International Velvet

Eat your heart out Tatum..this is Scarlet on Mabelle, her favourite pony at her riding school. This week she learned how to clean hooves with a disgustingly foul smelling paste that stuck to everything ...still, Scarlet and Mabelle enjoyed the experience. Bleurgh. How does Scarlet always manage to look slightly rakish when on horseback? Her hat never quite sits right......

Recipe for happy students. Makes 8.

Well, today Gregoire took a masterclass of students.How to deal with trout. First take some fresh whole trout, et puis...2 hours later you have trout tartare, warm quenelles of trout, and whole baked stuffed trout. Wash down with fresh farm poiré. Yum. Yum. Yum. What better way to spend a cold March Saturday afternoon?

Jaws

ok ok I admit it. I'm scared of my toothbrush. I decided to shake off my retro ways and upgrade my good old manual toothbrushing habits to electric ones. What a mistake. Too scary. Initially I didn't know how to use the monster...and I seemed to cover every square inch of tile space in the bathroom with toothpaste and water and severely damage my gums, whilst ensuring that my teeth stayed as dry and unbrushed as when the whole rigmarole started. Each morning and night I would battle through the roller coaster ritual of switch on, load toothpaste, wet brush and bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...what usually happened was chudda chudda bang bang interspersed with shouts of "oh f**k this b&st!!d brush" and the like. Scarlet (after much laughter) gave me the basic rundown of how to actually use one, but for now I have shakily reverted to my faithful old manual toothbrush. Nasty thing modern technology.

who's sorry now?

am paying for drinking on Monday night. Downed a coupla glasses of champagne, followed it with a fair number of glasses of wine (white then red) and finished off with some extremely tasty calvados. Resulted in very sore hair and a painful head to boot on Tuesday morning, followed by mega cold that hit me late afternoon Tuesday...obviously my body didn't like me drinking that much....I blame the calvados personally. Not the 10 glasses of wine I drank beforehand.

Emulating Delia

Gregoire's birthday yesterday so I promised him a cake. Chose a simple recipe - or so I thought. Turns out I chose the hardest thing in the world to make - and it ended up looking like a cross between a fat flat heavy pancake and a holeless tyre. Gregoire said it was rather odd but surprisingly tasty. And certainly one of a kind. Unlike anything he had ever had before - or was ever likely to taste again. I filled it with a little mixture of crème fraîche and fresh red berries I whipped up, and topped it with my own home-made lemon icing....yummy, almost. The overall effect was intensely sweet and fruity, whilst having a strong lemony flavour too...most unusual. Probably best not repeated.

life on mars..

sometimes it feels like we live on another planet. Yesterday we hosted an annual birthday do for the villagers born in 1933. The class of '53 they call themselves. We do lots of these *classes* (dated 20 years on from their birthyear) but this one is always a bit special. On the menu is home-made rabbit terrine followed by calves head (complete with tongue and served warm with parsley and shallot sauce) or tripe stew à la mode de Caen. Followed by high (almost running away) normandy cheeses and then apple and calvados tart. Wash all this down with rotting farm cider and finish with coffee and strip your throat clean calvados. Yum yum. Not for the faint hearted. Certainly not for the vegetarians amongst us. They loved it of course, and have promised to be back next year. With the same menu of course....

Dark side of the moon....

can't believe it is a week since I last blogged. Things seem to have got quite busy here in fact. Lots of workmen lunches, a rowdy Red Hatter do, and the weekend is here again. Tonight we have a group of mad Fermax men coming for drinks and to discuss various autocross events that somehow we seem to have become involved in. Tomorrow there is a village do and I am apparently going to be a waitress for the association organising things (I do the service here first then scoot off to the Salle des Fetes to join the crowds). I don't mind really, as afterwards we get offered lots of yummy home-made liqueurs and get tiddly and giggly. Scarlet spent the afternoon playing with Antoine - absolutely NOT her boyfriend she insists - they cycled around the village and the lake for over 3 hours then went paddling in the (freezing cold) lavoir. She came back happy as a butterfly and is now singing in the bath. Oh to be 7 years old again...

Total lunar eclipse tonight and we might actually see it....starts at 9.30pm and will be a total eclipse just before midnight.