid pans and water features and obstacles and generally the works, but I'd have had to travel a long way to get to them, they mostly seemed to be geared towards training commercial drivers, they involved comparatively little time on the practicalities and a lot of talking, evaluation, feedback etc (well, this is France) and to cap it all they were hideously expensive.

So I started browsing the driving schools, seeing what they offered.  Mostly their reason for being seemed to be to process French teenagers through the labyrinth of their code de la route and their permis de conduire as quickly as possible so they can launch themselves out onto the highways of this fair land with nary a care in the world.  Then, however, I found one in Loudeac which offered something called recyclage tous permis. Not, as it might sound and as I mostly still feel like doing, chucking one's licence and all one's driving related documentation into the waste paper to be turned into  egg boxes, selling the house and moving somewhere where I won't ever have to drive again, but for those who, regardless of age, hold a valid licence but for whatever reason, no longer feel à l’aise taking to the road, have got into bad habits, or who have fears about their own reflexes, or of driving in the dark, or the rain...

Figuring that I tick enough of these boxes, including as it happens, a mild rain-driving phobia, with the additional special case of needing to make the RHD-LHD switchover, I wonder if this is the place for me.  I felt instantly hopeful that I am evidently not the only such basket case and that there somewhere prepared to take us on.  Though I'm not sure how, even in Brittany, they can guarantee rain for those who fear driving in the rain, but still. So I shall set about finding out more, and even book a lesson this week if I can.

I've also had a very pleasant time organising some of the exciting Alphabet Soup submissions into a web album - deadline end of this month, still time to do something, open exhibition! - and when Mol and I were out walking at sunset a flight of maybe fifty magnificent curlews sailed across the sky above us - they moved in such elegant slow motion it was possible to count them.  

So there are things to keep me clear of the slough of despond (in my mind I always read it as 'sluff'), though relatively small matters, - never mind watching the news - can push me towards it. Such as the sudden blooming of horrible mouldy damp in the kitchen corner cupboard, which used to smell slightly musty sometimes but nothing worse, and we wonder if Jean-Paul's outside repointing, with the large amounts of water needed to soak the wall to make it stick, and the hydrofuge nature of the mortar, has caused the cold moisture to come through inside.  Or the poor little  hunters' beagle abandoned outside for the night, with soulful eyes who followed us most of the way round, appearing at every gap in the hedge with her tail curled under her but just twitching hopefully, I knew if she carried on to our door I'd have to give her a bed and a meal in the garage then waste precious hours tomorrow ringing round the loathsome hunters' associations or finally the mairie to get her impounded, but she left us at the next hamlet to ours. 

But there we are.  And here's a collage of pretty patterned or shiny kitchen stuff, just to brighten things up a bit. 

Pumpkins and Panhards

Following up on two of my current topics:

a contemporary advert for the Dyna Panhard - it can overtake a horse-drawn buggy!

and I could have got one with RHD back in the day...

In fact we're inclined to wonder if the Panhard in the Bon Coin advert in the previous post in fact has an engine in it, otherwise why would it be so cheap with such low kilometrage?  I'm half inclined to contact them out of curiosity.

It rained and rained today, but I made it to the bottom of the garden, picked scarole (I think that's a kind of endive) and Welsh onions, and Chinese leaves and a last few peas, for a kind of home grown petits pois à la français, and made another small dent in the pumpkin mountain, to bake with rigatoni and cheese - Tom had chicken and butter beans.

The pumpkin made a scary face at me.

That's it for tonight; thanks again for all the kindness, laughs and fellow feeling, I'll try to answer get round here or at yours ere long.