Posted on by loveleyjoy

CELEBRATING OUR 40TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

We are trying to downsize in preparation for our return to the UK. How to celebrate when we don’t want more stuff? A nice meal out? We certainly had that.

I have had an English Conversation group for several years. Maximum attendance is 3-4 people, as I don’t ask people to enrol for a term, they are free to go on holiday or be sick and they are not out of pocket.

Alain Number One, (we have an Alain Number Two) spent his pre-marriage years in the UK, working in hospital kitchens and learning English. He was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease which meant he had to give up driving. He has a very dynamic wife who takes moving houses, redecorating and creating gardens out of badly neglected parcels in her stride.

Alan has the most amazing imagination and once I challenged him to tell a story from some prompt cards and he spoke for an hour!

We visited him in hospital taking with us our pink picnic basket, plastic cups, a thermos, and slices of cake and couple of balloons for us to bat back and forth to give him some fun exercise while having to be bed bound. He hoped to be out by his 80th birthday and he was.

Today, we were invited to celebrate his birthday with him, 25 friends, neighbours and family.

The party started in their newly reclaimed and replanted garden that had had hedges so thick and tall that the neighbours couldn’t see the house. The obligatory glass of champagne accompanied little glasses of avocado and cream cheese, apericubes and lozenges of flavoured cheeses, smoked salmon rolled into tiny sausages, crisps, cashew nuts (my favourite) and refilled glasses of champagne.

The neighbour in the house behind them turned our to be very happy to help with the reclamation of the garden and all there is between them now is a waist height chain-link fence with a newly opened gap to allow physical communication between the families.

The neighbour was manning the barbecue that he had built. Coals were glowing and brochettes of chicken cubes, beef cubes were roasting. Plump duck breasts were on a higher level waiting for a space closer to the heat.

We were called to take our places at the tables as it was assumed that our stomachs were feeling empty! Not when there are cashew nuts and crisps looking so tempting.

The brochettes were served along with a cold pasta dish containing mini grilled tomatoes and chopped cucumber.

When eating French meals it is necessary to pace oneself. Even if the dish is the most delicious that you have ever tasted don’t, I repeat, don’t eat until you feel satisfied. We have learned this from experience. All will become clear.

When those dishes had been circulated a few times, the sliced duck breasts appeared, served along with tinned green beans to which the chef had added, fresh young celery leaves and a beetroot with apple salad. A pureed onion sauce was also passed around and I mustn’t forget the diced fried potatoes.

On the table were baskets of cut baguettes and red wine for those who wished for more alcohol. Conversations about the possibility of the police checking drivers limited some from second glasses, even though they knew that even one glass could lead to difficulties if stopped.

No meal in France is complete with out a cheese board. A blue-veined cheese, a goats cheese and a Brie are the starting points. Pace yourself – don’t forget those words.

It was a birthday and I wondered what the cake might be like. The day before we had been to afternoon tea with a couple from our church and a 12 inch disk of pink meringue, filled with fresh raspberries and cream was enjoyed by us all.

The friendly barbecuing neighbour was not only a keen gardener and outdoor cook, he also made cakes! He presented a ‘pièce montée’. Weddings, baptisms, births can be celebrated with one. First make an oven-full of choux pastry buns. Our man made 80 for this 80th birthday. Fill them with a ‘crème’ like a thick custard. Make caramel and mix in some chopped hazelnuts to make nougatine (caramel and nuts) and use that as the solid base. The little choux buns are dipped in the hot caramel and stuck together circle above circle until a tall cone takes shape. Our man proved his skill by taking hold of the whole creation and holding it horizontally, to prove it was well made!

More champagne was needed to accompany the distribution of the mini choux buns, and their copious caramel glue which was now very hard. I had fears for my recently crowned tooth and tried to eat and crunch with care.

We had arrived at 11.30 and were the first to leave at nearly 6pm when guests started reminiscing about things that had happened among them during the past 80 years.

So, to celebrate our 40th anniversary we had been treated to a multi-course meal thanks to Alan and family.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

BANANA BREAD

Just to illustrate what I was saying in my previous blog, that I can give you the recipe for the things I bake, but the result will not be the same.

Today, I used another of my favourite recipe books, ‘The Loaves and Fishes Cookbook’. It is written by Anna Pump, originally from Germany, who ran a restaurant on Long Island, USA.

When she moved to the USA, she found that everyone had a favourite recipe for Banana Bread, a cake that she had never heard of. Soon she developed her own list of ingredients and method.

2 eggs – yes I used that number, but I make sure ours are organic and free range.

1/2 cup safflower oil – don’t have any of that so used coconut oil and some organic rape seed oil.

1 cup of sugar – there is no white sugar in our house after reading, ‘Pure, White and Deadly’ the 1972 book by John Yudkin. I used golden granulated cane sugar and a spoonful of molasses. Sugar from sugar beet can be made to appear brown, by coating the crystals with molasses. Recently a limited range of ‘Sucre Roux’ appeared in our local German discount supermarket. I had not much brown cane sugar left and no trips to the UK planned. I was getting desperate. When I opened this sugar (produced in Belgium) it stank! It looks like golden sand that any beach would be proud of, but it smells disgusting. I looked on the internet and found that this was normal! I asked a Belgian pilgrim who was staying with us if it was OK . He tried to reassure me it was. I have tasted it, and I will never use it in any dish. The smell is like earth plus a chemical spill. Growing sugar beet sprayed with many chemicals and then trying to make the white product golden seems to have failed terribly.

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. I got out a bottle of vanilla pods infused in vodka but decided that would add too much liquid so didn’t put in any vanilla.

3 ripe bananas – yes, I had those. That was the purpose of making the cake – to use up 3 of the 5 ripe bananas we had.

1 1/4 cups of unbleached white flour. I made a mixture of toasted soya flour, some freshly ground whole almonds (with skins) and coconut that I also blitzed in the coffee grinder.

1 teaspoon of baking powder. After having a student stay with us for a month who was gluten intolerant, I started making my own mix of baking powder. I had read that some manufacturers use wheat flour to bulk out baking powder which should have only 2 ingredients -twice as much Cream of Tartar as Bicarbonate of Soda.

1/2 cup of walnuts, coarsely chopped. As I had already put in some ground almonds, and didn’t have any walnuts I added about 6 chopped delicious, plump Medjool, Israeli, dates. Our local Aldi had them in its special offer section and I bought about 6 packets as I knew they would not be there for long.

Cook for 60 minutes at 350°F or 180°C or until a toothpick comes out clean. Who has toothpicks in their kitchen? Inserting a toothpick into a cake in the middle of a hot oven seems to invite telltale burns on the forearms that novice cooks all seem to bear. Use a fork or blade of a pointed knife for health and safety sake!

The result? An unctuous, moist, flavoursome slice that kept calling to me during each entry to my kitchen, ‘just another spoonful’. The moist result made me wonder if I had put in 1 1/4 cups of flour. Finding 3 different ingredients and grinding 2 of them, plus my other substitutions means that an 8 step recipe became a 12 step recipe where an item could be missed or miscalculated. Oh, well, my husband and I have both had portions and enjoyed it.

Oh, and I almost forgot that I added a sprinkling of turmeric (curcuma in French) because it’s supposed to help heal ………… whatever I read it helped heal and as it was yellow, it wouldn’t be out of place in a Banana Tea Bread.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE

I have been downsizing my collection of recipe books. I had over 100. Some have gone to a school here in Reims that has a catering department. One I kept, was the Cranks recipe book. A ‘crank’ is a crazy person, or as the Oxford English Dictionary says, ‘a person who has strange ideas or unusual ideas and beliefs’. There used to be a Cranks restaurant in Norwich, which I had visited several times. Vegetarian meals were served there, way before vegetarians were considered normal. Flours used were usually wholemeal and ingredients were unusual like lentils, soya and buckwheat.

Years later, I had symptoms of gluten intolerance and cut out all wheat products. Looking back it was an easier journey than it could have been thanks to recipe books like ‘Cranks’ that introduced alternatives to the plain white, non-organic flour on which, the UK Flour Millers estimates, a third of our food products are based.

I had heard about buckwheat from the Cranks book but it was in Brittany that we were astonished by fields of a bright red cereal. We stopped to investigate and identified it as buckwheat that is ground to make sarrasin flour in France and turned into delicious savoury pancakes or galettes. Interestingly, buckwheat is a relative of rhubarb – so they say!

Another cereal that we drool over is maize-meal or polenta. We make the most delicious chips from polenta stirred into an organic chicken stock. It needs lots of stirring and gets thicker and thicker, before the final ingredient of grated parmesan cheese is added. The gloop is spread out in a large tray to cool and dry, then cut into chips to be fried. We had an Italian pilgrim stay with us who said our polenta was the best he had ever tasted – praise indeed!

Oats! Where would we be without porridge, muesli and granola. Cranks had a recipe for granola that was baked in the oven until crisp. I have often made it. Samuel Johnson in his dictionary defined oats as, “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”. We wouldn’t be without flapjacks, and cheesy savoury ones are also made in our house – great for eating on motorway journeys.

I’ve just seen that millet was another grain used in several recipes. It is the grain that is fed to budgerigars – a sprig is often hung in their cage. After trying it once, I don’t think I will return to those recipes- it was bland and tasteless.

I often bake cakes and biscuits for Afternoon Tea when we have pilgrims arriving to stay overnight while walking to Rome or Spain. When people taste my baking they often ask for the recipe. I have to tell them that I can give them the recipe, but what they make will not taste like the item that have just eaten. My box of flours rarely has white plain flour in it. At the moment it has toasted soya, rice flour, potato flour and sarrasin.

If the recipe says sugar, I might add raw cane, muscovado or date syrup with a bit of molasses for a depth of flavour. And of course all brown sugars have chromium in them – the mineral that is necessary for the digestion of sugar – but that is another story.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

FINALLY A LETTER TO THE MANAGER

In today’s computerised world you would think that the pricing of products in a supermarket would be easy. Bar codes are on every packet – all that is necessary is for the cashier to scan the item. However, we were continuing to find errors at every visit. Baby Bel cheeses were priced at 30c each. I put six in a bag and was charged 1.99 not 1.80 – a 10% overcharge. This chain had 175 stores. Over a month the store is making 1,000 euros extra for just 10 sales a day. But French people don’t complain.

The following incident probably illustrates why. One day a little recipe book was on offer just inside the entrance. It was marked as ‘FREE’. When I went to pay, I was charged 1.49c for it. Yet another trip to the Customer Service desk ‘A’ where 5 people were in a queue in front of two assistants. Two more assistants were there but were positioned well back as if they were not available. When I got to the head of the queue and asked for my refund, ‘Pas ici, Madame, c’est mon collègue‘. So I moved to the back of the queue B. I got my refund, but it was put onto my loyalty card. I wanted to have cash in hand rather than risk them taking away my points. But this lady could not give back cash so it was again, ‘Pas ici, Madame, c’est mon collègue‘.Back to queue A and 25 minutes in total to achieve a cash refund of something that was free – if you had the supermarket’s own cash card!

Another time, we saw a rabbit pen advertised in the supermarket brochure that arrived weekly in our letterbox.The price was reduced to tempt us to buy it and we had a rabbit! We went down the road, found the product and paid. However, the price was more than marked in the brochure. I pointed out the discrepancy to the assistant. She showed me where it was written SUPERMARKET NORTHERN BRANCH. Now, we lived 600 metres from the SOUTHERN BRANCH and 8 kilometres from the northern branch.It seemed incredible that the northern branch had different prices and that they bothered to put publicity leaflets in letterboxes so close to the southern branch. Unless it was done on purpose to trick people.

That was the final straw and the last red rag to the bull. A letter to the manager was called for listing all the irritations we had suffered. Another one was that people having the stores own credit card went to reserved tills. Other customers were in long queues while the cashiers at the reserved ones sat and did nothing. A type of apartheid. Also if you took a basket and put more than 10 items in it the assistant would tell you off. I thought I was a good customer if I went for 6 items and came back with 12!!

Anyway, the letter was sent and I received a surprising reply. All will be revealed!