Walking The Dog

One thing I like about catering on holiday is the inescapable and necessarily inventive resourcefulness of it all.  The - ‘Oh! I don’t have that ingredient’ moment, swiftly followed by the - ‘What shall I use instead?’ - slightly panicked moment.  And the - ‘Wow! This is good!’ - revelation that you determine to remember when you get home but will definitely forget due to having imbibed a holiday abundance of wine. And which due to the wine might actually not be as good as you think. Unless perhaps, the sozzled brain is capable of leaps of culinary inspiration that the non-sozzled brain is incapable of, due to sober adherence to the constraints of received rules on taste combinations.   Last night’s menu-en-vacances featured salmon on a bed of mushroom, white onion, and garlic with roasted potato wedges sprinkled with ground ‘saveurs epicees’ (which added good flavour - whatever they were). Followed by fresh apricots - drizzled with honey, liberally sprinkled wit...

The daily task of feeding the household - dogs, children, assorted adults who drift in and out of our home - is either easy: four-legged family members take on the role of shadow, closely applied to the ankles of the adult they regard as most likely to feed them, blocking doors, preventing access to stairs, standing between that adult and any activity that might delay dinner, or not so easy: endless nights of endlessly attempting to be endlessly inventive with meat and two veg. Then Littlest jettisons the meat part and the dinner dynamic changes to pasta and veg, pasta and two veg and occasionally pizza and veg until we reckon a rebalancing is required and start to experiment with fish (partial success - salmon ok, other fish “tastes of mango”), vegetarian ready-meals (all bad), vegi-burgers and sausages (“If I wanted to eat something that looked like meat I’d probably eat meat”) and the world of vegetables beyond peas, sweetcorn, broccoli and carrots (still working on this one)....

RSVP I know what RSVP means? You probably do too. But it's clear that we are in a minority. RSVP - origin: French, acronym - repondez s'il vous plait From an era of manners and etiquette (... also French). Whilst we native English speakers are not  renown for our enthusiasm or ability to grasp and learn another language (and indeed our tenure on our own tongue is often forged on dodgy ground), there are elements of the French language that creep into our everyday lives. RSVP is one such element. Neatly capitalised at the bottom of invitations, it politely asks for attention. Even if ignorant of the litoral meaning, its message is clear to anyone who has ever received an invitation - reply! Please reply. I know that. You know that. We both know what is expected; how to respond. In other words, those little letters standing to attention, so neatly vowel-less, and requiring of lovely linguistic acrobatics, prick us into action and elicit the desired response - a reply. Or...

Dare I whisper that the sun is shining and summer is skipping into view. * Or with those fourteen words have I condemned us to shivering defiantly in our seasonally-compatible if weather-inappropriate clothes braced on holiday against summer winds and showers of rain? Please note I didn't conjure up gales and torrents - I might be a bit of a pessimist but that would be glugging down the entire glass rather than leaving it half empty. To be a pessimist is, after all, to be pleasantly surprised when things turn out better. Perhaps the summer will too. Turn out better I mean. I hope so. So does Bertie Baggins. Or is he laughing at me? - 'Thinks it's possible to jinx the weather now? Definitely lost the plot.' Or am I anthropomorphising a wee bit too much? I mean: dogs don't really smile - do they? Or look disdainful ... Narrowed eyes, mouth shut in a bored harrumph. Why? ... ... 'Gardening! Again!! You said it would be how long before o...

Cinnamon - I know ... hmm - actually, I know not a lot about cinnamon. It sits on a shelf (labelled Cannelle, because I like my quirky, bought in France, spice jar) with its fellow (English bought) spices nutmeg and ginger, but where it, or indeed they, originally came from is a bit of a mystery. Nutmeg, comes from a roundish, knobbly nut. I know this because I have a tiny version of a cheese grater which is for grating nutmeg nuts (and fingers). Ginger comes from the root of a (I guess ...) ginger plant and cinnamon is from the bark of a tree (... perhaps?) Brief intermission while I do some research - Yes! Cinnamon is the bark of a tree, specifically the Cinnamomum tree and most of it comes from Sri Lanka. The bark is removed, dried and rolled into quills . These quills are cut into the cinnamon sticks that are the essence of Christmas and are ground into the fine powder that is used in everything from curries to apple crumble to mulled wine. Discovering that my hunch regardin...

Spoil : verb - to destroy or reduce the pleasure, interest or beauty of something (Cambridge Dictionary) All very 'that's a pity and how sad' but we all know what spoil means, when to use it and how to spell it, don't we; no matter which side of the Atlantic we stand on? Yes, probably. And why mention America - even if I didn't exactly, other than in a backhanded sort of a way? Well - this is  embarrassing, so I'll get it out quickly - as with 'learnt and learned,' I have a difficulty with 'spoilt and spoiled.' Phew! Awkward (if you're hobby is writing) admission out, if not quite over - as an English speaker, I sometimes feel less native when it comes to writing things down. I know how to say my words. I know what I mean. I just sometimes don't know how to spell them. So, which is correct? Does it matter? Does anyone else care? Is an overindulged child spoilt or spoiled? Or both? Actually, I think a spoilt (adjective) child is s...

Daffodil as hairbrush. And daffodil as towel. Yes, I promise I haven't lost the plot. Nor have I dug myself a pit of delusion, dreams and madness and jumped in. No, really, I haven't. Not yet. The daffodil is a thing of beauty - a yellow, trumpety flower on a long, thin stem, that bounces as it nods in the garden breeze. No part of it is bristly. No part could separate hairs in a manner necessary to serve as a conventional hairbrush. It is altogether too bendy and soft. It also lacks the absorbancy generally expected of towels. So  daffodil as hairbrush and towel ? - two impossibles that together go nowhere close to making one sound less implausible than the other. But that is my title. And this is how implausible became plausible. It is all the fault of Four-legged-friend. Or of me. As I supplied both weapon and water. Shortly afterwards, one less-stinky, happy and very wet dog was in need of a towel. Towels don't grow in gardens.  But un-mo...