Friday 6 February 2009

Doggy romps and French recipes

Its hooligan time here at Labartere as Boolie, Fleur and new Lady Dog charge about amongst the stuff in the courtyard playing chase with each other. Round and round they go. In here, round there, through there, oops didn't mean to barge into those legs nor tip over that ladder or make a mess of the once neat pile of ballast. Snap! someone upsets someone else, which sends Bools heading in my direction with his 'It wasn't me, Mum' expression on his face. B

ut two girl-dogs, wow! How his life has pepped up. Including the offer of having a go at fatherhood with Val's lady Springer-girl early next year to make Springer babies. Also possibility of Fleur getting her way as well. She's trying hard enough. Still visiting. But banned from tarpaulin-adventures. The new Lady Dog, belonging to the roofer? Well, Bool's would have to have a ladder to make her pregnant. She is quite a tall dog. As for Fleur - he can kneel down to oblige her, but of late she has been taken to rolling around underneath him, possibly to show him that there are other ways to get the job done. This is a very willing little lady dog.

I have mentioned before about French supermarket shopping - everything is written in French for a start, and the French people don't eat like the English do either. For instance, their view of cream is that it is hot milk with an egg yolk mixed in and then left to go cold. It's quite nice. In its own way.


I came here with a head full of known and tried recipes, plus a tattered old notebook of valued dishes, most of which have had to be dumped because for one: I can't translate the ingredients into French, and for two: I can't find the ingredients when I do manage to do the odd conversion. So I can either hunt down English suppliers, which most of the English seem to do here, which seems to me an intolerable waste of time, or I can go au naturelle and do French cooking. And joy of joys: looking at recipes in a French maggie, and actually recognising the ingredients by name. OK, so don't know where to find them yet. But I have seen them somewhere. So now I have to go on a hunt to find them, but at least I can ask someone the whereabouts of a missing ingredient.

Ah. A Thought. That would require, would it not, some French words? MMmmmm. Perhaps a stumbling block to my intended cooking project. Perhaps, maybe, ummm, .... now where did I put that old recipe notebook....


Updates: Builders rolling along. Rhubarb sprouting. Dreadful blackness over the Pyrenees. Bools slept on bed last night because he was cold which left us all squashed up like the contents of a tin of sardines - will have to stop him from doing that as Lester spent most of the night crammed up against the window, I had minimal space in the middle while Bools, bless him, took up nearly half of the bed and would not move AT ALL. But it was a cold night. So we were probably all the warmer for being in a huddle. Mud is slightly moister today, sun is asleep, methinks the Pyrenees are posting up to us some of their dark weather, et au revoir pour ce moment.

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