Chelsea.

Greetings from London! This morning, very early mind you.....as a cunning plan to beat the crowds, I dolled myself up and put a flower on my head and went to the 100th RHS Chelsea Flower Show:

I may have caught a fleeting glimpse of blue sky out of the hotel window, yet took precautions against the English weather by wearing thick, wooly tights, boots and four layers under my dress.....and a jacket. It was still cold. Later, there was rain and hail. There were lots of incredibly beautiful flowers though:

And topiary:

And.....champagne:

Even though it was just after 8am in the morning, it was still like this is the show gardens:

Yet the displays of garden artistry were very impressive:

Needless to say, I was riddled with gardening angst when I momentarily thought about my own garden back home in Hobart. I took comfort in the anecdote that the bus driver had told me about how his parents had been invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace for their golden wedding anniversary. As keen gardeners they thought that it was all beautiful and very neat.....except for the further reaches, which they accidentally stumbled upon.....which may have been just a little bit messy.

Rx

Nourriture.

I love French food, don't you? So, I'll admit, here and now, that I've succumbed and have not only reintroduced back into my diet, sugar (after an 8 week hiatus) but also coffee (after a four year break) and white bread (it's been banned for as long as I can remember). And what's not to love about a food culture that socially condones drinking wine at lunch. If you so fancy, you can even go one step further towards alcoholic anihilation and down a pastis in a cafe at 10am and no one will bat an eyelid....don't worry, I can't say that I've been tempted to....yet, but I've seen my husband eyeing it off.

During the week, with three of our children ensconced in their new school, we went out for a celebratory lunch in Nimes. I donned the sparkly new frock that I'd bought in the village:

The husband and I are creatures of habit....since we've been here, he has acquired a road bike and the associated lycra and cycling accoutrement that goes along with it, while I have been adding to my handbag and dress collection.

Anyway, as we hadn't managed to magic up a babysitter, we had to bring the two year old with us. Never mind, we hatched a cunning plan which saw me sit in the back seat of the car for the 20 minute drive into Nimes to induce her to stay awake.....so that she would fall asleep on cue, just as we arrived at the restaurant. I'm sorry to say that it didn't work....we even ended up doing laps of the old town with the stroller for over an hour to try and lull her to sleep yet her radar was on and she knew something was up and no matter that she was addled with sleep, she wanted to stay awake and be part of it. Say hello to the gooseberry:

We had lunch on the terrace at the Ciel de Nimes, on the third floor of the starkly modern art gallery, the Carre d'Art  which overlooks the ancient Roman temple built in the 1st century BC, the Maison Carre. It is a stunning bird's eye view which reaches out over the rooftops and bell towers of Nimes:

Much more recently, the Carre d'Art was designed by the British architect, Norman Foster....who also worked on designing  le Viaduc de Millau, just up the road on the highway between Montpellier and Paris....I know this salient fact because, while my husband loves cycling, don't be fooled, as he is also just a tad of a petrol head, to the extent that, when we drove over this same bridge....I had to video it. Anyway, the Carre 'Art echoes the rectangular shape of it's Roman neighbour yet is constructed of the very modern materials, glass and steel, and presents a striking juxtaposition between two buildings constructed 2,000 years apart:

I've been having a bit of a cooking holiday and can't say that I've been clocking much time in the kitchen....I've been working more on food assembly with the produce from the market:

Conveniently, the organic corner shop sells glass jars of tofu stuffed ravioli in a tomato and vegetable sauce, which I have been feeding with great regularity to the children. They love it. Don't think I'm not spoiled for cooking inspiration, the shelf in the kitchen is groaning with French inspired cookbooks from Elizabeth David, John Burton Race and Caroline Conran....and I even lugged Shannon Bennett's '28 Days in Provence' over in the suitcase.

However, in my cooking wasteland, I have made from scratch, chicken soup, not once but twice. We ate it for dinner last night and I was reamazed by it's utter deliciousness so thought I'd better share it. Don't just take my word for it, cook it! You will need either a chicken or a chicken carcass, so you can roast a chicken like I did the night before....with butter and slices of proscuitto stuffed under the skin.....or boil the whole thing and then strip off the meat. Boil the bones in a big pot with leeks, carrots, onions, garlic and whatever herbs you have on hand. Conveniently, I had a dried bouquet garni of thyme and bay leaves which was a 'cadeau' from the man at the shop....I even had the wherewithal, in French, to, on the spot, make a feeble joke 'a present...but it's not even Christmas'! Boom, boom. In another pan, sweat chopped carrot, leek and celery in a melange of butter/olive oil until it's soft. This is the step that elevates this soup from the banal into the realms of the superlative, so do not skip it out....I originally found this idea in Matthew Evans' tome 'The Real Food Companion' yet my friend Mary, who knows everything about food, assured me that it's a well recognised technique. Anyway, once you have drained the stock, add shreds of left over roasted or boiled chicken meat, the buttery, oily vegetables and a couple of handfuls of spinach and chopped parsley. Last night, I dressed it up with crumbled chèvre, grated Laguiole cheese and a sprinkle of fleur de sel from the Camargue that the ten year old brought home from his overnight excursion. If you are in Australia you could easily substitute a freshly grated local hard cheese and Murray River salt.

We went to the patisserie this afternoon. It is right next door to Picard....which, to the uninitiated, is an entirely frozen supermarket. Along with the usual suspects...frozen pizza and pain au chocolate....you can also buy snails, macarons, blood sausage....in fact, you name it and it's probably in their freezer. I couldn't resist these:

Kiss shaped pieces of foie gras and raspberry puree and cream cheese, basil and capsicum jelly. We are about road test them with a verre....as we also went to one of the organic vineyards on the outskirts of town and stocked up on wine:

I was sceptical about the frozen shop....yet threw caution to the wind and stocked our freezer up with various bits and pieces....because I'm going to London for ten days on Tuesday and I'm sure that my husband will need all the help that he can get.

Rx

Français.

Finally a quiet moment. The baby is having a much needed nap and the husband has gone off, clad in lycra, to rendezvous with some local MAMIL's at a roundabout, somewhere in the village, for a bike ride.

The morning was spent with the five year old's class, who were pony riding:

While the ten year old may have jumped off the bus after his class's overnight excursion, having had the time of his life (oh the relief...it was almost euphoric, as it could have gone either way), and the eleven year old has already brought home a party invitation, the five year old is struggling with school. After a week and a half, the novelty has worn off. He has no recollection of his term at school in France in 2010....which isn't surprising, as way back then he had just turned three, could barely speak English, let alone French and we had shamelessly and messily rushed him through his toilet training so that he could attend.

Before we left Hobart, just over three weeks ago, he was proud that he knew three French words.....'Jean Pascal' - the name of a French baker in Hobart, 'pain au chocolate' - of course and 'crocodile' - which is, well....crocodile.....in both languages.  We are so hoping that by subjecting our children to French while they are still young, it will be easier for them to learn....or that's what we keep telling ourself.

Learning French is hard. I know because I've been tormenting myself with trying to learn it ever since I first started boarding school in Sydney in Grade 6 and French was de rigueur. During my very first class ever, the  French teacher - a Parisienne, who wore couture, chain smoked and was the wife and muse of a very famous Sydney sculptor - slapped me across the face for cheating....I was so at sea I hadn't even been able to work out which page of the textbook we were on let alone been able to get my wits together to cheat. Needless to say, I cried foul to my parents, who at the time lived on a remote Indonesian island somewhere between Singapore and Jakarta and were incommunicado most of the time.....as we're talking about those hazy days well before the internet when even a letter took the best part of four weeks to reach it's destination. They were horrified.....until they sat next to this very same French teacher on a flight between Paris and Sydney, where they all got on the fags (we are talking about a very long time ago) and the vin rouge and got on like a house on fire. They refused to believe that this could possibly have been the same woman.

Scarred as I was, I didn't take up French again until mid high school, after we'd moved to Launceston.....and into the domain of a new French teacher. I even waded through two years of French in my HSC, and by default ended up with the French Prize in Grade 12.....regardless of the fact that afterwards, I still struggled to string a coherent sentence together. Then there was a time, during my early adulthood, when I was flatting in Sydney and had a fabulous friend who's French was at the same veggie level as my own....yet don't think that that stopped us having incredibly animated conversations, in whatever it was that we were speaking.....usually at the pub. It used to drive my male flatmates wild.

And now here we are and I'm working on my French, yet again. At least this time I'm spared having to use the gynaecological and obstetric vocabulary that I learned while gestating and giving birth in French, last time we were here. Mercifully, it's a different level of chat I'm having this time around....there is no chance I'm going to find myself being told to take my knickers off.

My main problem with the French language is, that I have just enough to see me happily ensconced in a conversation, yet once it's someone else's turn to participate, I turn into a teapot. And then, at this late stage, tongue tied, I play the '....je suis très désolé, mais je suis Australienne et je ne parle pas beaucoup de Français' card.....but of course it's not the equivalent of 'get out of jail free', as it's not generally accepted and by this stage I've hoodwinked them into making it this far......surely, there must be more there....somewhere. Inevitably there isn't.

This morning, when I dropped the children at school, I was hoping against hope that my French would miraculously work. Because I needed to ask the lady in the office about such important issues as child care options for the baby. You can imagine how much was resting on this conversation. Anyway, she said that because our baby was only two and still wearing a nappy, she can't go to the Ecole Maternelle. I think that she then went on to say, that there was a lady in the village who does family daycare at her house and that she would ask this lady to give me a call to organise it all. It's nearly 3.30pm and the phone still hasn't rung. Oh no....where's the dictionary.

Rx

Ecole.

This morning, we got up bright and early to wave goodbye to our ten year old who was due to catch the bus on a two day, overnight excursion with his class:

Fingers crossed his French comes good. In our typical, fly by the seat of your pants style, we only, accidentally, thought about checking the date of this much dreaded excursion at about 4pm yesterday afternoon. Panic stations when we discovered that it was today. In preparation, we spent most of last night drilling him in how to tell the teacher, in French, 'Stop the bus because I need to vomit'.....'Arret le bus, (s'il vous plait!) parce que je dois vomir'. I'm hoping that he doesn't actually need to use this. However, seeing that he's our chucker, he may. It was the promise of......Lego which may have helped him to get on that bus this morning, yet get on it he did. Phew. I was so proud of him. He's only had two full days in this class, yet already he seems to be reconciled to his fate....he's been entertaining us with stories about how he's been hanging out with....the naughty boys.  Or maybe this is just a tactic to get us to keep him at home, with us.

Old habits die hard and seeing that I was anticipating a run in the garrigue after the drop off, I may have dressed myself in my jogging kit. My husband laughed when he saw me and reminded me that as we were taking our son to FRENCH school, maybe I needed to rethink my outfit. Mercifully I did as there was not another pair of bike pants or trainers.....in sight. 

Three of our children had started school in Uzes last Monday:

Everyone was just a bit nervous. Even our eleven year old, who loves school so much that on weekends she laments that she has to be at home, was admitting that she felt nauseous. In the week since our arrival in the town we'd been walking past the school most days, rallying the troops. This was the foreboding face that it presented to us on the narrow, pedestrian street as it was all locked up due to school holidays:

Once we made it through the front door on Monday, with the swarm of children returning to school, it was revealed as a surprisingly sunny and welcoming place....there is a vast enclosed central courtyard with three storeys of classrooms on two sides. To reach the upper classrooms you wind up a dimly lit, elaborate wrought iron staircase with low ceilings and tromp l'oeil marble clad walls. It reeks of Hogwarts, so appeals to our children's sensibilities as they are big fans of JK Rowling's work. 

The older two, being able to remember going to school in France in 2010, were relatively unphased once it got down to the nitty gritty of being introduced by the headmistress and sitting down at a desk in their new classrooms. Not so the five year old, he howled uncontrollably and big, wet tears rolled down his face. We were hustled out and discouraged from participating in trying to console him. Several strong coffees in the square later and we were just about able to stop berating ourselves. It goes without saying that we spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that perhaps this whole French experiment may result in irreparable psychological damage to our children. Our hope is that this experience will give them a global outlook on life that it is difficult to learn.....at home in Tasmania. Hobart is a wonderful place to live, yet for us, it's important that our children realise that there is a whole wide world beyond Bass Straight and that, if they want to, despite differences in language and culture, they can participate.

It was with some trepidation that we went back to pick them up at 4.30pm....thinking we may be in line for a tirade of accusations. They were smiling. They'd had Spaghetti Bolognaise for lunch in the canteen.....which just so happens to be the five year old's all time favourite food. Lucky. 

At the end of the day, school is school wherever you happen to be...there's even a sign on the kindergarten classroom door warning of an outbreak of headlice (les poux), oh no....not again.

Rx

Fromage.

Here I am sitting at a table in a cafe in the Place aux Herbes:

My husband has taken himself and the baby off on a jaunt to Montpellier.......to look at a bike, as he has been struck with a sudden urge to conquer Mt Ventoux......in the saddle. I'm feeling somewhat virtuous as I've already been for a jog in the garrigue on the hillside outside town......except that I've cracked and  taken up coffee again, oh.....and after eight weeks of abstinence, sugar.

I needed a jog after the weekend. We made a sentimental journey back to stay with friends in Espondeilhan,  the village where we spent most of 2010.....it's only an hour and a half from here on the motorway....or significantly longer if you take a wrong turn, as we did on the way back. Anyway, as our friends who we stayed with are part of a wine producing family, Domaine l'Arjolle.... there was a lot of wine involved.

My husband may have found his French late on Friday night at the bottom of a red wine bottle. The conversation had moved onto the subject of Cannes and all of a sudden he was telling everyone about my friend Rebecca. Now, Rebecca.....who I met, at the gym of all places, when our now five year olds became firm friends at the creche way back in the day when we were both nursing a workout fixation.....is a filmmaker who wrote and directed the cult Tasmanian short film.....Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical. She is heading to the Cannes Film Festival later this month as she's working on her zombie lesbian musical being made into a feature film. You can imagine my husband trying to describe all this.....in French. It gets better. One of the songs  that accompanies the original film is 'My Girlfriend Ate My Pussy - Literally'. This is where we managed to pick up a couple of quirks about French language pronunciation. If you happen to find yourself having a conversation, in French, about your cat......it could happen....and you inadvertently pronounce the 't' at the end of the word 'chat' (cat) then you aren't talking about your cat but rather a woman's rude bits. Beware.

Think this is all just a tad too bizarre.....well, on Sunday....more food, more wine...more friends and their family......come the cheese course and out came the microscope to examine.....the cheese. I kid you not. On the cheese board was a young Mimolette, an 18 month old Mimolette and a chèvre style Mimolette that I'd bought from the Pezenas market the day before:

Mimolette is an orange, pockmarked cheese....orange because of carrot juice and pockmarked because of cheese mites which live on the rind and enhance the flavour. You can tell by the state of the holes, which cheese is older as the bigger the holes, the longer the cheese mites have had to do their thing. Supposedly, cheese mites, their skin and their excrement are wiped off regularly during the course of ageing and before sale. The whole cheese mite thing understandably grosses people out...... so much so that Mimolette has recently been banned in the United States and you can only buy the young, supposedly not so mite encrusted, Mimolette in French supermarkets. I must admit that I did have to psyche myself up to actually put it in my mouth the first time I ate it.....yet I can report that it really is delicious, with a firm texture and a nutty flavour. Truly.

Anyway, on Sunday, out came the microscope to check the state of cheese mites on the Mimolettes:

There were wrigglers on all three.....including the cheese from the supermarket. Under the microscope they looked like this:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

And the cheeses were teeming with them. Apparently....and I only have this on hearsay....the mites are good for your digestion, especially if you eat a lot of cheese and drink a lot of wine. Which is good news for my husband....he had seconds of the Mimolette.

Rx

Uzes.

Lok how beautiful it is here in Uzes:

We arrived on Saturday having caught the train from Paris. There were a few nervous moments in Lyon when we and all of our children and all of our luggage had fifteen minutes to change trains. The last bag was unceremoniously shoved aboard seconds before the doors closed. Phew. Disaster averted.....until we got to Nimes and discovered the car hire depot was closed. We made the final stage of our journey.....in two taxis. 

We had friends for lunch on Sunday and in the manic whip around the shops that we managed to find early that same morning we were able to serve a veritable feast:

Asperges blanches avec sauce  hollandaise. I steamed the asparagus while my husband utilised his party trick of whipping up hollandaise with absolutely no fuss. A couple of years ago, we had a family holiday on a P&O cruise ship. While that is a story for another day.....the only redeemable feature of the  entire ten, long and punishing days aboard was the Luke Mangan restaurant 'Salt'. You had to pre book and they charged a supplement (everything else was all inclusive all you could eat) which meant that it was virtually empty yet it was an enclave of delicious food and respite, an escape from the madness and confronting horror that was the rest of the ship. We ate there most nights, working our way through truffled and hollandaised everything (don't worry, they also had a gym). I came home determined to cook hollandaise....yet no matter how hard I tried, it never worked and I was time and time again, reduced to tears. Now hollandaise sauce is relegated to the domain of my husband's cooking oeuvre, it resides there along with his signature dish of Lemon Delicious Pudding......which is virtually all that he ever makes.

Anyway, next we had foie gras with fig confit and toasted brioche followed by roasted chicken (roasted by the traiteur, thank you very much) and potato gratin made by me. The gratin is so simple to make, all you need is at least an hour in the oven to cook it. Thinly slice peeled, waxy potatoes, grate in some cheese...in Hobart I use parmesan yet on Sunday I used tomme....add some fried bacon, cover with a mixture of creme fraiche and milk to just cover, season and bake at 180 degrees for as long as it takes. Mistakenly, we also served a green salad which our French friends refused to eat on the same plate as the hot food....they ate it with the next course, which it goes without saying was.....cheese. With gateaux brought as a gift, it was a spectacular lunch with minimal effort.

Our new house...and I use the term loosely, as it is supposedly built on Roman foundations.....is just behind the Ducal Palace. This is the Ducal Palace:

The house with the grey shutters is our domain:

On the hour, there is a confusing cacophony of bells which signal the time and rattle the windows in our home. One bell tower starts chiming just before the hour, while the second repeats the call about two minutes later. You can imagine what a noise this makes at midday....mercifully, at night they stop at 10pm and start again at 7am in the morning.

Bon week-end.

Rx

Paris.

So, after a twelve hour delay in Abu Dhabi we finally made it to Paris.....at 4am in the morning.

I can't complain though, as Etihad Airways looked after us and gave a a hotel room for what would otherwise have been a day of pain. We hadn't been at the hotel for five minutes before we were down in the shop kitting ourselves out in cossies so that we could hit the pool:

Our first day, of our 4 day stay, in Paris was just a tad hairy. Needless to say, we were somewhat jet lagged and aimless in our plan. We route marched our troops from the apartment where we were staying, over near the Jardin des Plantes, to the Luxembourg Gardens, for a pilgrimage to the children's play ground and then, like the incompetent parents that we are, thought that lunch at Restaurant Chez Georges, over near the Place des Victoires, on the other side of the river, was a good idea. No sooner had we sat down at one of the long communal tables in this bustling and beautiful little restaurant than we realised that we had made a big mistake. We really do live in la la land and nurse idealised visions of our children participating in a civilised lunch, actually eating the meal put in front of them with gusto and contributing scintillating conversation. It is never like this and we should have known better. In reality it's more like being on the verge of having a massive heart attack....with palpitations, sweaty palms and an overwhelming feeling of dread.  We are seriously outnumbered by our children and they are adept at sensing our fear. 

Tempers were already frayed, as the children's complaints about the food were in full flight and the wine wasn't quite working for the adults....and then seconds after the baby escaped and tried to sit on the lap of the gentleman further down the banquette, my husband may have said, out loud.....that I was a 'crap mother'. Quelle horreur. Our eldest daughter accidentally upset her orange juice on his lap. He was livid.....and was then presented with a bill for six people's lunch of snails and fillet steak with béarnaise sauce.....which was probably punishment enough.

Luckily, the gods smiled on us and a babysitter materialised in the form of the 21 year old son of the couple who owned the apartment. Even better, can you believe that his rate was €7 an hour (less than AUD$10.....yes, really) although we may have paid him more as we wanted him to come back two nights in a row. Our children described him as spunky and indeed he had that archetypal Parisian male look going on, all shoulder length floppy dark hair, unbuttoned shirt and velvet blazer. He is studying economics at the Sorbonne and is convinced by the benefits of yoga, which he does every day, even though he plays rugby (union) and when we met him, he was reading Homer's 'The Ilyiad'......for fun. He played games and drew and coloured in with the children, did the dishes, cleaned up after their dinner and brought them a cake made by his mum. The day we left he helped haul all of our bags down 4 flights of stairs.  How lucky were we.

Because we were in one of the most romantic cities in the world, my husband retracted his 'crap mother' comment and I forgave him and we went and drank champagne at The Cafe Marly in the forecourt of the Louvre during l'heure bleue:

Followed by dinner at Le Grand Colbert..... a beautiful old style brasserie (it's listed as a historic monument) which also happens to be the restaurant in the movie 'Something's Gotta Give'. We'd been there a couple of years before for lunch.....with our children....and I'd ordered the roast chicken that Diane Keaton's character in the film raves about, yet truthfully, at the time I hadn't thought that it was that amazing.....the roast chicken at Sean's Panorama at Bondi Beach in Sydney, is better. Seeing it was just around the corner and the clock was ticking we thought we'd give Le Grand Colbert another go. The poster for the movie was still in the window next to the front door, which caused us to hesitate as there is nowhere worse than a Paris restaurant overrun with tourists. No need to fear, as mercifully it wasn't and the atmosphere was buzzy and the food and wine, enhanced by the knowledge that our children back in the apartment tucked up in bed, was delicious....I had the snails (again) and the fish with hollandaise sauce. 

Hedonistic adult decadence aside, we dedicated one full day of our very short visit to lugging the family all the way out to Parc Asterix.....on the other side of Charles de Gaulle Airport:

It really is very cleverly done and the inherent Frenchness makes it, I think, much better than Euro Disney......I'm tempted to actually read an Asterix book now, which my children assure me are fabulous.  I'll admit, here and now, that I  have a bit of a thing for scary rides.......yet 'Oziris' takes the cake. I screamed from the minute that it plunged down the first terrifying descent, giving myself a hoarse voice, which of course has helped no end with my otherwise shockingly bad French pronunciation.....nobody needs to know that it's not caused by a packet a day Gauloises habit. It also made me rethink pelvic floor exercises....up until now I've been quite proud of mine even though I've had four children, as jumping on the trampoline in the garden at home presents no problem, however being whipped around loop the loops and corkscrew turns on what is effectively a swing is another thing all together. Be warned.

I'm proud to say that while we were in Paris, I got myself out of bed before sunrise, on not one, but two mornings, to get myself over to the Bikram Yoga studio in the Marais in time to do the 7am class. When I explained that I was from Tasmania.....they were incredulous. I mentioned this to my husband and he suggested that maybe they mixed up 'Tasmania' with 'Tanzania' yet I'd made sure that I gave them the word perfect 'small island to the south of Australia' spiel in French as taught by our Adult Education French teacher....before she moved to Queensland. The Bikram Yoga dialogue sounds lovely in French, however it was somewhat off putting having a clock and pictures of Bikram himself decorating the hot room. Both of the instructors, who took the classes that I did, were also keen on barking out posture corrections, no one was immune to their scrutiny, which meant that I had to keep my wits about me so that I could put them into practice when they called out to me.....by name. This was especially difficult during the second class, as I'd also crinked my neck on Ozsiris somewhat rendering my practice almost impossible. Anyway, the only difference, Anna if you are reading this, is that they do Standing Separate Leg Stretching Pose, Triangle Pose and Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee Pose sideways, standing on their mats. Otherwise, I could have been back on the mat.....in Hobart.

Rx