A Horribly Sticky Kitchen

I have rather a small kitchen, only nine feet long and five feet wide.  After I crammed in a fridgefreezer, cooker, and sink, there was very little space left for a table, storage, etc.  Most of these problems were solved when I bought a 1930s Hygena kitchen cupboard.  It has a pull out table and storage above and below, and aside from a little storage space underneath the sink it is all the cupboard space I have.  But since the skillets are hung above the sink, and the pots have their own dedicated potstand, everything I need fits quite neatly.

 

 

A tie hanger cum sausage storer!

 

 

These last few days I have been making candied orange peel (my favourate sweetmeat, terribly expensive when one tries to buy it in shops, and usually unavailable).  Friday I bought 20 oranges and 4 lemons (just for luck – I am not actually all that fond of candied lemon peel), squeezed out the juice, scooped out the remaining flesh, and boiled up the cut up peel three times in water to reduce the bitterness.  Then I made a thick sirup, dumped the peel in, and boiled it up.  Then I let it cool down.  Then I boiled it up again.  And cool down.  And so on and so forth until today (Sunday afternoon), when I fished out the peels one at a time and deposited them on racks for drying.

As you can see, I went a little overboard!  The kitchen is completely dominated by drying peels, and will be unusable for a few days.  Making candied anything is a sticky business, and the kitchen is a sticky mess. 

 When the peels have dried a bit and no longer drip I shall take them into the dining room, which is warmer, so they dry a bit faster.  When they are finally dry to the touch, I will cut them into smaller pieces and store in a glass jar.  I might even dip some of them in chocolate, if I can be bothered.

All these culinary projects seem great at the time, but once you get started they take ages and take over the house.  I was really truly going to sort out the attic this weekend, but after all the candying I am no longer in the mood.  I feel like mixing myself a stiff one and crashing out in front of the telly, but since I rarely drink alcohol and don’t have a television shall have to make do with a cup of tea and a game of solitaire.  And then it is back to knitting waistcoats and watching French movies!

What do you think of the balloon picture?  It is an oil painting I picked up a few years ago during one of my Charity Shop Shuffles for £2.  I suspect it has no artistic merit whatsoever, but it is so cheery it makes me happy every time I see it.  It hangs in the kitchen, goes well with the yellow walls.  I just took it to the dining room to photograph.

I wonder what excitement Easter Monday will hold?

From Oxford to Paris in 20 Degrees

Guess what this is?

I have had one of those really weird days, weatherwise.  Usually the temperature in Paris is very similar to that in Oxford and London, just a few degrees above or below.  But yesterday was another thing altogether!  I knew that Paris would be considerably warmer than Oxford (I have my spies everywhere!) – Oxford was below freezing and 4 inches of snow expected, Paris was supposed to hit a high of 12C – so what to wear was a bit of a headache.  Dress appropriately for snow and ice in a heavy wintercoat and perspire in Paris, or wear light spring clothes for Paris and catch a cold in Oxford and London, seemed to be the only options. 
 

Luckily I have a good assortment of clothes, and more than one warm coat.  I chose a light but warm darkish camel coat which looks good when worn open, and a Liberty heavy wool wrap.  While in England I wore the coat closed and covered my head and shoulders with the Liberty wrap.  In France I put the folded scarf into my bag and opened the coat to let in some air.  This worked well until mid afternoon, when the temperature hit 17C!!!! and I had to take off my cardigan and add it to my bag as well. When I got back to London it had stopped snowing but was still freezing cold, and I was thankful for my woolen winter clothes.  What a weird day it was!
 

Le Club

 First off I met a friend for coffee near the Gare du Nord, then I rushed to the centre of Paris to re-new my subscription to my club there.  One of the benefits of being the member of a club is that there is a network of them all over the world which give each other membership rights – free!!!!  So whenever I am abroad I can use the clubs there – provided there are any!  English speaking countries are very clubbable, the US and India for example are simply littered with them.  France, on the other hand, has just one (well there may be others, but only one is in the network).  One!  Even Germany has more, in Hamburg alone I can use three different clubs.  Luckily for me this French club is very conveniently located, right in the centre near the Louvre and other tourist attractions.  So once a year I drop by to renew my subscription.



Horse & Carriage

The trouble with the centre of Paris is that like Oxford it is simply heaving with tourists.  They are everywhere, ruining the prices and hogging all the best places.  For example, I have never been to Angelina in the Rue de Rivoli, a wonderful Viennese style café – long queues of people whenever I pass by.  And I hate queueing!  Then there is the toilet problem.  Most public toilets are not very nice, nor are many restaurant ones.  And of course they all have queues!  So having club in the centre of Paris is really very handy.

I decided to have lunch there, too, this time.  The receptionist – what a prosaic term for the utterly charming gentleman who hosts the visitors – told me, with a certain amount of pride in his voice, that they had refurbished the place since my last visit and that one could now have coffee next to the swimming pool!  Wow!  All of a sudden hot summer afternoons in Paris seem almost appealing.  I had a good look around, and decided to have a light lunch in the little bar area, it still being a little too cold for sitting near the pool.

The club is very different from a London gentlemen’s club.  There is no library or snooker room, and instead of leather armchairs and slightly faded rugs there is gold painted furniture and chinese carpets.  The main purpose of the London club used to be for men to hide from their womanfolk – which is why women gained admission to them only recently – and the atmosphere still reflects this.  The main purpose of the Paris club seems to be evening entertainment on a large scale and grand affairs generally, the place simply reeks of priviledge and drips with gold.  And the flower arrangements are absolutely marvelous, and everywhere!  I looked at them very greedily, and Mine Host, charmed by my obvious pleasure, allowed me to take a few photos provided I didn’t depict any club members.  Lovely lovely man!  They would skin me alive in a London club if I took photos of anything other than the toilets (and even that is probably a violation of the sacret principles of clubhood).

I had steak tartare for lunch, basically raw beef run through a mincer and seasoned with all sorts of spices and moistened with an eggyolk.  I am quite fond of this, but rarely dare to eat it for fear of nasty bugs – eating raw meat can be risky!  But I reckon they are not going to risk poisoning Giscard d’Estaing or any of the other amazingly illustrious club members so the food should be safe.  There were only about a dozen people around, noticably most were couples (as in one woman one man).  In London clubs on a Saturday you would mainly see men, single or in small groups (until I started to arrange my little Ladies who go Clubbing events, that is).

Eventually I had to tear myself away and dropped by the Hermes store just down the road, to torture the sales assistants.  For years now I have had a scarf called Pani la Shar Pawnee, and been trying to find out what the heck ‘la Shar’ means.  I have looked at oodles of dictionaries and quizzed innumerable ‘experts’, to no avail.  So I decided to invade the Great Mothership itself and force an answer to my question.  I asked one sales lady who didn’t know but referred me to another one more knowledgeable, who didn’t know and referred me to another one, who didn’t know and made me wait for ten minutes until she had rootled out their Assistant Scarf Expert – who didn’t know, either.  But he took my address and promised he would investigate.  I threatened him with my return in three weeks’ time if I did not hear from him, but he seemed unfazed by the prospect.  All the staff are unfailingly charming in this store, I never had a bad word from any of them even though the store is usually very hectic and I am obviously neither rich nor a celebrity.  They have given me cups of tea and let me use their toilet and drawn little maps to show me where to find a little out of the way beautyspot, so I can’t really be cross with them for not knowing more than me about the scarves they sell.

 

After that it was time to meet S for tea, and I took any number of photos on the way to my favourate little café near Notre Dame. I am going to skip the description of the journey home, especially the cancelled bus and wait in the cold for 45 minutes – I don’t want to destroy the illusion that I am leading an impossibly glamorous and priviledged life!

 



Not a bad light fitting, eh?
 

Impressions of the Louvre below ...

 

Another weird French sign - where am I going to get a pole from to walk across the grass?

 

Marie Curie Cancer Charity event - I just love all that yellow, and the wall of daffodils!!!!

 

  

As soon as I do a bit of gardening, it snows again!

The fountain in the pond this morning

Yesterday I did a bit of gardening.  It seemed high time; the frogs were getting restless and the birds kept visiting the garden to stake out claims for the best nesting sites.  Once they arrive I am not allowed in the garden any more, they are extremely possessive.

The thing in the middle is the Clippings Pile

As you may remember, last autumn I went crazy with a chain saw (OK, hedge trimmer) and cut back everything vegetablian that cast shade over my little plot.  There was quite a lot of it, and after I had filled the compost heap to overflowing there were still a lot of prunings left.  So I assembled them all into a pyramid shape in the back garden, behind the pond, where the Wild Things live.  I fully intended to do something with the heap, but somehow what with one thing and another nothing got done. 

 

 

And now it is gone ...

Then yesterday I had a quick look at the garden and saw a few little ramsons trying manfully to struggle through the litter I had piled on top of them, and decided it really was time I did something.

.....and Molly is back!

First I pulled out all the large branches and put them aside, then I scooped up the leaf-litter and smaller branches and cast them upon the now somewhat lower compost heap (it had spent the winter digesting the previous autumn’s offerings).  I also carefully separated out the rose branches – they have large nasty thorns and I put them out for the Men From The Council to collect.  I am afraid to put them in the compost heap, because I suspect even when they have rotted down their thorns will survive to inflict horrible wounds when I spread the compost all over the garden.  Perhaps I should stop making compost; my garden is already a foot higher than those of my neighbours on both sides!

A few little primroses struggling in the leaf-litter .....

The whole task took two hours, and when I finished it started to rain.  Great, I thought, just what the trampled down little ramsons need!  A bit of water and sunshine and they will grow rampant.

Ah well.  I had hardly left the garden when the cats arrived.  Most of my neighbours have paving or decking or other devices designed to keep cats from powdering their noses in their gardens, so all the neighbourhood’s cats used to come to mine for that purpose.  The clippings pile in the area behind the pond had discouraged them, but now that it is gone they all moved back in.

Witchhazel in blooms!!!!

And if that wasn’t enough, today it snows!  Big flakes!  And it is cold!  How are those little ramsons ever going to grow and flourish and produce the delicious leaves I plan to pick and eat in May?  Between the cat urine and the frost they haven’t got a chance, you might think.  But ramsons are extremely tough, so who knows …

London's Wednesday Attractions .....

Me, obviously, first and foremost!  I insist you admire my new hat!

On Wednesday the office was disfunctional, as in that we had no electricity and no water due to construction work being done elsewhere in the building, so I decided to take the day off and go to London.  Luckily S and R had time to spare, so the three of us met at the Club and planned our adventures from there.

The afternoon’s highlight was meant to be the newly refurbished Dickens Museum, but since I had run totally out of Assam and Lady Grey (I had been subsisting on teabags for three days!) we had to drop by the Twinings Tea Shop first.  A wonderful wonderful shop – well, it was before they decided to refurbish it!  Now it looks like all such shops look.

Why do shops and cafes who have the luck to possess a venue which is unique and full of character insist on changing it to look like all other shops and cafes, rather than preserve and showcase what they have?  Oxford used to have a wonderful café called Rosie Lees, very quaint and chintzy and old fashioned, and I used to go there quite a lot.  Then they ripped out everything that made the place special and put in bog-standard mahogany floors and steel counters with ugly tables and chairs and I now avoid it like the plague.  

But we were in London.  The Twinings Tea Shop continues to have good tea, and since it is the only Twinings Tea Shop in the world I continue to buy my Numero Uno beverage from them twice a year or so.

Then we headed towards the Dicken Museum, but shock & horror! it started to snow.  Nasty pellety kind of snow.  My friends were all for going on and battling our way through the blizzard, but I am a creature of luxury and anyway it was a long time before I would get home that day and wet clothes worn for hours are a recipe for an unpleasant cold, so I flagged down a cab and we piled in and rode in style to the museum.

Being cold and hungry we decided to first partake of some light refreshments in the museum’s café.  It is a very small, light and pleasant café, and the ham & pea soup I had was both excellent and plentyful, accompanied by nice bread.  Alas, S was punished for her vegetarian ways and had to subsist on whatever nutrients her body was able to extract from the pieces of dry bread and the apple she was able to obtain.  Not a good place for vegetarians to visit!

 The bathroom

Then we purchased our tickets, at £8 each, and looked over the house.  Dickens only lived there for two years, but they had some nice artefacts of his life.  I must say, I was a bit disappointed.  The whole place was sterile.  We go to the Nursery and there are no toys.  We go to the kitchen and it is aseptically clean (though it doesn't show in the photos) and doesn’t have most of the implements needed to whip up the simplest dish (no food of any kind, either, of course - the white stuff in the pitcher isn't real).  The bookcases were tall and full of books from that period, including many by Dickens himself.  But they had huge glass doors.  No writer would have bookcases that huge with doors, because every time you want to consult a book you have to fetch a ladder to open the doors!  I suspect Dicken’s bookcases did not have such doors, they were installed later to stop the tourists from touching the books.

 The kitchen

But I must not be too negative.  There were a few nice touches as well.  Scattered throughout the house were books with the title of ‘Read Me’, which my friends rather liked.  I didn’t, because if I had actually actually come over all Victorian and picked up one of those books and curled up in one of the armchairs and asked one of the museum guides to be a sweetie and fetch me a nice cup of tea with a biscuit or two it would not have gone down well.  They don’t really want you to read those books, just pick them up, open them, look at the title page, and then put it back, thinking how deliciously quaint it all is.  

The hedgehog

The one thing I really liked was the stuffed hedgehog in the kitchen!  Apparently the Victorians quite often kept hedgehogs in their kitchens to eat the cockroaches and other insects.  The kitchen often had a door to the backyard, so the hedgies could come in and go out at will.  It reminded me of the most interesting thing I read in the autobiography of Colette, the French writer; viz, that her mother kept spiders in her linen cupboard, to eat the moths! 

There is a huge field for genetic engineers here, they could genetically modify all the little undesirable creatures that share our house.  For examples, they could breed spiders that avoid humans like the plague and never presume to run across our faces while we sleep.  Or they could create cockroaches that eat all the little crumbs and things that fall to the ground and litter our floors, but rarely multiply and always spend the day hiding in little boxes secreted behind the stove.  Ditto for clothes moths; if they contented themselves with eating the fluff-bunnies (aka sluts-wool) behind the doors, and the dust off the furniture, they would be welcomed with open arms into our homes, and not persecuted and exterminated, as they currently are.  Someone ought to have a word with those lazy scientists out there, to get them to do something useful, instead of modifying tomatoes and maize and generally interfering with our foodsupply!

‘Nuff said!  We did the museum as quickly as was feasible, and then went our separate ways.  Against expectations I did not get lost on the way to the bus stop, but arrived just in time to catch the coach to Oxford.  I stepped off to be greeted by a rather lovely evening, with a sickle moon hanging invitingly above my favourate fish restaurant – not that it photographed well, but you get the idea.