Eight alcohol-free days done, a mere twenty two to go.
Over a quarter of the road completed and (despite appearances) I feel fine.

Yesterday was alovely bright Autumn day and Síle and headed off to the mountains of the Languedoc for a picnic.

One of the objects of the day was for me to show Síle the village of Brusque which Colm and I had come across last year and the other object, which is always on ones mind at this time of year, was to see if we could find some mushrooms.

Brusque is actually in the Grande Causses which is in the Aveyron about an hour from our house but you have to drive through spectacular mountain scenery to get there, and to pass many woods.
Our first excursion into a chestnut wood yielded some mushrooms but nothing fantastic ( we were it must be understood rather spoiled in finding Ceps on our first day out, this is like learning to drive in a Rolls)
Second forray into a pine wood yielded even less, the wood was carpeted in mushrooms but none were that interesting looking.

When we got to Brusque the first thing we saw was an elderly man getting out of his car with a basketful of delicious looking but small brown mushrooms.

I admired them and asked him what they were.
“Champignons” he said
Yes but what sort said I.
“Mousserons” was his smiling answer.

After that we explored the village which has a ruined bastille and a watch tower (which is lived in) and even a door which is decorated with linen fold carving, it is a little gem.

All the time the word “Mousserons” was running through my mind.
I had my suspicions.
Sure enough when I got home out came the first volume of the (shorter)OED and there under the origin of the English word mushroom was its origin; from the French Mousseron.
Over to Robert and there Mousseron was translated into English as Meadow Mushroom, over to my Mushroom book where Meadow Mushroom turned out to be the common field mushroom which even I am familiar with in Ireland.

There is no way that the mushrooms in that man’s basket were field mushrooms.
I reckon he just decided that these ignorant foreigners didn’t understand Champignons and so he gave us then next nearest generic term.

We didn’t find out what he had in his basket but at least I now know from where the strange word “Mushroom” originated.

On November 1st, the feast of All Saints it is traditional for the people of France to visit the graves of their dead relatives and friends and leave huge pots of Chrysanthemums.

To this end all the shops in the village have been selling these beautiful pots of flowers for the last fortnight.
Even the Tabac and the Supermarché had them for sale.

Today being the fifth, and all the paying of respects well over, Sile and I went up to the graveyard to see the display.

We were not disappointed.
Nearly all of the graves were decorated with overflowing pots of Chrysanthemums.

The paths in the graveyard were bordered with fresh flowers.

One grave to an obviously much loved Granny positively overflowed with flowers.

There was one grave however, right at the gate which was undecorated.

Síle and I have noticed this grave before. Although it was originally a large momument to who lies beneath it has no flowers or mementoes.
Also, and this is quite bizarre, the name, or names on the front of the grave stone have been effaced or maybe just eroded away.
It seems a sad little mystery in a graveyard full of the remembered dead.

I love a stew, it is almost worth having winter just to have a stew.
Stew hits us in various guises from the posh French numbers, Bourguignon, Daube (which use red wine,) the Belgian Carbonade (which uses beer) through the Hungarian Gulyas (Paprika), the Lancashire Hot Pot to our own humble Irish Stew.
They all have something in common.
They are the long slow cooking of tougher pieces of meat to reduce them to melting delicious tenderness.

Today I made a stew, and as always with me I tend to throw in anything I have to hand which I feel might make it delicious.
I am now going to show you how I made it, without giving you a recipe or directions but just telling you how the humour took me as I proceeded.

One thing I had bought specifically for the stew was some chunks of smoked bacon which I chopped roughly and fried up in a little duck fat (left over from last weeks confit) until crisp and then scooped them up with a slotted spoon and put them in the bottom of a large stew pot.

Next step was the beef, I had bought about 2 Kilos of Shin of beef, freely available in France and any decent butcher in Ireland should be able to save a bit from his mincer if begged in advance. This I cut into large pieces and then fried in the fat in which I had cooked the bacon, in about three batches, until crusty brown and then threw that also into the stewpot. (along with a large bunch of thyme from the garden)

In my veg box I had loads of pink garlic and some shallots.
These got skinned, and the shallots divided into cloves and all browned in the pan along with some more of the duck fat .

Then I chopped (not too small) three or four onions and three or four carrots and gave them the same treatment as the shallots and garlic

After they had joined the meat in the pot I poured about half a bottle of our local red into the pan and proceeded to boil it hard to reduce it to about half its volume.

Then my eye was caught by a bowl of Oranges on the counter,
Ideal.
The Provencals love a little orange peel in their stews, in some went.

Sudden memory of a box of the yellow Ceps we had last week.
We hadn’t been able to finish them all so I had frozen a few after I had fried them.
(If you are not so lucky you could always fry up a few ordinary mushrooms and throw them in)

In they went, into the reducing wine along with the peel of the oranges and a few bay leaves

Once the wine was reduced I threw the contents of the pan into the stewpot.
I also poured in a pint of chicken stock left over from last night.

Now I am going to show you something never before shown in a cook book or a cookery demonstration but which all cooks see after they have put their masterpiece into the oven.

The wreck of the kitchen.

However all was clean and clear and three hours later I pulled this out of the oven
(I had cooked it very low, at about 150 C, just so it barely bubbled)

A wonderful pot of melting aromatic succulent beef and vegetables and, as there is enough here to feed eight, after the left overs are frozen tonight I should be in for same at least three times more.

My best French teacher at the moment is the cost, in the village, of the English daily papers.

The London Times come in at about €3.25, or nearly €20 a week, so as a consequence it is not a daily purchase but an occasional one.
I am then thrown on the Midi-Libre for the news, and from there come my French lessons.
Almost inevitably, within fifteen minutes out has to come our Robert French Dictionary.
Take this morning’s headline.

Le préfecture du Gard coiffe encore le bonnet d’âne

Literally:
The governing body of the Gard (department) again style the hair of the ass’s bonnet.

Out comes Robert.
First the asses bonnet, this means quite simply a dunces cap.
Okay, so now we know that the Prefecture of the Gard intend to style, again. a dunce’s cap.
Back to Robert.
Coiffer means not only to style hair but also to don any form of headgear.
So then all is clear;
The Gard prefecture have again put on the Dunce’s Cap.
This is because of the departments in the area, it takes them longest to produce certain documents.

For example 28 days to produce a Driving Licence compared to the Lozere who have it the following day, 12 days for a passport compared to the Aveyrons 1 and 11 days to produce a national identity card compared to a mere 1.7 in the Landes.
I don’t know , the poor old Gard don’t seem too bad to me, but then I was reared in a hard slow school.

A fascinating little bit of trivia happened when I started to look of the meanings of Coiffer in Robert.

The following sentence occured:
Elle allait bientôt coiffait sainte Catherine
This seems to mean that she will soon have crowned Saint Catherine.

But (of course) it doesn’t.
In fact it means: (says Robert)

She would soon be 25 and still unmarried.

Now I am still unsure of how they come to this conclusion.
My guess is that as Saint Catherine achieved her sainthood for (as well as becoming the role model for a firework) being a very adamant virgin.
Could it be that the French in their wisdom have decided that a girl 25 and still a virgin is never going to lose that distinction ?

Seems a harsh judgment to me.

As I said at the begining it is amazing what the the papers can teach you.

Day five of My Annual November Dry and bearing up well.

I have decided to list 5 positive aspects of the exercise.

1. The Mornings; they are much improved. I am not a person who suffers much from hangovers (that is provided I remain within my fairly wide parameters) but it often takes an hour and a pint of coffee before I become my usual cheerful self.
In November I awake in good form.

2. The Weight ; This hasn’t been doing too well lately. The Chambre d’Hôte system doesn’t help, sitting at table with guests and matching them course for course. I’m hoping that ( and therefore this one has to be aspirational positive) the reduction of calories from the reduction of alcohol will make me miraculously slimmer.
But then there is point three.

3. The Financial Gain for the Lemonade and Exotic Fruit Industries; These lads are thriving. Because I have forsworn the demon I reckon I can thoroughly indulge in lemonade and fruit juices. Lemonade here is made in the old fashioned way with citric and tartaric acid and loads of sugar, none of that silly introduction of lemon juice. But its raison d’etre and the justification for consuming great quantities is that it comes in these marvellous glass bottles with attached ceramic stoppers which we re-use as carafes. The fruit juice aspect is that I then further indulge in exotics like Mango and Lychee juices to make these palatable.

4 Then there is Not Getting Pissed and Disgracing Oneself : Always a possibility with my generous attitude to self drinking which a few glasses endows. This is particularly dangerous when we have guests present. This results in that dreadful moment in the mornings (see 1.) when you wake and remember that you can’t remember the last hour of being awake the night before.
Not drinking makes such moments extremely rare.

5 The Brain. I have beaten Síle in Scrabble every night since the 1st of the month.
Enough said.

Last week on an evening stroll we spotted an olive tree in a ditch and it was full of delicious looking plump black olives.
This is the first time we have seen a wild tree, obviously an escape from cultivation, with a goodly amount of ripe black olives on the branches.
Now I know that you cannot eat olives straight from the tree, they need to be cured first, but these looked so good I succumbed and tasted one.
It was disgusting.
I decided that this was one food for free we were going to have to miss out on, at least until I discovered how to perform the cure.

Then just this morning I was starting to try to sort out some cookbooks and came across Provencal Food by Patricia Wells and started to read through it (as is my wont) looking for ideas.

There, in her section on preserving, I found two different methods of curing olives- a dry salt cure (which involves pricking them all over with a tooth pick) and a wet cure, where you soak them in brine for 4 months or so.

And so to this evening, we decided to take a new route around the village- I will confess that I snuck a cotton bag into one of my pockets.

We met a man out stripping his olives from their branches and had a bit of a chat with him (his accent was harder than most so there was a lot of nodding and smiling on our side) but the gist of the conversation was that he had got a good crop this year and was taking them off to the mill to be turned into oil.

Further on , in a hedge we found a tree dripping with olives, most of which had fallen on the ground.

We decided that these were up for grabs so we gathered a few for the cotton bag- not too many just in case someone else decided that they had dibs on them.

At home we weighed them out, just 500g.

Deciding that the effort of pricking each individual olive was a bit energetic we decided to go for the longer brine cure, so we made our brine solution as instructed, poured this and the olives into a jar, used a lid full of brine to keep them submerged, sealed the jar and now we just have to wait for four months ; sometime around Easter, to taste and see if Ms. Wells knows her olives.

You will be informed at easter.

Seen on our nightly perambulation, lit by the setting sun.

Another lovely painting from the Museu Emporda (I did love this Gallery, all locals and no Dali’s) this one painted in the 1950’s is of a kitchen in the country and could almost be a photo.
Again I have no idea who painted it, apologies to the artist.
The things which fascinated me were the cooking hobs, perfectly modern , set into the counter but made for fire like those of a mediaeval kitchen. I presume charcoal was used but it could just as easily have been sticks. I wonder did they have a problem of smoke in the kitchen, I produce pillars of smoke when I barbecue.

From the Museu Emporda in Figueres.