(enough for two x 1 litre pudding basins)

This is a Christmas pudding for wimps (like me)who can’t handle the traditional one after the ritual stuffing but would rather something a bit lighter.
You could also make both,one iced one for the wimps one traditional one for the trenchermen.
They would look rather well on the table together.

225g (8 oz.) Sugar
150ml (5 oz.) Water
6 large Egg Yolks
300ml (½ pt.) Cream
280g (10oz.) Dark Chocolate
110g (4 oz.) Sultanas
60g (2 oz.) Stem Ginger
110g (4 oz.) Chopped Walnuts
1 large measure whiskey

Soak the Sultanas in the whiskey for a few hours.
(You can soak in cold tea if you want to keep it alcohol free)
Melt the chocolate over a saucepan of simmering water or in a microwave.
Once melted add two tablespoons of the cream to keep it liquid and let it cool.
Put the sugar and water together in a small pot.
Bring to the boil and simmer briskly together for 5 mts.
Beat the egg yolks in a non-plastic bowl with an electric beater.
While beating very carefully pour in the simmering sugar syrup.
(Be extremely careful as this is very hot and will give you a bad burn.)
Keep beating this mixture as it becomes pale and thick and frothy (for at least 10 mts.) and then let it cool.
Beat the cream until stiff and then fold this, the chocolate, the sultanas and the whiskey, the ginger and the walnuts carefully into the egg mixture.
Line two Christmas Pudding basins with cling film and pour in this mixture.
Freeze well for at least 24 hours.
To serve take it out of the freezer and turn out on to a plate and remove the cling film and decorate with holly like a proper pudd.
You can serve a little whipped cream on the side.

I got this Christmas Card from my friends the Divinas from the US this morning.
It nearly cured my hangover.

I found this yesterday and have decided to send email Christmas greetings instead of cards to all my friends who have email and contribute what I save to this excellent charity.
All food bloggers please copy!

I am in a French class this year, run by the Alliance Francais and we have an excellent teacher, Claire Jacob.
She is doing her utmost to get us to work and one of the first projects she gave us was to prepare a five minute talk about something which interested us.
I picked La Cuisine and ended up talking about our new project in Thezan.
One of my co-pupils, Charlotte, who is Dutch, immediately asked me what were we going to call the place.
My answer was that I really didn’t know.
Up to to that moment I had vaguely thought of calling it La Presbytere which seemed logical.
I then googled in that name and discovered that practically every village in France has a Chambre d’Hote with that name.

The first name I have come up with since that was inspired by the Maire of Thezan who said, when we told him where we had bought, “Ah The house where the sisters lived”

This we knew anyway, and there is plenty of evidence around the house to indicate that the last inhabitants were nuns.
How many of them?
Three seems a likely number.

This led me to the idea of calling the place The Three Sisters,
Les Trois Soeurs.
I have been hunting about the internet (as has daughter Caitriona) to look for images to illustrate the various reasons why it should be so called.

These three were just plucked from the internet.
They would be as I imagine the three nuns living
in the presbytery would have looked.

And how they would have looked on a day at the beach.

Caitriona visited these three in the Blue Mountains
near Sydney in Oz.

This is the Native American Three Sister Crops
which they thought essential for survival;
Squash, Beans and Corn

This is the Irish Connection.
The South East of Ireland is drained by
the Three Sister Rivers;
The Barrow, the Noir and the Suire

Another Irish connection.
The Three Graces in Stephen’s Green

A good image this.
The Three Sisters by Tarbell

My Three Daughters in Brittany about 20 years ago

Three nuns walking on Dun Laoighre Pier
photographed by Caitriona

My three Graces again, this time on an island
in Lough Earne.

Sile, Una and Maire of the Ronaynes
(Pictured in 1980)

And lastly my own three sisters
(actually singing the song”Sisters”)
Fifi, Val and D.

There are more reasons to call it Les Trois Soeurs.
As well as Sile being one of three sisters so was her mother,
Una, Sheelah and Emer O Kennedy.
My nephew David’s restaurant by the Barrow in
Graiguenamanagh was called The Three Sisters
and I am sure some more will hit me.
However it is far from settled.
The Presbytere itself is on Rue Rene Lentheric.
I have just found out the the same Rene was the
first Thezan casualty of WW1.
That leads one to another direction altogether…….

Later
And here are some more sisters

This is the logo from David’s restaurant
showing the boats on one of the Three Sister
Rivers; The Barrow

And this is of our three daughters picking holly for Christmas
up the Minaun about 1985.

It is incredibly frustrating to have bought a property in France and now to be sitting it out here in Ireland when every bone in the body wants to go out and explore the surrounding area.
The one sensible thing we did last week, on our very fleeting visit, was to buy a 1:25000 map of the area.
I now find myself pouring over this, conjecturing.
Just to the east of the town there is an area called l’Homme Mort, surely he must have died quite dramatically to be so remembered.
To the north there is a chateau called, pleasingly to me, St Martin des Champs.
Around the town are several Peuchs, that I know is the Languedocian for hill so the place cannot be as flat as it looks.
To the west is the Orb river which seems to widen pleasantly just down the road from the town, is this a going to provide good swimming in the summer? I know there are several canoeing hire places on the Orb and as this is one of the few outdoor pursuits I enjoy this bodes well.
To the south west of the town there is a building named on the map as la Chartreuse, that I know means a Carthusian monastery but just next to it is one called la Chartreusette, could this be a Carthusian convent and if so aren’t they a little close for comfort?
Again to the East there is a little chapel called Notre Dame de la Neiges, I wonder why, very little snow falls here, although they did get some last year.
Roll on the new year when Sile and I have rented a house in a village nearby.
We then will get a chance for a good explore.

Taken from the Cemetery, closer to heaven than the town.
Our house is hidden behind the church

I have just been watching a programme on the television called Unknown White Male about a young English man who was found on the subway in New York having completely lost his memory.
Two years later, having been reunited with his life, his family and friends it still hasn’t come back.
People keep telling him it will.
Others frankly think he is faking it.
This ironically brings back strong memories to me.
Memories that there is still about three weeks of my life that I cannot remember.

In 1991, on 12th March (a date easy to remember, it was the day before my birthday), I had a brain haemorrhage, or more correctly as they never found traces of the bleed, an aneurysm on the brain.
After suffering some hours of very intense headache I “came to” again to find myself in intensive-care in the university hospital in Cork.
It was a week later.
Then I made what appeared to everyone to be a remarkable recovery.
I went back to work in the restaurant which I owned.
I cooked, so they tell me, as well as ever.
We closed the restaurant for a week and went for a holiday to my brothers new house in West Cork.
I remember none of any of this.
Other than that moment when I left the hospital I came gradually back to normal memory about three weeks later.
Not suddenly with a jerk but gradually over some weeks.
When I say I can remember nothing of those three weeks there is one thing I can.
For some silly reason I can remember quite clearly a trip we took to Bantry House, and a visit, I think on the same day, to the Hotel in Barley Cove where I had worked as a student.
All the rest is wiped out, a year later I returned to my brothers house, hoping that the sight of it would somehow remind me of it but no, absolutely nothing.
It must now be all well gone, and, what does it matter?
I no longer even care whether I will remember it or not.

I think I came out of the whole episode much the same person as I was before, I have a certain intolerance to non-fiction which is gradually diminishing with old age but there is no other change which either I or my family can pinpoint.
Now its rather fun to remember that I cannot remember.

One of the most popular and easiest ways of cooking chicken in our family goes by various names.
The dish was originally known as Chicken Tangiers, when I cooked it first in Snaffles in Dublin in the early seventies.
The version which I still cook today I more often call Chicken Honey and Ginger.
Then it was a roast chicken with honey, ground ginger and orange juice poured over and then carved to order.
Now it is a jointed chicken with grated orange zest and juice, grated fresh stem ginger and honey rubbed into the joints before roasting.
This gives a crisp and aromatic sweet and sharp chicken which is not only a staple in our house but also in the houses of many of our friends and relations.
One problem with it is that it produces copious amounts of thin but delicious sauce, delicious when you are serving it with rice but a bit redundant otherwise.
I have tried thickening these juices up in various ways, using beurre manié and even arrowroot but it seems more trouble than it is worth. Boiled strongly and thickened in the traditional French way by beating in cold butter it is absolutely delicious but incredibly high in cholesterol.

Last Saturday in Waterford market I bought some Sweet Potatoes, not a tremendously exciting veg but at this time of the year it is at least local and in season.

Tonight I was cooking the old familiar chicken for dinner.
It was just about ready, as were the fried poppies I was oven roasting when I suddenly realised that I hadn’t totally forgotten to do any vegetables.
I put the chicken on hold, in fact I took it out of the oven with the notion of putting it back for a reheat later and then found the sweet potatoes in the cupboard.
Left with these and a few little shallots I decided that their moment had come.
I cut them into one inch chunks , peeled some of the shallots and put them on to fry them quite hard in some oil in a covered frying pan.
However hard as I fried them they remained hard in the centre.
I needed some liquid to speed up the process.
Serendipity moment happened.
There was my chicken with its copious juices standing by on the counter.
I tipped these into the sweet potato, boiled hard and after about five minutes was left with a delicious dish of sweet and spicy
glazed Sweet Potato.
Delicious, and a perfect dish with the chicken.

However they are so good that they could be cooked on their own without the chicken.
(Unless you want to be like Bo-Bo in Lamb’s Dissertation upon Roast Pig and burn down the house to roast the pig)
Cooked like this they would be a delicious foil to the Turkey on the 25th.
The Americans do something similar with Yams at Thanksgiving which must have been on my mind when I threw the sauce into the Sweet Potatoes.

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

2 Medium Sweet Potatoes
1 tablespoon Olive Oil
Grated Zest and juice of 1 Large Orange
1 Thumb of Ginger, peeled and grated
1 Tablespoon Honey

Peel the Potatoes and cut into one inch cubes.
Fry these in a covered pan until the brown on the outside.
Throw in the orange ginger and honey and put the lid back on.
Check them and when nearly cooked take off the lid and put up the heat until the juices are reduced to a shiny glaze.
Eat with chicken or Turkey… or pork chops.. or even on their own.

As I headed down to the shop to get my papers; the Irish Times and the (English) Independent, a little confident dog passed me on the pavement trotting towards my house, tail up, purposeful.
I immediately thought to my self, that’s him, that’s the little bugger who has been crapping on my front lawn.
I walked on a few discreet steps (you don’t want to be seen kicking neighbours dogs without sound evidence) I then glanced over my shoulder.
There he was the little defecator, standing at my gate, head turned to me waiting for me to go around the corner before he went to do his duty.Sometimes you can’t win.
In the paper shop my friend Tony had my two papers ready rolled together once he saw me coming.
It was only when I got home (yes, the dog had done his duty) that I noticed he had given me the Irish Independent instead of the Times.
I headed back to the shop.
Tony saw me coming, guessed immediately what had happened and then wordlessly, with his hand covering his eyes in shame, he gave me the correct paper, equally wordlessly I swung home out of the shop. The customers regarded this pantomime with disbelief, and as I went home I realised that it is this type of humour that I will miss when I get to spend more and more time in France.
I remember a few years ago going one morning to my bank, a fairly large city centre bank, normally very busy.
For some obscure reason it was empty on this particular morning, all the cashiers looking up at me expectantly when I came in.
Very deliberately I stood in the middle of the floor and said in a loud voice;
“Right!, Which of ye wants me most”
To their credit they all laughed.
The best of these shop moments happened to me a few years before that again.
I was dealing with Kervicks, a mad busy greengrocers in Ballybricken.
Here there were always about six people behind a counter and about twenty eager houswives clamouring for service.
As I came in the door, (bear in mind I am taller than most), Kevin, one of the people behind the counter said;
“It’s Martin Dwyer! Duck!”
To a man, like synchronised swimmers all the counterhands ducked.
The twenty busy housewives were left astonished, as they looked around themselves like babes in arms saying;
“Where’re they gone?, Where’re they gone?

Maybe I misjudge the French but somehow I think their sense of humour is not the same as that.

In October while we were at the house in Thezan I noticed that when one stepped out the back gate into the Ruelle there was another little path on the left leading to a little cellar (cave in France)
Almost idly I asked the Notaire about this last week during the signing and, yes, it is part of the property.
When we went for our quick look after the signing I took this shot of the doorway but, not having a torch, didn’t have the courage to look inside.

For Sale. Sight unseen, cosy French Pied a Terre, garden level,of unknown size,suitible for troglodytes and people suffering fron vertigo.