10 Facts to Know About Nutella...

    It's wonderful for sandwiching biscuits together for an instant treat and, mixed with whipped cream, it makes an insanely good mousse. But that evil mixture of chocolate and hazelnuts known as Nutella has no place in my pantry. On the rare occasions when I do buy a jar...blink, and it's gone. In fact, a photo exists in the family digital files of me spooning Nutella straight from the source.
    I adore the stuff. Occasionally I'll break down and have a Nutella croissant and recently, preceded by spring rolls, samosas and far too much rosé at the village night market, a Nutella crèpe passed my lips. That's all the four food groups, right?
    Some years ago, I was asked to write a magazine story about Nutella, which meant I had to buy several jars for research purposes.
    A few facts I remember, and some I've learned since:
    1) The happy result of combining chocolate and hazelnuts was originally discovered in Italy.
    2) During World War 11, a chocolate shortage led to the invention of a paste with chocolate and hazelnuts in it. (See where this is leading?)
    3) In 1964, it was named Nutella.
    4) Nigella Lawson has a recipe for Nutella cake that uses an entire jar.
    5) The most colossal, humungous jar that I've ever seen in a supermarket was a massive 5 kilos.
    6) You can be a Facebook friend of Nutella.
    7) Nutella is made by the same company that makes Ferraro Rocher chocolates.
    8) You can waste a pleasant hour exploring the various national sites for Nutella (all linked through www.nutella.com ). Italy can have you collecting limited edition decorative jars. The UK site includes a recipe for a Nutella-and-banana breakfast wrap. Hmm. Have to think about that one. Best of all is the Moroccan site, which lets you draw a digital message on digital toast, using a digital knife that you dip in a digital jar.

     9) Here, in France, you can buy jars of Nutella in several sizes, and also, at the checkout, miniature packs of Nutella with biscuits to dip in them.

     10) You can find cookbooks containing nothing but recipes that use Nutella. 

   And, finally, to finish, some Nutella images...

 This is actually Spanish Nutella, shot on location in St. Sebastian. Note the wee jars on top of the stacks of big ones.

  

   A boulangerie in Lavelanet has a permanent sign outside advertising its specialties. What more can I say except that writing this post has given me a deep desire to go and buy a jar.

  

A Vintage Skirt, and Other Finds, at the Vide Grenier

    If you read this blog even once in a while, you'd think we spend every Sunday morning browsing through secondhand goods. Which is true. Well, maybe not every Sunday morning, but probably one in four.
    Like fishermen, we have our favourite spots. If you've caught a record-breaking salmon there once, you tend to return to the same place. Because the summer vide grenier in La Bastide de Boussignac has led to some "yesss" finds over the years, including four tall curtains in the perfect shade of yellow, we were there soon after it opened.
    That first quick browse of the trestle tables often produces old friends: there's a certain plaster dog that I swear I've seen in half a dozen villages, and an old coffee tin that's too rusty even for me. You get to know some of the vendors too. But I've never seen this Madame anywhere else but in La Bastide.

 She's got so much style that I'm in awe. She also has an enviable collection of vintage clothing, cushions, lace and other bits and pieces.

  I would never have the courage to wear this hat. The ultimate Easter bonnet...

  
...or this one. Although I could see it going down a treat at Mirepoix's annual apple festival.
    No, what I fell for was this skirt which manages to combine a riotous palette, a cheerfully slapdash approach to tie-dyeing and loads of sparkly sequins.

    What's your guess, maybe mid-1950s? Five euros changed hands and I wandered off, sure that I'd used up my vide grenier karma for the day but quite content with my find du jour.
    But no.
    When friends come to stay, we always joke about the monogrammed linen sheets they'll find on their bed. Except it's true. Years ago, we realized that we could buy superb antique bed linen for less than you'd pay for plain old cotton sheets at Ikea. There are two reasons for this. First of all, vintage linen was usually made for double beds so, if you sleep in a king- or queen-size, you're out of luck. Second, laziness. Most people think that antique linen calls for huge amounts of work in the washing and ironing department. I swear on my grandmother's wringer that this is not true. I machine wash my sheets and drape them on the drying rack. I never, ever iron them. Back in the days when I had a clothes dryer, I simply threw them in to dry and that was that. Yes, you do end up with the  odd dimple or rumple. So?
     Even though we now own enough vintage linen to stock a small hotel, I'm always drawn to it so, at this particular vide grenier, I jumped up and down when I spied a gorgeous damask linen table napkin, hand-monogrammed and dyed a deep shade of green.

      I unfolded it. It was so enormous that...you must excuse me while I go and look for the tape measure. Right, it's 82 cm wide--just under three feet--and proportionally deep. To have a napkin of this size and weight on your lap is to make you think you're eating lunch with the family in a chateau in Bordeaux.
      Meanwhile, back in the Ariège...
     "How much?"
     She named a price.
     Ok, I thought. I'll buy two, for sumptuous suppers just for the two of us.
     The vendor pointed at the stack on her stall. The price she'd mentioned was for "le lot."
     I rammed them into my basket and didn't even count them till I got home when I discovered I'd bought a dozen enormous linen napkins, monogrammed by hand....
      ....for four euros.

Why Honesty is honestly one of my favourite plants.

   As a compulsive researcher, I find facts are addictive. Even before the worldwide web was invented, I used to spend hours in libraries, carting stacks of books to a table, scribbling notes, and squirreling away all kinds of arcane bits of information.  (Speaking of the web, I heard a terrific radio interview the other day with Internet-inventor Tim Berners-Lee. When the interviewer asked him the reason for those two forward slashes after the "http" and colon, he said he didn't know. Can you imagine the gazillions of unnecessary key-strokes that decision led to?)
   So, honesty. Or rather Honesty. Or, as fact-digging has made evident, any number of other names for this most easy-going of plants. Americans call it "silver dollars." Elsewhere it's known as "Chinese coins" or "coins of Judas." Good reasons exist for all of these names but my personal favourite is the accurately botanical Lunaria annua. "Lunaria" presumably because each seed pod looks like a full moon and "annua" because it's an annual.
   Early each spring, in one of the more unkempt parts of our garden, honesty plants spring up with abandon and in abundance, a great drift of foot-high plants with small purple flowers that relieve the sombre bed of ivy that usually occupies this spot. Time marches on, Nature does her thing and, by mid-summer, you can make out the opaque round seeds through their vivid green casing, especially when the sun shines through them.

  A couple of days ago, I harvested some of the stems, the pods now dried to as many shades of yellowy-grey as there are in our stone walls.
   Rubbing off the thin papery skin either side of the central "moon" releases the seeds (which I've saved to scatter sometime soon). What I was left with are these glimmering, gleaming miniature moons. Every vase in the house is now filled with them.
  

    Get your hands on some seeds if you can and scatter them freely. They will grow anywhere, in any kind of soil it seems, need no care at all, and reproduce as generously as Victorian paterfamilias.

The Biggest Tomato I've Ever Seen.

  No hidden thumbs on the scales. Honest. Weighing in at a whopping 690 g (roughly one-and-a-half pounds if you don't do metric) is this colossal tomate that I bought at Friday's market. That photogenic drop of tomato "blood"? That's because I sliced off the bottom of the tomato before I remembered I hadn't weighed it.

  Sliced, dripped with olive oil, and with a sprig of basil on top: this was the salad we had with today's lunch of baguette and pâté.

Montségur in an autumn light.

   Suddenly, overnight, it became autumn, and we went outdoors to feel a nip in the air. After weeks of coming indoors to get cool, we've now started doing the opposite.
    And we've had rain, a blessing after what seems like weeks of 30-plus temperatures. You can even get tired of blue skies (but not for long).
     The other afternoon was grey and dull as a friend and I drove to Lavelanet. Usually Montségur, the dramatic peak that was the last stronghold of the Cathars, almost fades into the background hills. Today, it stood out so spectacularly that I grabbed my camera.

     Those grey spots are rain on the windscreen.

Thinking of Curry, Apples--and Chutney

   Over the past month, Indian spicing has figured large in my life. A couple of weeks ago came a pot-luck Indian dinner and a laugh-out-loud showing of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Next was the discovery of a new Indian restaurant in Mirepoix. We ate more Indian food at a friend's a week ago, and I left with his Maddhur Jaffrey cookbook. Copious stains and stuck-together pages gave away which recipes he'd used.
   I grew up with curry, but not curry as you or I know it. Chicken tikka masala may be the UK's second most popular dish these days (knocked off its pedestal early this year by "Chinese stir-fry") but fancy dishes like that came late to the English table. In the early 1960s, "curry" was shorthand for a ring of steamed rice, not necessarily basmati, surrounding a hillock of cooked mince and onion made yellowy-brown with curry powder. It wasn't particularly spicy, but you could "cool it down" by helping yourself from the inevitable side dishes of yoghurt, cucumber and, curiously, raisins. Today, the UK has around 9,000 Indian restaurants--that's a lot of chicken vindaloo and mountains of roti under the bridge.
    Spicy dishes have never featured much in French cuisine but Indian food is slowly making inroads. When I made a batch of shrikand for the Indian pot-luck recently, I thought I might find cardamom in the local Intermarché--and I did. (Wandering off track, "shrikand" is a thick, luscious and aromatic Gujarati dessert made from drained yogurt, chopped pistachios, saffron and cardamom.)
    And, of course, you can find curry powder everywhere in France., and that was what I needed yesterday morning. A rainy Sunday, a perfect time to make curried apple chutney.

   Before she left ten days ago on her vacances, my neighbour told me to help myself to as many apples as I wanted, which I had. I peeled, cored and chopped about 1.5 kilos, added brown sugar, cider vinegar and raisins..

      ...and then spooned in coriander, cardamom, chili flakes, cinnamon and, of course, curry powder pondering, not for the first time, why so many spices begin with "c".
     Compared to making jam, chutney is a doddle. All you do is bung everything in a saucepan, bring it to the boil, simmer it until it thickens, pour it into jars, label it (one chutney looks very much like another) and let it age. Right now I've got six jars maturing in the pantry, and another half-jar maturing in the fridge. Should be nice with baguette, cheeses, tomatoes and radishes for lunch. Wonder what they call a "ploughman's" in France? My enormous dictionary says it's an "assiette de fromage et de pickles."

Easy Side Dishes to Serve with Roast Chicken

     Pasta tossed with olive oil and parsley, steamed potatoes, couscous, polenta, a baguette...just about any starch you can think of goes with roast chicken. In my book, it's even better if you tart up the starch component so you get your vegetables at the same time. 

     You can take the parsley approach or mix chopped fresh tomatoes and torn basil leaves into pasta instead. Potatoes taste much better (and look far prettier) sprinkled with scissored chives. Couscous becomes tabbouleh when you add handfuls of red or green pepper, cucumber, tomato, mint, and cartloads of parsley, all chopped. Polenta is lovely when you throw in fine snippings of rosemary and/or shredded sun-dried tomatoes as you cook it.   

 All these additions work with rice too but what I've been making a lot over the past incredibly hot month is rice salad. I can't give you a firm recipe because it's never the same twice, depending on what I've got in the fridge.
    Once the rice was cooked, today's chicken-accompanying version began with the bird's juices, which I degreased first. Then I sloshed in some olive oil. As soon as the rice had cooled to room temp, in went chopped red pepper, red onion, parsley and--the secret ingredient--finely chopped preserved lemon, which adds a deliciously citric edge to the dish.

   Last Friday I bought a kilo of haricots verts at Lavelanet market for all of two euros. One handful per person, topped and tailed (scissors are the swiftest way to go about this), went into a pan of boiling water for five minutes. While they were cooking, I fried a finely chopped large clove of garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil, just until it turned golden. Beans drained and put in a dish, garlic-y oil poured over. Done. Nice cold too and keeps for several days in the fridge, as does the rice salad, so make lots.
    Vinaigrette-d lettuce leaves. Tomatoes from the garden, still warm when we ate them. Bread (not a baguette but the rustic couronne with holes the size of centimes that we buy at the market). Cold rosé from Provence.
    And suddenly it was four in the afternoon.