Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sunday 19 August 2007
For some time now N has been hatching a plan to build some kind of wide brick doorstep outside the verandah door as when it rains a puddle collects and seeps under the wooden threshold. So on Friday morning we drove to Point P at Conches, where he ordered a square metre’s worth of pale square bricks and also some planks for kneeling on in the vegetable garden (apparently lots of people buy them for that purpose.) All this will be delivered next Thursday. Meanwhile I caught up with shopping at the Champion supermarket over the road. As always when I go there I am pleasantly surprised to find how much non-food stuff there is. An extra surprise was some very good reasonably-priced reines claudes (greengages) so after a little thought and calculation I bought 2 kilos and made jam that afternoon - fortunately not quite so bad on the hands as the plums! It was the first time I have ever made greengage jam, never having had access to the fruit before. It is a beautiful colour! and has also finished up our entire supply of empty jam jars, antique and otherwise, plus the frilly covers, so no more jam-making for the moment until we get hold of (or empty) some more.
Before going home we went on another « brick » expedition, to the Grange des Ongliers, the antique barn we last went to in April with Bobbie and Guthrie. N was looking for - and successfully found - old bricks to repair a gap in the corner of the brick floor in the second outhouse. I was looking at garden furniture, as I have decided it is time to replace the plastic table and two chairs from Cambridge, my so-called luxury garden furniture. As I expected, there were no complete sets there, only old tables, mostly rectangular, but it was useful to look. What I am really looking for is a smallish round white wrought iron table (big enough for breakfast!) and two chairs; either old or old in appearance. If the table top comes off or folds flat then that would be useful for storage and transport.
We had a good look round all the rest of the Grange des Ongliers but didn’t buy anything; we looked for large gilt-framed mirrors to go over the fireplace in the salon, but there were far fewer than last time, and all too big or to small. Apart from the bricks (and a couple of shop ledgers from 1911 and 1913) the most interesting thing there was a large tabby & white cat asleep on a beautifully upholstered chair, but he wasn’t for sale.
After finishing the greengage jam in the afternoon, I made a second plum cake with the rest of the Victorias from Wednesday, as the first one was such a success. (A small plum crumble had also been made and eaten in between.) This is a recipe I have had for years, officially for an apple cake, but I substituted plums when I had a plum tree in Cambridge. When it is served on a glass cake dish complete with pedestal, and dredged in icing sugar, it looks like something from a very exclusive cake shop!
This weekend the weather has been cold and chilly; not much more than 16 degrees. Yesterday morning I caught up with new and exciting exercise DVD and resulting shower, hair wash etc, while N laid his new bricks in the second outhouse and started preparing the beams and the intervening plaster for re-surfacing. He had intended to renovate it completely during the summer, but it hasn’t been that kind of summer; the same goes for my plans to paint the ground floor windowsills.
Today we planned to go to two bric-à-brac fairs and then return via the Grange des Ongliers, as N found he was about five bricks short for the outhouse floor. It was raining, always disappointing for fairs and the first one was in a village not far away on the road to Conches, called Sainte Marthe. As before, it was interesting to see the centre of a village we only know from a signpost, and if it had been fine I think we’d have enjoyed it more. There were some intriguing metal labels on sale for pricing various kinds of cheese - in francs! - and a small dog sitting in a travel cot accompanied by two dolls; it was difficult to make out just what was for sale.
N found two large bottles for his collection, and all I bought was three kilos of apples, from the same vendors as one of the bottles. They made the usual joke about the bottle being empty, and the woman said yes, she had finished it that morning before setting out. Last autumn the idea of buying apples would have seemed ridiculous as we thought we had enough to last for ever, but our apple tree seems to be having a gap year; at last we hope that’s all it is, and N keeps asking when I am going to make more mint jelly with the vast amounts of strong Italian mint in the garden. For the moment I have stored them on the « apple shelf » in the first outhouse, where luckily we still have enough small jelly jars.
We then went on to Droisy, an obscure little village some way away where - according to a newspaper supplement - we hoped to find a second foire à tout. For the first time, however, the place was completely deserted, with no sign of life - or foire - at all. On the way we passed a Chocolatarium, a sort of chocolate factory, a most unusual thing to find in the middle of the Normandy countryside where normally the economy revolves round grain, cows, cider and antiques. After calling in once again at the Grange des Ongliers to get our extra bricks we went home for lunch, buying our bread this time at a nearby village called Chandai.
Tuesday 21 August 2007
After having enjoyed Lark Rise to Candleford, N is now reading Flora Thompson’s Country Calendar, and is pleased to find that she too observed swallows flying in and out of a garden building where they had made their nests. She also talks of hanging up herbs to dry in the sunshine, in the same way as we have dried mint and verveine. On Sunday afternoon we sat at the verandah table, N polishing his recently bought wooden clogs, and me stripping the dried mint from its twigs and putting it in a large glass jar which came from Italy, and N said it was good to be involved in such country pursuits. There is a smaller Italian jar which should be the right size for the bunch of sage now drying; the verveine is in the square glass conserves maison jar I bought at a sale a few weeks ago. Afterwards I polished some silver, including the wine bottle holder bought last week, and it is now sitting on the sideboard with a bottle each of Pommeau and Calvados in it.
I have now finished the third volume of Les Thibault, a fascinating story of the relationships between the members of two families, set against a back-drop of Paris, Maisons Lafitte, Le Havre and Marseilles in the early 1900’s. I have also had a look at the 1926 book of advice to a young girl which I bought recently; although it is addressed to girls leaving school, and gives plenty of information on equipping kitchens, first aid and nutrition and mentions the importance of looking after husbands and babies (a long chapter, this) it gives absolutely no idea about how one obtains either a husband or a baby! Though, strangely, there is quite a long section at the back on divorce. It also makes reference more than once to « our brave soldiers » who have recently given their lives in the Great War. There are also some interesting pictures and diagrams, mostly of unappetizing cuts of meat, and layouts of furniture in sitting rooms.
Today we have had a guest for lunch, for the first time in ages. (No unappetizing cuts of meat.) It was Professor J, who came visited us at Saint-Denis last autumn, and this time he was calling in on the way to visit his daughter near Giverny. We had hoped we might have lunch in the garden - a not unreasonable idea in August - but the weather is still not at all reliable, (though better predicted for the weekend!) so we had salade niçoise indoors, preceded by some of last year’s spinach & orange soup from the freezer, and followed by a selection of local cheeses from the market and a tarte Normande from the village boulangerie. The soup was excellent and N suggested I made more this year with the threatened glut of spinach in the potager; I had no memory of the recipe so have done a little research and am pleased to report that I have now found it.
As always it was very enjoyable to show someone new around the house and garden and outhouses, and fortunately in between showers it was dry and even sunny for the visit to the vegetable garden and new flower bed. Professor J was duly amazed by the recording studio, the system of linked water butts, the jam and chutney store and the second outhouse which N is half-way through restoring; yesterday he finished up the contents of several different half-empty pots of creosote, wood preserver and brown stain on the beams in the ceiling. After we’d had coffee in the verandah, N took our guest to his study to show him Sibelius (computer system for transcribing, composing and printing music) rather like a small boy taking his friend to his room to show off his train set.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Today the weather is terrible; dark clouds and constant rain all day. It is like winter and I found myself wrapping up to go and get the bread and then going straight away to the outhouse to get what was needed there for the rest of the day, just as I do in winter. While I was there I sorted out and rationalised the jam and chutney store; there is so much now that all the jams are on the original wooden shelves and all the chutney sorted into baskets on the new plastic shelving. It’s amazing how much time this sort of thing takes! I also labelled the jars of dried mint etc; as with things in the freezer you start by thinking you can’t possibly forget what they all are, but the more there are, the more you forget.
N can’t get on any further with his outhouse renovating project because of the weather, so is looking through his newly acquired purchases of stamps complete with an up-to-date Stanley Gibbons catalogue, just in case any of them are worth thousands of pounds. They haven’t been so far, but there are a couple of dozen or more worth £2 or £3, so not a bad investment on an album costing 10 euros.
Thursday 23 August 2007
A drier day, well at least a drier morning. I got some washing almost dry and N, in his new role of bricklayer manqué, waited for the delivery of two kinds of bricks, sand, and his two garden planks. (Lots of jokes about two short thick planks…) All this arrived towards the end of the morning, so lunch was late; I was busy with the spinach and orange soup in any case; one kilo of spinach fills two sinks! and he filled in the cement around the bricks in the corner of the second outhouse and after lunch designed and laid a brick « doorstep » in front of the verandah door. He filled in the cement in the rain, and covered it all in plastic to protect it. Hopefully both sets of bricks will dry nicely while we are away, as tomorrow we set off for Saint-Denis for the first time in about two and a half months - the longest we‘ve ever been away, I think.
For some time now N has been hatching a plan to build some kind of wide brick doorstep outside the verandah door as when it rains a puddle collects and seeps under the wooden threshold. So on Friday morning we drove to Point P at Conches, where he ordered a square metre’s worth of pale square bricks and also some planks for kneeling on in the vegetable garden (apparently lots of people buy them for that purpose.) All this will be delivered next Thursday. Meanwhile I caught up with shopping at the Champion supermarket over the road. As always when I go there I am pleasantly surprised to find how much non-food stuff there is. An extra surprise was some very good reasonably-priced reines claudes (greengages) so after a little thought and calculation I bought 2 kilos and made jam that afternoon - fortunately not quite so bad on the hands as the plums! It was the first time I have ever made greengage jam, never having had access to the fruit before. It is a beautiful colour! and has also finished up our entire supply of empty jam jars, antique and otherwise, plus the frilly covers, so no more jam-making for the moment until we get hold of (or empty) some more.
Before going home we went on another « brick » expedition, to the Grange des Ongliers, the antique barn we last went to in April with Bobbie and Guthrie. N was looking for - and successfully found - old bricks to repair a gap in the corner of the brick floor in the second outhouse. I was looking at garden furniture, as I have decided it is time to replace the plastic table and two chairs from Cambridge, my so-called luxury garden furniture. As I expected, there were no complete sets there, only old tables, mostly rectangular, but it was useful to look. What I am really looking for is a smallish round white wrought iron table (big enough for breakfast!) and two chairs; either old or old in appearance. If the table top comes off or folds flat then that would be useful for storage and transport.
We had a good look round all the rest of the Grange des Ongliers but didn’t buy anything; we looked for large gilt-framed mirrors to go over the fireplace in the salon, but there were far fewer than last time, and all too big or to small. Apart from the bricks (and a couple of shop ledgers from 1911 and 1913) the most interesting thing there was a large tabby & white cat asleep on a beautifully upholstered chair, but he wasn’t for sale.
After finishing the greengage jam in the afternoon, I made a second plum cake with the rest of the Victorias from Wednesday, as the first one was such a success. (A small plum crumble had also been made and eaten in between.) This is a recipe I have had for years, officially for an apple cake, but I substituted plums when I had a plum tree in Cambridge. When it is served on a glass cake dish complete with pedestal, and dredged in icing sugar, it looks like something from a very exclusive cake shop!
This weekend the weather has been cold and chilly; not much more than 16 degrees. Yesterday morning I caught up with new and exciting exercise DVD and resulting shower, hair wash etc, while N laid his new bricks in the second outhouse and started preparing the beams and the intervening plaster for re-surfacing. He had intended to renovate it completely during the summer, but it hasn’t been that kind of summer; the same goes for my plans to paint the ground floor windowsills.
Today we planned to go to two bric-à-brac fairs and then return via the Grange des Ongliers, as N found he was about five bricks short for the outhouse floor. It was raining, always disappointing for fairs and the first one was in a village not far away on the road to Conches, called Sainte Marthe. As before, it was interesting to see the centre of a village we only know from a signpost, and if it had been fine I think we’d have enjoyed it more. There were some intriguing metal labels on sale for pricing various kinds of cheese - in francs! - and a small dog sitting in a travel cot accompanied by two dolls; it was difficult to make out just what was for sale.
N found two large bottles for his collection, and all I bought was three kilos of apples, from the same vendors as one of the bottles. They made the usual joke about the bottle being empty, and the woman said yes, she had finished it that morning before setting out. Last autumn the idea of buying apples would have seemed ridiculous as we thought we had enough to last for ever, but our apple tree seems to be having a gap year; at last we hope that’s all it is, and N keeps asking when I am going to make more mint jelly with the vast amounts of strong Italian mint in the garden. For the moment I have stored them on the « apple shelf » in the first outhouse, where luckily we still have enough small jelly jars.
We then went on to Droisy, an obscure little village some way away where - according to a newspaper supplement - we hoped to find a second foire à tout. For the first time, however, the place was completely deserted, with no sign of life - or foire - at all. On the way we passed a Chocolatarium, a sort of chocolate factory, a most unusual thing to find in the middle of the Normandy countryside where normally the economy revolves round grain, cows, cider and antiques. After calling in once again at the Grange des Ongliers to get our extra bricks we went home for lunch, buying our bread this time at a nearby village called Chandai.
Tuesday 21 August 2007
After having enjoyed Lark Rise to Candleford, N is now reading Flora Thompson’s Country Calendar, and is pleased to find that she too observed swallows flying in and out of a garden building where they had made their nests. She also talks of hanging up herbs to dry in the sunshine, in the same way as we have dried mint and verveine. On Sunday afternoon we sat at the verandah table, N polishing his recently bought wooden clogs, and me stripping the dried mint from its twigs and putting it in a large glass jar which came from Italy, and N said it was good to be involved in such country pursuits. There is a smaller Italian jar which should be the right size for the bunch of sage now drying; the verveine is in the square glass conserves maison jar I bought at a sale a few weeks ago. Afterwards I polished some silver, including the wine bottle holder bought last week, and it is now sitting on the sideboard with a bottle each of Pommeau and Calvados in it.
I have now finished the third volume of Les Thibault, a fascinating story of the relationships between the members of two families, set against a back-drop of Paris, Maisons Lafitte, Le Havre and Marseilles in the early 1900’s. I have also had a look at the 1926 book of advice to a young girl which I bought recently; although it is addressed to girls leaving school, and gives plenty of information on equipping kitchens, first aid and nutrition and mentions the importance of looking after husbands and babies (a long chapter, this) it gives absolutely no idea about how one obtains either a husband or a baby! Though, strangely, there is quite a long section at the back on divorce. It also makes reference more than once to « our brave soldiers » who have recently given their lives in the Great War. There are also some interesting pictures and diagrams, mostly of unappetizing cuts of meat, and layouts of furniture in sitting rooms.
Today we have had a guest for lunch, for the first time in ages. (No unappetizing cuts of meat.) It was Professor J, who came visited us at Saint-Denis last autumn, and this time he was calling in on the way to visit his daughter near Giverny. We had hoped we might have lunch in the garden - a not unreasonable idea in August - but the weather is still not at all reliable, (though better predicted for the weekend!) so we had salade niçoise indoors, preceded by some of last year’s spinach & orange soup from the freezer, and followed by a selection of local cheeses from the market and a tarte Normande from the village boulangerie. The soup was excellent and N suggested I made more this year with the threatened glut of spinach in the potager; I had no memory of the recipe so have done a little research and am pleased to report that I have now found it.
As always it was very enjoyable to show someone new around the house and garden and outhouses, and fortunately in between showers it was dry and even sunny for the visit to the vegetable garden and new flower bed. Professor J was duly amazed by the recording studio, the system of linked water butts, the jam and chutney store and the second outhouse which N is half-way through restoring; yesterday he finished up the contents of several different half-empty pots of creosote, wood preserver and brown stain on the beams in the ceiling. After we’d had coffee in the verandah, N took our guest to his study to show him Sibelius (computer system for transcribing, composing and printing music) rather like a small boy taking his friend to his room to show off his train set.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Today the weather is terrible; dark clouds and constant rain all day. It is like winter and I found myself wrapping up to go and get the bread and then going straight away to the outhouse to get what was needed there for the rest of the day, just as I do in winter. While I was there I sorted out and rationalised the jam and chutney store; there is so much now that all the jams are on the original wooden shelves and all the chutney sorted into baskets on the new plastic shelving. It’s amazing how much time this sort of thing takes! I also labelled the jars of dried mint etc; as with things in the freezer you start by thinking you can’t possibly forget what they all are, but the more there are, the more you forget.
N can’t get on any further with his outhouse renovating project because of the weather, so is looking through his newly acquired purchases of stamps complete with an up-to-date Stanley Gibbons catalogue, just in case any of them are worth thousands of pounds. They haven’t been so far, but there are a couple of dozen or more worth £2 or £3, so not a bad investment on an album costing 10 euros.
Thursday 23 August 2007
A drier day, well at least a drier morning. I got some washing almost dry and N, in his new role of bricklayer manqué, waited for the delivery of two kinds of bricks, sand, and his two garden planks. (Lots of jokes about two short thick planks…) All this arrived towards the end of the morning, so lunch was late; I was busy with the spinach and orange soup in any case; one kilo of spinach fills two sinks! and he filled in the cement around the bricks in the corner of the second outhouse and after lunch designed and laid a brick « doorstep » in front of the verandah door. He filled in the cement in the rain, and covered it all in plastic to protect it. Hopefully both sets of bricks will dry nicely while we are away, as tomorrow we set off for Saint-Denis for the first time in about two and a half months - the longest we‘ve ever been away, I think.
# posted by Chez Katherine @ 9:38 AM 
