When my botanical brother-in-law Colm was here in the early summer he got a notion to put some root ginger in a pot in some soil to see what would happen.

Well the root produced plenty of greenery and now it is just about to flower.
We check it every hour on the hour, exciting times.

One evening’s harvest of quince and pomegranate.

On our walks around the village in these cooler evenings we now carry a bag to gather the pomegranates and quinces which grow in the hedge rows.
Now that the Vendanges are completely finished we have also taken to gleaning the vines for any odd bunches of grapes which the pickers may have missed, these are usually wonderfully sweet red fruits.

The quinces we turn into a delicious jelly, they have a bitterness which seems to balance the sugar perfectly.

The Pomegranates posed more of a problem.
We tried tossing the juicy seeds on fresh fruits but found them a little too astringent, the juice itself gave us a similar problem, although very rich and thick (and wonderfully easy to extract with my old restaurant juicer which is like a large garlic press) is also quite bitter.

Then we hit bingo, press the sweet juice form the grapes and mix fifty fifty with the pomegranate juice and you have a great drink for the mornings with just enough sharpness to set the palate zinging.
Our guests are loving it and the astute among you will have spotted that it costs us absolutely nothing.

Autumn just touches the vines near Thezan and still not a cloud in the sky.
It will be November in two weeks, is there such a thing as an Indian Autumn?

Last year I bought myself a paperback cook book at a fair called La Vrai Cuisine Française by Savarin.
It purports, like a lot of other French cook books to give the authentic recipes for French dishes. It then blots its copybook ( my copybook anyway) by including garlic sausage as a basic ingredient in a Quiche Lorraine.

It does however answer one question which has been troubling Síle and I since we started serving dinners here.
Even more so than in Ireland the French make a point of serving cheese with a meal and we are determined to follow this tradition here.
They serve it, correctly I think, before the dessert so that one eats it with the remains of the red wine.
The trouble is that our Irish friends, having gorged on France’s excellent cheeses, can often not find room for my carefully prepared dessert.

In the cookbook I was delighted to find a quotation which supplied the French reason for the cheese course;

Le fromage est le compément d’un bon dîner, mais c’est aussi le supplément d’un mauvais repas.

This brings me back instantly to my very first job in Snaffles in Dublin.
My boss there, Nick Tinne, used to slather on butter before adding a piece of Brie to his Carr’s Table Water quoting Clement Freud’s dictum;

“A bad cheese needs butter, a good cheese deserves it”

I can then instantly translate the French saying as;

A bad meal needs cheese, a good meal deserves it.

I will just have to make my main courses a little smaller to leave room for the cheese.

We found this postcard on a stall in the Brocante in Pezenas
last week. It was easily recognisable as the Place d’Horloge
just around the corner from our house (even though it was
then called Place Pierre Cabanes according to the card)

Just an hour ago Síle and I went around the corner and took
another shot from the same spot.

Not a lot has changed has it?

As I said in April four years ago:

Even though I was born and reared in Cork, a very musical city, I was never really an opera person.
Thanks to the pioneering spirits of Aloys Fleischmann and Joan Denise Moriarty the arts of classical music and dance were well catered for in Cork with institutions like the Cork Orchestral Society and the Cork Ballet Company.
On the Opera front however things were not so impressive.
We were fed large quantities of various light operas, there was always a good house for Merry Widows, Student Princes and anything by Gilbert and Sullivan. To lower the brow a little musicals comedies, especially those by Rogers and Hammerstein were always popular and much loved (by me too, I must say.)
I do remember a terrific production of Traviata in the Palace Theatre and there were, I am sure some others, but, on the whole I think Opera was the poor relation of the performing arts in Cork. Consequently I was fairly ignorant of, and imagined I would be bored by Opera.
My first contact with opera, as an adult, which began to break down this apathetic disinterest, was with Ingmar Bergman’s production of Mozart’s Magic Flute which and I saw on the television on RTE 1 in the late Seventies.
This fabulous production made me a fan, but only of this particular opera.
My relationship with opera has followed a pattern since of really having to listen many times to an opera before the familiarity breeds respect.
I now have a repertoire of probably only six that I truly like but look forward, with much anticipation , to getting to know some others.

So on to Rigoletto.
The French version of Lyric FM is Classique and we have taken to having that on in the car as we drive around and it was on this that we heard Callas singing the aria Gaultier Malde from Rigoletto.
It is beautiful.
We were both just struck dumb and I determined that a copy of same I just had to have.
Amazon France furnished us with a second hand copy (another advantage of living in France is that cds or books -even from English companies- are way cheaper or often post free sent to our address in France. I never realised just how much broader the Irish Sea was than the Channel) and I have been playing it incessantly ever since.
It is incredible music now I want a production please.
Anyone know of one coming up?

Last night at sunset I noticed Canigou in the Pyrennees silhouetted by the evening sky.
I have hardly seen the twin peaks of this mountain since June through the haze of summer so I suppose it must be a sign of winter’s approach when we can see Mount Canigou, long held sacred by Catalans and fully 150 klms away, from our terrace.

Got a mail purporting to be from the Irish Tax Office today (all logos etc correct) telling me that I was entitled to a rebate of a plausible sum of €340.
All I had to do to recieve this was to write back to them giving my bank acc details and all passwords etc.

It was heartening to see that the return address was irishtax@orange.fr.
Decentralisation has finally taken its logical course and the tax office has decided to join us here in France.
I am delighted to see that the fortune I paid them in taxes over the years has finally been put to good use.

I always love to find pieces of glass with stuff written on it, particularly if I can relate in some way to the words.
Three years ago I found a blue soda syphon, headless but none the worse for that, in a Brocante on the Narbonne road which I picked up for about €20-cheap because of its decapitation.

It now sits proudly (with a fully headed twin from Annecy) in the meat safe in Le Presbytere.

At the Brocante fair in Pezenas last week I was rootling around in a junk box in the back of a shop when I found an old bottle on which, though truly filthy, I thouight I could decipher the word Beziers.
The Brocanteur looked at its filth in revulsion and, keeping his hands behind his back, looked for €2 for it. (I could easily have got it for €1 I know but, aw shucks)

I took it home and washed it well and this is what emerged:

A half litre Primerose (Holyhock) beer bottle, who had managed to keep his head, and his cap, and , as a bonus, I found a lady sitting on the knee of the man in the moon.
I think it was worth the €2 .

Today Síle and I decide to take the day off.
Our last guests left after breakfast and our next lot aren’t due in till Friday so we are on our holliers for a few days.
We headed up to the Lac de Rivages, up the mountains in the Haute Languedoc and set about having a walk in the woods.
The weather is still sunny and pleasant, cooler now in the lower twenties but I’m still in shorts and t shirt (the French, who appear to feel the cold more, are rather more warmly dressed.)
We were walking in the woods partly to test out Síle’s new walking sticks and also wondering if on the off chance we might manage to see some mushrooms as they are in season now.
I’m no authority on Mushrooms but know that every mushroom hunters dream is to nab a few Ceps.
These fat meaty wonders are called Porcini in Italy and are only rated after the truffle for deliciousness.
They occasionally appear in the markets here but are usually bought up before I get there.

As soon as I left the car I spotted a mushroom in the ditch.
I thought it could have been a Cep, but of course it couldn’t be, could it, so I tucked it down under a leaf and walked on.
We strolled on for about a mile and saw nothing further in the Fungi line bar a few ratty looking shaggy caps and a load of venomous yellow babies so we decided to head back to the car.
Coming against us were a French couple, our age, carrying full plastic bags.
“Did you get some mushrooms” said I after the Bon Jours.
“I did” said he, opening the bag, “All Ceps!”
And he opened the bag showing about a dozen large Boletus Edulis, fat monsters which the English call Penny Buns and the Italians Porcini.
And it seemed that this little Frenchman had gathered these on the road which we had just travelled.

We bid them Bon Appetite for the feast they had ahead and strode back the road determined to find some of their leavings.
After about 100 metres Síle spotted a monster which looked like theirs.
I agreed to carry it reverendly in my hand.
Then she spotted his tiny brother which we also thought worth the try.
We got to where I had hidden my medium sized fellow and now, having been shown the real thing, decided that this could also be the real thing.
When we got back to the car I took a portrait of the three posed on the bonnet.

We then belted it back as quick as we could to the chemist in the village.

There is a very simple system in France, each Chemist is obliged by law to employ a mushroom person who must be prepared to pass the mushrooms for eating.
I went into the chemist (who knows me) and told him my errand.
We will have to ask M. to come out, he said, and called the Mycologist from the nether regions.

In the meantime He peered into the bag to see what this Irish yob would think edible.
Instantly his expression changed and gave a low whistle, Trois Boletus Edulis he said, he then gazed at me with admiration;
Ils sont tres tres Bon !
The mycologist backed up this opinion with even more flags and whistles so I fairly floated out of the shop.

I weighed them when we got home, Síles monster alone came to eight ounces !

They were washed (gently) trimmed (slightly) sliced (thinly) and fried (softly)in a generous quantity of butter, black pepper and salt until just tender.
Síle ate hers on toast;

I ate mine with (but not in) an omelette.
They were absolutely delicious.