periwinkles for dinner : what to do

Not much time to commit anything to this blog, but this is busy time with the animals (12 chicks, one duckling, and counting) and the plants and the grass and also gone out camping with the children what a wonderful thing to do, we had only forgotten to bring plates so we ate out of the pots from an ancient aluminium (I never touch the stuff normally) camping set I bought for 1 euro at a car boot sale in brittany, but we thought of everything else, water, matches, gas stove, eggs, bread, our own goat cheese, knockvicar cucumbers, tomatoes and salad bag, a jar of organic ravioli, a packet of organic instant mash, and a packet of Polish sausages to tickle the fire with. We even professionally managed a little fire and we brought home the rubbish of the people before us : a disposable barbecue, two plastic bottles (one burnt), two cans (one ripped), plastic bags and more. We had made a neat pile of it when we arrived. That’s how I was brought up, I’d hate somebody to think that it was my rubbish, and we had such a lovely time. Picked periwinkles for the dinner back home.

What to do with periwinkles : rinse well, at best keep them in clean sea water for a couple of days at the bottom of the fridge before rinsing well. Cover in cold water, with a couple of bay leaves, salt pepper and chillies, bring to the boil turn the fire off immediately and let cool in the water. Make your own mayonnaise meanwhile, one egg yolk, whisk in a little apple cider vinegar or half a teaspoon of mustard, then add sunflower oil a dribble at a time whisking energetically, add a little olive oil for taste, salt and pepper and a few drops of lemon juice . Use sharp needles to extract the cool cooked beasts. A delight.

 

back home

Back from holidays in finistère, the maddest yet, mad in ways that I’m unable to share with you unfortunately. The weather was splendid as one says when referring to holiday weather, and the sea, when we reached the beach around 6 pm was a perfectly civilized temperature. We lost nobody to the high waves, perhaps as everyone was suitably weighed down to the solid ground by the copious amount of wonderful local organic produce. We are very lucky, very lucky, very lucky. I have been reading Animal, vegetable, miracle by Barbara Kingsolver a book my friend R gave me for perfect holiday reading, this is highly recommended. www.animalvegetablemiracle.com

Anyway I will keep this short, plenty to bake, settle the levain (sourdough) back from its own holiday with us, food for the opening of the Landscape show at the Dock in Carrick on Shannon, on friday at 5.30 pm, all welcome they say there, and bread and cakes for saturday morning in the midst of a wonderful jumble sale, all welcome, see you there.

By the way, the garden at Knockvicar is so full of beautiful stuff, what a gift of a season, and open everyday, yes, every day, courgettes, cucumbers, salads, chard, potatoes, beetroots, onions, garlic, and as soon as the sun decides to show its little nose, tomatoes, I’m sure I’m forgetting something, you should have seen the pile of stuff I gathered, you would call me greedy no doubt, but healthy too. Delicious, get there without fail, this is my message to you today.

 

won’t you tempura while I away ?

Next friday, instead of doing the maison djeribi work, I’ll be heading for Cork to get onto the ferry to Roscoff. I’m already looking forward to looking into rock pools, reading and writing, speaking a lot of French, practicing diabolo and going to our precious little organic market in Tregunc (south finistère) on tuesdays from 4 to 7 p.m. I’ll be back on 12 july with freshly baked loaves (but on that day I will set up stall in the Cleen community hall a few minutes down the road [signposted on the day] for a community benefit day jumble sale and more), in the meantime, while I rest my kneading muscles, see below a 1940s red cross poster : ‘save bread, cut it in very thin slices, and use all crusts in soups’.

Knockvicar community organic garden is open every day in my absence, check out the baby cucumbers and make some tempura batter for courgette flowers (mix one egg yolk with 175 ml of water, add 120g of flour [I use hildegard white spelt flour, sifted] and add those little plastic ice cubes that were pretty cool in the seventies allowing you to chill out the mix without diluting it, dip and throw into very hot oil, I used a pan but I am led to believe that a lot of you own a deep fat fryer, for dessert we tempura-ed some banananana, see the smile on our contented faces, but I would recommend sprigs of flat-leaf parsley and also spring onions, let me know how you get on).

If you have more than a minute, check out one great French food blog, do ignore the ads on the left-hand side, though. http://chocolateandzucchini.com

 

being in the right place

Difficult extraction from bed due to time change. Fed the cats with home-made cat stew, milked the goat, bottle fed the kids and carried them to their little pasture, let out and fed the chickens and ducks, checked on sick chicken, made pizza for school dinner, ate a breakfast of soft boiled egg from the garden and own-home-brand bread, with a lot of water and (equal exchange) rooibosch tea and then I finally put potatoes to sprout. I will be late planting them again this year. One of my neighbours said you can set potatoes as long as you can see through ash trees, I like that, I may not quite manage it, though.

I suppose it is not just about traveling sensibly it is also about loving where you are, looking at the trees, feeling lucky about your life. I long ago heard on the radio about this very old lady who had not ever left her village, who said, ‘why would I travel since I’m already here’. I do like to travel because I love seeing concentrations of people and what they make, but if I could no longer travel it would be all right too. The whole world is also here in my little community and I do love my life and it is a bright sunny day today.

 

holidaying

I am back from my trip to france. 4 nights at sea or on the road, 6 nights in Paris with the children walking eating visiting (people and museums). Good to be back to do the maison djeribi job among other things, to bake, to eat my own bread and also to bottle feed our two orphaned kids (doing really well, thanks).

paris
Good hot chocolate at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Le Marais. Two good shows, one Japanese one French, more on that later. Free entry from 5 pm on wednesdays (I love that). Lovely lunch at Tokyoeat at the Palais de Tokyo, poor show (ha ha a lot of money was actually thrown at it) in the gallery but who cares great space, perfect art space, rough and ready in a clever way, open until 12 midnight (I love that), €1 for artists (I love that), the book shop could be bigger and should have solid walls in order to turn it into a place, the friendly staff deserves no less.

travel preferences
Since deciding that plane trips are to be avoided where and when possible and since I live on an island (Ireland) I have been experimenting with ways to go home (france) once or twice a year. In the past I travelled via the UK from Dublin by bus-boat-bus-boat-bus (which took one night, one day—wrecked—in London and one night) and more recently from Leitrim by either train-boat-train-train and train-boat-bus-train. The train-boat-train-train overnight is not to be recommended, it involves waiting for train connections for over an hour twice during the night including around 5 am in Birmingham station sitting on a concrete floor because there are no seats, there are seats but that area is partitioned off during the night just in case some god forbid homeless person might want to spend the night there. A definite anti-poor policy being in place in most ‘rich’ countries. All those trips are relatively tiring, the bus less so, the bus is also the least stressful of all (highly recommended for traveling between Ireland and the UK) ; the eurostar is good and cheap when booked well in advance. When we go to Brittany we drive the car to Cork and sail to Roscoff with Brittany ferries and drive to south finistère. We try not to use Irish Ferries since they laid off all their staff and decided to hire a subcontractor ensuring minimal pay, even though they have been since been brought to boot a little, we do not approve. I long ago sailed p&o with a car from Cherbourg to Rosslare, a trucking ferry that was more like a boat than the usual floating supermarket/fastfood/arcade, one of their boats is now operated by Celtic Line, a one boat ferry company. This, like the Norfolk line to the UK do not take foot passengers so I decided to try driving there with my mother’s minuscule twingo car that is quite fuel efficient, it saved on packing as everything was thrown into the boot inelegantly. It turned the holiday into a funky road trip. The ferry is great, it is like a small boat as most space is given over to trucks and containers. The return crossing was just over €600 which is reasonable, although one’s judgment is skewed by the obscenely cheap cost of air travel. All meals are pretty decent and all included and there is hot water/tea/coffee/cold water on tap. The cabins and the beds are comfortable. There is a bar with a television and perhaps even some money machines but that is easily avoided. There is a large room/lounge at top level with a lovely deck, as there are few passengers and a small crew it all feels quite homely, it would have been almost cruise like if N had not been rather sea sick, both ways. Despite the red wrist bands, the ginger, the lemon, Tabacum (homoeopathy), and remaining horizontal for most of the trip. The crossing takes about 20 hours over to Cherbourg and 18,5 hours return, a good way to catch up on sleep and sitting around generally.

road trip
Two shops I will recommend : in Ireland, in Tullamore a charming little shop packed with organic goods including handsome-looking (did not taste) locally-made organic bread : Wild Harvest. Good place.
In France in Cagny (24, route de Paris) on the way back we bought three different types of bread in a small boulangerie patisserie: E. and F. Cornu, two different baguettes (out of 5 models available) and one round loaf of Pain bûcheron, all lovely. On their bag they claim to run a bread service 24h 7/7, so there. (no, I regret, maison djeribi does not plan to do that, ever)

eating lunch in Ireland (i)
On the way to rosslare we stopped in Portlaoise for lunch and ended up in a restaurant that tried hard to look sophisticated, dare I say, continental, serving (really) overpriced food that we strongly suspected had not been prepared in the kitchen. More and more this is the case : food is prepared in factories and delivered frozen to restaurants who then hire minimal staff, display a varied and thorough menu and are able to keep the Environmental Health Officer sweet—most enrironmental health directives are designed for factories : hence for instance the global takeover of the plastic-wrapped sandwich and muffin. We were served the pinkiest sausages ever—colouring suspected, the salad was fresh although since my spotting of a van outside Connolly station in Dublin claiming to deliver ready-cut ‘fresh’ salads to restaurants all the way from Cork on a daily basis, fresh has become a relative. The chips were, again, alas, undercooked from frozen.

eating lunch in Ireland (ii)
Is it still possible to get a simple cheese and onion toasted sandwich anywhere ?
In the midlands I would recommend lunch at The Aubergine in Longford town, and Gallery 29 in Mullingar, but in general, bring your own pic-nic.