Rural Life

Les en primeurs sont arrives!

With many apologies to the French language for missing acents and dodgy spellings and potentially missing agreements.  It is the third Thursday in November however and as such the formal date for release of many of the en primeur or nouveau wines.  Some do come out earlier - we had primeurs in a restaurant in Narbonne in late October last year, but today is the day for Beaujolais and for Anjou Gamay.

I gather there are still parties for the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau but a lot of the marketing hype and fun seems to have gone out of it and wine snobs are sniffy about the quality of a wine that has been maturing for a few weeks at best.  I think they are missing the point with it.  November is a pretty grim month quite often, with storms, flooding, short days, cold nights, so something a bit fun is nice to change the mood.

The wines are young and therefore bear a very strong resemblance to grape juice with a kick, but you aren't drinking them for deep tanins and a complex nose, you are drinking these wines for a giggle.  If you want your tanins and complex nose and oak top notes and all the rest, pay a few pounds or euros more for something that is older and don't be offended by a young wine.

One thing we have found with Beaujolais Nouveau Villages, is that if you keep them for 18 months, you end up with quite a nice complex wine, although one with no more keeping qualities.

So this is our selection from Super U, and we will work our way through them, and if any are any good, we will probably invest in a couple more bottles, to keep us giggling until Christmas!

The fruits of my labours

Not the picture of pigs' ears but rather nasty weather has enabled better photographs to become available finally - could normal service be being resumed?  But then what is normal?

We have now picked the 9 fruits that we let mature on the young medlar tree, partly as all the leaves fell off and it looked rather odd.  We have the fruits bletting now in the entrance hall in an egg box, and one would appear to be right for eating - well it is mushy anyway, so later on I will find a sliver of Wensleydale and try it out.  However, as you can see, before the leaves fell off, it looked rather splendid.

As we are now at the middle of November, I thought it was about time to put away the more delicate potted trees and plants - two olive trees (neither very large), an agave (again very small) and a prickly pear.  They spend the winter in the unheated greenhouse, along with the brugmantia and the lemon tree and a pot of avocado saplings.  While I am not too worried about the cold for the olives, I am concerned at them getting water-logged, which is what they really hate.  This year I got one full sized and ripe olive - not enough to bother with either making oil or curing to eat I fear!

And finally sorting through the 400 odd photos on the camera, I came across this lovely picture of the two types of chillis we had growing this year - the smaller ones are hot, while the large ones are totally mild but add a lovely rich flavour to chillis and stews.  Previously I have grown Cayenne chillis which are very hot, but don't do much on flavour so this year has been quite a change.  I picked the last mild chillis yesterday - they are still green but should turn red in the kitchen over the next few weeks.

 
  

Afraid of 13?

Today is Friday the Thirteenth - a day when many try to spend the day in bed in case of bad things happening.

In France they are a bit schizophrenic about the number 13, so there is always a special massive jackpot on the lottery, they do not fear having 13 people sit down to dinner and if you ask for a dozen oysters from a vendor, you are likely to get 13 not 12.

Today the news reports are full of stories about people being afraid of Friday the thirteenth, putting the blame on Jesus sitting down at a table of 13 at the last supper and then being crucified on the Friday.  Personally that seems more likely to bring on an Arthur Dent moment of not being able to cope with Thursdays rather than Fridays, and better vetting of friends, but there we go.

Could it be that the French are trying to avert people's attention from the truly unlucky Friday the thirteenth back in the forteenth centruy when the French king, Philippe the Fair (Philippe le Beau) had the Knights Templars rounded up and burnt on a Friday 13th?

Still no luck on the photos clearly ...

Must get better photos!

So it's like this:

• two weeks ago we had the final stages of the masonry project at the back of the house to deal with, plus next door's new kitten
• last week I was tearing round the UK trying to earn an honest crust
• this week I have to catch up with all teh work that didn't get done last week as I was tearing around the UK

All of this impinges on two things, my ability to sort out photos and my ability to find nice ones to adorn this blog, or even to write something for this blog or my other one.

So in order to prove I still exist, and in a vain attempt to spur myself into finding something better jolly quickly, I put in the photo below.

It was taken on a friend's Blackberry and quite late in the evening, hence the grainy quality, on Easter Sunday when the really rather good Dutch band, Forty Fingers, were playing a gig outside the Excaliber Pub in our village.  The picture is of my frind Kathy and myself with a pair of pigs ears Kathy had brought over for me from their small haolding - I am a fan of eating pigs ears.  But by the time this was taken, we had both had a couple of Stellas....