Trimming my bush and other Francophile adventures.

Yesterday and today I have been trimming my bush. It was a big job and due to the regular bouts of rain we have been experiencing here in Nottingham I kept having to pop indoors and resume when it dried up enough to sit in the garden with my hardy clippers at the ready. Well to be exact I would have to say trimming my bushes but it’s good to get folk’s attention at the beginning of the blog post.

My referred to ‘bushes’ were the French lavender bushes (eight of them) that make up most of my bijou gardens either side of my house. After some careful pruning and secure trussing I have hung some of the longer stems in my kitchen window to dry. It almost looks like a French cottage. All I need now is the mistral to blast down the communal path and rattle the new gate and loosen a few tiles on the roof.

On Thursday I cooked a lovely peppery sausage stew with butter beans, tomatoes, onions, button mushrooms and fried courgettes (in olive oil) which I then decided to share with my neighbours and which we ate with some dark green Puy lentils, pain rustique and a glass or two of red wine. Yes I have lapsed Lord. Please forgive me and pour me another glass while you are at it. Merci.

Friday night, after pruning the bulk of the bushes I used some of the leftover stew and Region de la Puy en Velay Puy lentiles and had it with a very succulent pork chop. The pork chop had a beautiful coating of fat on its back which made it taste so much better than the usual dry specimens that the local Supermarché Co-operative package up for the healthy ‘We’re not really eating a pig are we?’ masses.

The finished meal.

I had spent the afternoon enjoying tinkering in my kitchen and felt I was almost in La belle France (Pays de mon coeur) as I tuned my laptop into France Bleu Charente Maritime. This time of listening there was a lot of phone in type chat and whilst my French is as fluent as a particularly bad traffic jam on the périphérique I did enjoy hearing the language and repeating some of it out loud to the amusement of next door’s cat Harris who was watching me from the open staircase. The fact that he yawned a lot I put down to general feline tiredness after a night sur les tiles. Why he was wearing a cat sized beret at a jaunty angle was another matter.

Le chat qui bâille sans beret.

Lavender in my kitchen window.

Today I ventured once more into mon petit jardin and trimmed my last bush for 2010. The smell in the house is lovely and quite soporific or as the French say; soporifique. Par exemple; Tros de vin peut avior un effet soporifique. There’s that wine again, pass my glass please.