Portrait of the Chef as a Writer (taken on the terrace this afternoon by Mrs. Dwyer)

Sometimes I think I have just that.
You will all be aware at this stage that I am plugging away on A BOOK- (at long last ) this oeuvre is at the moment somthing less than half way through but I have been blabbing on about it on the principle that this will shame me into finishing it.
It is part memoir , part travelogue and part recipe book and so will probably disappear instantly between three stools.
It has a working title ; À Table ; An Irish Chef in a Village in the Languedoc.

I was contacted a couple of weeks ago , totally coincidentially , by Waterford Writers Week (which festival takes place at the end of March) to ask would I be part of a panel on an open forum on Cookery Writing (this from my bits and pieces of food journalism) , this I accepted , they further contacted me today looking for a picture and a bio for their programme and to tell me that the local paper wanted to do a spread on me to publicise the festival.
Could any writer (especially putative) ask for better pre publication publicity ?

The divils own luck I tell you.

And now I am certainly going to have to finish the thing!

We did a bit of babysitting over the Christmas and re-introduced Fionn to the French folk song; Il Etait un petit Navire.
Frustrated with having to sing it to him all day I found a version on youtube where , with the help of some earphones , Fionn could indulge in his passion without disturbance.

We are back home in France now for just over a week and the difference of temperature in the house in that time is remarkable.
The first few days after we got back were perishing - this was not at all the fault of the outside temperatures- they rarely, even at night , went below 4 or 5 C -but due to the fact that we live in an old stone house.
Stone has some very strange properties, one of them is its ability to conserve temperatures. We have a large wood burning Godin in our living room but for the first days back it might have been a candle in a freezer for all the heat it gave us. Gradually the wood heat penetrated into the bones of the house and by about Thursday we could come down stairs in our dressing gowns again.

All this time the outside temperatures were rising , which also obviously affected the interior but , oddly , not as much as you would expect.

The house has a remarkable ability - based also on the fact that there is quite a small area of windows- to remain a bit aloof from the outside , a fact which we are greatful for in the summer when the temperatures outside can hit the thirties.

Another relevant factor are the shutters , putting these across the French windows into the terrace in the evenings in winter has an immediate effect on the inside , as this also does in the heat of the day in summer .

We were strolling around the village last week and noticed that the New Builds in the lotissments are all furnished with air conditioning units , it seems almost as standard. These houses are of course , as all modern houses are , built of cavity brick.

Just as we bought our Presbytere , a French government initiative was brought in that each house as it was sold had to be furnished with an energy rating , ours was one of the first in our area to be so rated and I remember the Nortaire remarking to us that it had scored particularly well, better than the new builds.
This is proof -I suppose- that sometimes the old ways were not the worst.

When we bought the Le Presbytere, now five years ago, the sisters who had been living here left some things behind which the archdiosces of Montpellier , whom we paid for house, didn't think worth removing.

In the courtyard under our terrace , just outside the garden lavatory , they left a full sized statue of Our Lady of Lourdes . we were bemused with this legacy , not being strong Catholics it didn't seem appropriate to bring her into the house and offer her a niche on which to be venerated, but still we were far too engrained in our religion to either destroy her or give her away.
She is a little past her prime , we think she had lost her place in the church (replaced by a newer model) when her blue sash started to flake off.
And so she has stood in the courtyard , occasionally putting the heart and soul across an unsuspecting guest who might wander in the garden as she appeared out of the gloom.

Yesterday Síle was doing some gardening and decided to move some plants around , a Lemon tree was moved to a sunnier spot and another Lemon (another legacy from the nuns which has never borne fruit but which has the most spectacular thorns ) was moved out to a place where it would perhaps be less sunny to stop its heady growth .
Then under our climbing Solanum - another legacy from the sisters which produces lovely clusters of white flowers for ten months of the year- we had a hole to fill.
Síle was inspired to put the virgin into this bower and so , with much pulling and hauling (and puffing and panting) we pulled the lady across the garden and set her into her new grotto.

It was made for her.

We are not quite sure what will happen next , the weather may be unkind to her and remove her last vestiges of colour , being made of plaster of Paris she may start to melt away slowly but whatever is in store for her I think we are both much happier that she will not end her days , in a gloomy courtyard outside a lavatory door , but in a position where she can be admired and where she will be crowned with Solanum blossom.

I know well that people talking about their diets is just about as boring a topic as you could imagine , however , obese people - like me- even those -again like me - with an ostrich ability to bury their heads in the sand find themselves facing this four letter word every so often.

The buzz word for diets over the Christmasin Ireland was low carb. My son-in-law was the first to moot it as a diet from Sweden, then Tom, a young sportsman friend laid up for six months with a broken leg claimed it's success but it was Lucinda O Sullivan in the Indo, a food critic with the sort of necessity of eating for a living as I have extoling it as a painless method of weight loss that finally clinched it for me.

I am (but of course) doing my own version of this.
I have decided to eschew for six days of the week all the bulk carbs I normally eat with each meal viz ; Bread, Potatoes , Pasta , Rice and also to exclude from between meal snacking on biscuits or cake.
Nothing else is going to be excluded, butter, cream, cheese (my firm favourites) are allowed, but of course are eaten in lesser quantities without their carb fellow passengers- butter and cheese need bread like cream needs cake.

So far very little pain at all, I will discuss weight loss at a later date when I have had the nerve to climb on the scales.

Principal difficulty is breakfast- formerly being a la francais i.e. bread, croissants and jam.

On our way to the ferry in Cherbourg at Christmas we stopped at an absolutely charming hotel in Chinon called Hotel Diderot , there (as well as about 150 jams) they offered a plate of fresh goats cheese drizzled with honey and scattered with fresh walnuts. I tried it. I was conquered.
This is now the basis of my new breakfast.
I have added some fresh fruit to the mix, I now line a plate with some fruit (Satsumas and Mangoes have worked well) cover this with a generous disc of Fresh Goats Cheese (it must be like a set yoghurt ) and then proceed with the honey and walnuts.
This has so far provided me with a pain free breakfast.

If I manage to keep this up I will let you know in a few weeks if it works.