vincent and fennel
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 3 Comments
just two buddies, chillaxing on a daybed:
the blocks have arrived!
Posted on | August 20, 2010 | 3 Comments
this building is proceeding at a rate of knots.
the builder is extraordinarily organised and things happen like clockwork around him.
materials, equipment and blokes arrive precisely on cue and leave precisely on cue.
i am enjoying watching it all unfold.
he makes it look so easy that one would be tempted to have a crack at some building oneself.
except one is already far too busy, and one knows one limitations. i mean, ballet also looks pretty easy, doesn’t it?
the weather is holding perfectly….really the first fine days in a row all year!
it can rain all it likes after the roof goes on!
every day, new things arrive and new things happen, and every evening, there are six cats swarming all over everything, checking out every last nut and bolt.
if you received a windfall…
Posted on | August 18, 2010 | 8 Comments
i received a note with an online soap order the other day.
to the effect that the note-writer had wanted to try my soaps for ever, and she had recently received an inheritance, so now she was buying my soap at last.
i was extraordinarily touched by this; the thought that my soap was on someone’s bucket list, so to speak.
and it made me start to think about what *i* would do if a really large sum of money fell into my lap.
what would you do? feel free to leave a note in the comments.
the extension
Posted on | August 15, 2010 | 6 Comments
we’ve been discussing this for six years and at last the day is at hand.
we are building an extension onto our home and what this means is that we will no longer have to live in our bedroom.
we live in a very simple shed that is divided into a large room, a kitchen and a bathroom……with a sort of lean-to that was added on by the previous owner.
the lean-to houses the office and our wardrobe.
the large room is our bedroom and living room and while it is certainly a lovely big spacious room with 4 metre high ceilings…..i really dislike living and sleeping in the same room.
so, here we are.
this is the frame for the slab:
this the concrete that was poured yesterday and then had cats swarming all over it:
and why the terracotta coloured concrete?
because that is almost the precise shade of the earth around here (volcanic) and that colour gets everywhere eventually. and boy does it stain.
so we figured we would work with it and not agin it.
the best part of the whole thing is that we can keep the kitchen doors closed until the entire thing is finished….and keep the dust and dirt and noise out as much as humanly possible.
the doors will then be removed and we’ll have a nice big kitchen/dining/living area.
new look for the website
Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 5 Comments
after years of instructing designers to pare things down and go for extreme minimalism, or should i say mnmlsm?….i have had an abrupt volte-face.
i am tired tired tired of arial and black and white and wide white spaces on the page.
i’ve done that pale discreet subtle natural gentle whispering simple minimal (mnml) thing to death and suddenly one day, i looked at my soap and realised….that isn’t actually what my soap is all about.
my soap is about colours and flowers and fragrance and textures and opulence and a kind of bodacious bohemian nouveau-baroqueness. or is that nouveau-baroquicity?
so, that was the new edict: i want it to look like a psychedelic sixties hippie vw bus, but with a modern edge and some of my favourite motifs sprinkled throughout. striped cats. teapots. trains. flowers. japanese waves. chinese chops.
so, if you are wondering what the recent mayhem on the website is….it’s a trippy, fun, colour-saturated playtime extravanganza.
and i hope you enjoy it as much as i do.
there are still some details to iron out and complete.
my web designer is one of these incredibly busy women and she is in a completely different time zone to me, so we only catch one another for a few minutes at the end of my day and the very beginning of hers.
it will be a week or two before all the pages are perfect.
the important thing is that both shops are back up and running, and we have soap coming out of our ears, for all of your requirements.
and for me, it is back to the soapmines.
home again
Posted on | August 7, 2010 | No Comments
we’ve been home for only nine days and it feels as though paris was a lifetime ago already.
really, you couldn’t find two environments more different than the middle of the marais and the outskirts of malanda.
fortunately, both places have their compensations.
usually when we go away, by the last week, my husband is ravingly homesick….asking me what i think the cats might be doing right now (the answer is always: sleeping or eating), or how much rain do i think the place is getting.
he is usually the one who has to be coaxed onto a plane for the next adventure, because he truly is a happy homebody.
in a bizarre turn of events, he is the one who is heading back to paris in about 4 weeks’ time.
yes, i am aghast!
he was home for four days and spent the entire time on the phone telling his mum how beautiful paris is…..and to cut a long story short, early next month he is taking his mum to paris for 17 days.
o and just to make me completely sick, they are going via tokyo and will be staying in the ginza.
yes, i booked it all for them.
it is going to be an awesome trip, flying right into charles de gaulle airport, armed with opera tickets and paris museum passes.
i am choked at the thought of all the art in the louvre that i missed purely because of time constraints….but i know that my mother-in-law will have the time of her life, and she has a great guide.
meanwhile, i am trying not to be too overtly jealous and to find some joy in life.
i picked a bowl full of brazilian cherries which are covering a tree outside my office window right now.
they are an acquired taste, kinda tart and sweet and herbally/eucalyptus-y at the same time.
but once you have the taste for them, you salivate when you see them ripening on the tree.
i have tried something different….putting them in the fridge.
i read on the internet that this makes the eucalyptus flavour go away and the sweetness increase.
we shall see.
they really are cute:
and here is a picture i took at hampton court, with my back to the thames, looking in to a thundery sky.
we had the most perfect summer day there, picnicking under the trees, wandering the house, and zipping around the maze and suddenly there was this roiling sky behind the gold gates.
kuala lumpur haircut
Posted on | July 29, 2010 | 2 Comments
i had an excellent haircut in KL on weds morning.
i chose a salon at random, and was lucky enough to get a stylist called alexander, who cut each hair individually (almost) and then gave me a pretty fabulous colour job to boot.
i’ve never had such a precision cut in my life.
he did a good job on maurice’s hair also.
and a girl came in to give me a pedicure, of which i was in dire need after a summer of traipsing about france in sandals.
i didn’t want any polish, so she took the trouble to buff my toenails instead.
it’s not a fancy salon, but it’s clean and very friendly.
so, for an inexpensive but fabulous cut and colour in kuala lumpur, look no further than alexander at:
art cut
unisex beauty salon
lot no. 280
ampang park shopping centre
jalan ampang
ph 03 2164 9427
alexander speaks beautiful english, and he really is an artist.
and just next door is a good dentist, and loads of restaurants where the locals pile in to have lunch.
some images
Posted on | July 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
from the louvre:
at versailles:
in paris:
almost home again
Posted on | July 28, 2010 | Comments Off
we are in kuala lumpur right now, in the largest hotel suite we’ve ever seen.
we stayed at the renaissance hotel on the way over, and enjoyed it so much that we booked for our return.
upon arrival they informed us that we had been upgraded.
you should see this suite! it’s twice as big as our house!
we flew from london last night, after staying with our dear bodyflik friends just out of london.
we loved their lucia-pillson-like “busy, fragrant life” in a truly enchanting old english village…..with beautiful woods right on their doorstep.
wendy is planning to erect a narnia lamp post right there in the woods and i am dying to see it next year. magical!
of course, i want a narnia lamp post too, but it just wouldn’t be the same in our style of humid steamy dense jungle.
we visited hampton court for the day and picnicked lavishly in the gardens there.
maurice assured me that the chapel royal at hampton court beats sainte-chapelle in paris HANDS DOWN (he visted sainte chapelle while i was riveted for five hours by renaissance paintings at the louvre on our last afternoon….i don’t think i can even post about those yet…..it was very intense and i got a touch of stendahl syndrome).
hampton court is so very beautiful and has a much more live-able friendly feel to it than those older castles with their undressed stone and their draughts and their lack of fireplaces.
we spent an inordinate amount of time in henry viii’s kitchens, talking to a charming man who was all dressed up in tudor gear and who was most knowledgeable about all aspects of the kitchens of the tudors.
we were especially fascinated with the HUGE solid elm kitchen worktable that stands in the middle of the kitchen in front of the spit roasting fireplace.
we had quite the discussion on elm rings and dutch elm disease and carbon dating and how many men it takes to move a table that size.
it was an old and worn and scarred workhorse, and it will still be there in a thousand years.
i thought it was one of the most wonderful things in the court.
we enjoyed the maze and i remembered how to get in and out of it….you keep your left hand on the hedge at all times and keep following it, even along and back up dead-ends, and eventually you get to where you need to be.
maurice followed me through the maze, laughing to himself (because he knows i have been plotting my triumphant return to the maze for over 30 years) while our hosts snoozed on the grass under ancient manicured trees.
a very pleasant afternoon all round, and we followed it up with meals of haddock and chips, and bangers and mash at a pub that is one of the 100 pubs that claim to be the oldest pub in england.
this place was certainly pre-elizabethan with low low ceilings and little strange rooms running off in all directions and uneven flagstone floors and half timbered walls and mullioned windows of all shapes and sizes.
the next day we really only had the morning before setting off to the airport, so we visited a small but ancient year old church….unlocked with a note to please turn off the lights when you leave….with traces of the original frescoes on the walls.
the whole place was steeped with a lovely restful meditative atmosphere that has been building in layers for centuries, and we both adored it.
we tore ourselves away from there to drive to great missenden which was roald dahl’s home for thirty years.
i read my first roald dahl in 1974 and have been a devotee ever since….so it was unutterably thrilling to walk amongst the georgian and half timbered houses of the streets of the village and know that mr dahl had been there, walked the same streets and seen the same things.
we topped off the morning with a quick visit to ambers of amersham….a marvellous frock shop stuffed with beautiful designer gear in a gorgeous old old olde building….again, the elizabethan half timber everywhere, the mullioned windows, and on the way to the tea room also housed within, a large window looking out onto a stream running right under the building, which was of course originally an old millhouse.
we restored ourselves with cakes and tea and then had to tear home to pack and get to the airport.
the weather was perfect…..warm but not hot, gently breezy and even a touch of soft misty rain.
if it was always like that in england, i’d move there in a heartbeat…..but i took note of the boots and hats and gloves and coats hanging up, and heard tales of snow in the woods and that was enough for this hothouse flower!
versailles
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | 6 Comments
well.
now that i have seen versailles with my own eyes, i’ve got some FABULOUS inspiration for my own home and garden.
we need more gold around the house. and gilt. and carving. and ornate plaster work. and oil paintings. and furniture with inlays and repoussees and chassees. and murals on the ceilings. and REALLY high ceilings. and candles by the thousand. and mirrors, LOTS of mirrors. and marble panels. and canopies. and ostrich plumes. and tapestries. and carpets. and marble statuary. and lots and lots and lots of rooms. and some really huge long rooms to impress the visitors.
and the garden….ty, i hope you are reading this!
with a few fountains, and a few kilometres of ornamental lakes, and some white swans, and really extremely decorative statuary of dolphins, mermaids, neptune, cherubs, urns….you can make a really nice water feature.
and if we level everything and start from scratch, it is entirely possible to have those lovely long avenues of shady trees, all in perfectly straight lines….so we can roll the gilded carriages up and down without snapping branches off.
those old french kings really knew how to spend some money and make everything gorgeous as far as the eye could see.
versailles was about the maddest thing i’ve ever seen, and i’ve seen some mad things.
the whole thing reaches it’s apogee in two rooms: louis’ bedchamber and the hall of mirrors.
with the sun pouring in, it would be simply blinding.
a wise move….they had a custom of levee, when the king received visitors in his bedchamber upon arising each morning.
if louis looked anything like most other people, first thing in the morning, the blindingly beautiful room was a very cunning distraction.
we made the huge mistake of touring the dauphin’s apartments last.
o dear.
after the demented decor of the upstairs bits, the dauphin’s rooms looked positively threadbare and somewhat plain.
however, the whole experience fulfilled most of my dangerous liaisions fantasies….i think it would have been marvellous to have turned up in full pre-revolution clothes and swanned through the crowds thus.
of course, one would perish in the heat and possibly be crushed to death….but still, what a glamorous way to go.
our photos fail to capture the glories of the place….it is something that has to be experienced.
and indeed, we didn’t take a lot of photos, we were too gobsmacked.
o and the scale of versailles…..simply IMMENSE.
we knew intellectually that it was large, but when you get there and see the kilometres of lawns, it does take the breath away.
the first thing we did was take a segway tour of the park.
we’ve both wanted to try out the segway since seeing arrested development!
after a few wobbles, we were off at a smart 20 km/hour, along those avenues of shady trees.
we circled the place, and took in the grand trianon, the petit trianon (what a perfect little poem of pink and green marble that is!), the french president’s nice weekend shack (with a very discreet gendarmerie presence under the trees all around), the vineyard, marie antoinette’s play-farm, the roots of a huge tree which blew over in 1999 and under which marie antoinette liked to enjoy the shade and we got to see the palace from the other end of the lake.
it was all wonderful and the segways were huge fun.
obligatory eiffel tower photographs
Posted on | July 22, 2010 | 3 Comments
and some beautiful art nouveau ironwork on a metro station railing:
good to know
Posted on | July 20, 2010 | 1 Comment
just in case anyone was wondering:
more moet
Posted on | July 18, 2010 | 5 Comments
as you drive through champagne and especially around the grand cru villages (there are 17 of those) you see little headstones near the grape vines, bearing the name of the champagne house who will be getting those grapes.
it is mostly the big commercial champagnes who have these, and i can tell you it was simply wonderful to be driving along in the rustic countryside, reciting a litany of magical mythical names off the headstones: taittinger, bollinger, moet, veuve clicquot, mumm, roederer, perrier jouet et al.
my friend clare sent me this photo of maurice and me posing over a moet headstone.
this was opposite the cramant pressoir of moet, which was 200 metres from our cottage.
we strolled there several times in the evening (it was light until after 10pm) to walk off dinner and admire the view and check the grapes.
some photos
Posted on | July 10, 2010 | 4 Comments
normally i wouldn’t just shove a link on my blog and be done with it…but i am a little pushed for time.
this link
will take you to the photos i have uploaded so far.
some were taken on the little leica and some were snapped on the iphone.
things are a little out of order, i am sorry.
here is maurice in lavenham:
moet in cramant
Posted on | July 9, 2010 | Comments Off
here are some of the famous vines…..we are staying just up the road and around the corner, a mere three or four minutes walk:
and this is the view over the moet vines, to the next village, which is called avise:
it is beautiful and green and not an inch of land is wasted.
in the next few days we want to visit the village of bouzy and try the famous bouzy rouge wine.
bouzy is a grand cru champagne village….the grapes are officially classified as the very best….but the rebels of bouzy turn over some of their grapes to make a very special red wine instead.
it is an expensive wine and we have been told that it doesn’t travel well.
so, seeing as how we are in the area, we’ll have to drop in for a glass.
late yesterday afternoon, maurice took me to a champagne bar in epernay.
they have repurposed a lovely old bank building for this bar and as well as a long long marble bar serving up all kinds of champagne by the glass, they have a restaurant as well.
as we thirstily drank down my new favourite (guy charlemange’s blanc de blancs), the barman told us that albert, prince of monaco, had had lunch there earlier, after seeing off the epernay start of the tour de france.
le tour again
Posted on | July 9, 2010 | Comments Off
my absolute best photo of the race…..they scorched past us and i snapped off four photos or so.
you can see how close we were….literally right there.
le tour de france
Posted on | July 8, 2010 | 3 Comments
ok, this was SUPER exciting.
you never met two less likely sports tourists as maurice and myself…..and our idea of a big morning’s exercise is walking to the patisserie.
however, we turned into rabid cycling fanatics for 24 hours when the tour de france swept through champagne.
last night, they raced into reims and we watched it on tv, with a couple of friends from australia and nz, who are actually chasing the entire race around the country….in a peugeot van….with their fancy bicycles as well!….and it wasn’t their first time doing this, either.
so they were able to tell us who was who and what was happening.
this race is a brutal business, with crashes and injuries galore and all kinds of rules so nobody can just cruise along.
a new zealander came second and an australian came fourth yesterday, so everybody was happy with that.
then we pored over maps and the tour book and worked out where we could drive to, to most conveniently see the race go past.
today, the race started in epernay at 12.30pm (all this mad cycling in the hot hot afternoon, i don’t know how they do it…..anyone normal would want a nap. in the shade).
we parked where the road was blocked off and walked down the highway to a roundabout where they would be zipping through….about 5 km from the start.
people were already set up with umbrellas and barbecues and bottles of champagne and cameras at the ready.
at about midday, the official traffic began.
cars and motorcycles straggled past….sponsors, partners, media, team support….for a full thirty minutes.
the excitement was building….some kids near us were getting quite overwrought….or maybe that was us.
we were looking down a straight of about 1 km, to a curve and suddenly, they all exploded around the curve and started hammering down the straight.
because the race had just begun, they were all travelling in a solid pack.
within a couple of breaths they were upon us….we could have reached out and touched the riders…..and then they were gone, splitting in two packs to pour around the roundabout.
it was utterly thrilling!
all the colour and shininess and cheering, it was full panoply really,….and then dozens of support vehicles loaded with spare bikes and wheels.
and within 90 seconds everyone was past and the whole thing was over.
i managed to snap off about three photos…using the sports setting on the leica for the first time everrrrr……and because one of our guests kindly left the relevant usb connector with me, i’ll be able to upload those in the next day or so.
war. what is it good for? absolutely nothing.
Posted on | July 7, 2010 | 2 Comments
yesterday we leapt up early and drove out to verdun, which is actually not in champagne, but over in alsace-lorraine.
if you don’t know what went on in verdun during WW1, then get googling, because it’s a gripping read.
the germans decided they wanted to capture verdun at any cost, and the french simultaneously decided they wanted to hold verdun….at any cost.
both sides paid dearly over the next couple of years, with approx 550,000 dead and 800,000 wounded.
several small towns around verdun were flattened completely and after the war, it was considered too hazardous to rebuild there because of the insane amounts of artillery stuff lying around and buried to several metres in the churned up mud.
one such little village was fleury and one was douaument.
the whole area has been reforested and they have kept some of the carved up trenched ground just as it was….with a peaceful layer of grass covering it now.
there are memorials and monuments and cemeteries and ossuaries over a 10 km radius and it is really all very sad.
i was oddly moved to see a foot long metallic sliver of the bell from the church of douaument…almost the only thing left from there.
these villages still have an elected mayor and council, whose job is to keep the memory of the villages alive…..these ghost councils are unique in france and perhaps in the world.
we visited the souterraine citadel in verdun itself and went through the creepy chilly dim and gloomy tunnels.
there was a waxwork style scene with a voice-over of the unknown soldier being chosen at verdun, prior to being buried under the arc de triomphe….i always wondered where he had come from.
all in all, a very sobering day out ….as if i needed any further evidence to be anti-war and a complete pacifist and utter sook.
one wonders if that sort of battle would happen today. would people allow it to happen?
on a lighter note, the public toilets at the citadel were fully the equal of the nastiest i have experienced anywhere in asia…squat style, unclean and sans papier toilette. bizarre.
the drive there took us out of our now-familiar grape vines and across plains of golden wheat, with the odd windfarm.
we saw a few huge long trucks bearing a single windmill blade each…..staggeringly huge when you get close up to them.
we took a shortcut on the way home and ended up in cramant via a bit of a goat track through the moet vines.
the chocolate eclair
Posted on | July 5, 2010 | 6 Comments
when i was a child, back in auckland, when the earth’s crust was still cooling….my mother worked next door to a weird underground coffee bar.
literally underground.
once you got there though, they had chocolate eclairs.
these were feather-light tubes of choux pastry, filled with chantilly cream, and lavished with a coating of sticky, sweet, soft, smooth chocolate icing.
in a word…divine.
now, fast forward twenty years or so, to cairns, australia and me standing salivating in a new euro-style patisserie in town and i spot them! choc eclairs!
i’ll have one of those.
imagine the crushing disappointment when i bite into the thing, expecting the luscious softness i remembered so well, and instead my teeth crash against a thick layer of solid dark chocolate of a particularly rock hard type.
a long thick smear of solid chocolate.
and not good chocolate either, gentle reader.
o no, the kind of chocolate that leaves a disgusting greasy layer on the roof of your mouth, if you are lucky enough to get the damned stuff to even melt.
usually it just cracks into smaller bits and you chew it down…and the cream inside the eclair is squirting out and all the textures are wrong wrong wrong.
so, for the last 20 years in australia, i’ve been consistently served up these filthy eclairs to the point where i just wearily quit ordering them.
i began to wonder if the perfect eclair of my youth was just a hazy dream, along the lines of “fruit used to taste so much better when i was a child” and “summer used to last for months and months and months”.
yesterday, my faith was restored.
my husband has found a fantastic little patissierie/boulangerie in epernay.
he noticed a queue outside on sunday morning, then when he drove back a few hours later, there was still a queue.
on a third pass, they were still queueing, so he decided to stop and get in the queue too.
this is a man who will.not.queue.for.anything.
except pastry.
the bread he turned up with was so fabulous and his descriptions of the other goodies were so vivid, that he had no trouble luring me into the queue also.
i spotted the eclairs from the street.
by the time i got to the front of the queue, i had my order alllllll ready.
i ate that eclair in the car on the way home and it was perfect.
it was even a slight improvement on the auckland eclairs because it was filled with some light chocolatey custard pastry cream type confection, instead of sweetened whipped cream.
you know, so you can eat more of them before you feel sick.
the chocolate icing on top was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
so take heed, australian patissiers.
U are doin’ it RONG.
get that ghastly solid chocolate out of there and learn how to make sticky soft chocolate icing.
and make our lives worth living.
moet et foie gras
Posted on | July 2, 2010 | Comments Off
yesterday we spent the afternoon in the caves beneath moet et chandon.
gracious….28 KILOMETRES of dimly lit subterranean tunnels with cellars branching off on every side, simply crammed full of millions of bottles of moet.
it was THRILLING.
and it was very nice and cool down there after the 36 Celsius afternoon we were wandering about in up top.
did you know that someone somewhere in the world opens a bottle of moet every two seconds?
and every drop of it originates from those 28 km of cellars.
it is mind-boggling.
at the conclusion of the tour, we sampled a glass of the 2003 vintage rose and the 2003 vintage regular.
wow, the white was incredible and totally worth the extra euros.
we decided we hadn’t come all this way to drink ordinary old moet we could get at the bottle shop in malanda for heavensakes.
in 2003 they had a ragingly hot summer and the harvest was ordered to start in late august which is madly early.
it has resulted in a delicious champagne, that’s for sure.
i wasn’t quite as enthralled with the pink, but i wasn’t exactly dashing my glass to the ground in a disgusted pique either. it was fabulous.
we bought a bottle of dom perignon and a dom perignon apron to go.
the dom perignon is already chilling in the fridge and will go down nicely on one or other of these long hot evenings.
and i can prance around making soap in my dom apron in august.
after all that excitement we went home for a couple of hours to read and relax, then we set out again to les grillades gourmand, where maurice had taken the precaution of booking us in the day before……very good planning, because we saw disappointed diners being turned away with our own eyes.
we sat out on the terrace and ate our way through three courses of beautifully cooked and presented french food, washed down with plenty of champagne by the glass.
i had grilled sea bass with asparagus and maurice had quail with foie gras and rocket.
he cut off a slice of the foie gras for me and i can see why people love it so much.
the stuff is simply divine, but i cannot get past the cruelty involved in procuring it….so i won’t be having it again.
not to mention the coating of the arteries that you can actually feel happening in real time.
i had a crisp apple tart with the best french vanilla icecream ever, and a big belt of fraise des bois….and maurice had a perfectly poached pear with cinnamon icecream and a big snifter of gorgeously marmalade-y mandarine napolean, which you cannot seem to get any more at home for love nor money….le sigh.
all was excellent, but i do prefer my own pear recipe which involves a bay leaf.
we met the chef-patron, christophe, who graciously comes out and greets all the diners table by table, and then waves the happy and replete ones off at the end.
he has worked with bocuse and ducasse and i have no doubts he could snatch a michelin star of his own.
however, that would require driving up his prices and altering the vibe of his restaurant and truly….it is perfect just as it is, in my opinion.
les grillades gourmand in epernay: recommended!
just say no
Posted on | July 1, 2010 | 4 Comments
crikey.
maurice bought some andouillette de troyes at the supermarket and cooked them up last night, while i made a russian salad* to go with.
they smelled….odd….while cooking.
but i sat down with plenty of mustard and i ate one.
i wasn’t thrilled, there was a weird flavour i couldn’t quite put my finger on.
maurice ate three of them and i could smell that odd note all night seeping out of his skin.
in retrospect, it smelt like kidneys cooking and if there is thing i cannot abide…it is kidneys.
so, i have just googled andouilllette and now i want to throw up.
The traditional Troyes andouillette is made out from quality pork products – large intestines and stomachs – attentively selected. The original recipe dates back to the Middle Ages according to the Champagne legends.
The delightful – and distinctive! – taste of the andouillette results from cutting the chitterlings lenghtwise first, and seasoning these thin stripes with onions, herbs, salt and black pepper.
The next step is to wrap the mixture with pork bowels and slowly cook these typical French sausages in a court-bouillon stock for 5 hours.
According to the Champagne Ardenne porkbutchers – or charcutiers – this meticulous recette gives the andouillette de Troyes its sharp taste and delicate texture.
pig’s guts. and bowels.
i am sorry….it was all a bit too local and authentic for me.
sometimes you just have to put your foot down and stay in your comfort zone.
* well we always called it a russian salad, but i am unsure how russian it is.
basically….tinned mixed vegetables dressed with mayonnaise.
i found some beautiful looking mixed vegetables in a glass jar at the supermarket and thought ahaaa, that is an easy thing to prepare in a kitchen that doesn’t belong to me.
i added some chickpeas, some fresh garlic, some chopped tomatoes and i wish now that i’d just eaten that and left the andouillette well alone.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhh champagne
Posted on | June 30, 2010 | 2 Comments
we have been in cramant for four, or is it five? days already.
time blurs here, what with the long long summer evenings and the constant flow of champagne.
i will make a list at some stage of the champagnes we have tried….but seriously there are HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of champagne houses here and most we have never heard of.
i am kind of wallowing in obscure pink champagnes, to be honest…..but we will be picking up our game later this week with some dom perignon and other goodies. i hear perrier jouet calling my name, and a lot of vintage veuve clicquot seems to be floating around here.
we took the train from paris, and found the rental car place without too much drama.
we are zipping around in a renault clio, which is quite large enough for four passengers and their bottles of fizz.
the GPS is entirely en francaise, and fortunately i can understand a lot more french than i can speak, so things haven’t been too dire, nor have we been lost at all. my school french of almost 30 years ago has kicked in quite nicely….i retained a lot more than i thought.
i’ve got vocab galore: i am just unable to string it together meaningfully.
we have visited the beautiful notre dame cathedral at reims, where a thousand years of french kings were crowned….just imagine that! a thousand years! but there has been a church there since the 5th century.
notre dame is just as gothic and gorgeous as the big one in paris, but with about one thousandth of the crowds.
we had ample time and silence to walk around and marvel at the height of the vaulting arches overhead and to gaze at the exquisite stained glass work, including three simply breathtakingly divine panels by marc chagall.
so beautiful.
across the road was a little shop selling the special reims biscuits, little rose-pink coloured crispy sponge finger biscuits with a thick dusting of icing sugar on top.
surprisingly delicious with a glass of champagne, nom nom nom.
we have a cottage with a kitchen in cramant, so we’ve been mostly self-catering.
in the mornings, maurice walks up to the patisserie and picks up a baguette, and pastries du jour for breakfast.
along with some cheese and fruit and salad and pate and walnuts and dates and of course a lot of champagne, we are feeling quite replete.
everything that we have had so far is just scrumptious.
i suppose that at some stage we will actually go out to a restaurant and eat a proper meal….but we cannot stop buying the cheese and pate!
of course it is summer, so the stone fruits are in full fling….i am as happy as a clam when there are peaches and cherries about the place.
cramant is surrounded by vines and the famous chalky soil….just three minutes stroll from our cottage are some moet vines.
most people plant roses in front of their vines…..i have heard that the roses react first to any changes in the soil, so the vintners can act before the grapes are harmed….sort of the mine canaries of champagne…..i don’t know how true this is these days, but it certainly makes for a charming landscape.
we have also visited troyes this week and we want to go back for a more thorough look.
the city centre is in the shape of a champagne cork.
the locals are called trojans.
troyes is where the troy ounce comes from.
the city centre has entire streets of perfectly preserved medieval buildings (said to be the best collection in europe)…..all on a lean and bulging alarmingly with age (and i mean to say, who isn’t?)…o, the half timber and ancient stone is simply beautiful.
speaking of lovely ancient buildings, i have some photos of lavenham village in suffolk to share later. divine little houses, with nary a right angle anywhere in sight.
i said to maurice OMG let’s buy one! plenty for sale, anything from 250,000 to 500,000. pounds. sterling.
images of pere lachaise
Posted on | June 25, 2010 | 6 Comments
i took all of these photos with my iphone, in dappled sunlight for the most part.
the hazy saturated greens and sudden over exposures are very true to how the place felt and looked on the day.
i especially enjoyed capturing the orange cat stretched out on the tombstone and the stone cutter busy at work on a new headstone.
the tombstone of oscar wilde:
detail:
jim morrison’s final resting place:
nearby graffiti on a tree:
musee carnavalet
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | Comments Off
an online soapmaking friend suggested that we visit the musee carnavalet and we found ourselves wandering in that direction today, after a breakfast cooked by maurice, of spanish omelette and toast and that’s the end of the poilane bread.
baguette tomorrow!
it’s a gorgeous museum housed in two huge old neighbouring mansions in the marais, just a couple of blocks from our apartment, and focuses on the history of paris through art, furniture, objets, archeological bits and pieces…
roaming through the dimly-lit chandeliered beautiful salons with pastel ornate plaster work, gilt everything and plenty of mirrors, it all felt a bit dangerous liaisions to say the least.
i enjoyed myself immensely even though i didn’t get to see napolean’s very favourite toiletries case (god it is so hard to get a decent one, is it not?).
all of the signs were in french so we really only had the haziest idea of what was going on…fortunately we could look at the 17th, 18th and 19th century paintings of paris and orientate ourselves….it’s still all pretty much the same today.
for a complete change of pace we stopped at muji on the way home and bought a pair of socks.
and an enormous meringue with chocolat, to share.
then we turned a corner and we were suddenly in the jewish quarter…..with kippa-clad guys selling felafels, bagels in the bakeries, really good delis, and diamond studded stars of david in the shop windows. it was literally from one side of a building to another.
we saw paris’ answer to amy winehouse crunched down in a boutique doorway, smoking a cigarette and looking all very heroin-chic and derelicte (as they would say in zoolander).
we walked around for a bit, and suddenly we were back on the rue de rivoli and a short stroll from the apartment.
pere lachaise and eartha kitt
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 1 Comment
i struggled up off my deathbed yesterday at last.
what a difference a couple of days rest and a hit of antibiotics can make!
we strolled down to the river and over to notre dame….the queue was unthinkable, so we walked all around the outside of notre dame and marvelled at the gargoyles (they all look like angry cats to us) and the endless decorative stonework and the fabulous flying buttresses and the stained glass for a while….then we found ourselves at the batobus stop, so we hopped onto a glass topped boat and drifted up and down the seine for a couple of hours.
very lazy way to see the sights….the trouble with paris is that there is just too much of it!
o look, the eiffel tower. o look, the pont neuf. o look, the obelisk of luxor. o look, les invalides. o look, the louvre and the louvre and the louvre and the louvre!
it’s all a bit overwhelming.
the bridges are so beautiful and there are lots of them…i hummed a few bars of eartha kitt’s “under the bridges of paris” to get myself properly into place.
we love the area we are staying in….le marais….the small food shops around here are just wonderful and everything i’ve ever hoped for.
chocolatiers….patissiers….boulangeries….wine shops….wine bars…cheese specialists….a honey shop….and that is all within a block or two of our apartment.
everywhere there are people walking around with a baguette….it’s so paris.
we’ve been greeted with cheery bonjours everywhere we go….they must know we are freaked out foreigners….and we adore shouting cheery bonjours back.
i know it’s wrong to just shove people into a category, but all the parisians we have met so far have been utterly charming and civil.
frankly, if i had bread like that every day and access to all that pastry, i’d be utterly charming and civil too.
food is culture after all.
i cannot stop eating baba au rhum…..hardly anyone makes this in australia and if they do, they are small miserable affairs, not like the enormous syrupy boozy soft baba au rhum of rue st antoine.
and the peaches and cherries are to die for.
and the poilane bread was every bit as good as i have been imagining for years.
maurice came home with a sliced half round of poilane sourdough and we have been chewing steadily through it with poached eggs….and cheese and tomato and salami…..and sometimes with just a lot of normandy butter slapped all over it.
of course, i’ve had nothing to drink so far.
no wine, anyway.
i’ll finish my antibiotics first.
but i am getting terribly thirsty.
today we set off walking in the opposite direction than yesterday, with no real plan.
i suggested we just walk and we’d definitely find something interesting….that’s paris.
so we walked through the place de la bastille and we walked along the rue fauborg st antoine and we had a slight tiff at the place voltaire so maurice suggested some pastry and a drink because maybe we were getting hungry, so we dived across the street and had orangina, and i had a poire gallette kind of thing and maurice had an almond croissant and then we looked at the paris map app in the iphone and we saw that if we just carried on up the rue de la roquette a little more, we’d be at pere lachaise.
so off we trotted and it was getting quite warm by now.
we were grateful to get into the shade at pere lachaise.
what wonderful ambiance there!
shady trees and mouldering old tombs and crypts with every imaginable style of decoration and then modern large crypts and memorials….thousands and thousands and thousands of them, all set out on meandering shady cobblestoned paths that wind up a hillside.
there are 300,000 people interred at pere lachaise and a heap of famous types.
we joined in a frenzied treasure hunt for jim morrison’s grave….i encouraged a wad of people to break up and all search rows independently….and maurice was the eventual finder of the grave.
it wasn’t anywhere near where it had been marked on the official map….he was canny enough to see a few people waving cameras about, some rows over, and to go nosing about.
poor jim’s grave was half hidden behind a crypt, closed off with sturdy official metal railings, and looking very tawdry and folorn.
rum bottles….dead flowers….graffiti….but no dancing naked mourners or drunk poets or people shooting up or anything like that.
it was weird to be there.
the bust of jim wasn’t there…..i bet it has been smashed or vandalised with paint.
the whole thing was sad.
so, we went looking for oscar wilde.
we climbed the hill and the whole thing started to look a bit smarter and posher.
we were moving into the money perhaps.
we found dear oscar quite easily, under an enormous and beautiful stone memorial featuring a very modernistic swooping angel, the whole being covered in lipsticked kisses and anguished graffitied notes.
i thought about the happy prince and sniffled a little (as i do) and it was all very nice.
i declined to leave a lipsticked kiss…whatever the sentiment, it is still desecrating a grave, non?
and so we departed……for some really delicious little toasted paninis w/ chicken breast/mayonnaise/tomato/soft cheese, at a shop near us.
and a baba au rhum to go.
tomorrow….i’ll have a crack at the louvre.
but the size of the place….it is somewhat intimidating.
