Saturday 7 October 2017

Lentil vegetable fish risotto

Saute in olive oil  finely sliced red onion, smashed chopped garlic and a quarter of a red pepper chopped small ... then add about 60g risotto rice per person. When glistening start to add stock little by little.  Today I used fish stock made from a trout head having eaten the filleted trout several days ago and which my cat enjoyed when it was cold.  Throw in sliced mushrooms during the process of adding stock, letting the rice absorb it but trying not to stir too much.  Meanwhile season with salt, pepper, herbs, spices of your choice. Throw in a goodly quantity of washed fresh spinach  as it does reduce to not very much... Add the previously cooked brown lentils or from a  can.  Leave to simmer softly.  I also steamed some raw hake (cuttings from hake steaks also from a few days  ago!) above the risotto.

It was quite filling...  a goodly pile of risotto on a white plate with the fish meat placed on top and sprinkled with as much grated parmesan cheese as you like.


I hadn't thought of making a lentil risotto before but it worked exceptionally well.
There are leftovers ... I didn't take a photo... I enjoyed drinking Jasmine tea  to accompany it instead of white wine!

Bon appetit!

Friday 15 September 2017

A Visit from Little Jenny Wren

On a Sunday in July, I was working at the computer. THE WRETCHED  WILL of mother aged 90+ and all that she left me to do as Executrix, isn't much, but I decided I would serach for Truth even if it changed nothing.   I was so annoyed by what her husband * has done. It made the wishes of my mother's will a conundrum.  His actions in 2012 created a situation where the will has been superseded.   
Would it have made any difference if they told me in 2012. Well, at least I would have been able to discuss with my mother.... maybe not, just wishful thinking, as she never talked about anything to me .. especially in the last five years.. I always thought it was to do with me but now, I think she knew she had sold herself and given away her son's inheritance and was careful not to tell me.  
 
PLUS the unpleasantness of my aunt for I say I know not why but, WELL,  I DO !!! She, as second Executor was being manipulated by him * ....

Just as well perhaps as it would have been unmanageable by me and one other aged 83 to have managed the property for my brother with a disability and the husband to live in.  Mother knew we lived in N.Ireland and France. 
The solicitor knew that too as the will was written in 2009! 
Now they own it between them and to me and my sister zilch! 
I don't really care about the money. I care about honour and respect. For over forty years we had visited each other as family... does that not count for anything!!    

 

Troglodytes troglodytes came and stayed a while.  Four hours!  What was it doing not near a wood, orchard, hedgerow, heathland, farmland, sea cliff, mountain, but yes near gardens.  
 Image result for jenny wren photo to copy

For some time I kept thinking there was something with me in my large living room but couldn't identify what it was.  Only the kitchen door was open with its door to the courtyard open, where slept my cat and open was the door to the makeshift tumbledown built with recycled  materials atelier extension (now to do with me!) at the rear of the house which also has a door and with gaps in the walls to the garden.   
Then I saw a fluttering out of the corner of my eye and heard a small fluttering ( I believe I am slightly deaf! ) 

I guess it crept in from outside and did not fly in.   

I wondered why this little bird had come into MY house, which is now named Le Petit Oiseau.

I decided the bird was my reincarnated mother. So I talked to her!!!!!! Told her how I felt!!!!!

On the day she died,  I'd suggested to her that she could grow wings and fly away

I gave her permission after her 12 days in a coma from an ISCHAEMIC ATTACK ruining 80% of her brain. She was tenacious without food and drink, unable to speak or eat, unable to move.   Soon in a coma.  I suggested that her son who had lived with her for 69 years would be ok!   It's quite odd what one can say to a mother dying!  A mother who never spoke to me about anything, about adolescence, being an adult, life or relationships!  I stroked her and touched her as never had I done before. I sang to her.


The European Wren measures 9 to 10 cm long and weighs about 10 grams, the same as an old £1 coin!  It is described as an inconspicuous, secretive bird.


It eats spiders, insects and beetle larvae, which explains why the moist bread I put to tempt it to the open door was not considered and it kept pecking on the ground and under furniture. A few webs there and at one point I was horrified to see a web caught on it's wing.


I used to read about Celts and Native American Indians and symbolism from nature. Much has been forgotten.  I returned to ask the WWW about the symbolism of wrens.


Birds raise their young with care from both parents.  Some articles on the internet suggest that the wren is a symbol for sharing tasks in the home.  As I haven't got anyone to share with, maybe it was saying it is TIME to find someone!   The article I read suggested that the wren is a reminder to not get stuck in gender roles but to approach traditional roles with a modern innovative approach!  
H'm 


The busy wren symbolises activity, agility, vibrancy, alertness, fastidiousness, efficiency, determination, quick-wittedness, creativity. It is sociable and friendly, so we must keep a happy heart, be kind to others, be a free spirit, make progress each day to bring light heartedness to living!   
H'm


It is said that the delightful song of the wren inspired bards & poets and is a symbol of musical poetry, art and song.  Like many songbirds, the wren migrates.  It is content to flit from place to place .. it has shallow roots - hence  "home is where the heart is"  as it moves abode!   In this respect, the wren reminds us it is not the material items we gain, but the quality of relationships made along the way that enrich our lives. 
H'm


The wren's light flight is a message to branch out, to expand a circle of contacts, to step out of habitual patterns in life.   
H'm


The wren may be small but with  a powerful symbolic message.   

Maybe she came to encourage me to believe I am in a  realm of the "known" but with access to an adventure that awaits me! 
Indeed H'm!!!!!!

Mother, I have much to think about and indeed I had promised much of the promise of the little wren myself before you died BUT a whole year has been spent visiting England for your birthday September 15th.. and since then November when a cousin died and though frightened I came to see you unexpectedly and was in horror ... I should have stayed!!!!! ...I thought it might be the last time ... then two weeks later.. tragedy!   I am sorry I abandoned you!  I am sorry you are not here anymore.   I am.  I really am. I am sorry to abandon your son in the light of the fact that I live in France and he lives in England with your widowed husband 31 years  younger than you and 9 years younger than me!  Bloody hell!!!!!! MADNESS!

Saturday 2 September 2017

What a mess in the kitchen!

TODAY it was FUN of sorts!!!

Three batches of 2kg of harvested from the garden over many days. Red tomatoes were blanched in boiling hot water to remove the skins. Added to three large cloves of decent French garlic sautéed in olive oil.  PLUS into the redness lots of fresh basil leaves from the courtyard, from the previous house matured  ( ! ) red wine vinegar, Ile de Ré sea salt, ground black pepper, a spoonful of brown sugar,  heated high then simmered together...reduced until thick and a different colour.   Jar or freeze.

Each time it took about an hour!

2 kg of medium sized cougettes before they were too large to seed, peeled with the best vegetable peeler in the world from IKEA, ends chopped off, sliced into finger sized lengths, placed on a baking paper on the large trays of my Neff oven, the one where the door folds down and disappears  (Porte escamotable "Slide and Hide"),  drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper and baked slowly.. When cooked and cold packed into a container for the freezer.

4kg large courgettes bordering on marrows. peeled, and inner seed pulp removed reduced to 2kg weight. Added 1.5kg sugar, juice from 4 Valencia juice oranges.  The skins and fruit of the oranges were cooked in a saucepan for at least an hour to soften.. All left over night.
Next day, simmer the marrow and sugar, with added sliced thinly cooked orange rind for as long as it takes to change colour and reduce liquids, then rapidly boil.  Stir often. Towards the end add some sliced crystallized ginger, or suspend in the pan at the beginning some fresh grated ginger.  Taste and see. 

About a week ago I was gifted plums so I made yum plum jam!

In  between i picked more courgettes and more tomatoes... and worried like HELL about my daughter and grand daughter and LIFE and  LOVE discovered and LOVE LOST and men and women and relationships  and how suddenly some days women or men start being unkind to the very person they were in love with.........Why does that happen?

In  between I look at the UK and world news and someone's TWITTER page and wonder why so many people detest and hate each other and why do people wind each other up about faith, religion, politics, etc etc etc etc etc etc and it brings me down to my knees sobbing my heart out!

I swept the courtyard and rearranged the garden pots.. Must weed the white stones tomorrow and then there is more cleaning of the cuisine and the arrière cuisine and vaccing and paperwork to organise yet again.

It all got muddled at the TAX OFFICE when the man who was angry with me for complaining insisted it was my fault !!!  I was wrong - they were right. Eventually, he thought there was an error on their part. He produces=d a new blue form, filled in my pensions in certain  boxes. Bring it back on Monday filled in!!!!!!!!  Gosh, I am grateful!   With any luck I might get  income tax reduced... They wanted 600 plus euros this year and I am not the only English person with a huge demand!!!!! Others have had huge increases!   Last year they repaid me almost 100 euros!  WHY?   The year before that 370e and the year before that 335e and the year before that 51 euros... it does not make sense!!!!!!!! 
This year they changed the forms and the boxes we have to fill... NO - state pension is not a private pens=sion. The French insist it is.. I had this several years ago when I was first privileged to receive my State Pension.
This year the man who started to be hostile was asked by me not to be angry with me.. He then was polite and at the end we were both empathetic as he heard a little of my story.  He two lived alone and said it was preferable to living with someone where there was pain and unkindness!!!!!!  He was so kind, gentle and warm at the end that I wished almost to hug him!!!!!!!

After the struggle to be in the kitchen when there is so much else to do I had a happy day. My hands are stripped of the oils by the marrow ... quite I am happy at the close of day.

 Tomorrow is another day!

Friday 1 September 2017

Saturday 15 July 2017

Threadwork


Chains do not hold a marriage together. 
It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
Simone Signoret

Friday 7 July 2017

11 months later

I come to my blog to see if it is still here... Ah, yes! 
For some reason last year my list of blogs I follow all disappeared.  I lost heart to get them back!
PLUS.
Battling with an ailing, failing computer
P. L. U. S. exhausted after the making of my kitchen I just gave up!
I am Emptied!
I gave up because I felt I was being followed which felt uncomfortable knowing that I was being read to see where I was, what I was doing, saying, thinking.  Yes I know,  in former days it was nice to know people are looking at my blog out of interest... It's what a blog is for!

Those who know me know that I have been quite public with my emotions in this blog. It was started in 2010 to record the renovation of my French property bought in a moment of desperation and madness it seems if I turn the clock back ... the need to for a base, security, safety.. a bolthole!
Crabby me needs her Cancerian hermit shell!

I also gave up because in September I headed off to UK for my mother's 90th birthday.. and did not like what I met...buried head in the sand - IN DENIAL! Shocked!
It is always a visit of three weeks with couch surfing from place to place. I am always aghast at the price of things and realisation of how 'out of touch'  I have become with LIFE whilst Restless in France.   After encircling the south of England and enjoying driving to cousins, friends, son and daughter I drove homewards the long drive to my cat!
Within a few weeks my daughter and grand daughter came and we had a wonderful time but then the news arrived that my cousin's husband had died.  In November another three weeks of round the south of UK,  this time with family for three days at John's funeral.  Such a loss of a dedicated father and amazing architect, artist, Aston Martin lover and mechanic - a personable kind, soft, warm hearted, intelligent, loving, family man  for whom I had enormous admiration and respect.

Then unannounced I visited my mother and 'quel horreur' but all ok ... or was it????   I was rather alarmed that my brother, two years older than me with a lifetime disability of cerebral palsy having never lived anywhere else but under the wing of my mother did not know what the plans were should she die or he die!   I did not pose enough questions.  It felt intrusive . I also told my brother that I did not wish the stepfather to know I had been asking questions. RED ALERT!  LIFE is Hard alone and with the presence of a stepfather whom I now see that his presence on every visit I have made for the last x years was probably intended to ensure I was never given information!!!!!!!!!  After 21 years I know him not except who would like someone who has been in prison for GBH!
Try to make allowances. Can leopards change their spots? Can pussycats stop scratching?

Back home, after the long haul drive I came across my house,  cat sitter and wondered what is going on!!! We got on with more WORK as I had agreed his stay until the new year... to help him out... to help me out... give and take as friends are supposed to do!  It was winter!
Just as I was catching up on admin STUFF, cleaning and gardening tasks,  the phone rang in the building where I had not been sleeping but to which I had moved that morning at about THE TIME IT HAPPENED.  I'd felt for the first time for some time distressed in the early hours at about one pm... I'd gathered up my duvet and swaddled myself  along the full length of my L shaped house to the room with the unmade bed - my bed, as after Airbnb guests had left I had not lit the woodburner in that part of the house hence did not go there to sleep.
At 9h French time the phone rang... No she is not dead but has had a massive stroke.. At that time I did not know what it meant... but said I would be there...  After a lot of faffing around trying to inform people, book how to travel, not knowing how long I would be there for......incredibly calm prepared for the worst,  I drove again, solo, the long journey, though this time through the tunnel and wow what a price that was! ...and non stop apart from two pee breaks of no more than 15 minutes max... until I arrived at the hospital to surprise unintentionally the stepfather who expected me in another 12 hours!
Like the wind... I kept telling her to hang on until I got there.
On the drive I asked her to hang on like the wind!

I am still in bereavement I guess..

Tears fall like tears of a child who has lost her mother but I lost my mother years ago when I was never hugged or told that I was loved and when a dog was treated with a bone better than I .. hence why perhaps many people say i am like a dog with a bone over issues and problems!!!!!
Canine anecdotes have abounded.

To cut STORY short, 12 days in a hospital institution was like being in 'a no man's land.'
So kind they gave me a key to a room where I could stay each night with the proviso that they never knew if someone else would need it.
My admiration for the positivity of nurses and doctors was off the end of the scale... one could neverv thank them enough for being who they are and doing what they do.
Angels with wings to fly to those needing physical, mental or emotional help.
I was not a patient ... nor was the stepfather but they treated us as if we were whilst they cared unstintingly giving enormous respect to my dear mother, dead but alive on the bed...

It is OK to grieve  for the loss of a mother... for the loss of never knowing what she really thought about me.. although she once said I was clever... NO I am not!... and the last real interaction was when she said in November 2015 that I have everything I need?   Have I?? Even if I asked her she would not have said... ... COUPLED with the statement was a long hard STARE!!!!!!!

In the last few years I have never been able to sit for long because of fibromyalgia (but recently that phenomena has changed ) whereas the stepfather could sit all say and night by her bed and not move!   My brother came and went from his home every day .. there was a dog to look after ... thankfully only the one after all the years of breeding, showing and the rest!

It was almost Christmas day with nowhere really to stay when I learned I was Executor.. but not a beneficiary and the implications ... when there was no money to pay for solicitor fees.
I was naive to say YES. It would have fallen to my brother to do if I had not said YES.

Distraught with what I learned about circumstances I drove the long distance home again ( for it is HOME despite my current feelings ...  to be in my own home with my own bedcovers and my own lifestyle but oh my the unexpected return met chaos in every room!!!!!! I spent two weeks sorting it, doing christmas with a small c for one day, then back to UK, where I stayed for the funeral and the aftermath couch surfing with THINGS TO DO and the LAW to UPHOLD when I could see that all seemed incorrect!!!!!!
What proof have I?  There are rightful entitlements on some levels and no rights at all on others.. such is UK LAW!
There is a clause in the will which cannot be fulfilled.
That clause has been superceded by the sale of the property for one pound .
The will does not mention the shop and the flat on the same plot of land so how does all that work?
I have not yet asked the two men who live in that house. FEAR of the man who has been in prison for GBH! 
I spent January and February with every hour awake and asleep going over and over injustice and my fear was compounded with verbal abuse!
At the end of the shortest month a new pile of poo developed and the outcome of the request for Grant of Probate arrived about June 7th...
Since February I have had a lot of work in the garden and trying to continue the questions of almost every day for six months I am no nearer proving the truth.. ..which I can see!!!!!!!!!! which eats me...
CUT...

It is JULY.. I must make more effort to avoid the paralysis I find myself in, the depression, the total collapse of energy in the last week when I feel I can no longer carry on but I must. I have no choice. The mind has to be reprogrammed. It is very difficult alone. 

ADDENDUM
I do not always assume that I am the only one to grieve and be in bereavement.
NO.
Most people have struggles.
I an sure I have tried to turn negativity into positivity in France.
It fails and I try again.

I don't actually know what would make a difference.
I suppose a sense of purpose in life.
I suppose a sense of being valued.
I suppose a change is as good as a rest but I increasingly hear the words
"I can't carry on doing what I am doing"
NONE OF US CAN!
I would like to find happiness somewhere for more than a few nano seconds or hours having fun in the village or with others...
BUT WHERE?

it has to start within me... and facing the task of clearing out is not easy alone!

We would all like a life half full ... at least half full... 
I WILL END THIS ................... for now...