Pancakes and Fête de la Chandeleur

I often wondered why pancake paraphernalia started arriving on the shelves in the supermarkets so far before Shrove Tuesday in France.  Thanks to a posting on a forum I belong to I now think I understand. 

 

 

Fête de la Chandeleur is the Catholic holiday of Candelmas which falls 40 days after Christmas Day, on 2 February every year.  This date is fixed, unlike Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day in the UK, which is tied to the moving date of Easter. 

 

The pancakes are eaten in the evening, traditionally by candlelight, and every member of the family tosses a pancake with the handicap of holding a coin in the hand they write with and using the other hand for holding the pan.  A successful toss ensures prosperity in the year ahead and for farmers, a good harvest.

 

Back in the 80s two friends and I all had birthday within four weeks of each other.  We would each do lunch for the birthday girl.  On my 37th birthday, my friend Viv made me stuffed pancakes which I loved ever since.  I don't suppose the recipe is exactly the same as hers but this is the one I have used for the years since then.  It is very popular in my family.

STUFFED PANCAKES

Bacon - small pieces like lardons
Roast chicken in bitesize pieces or fresh chicken breasts cut into small pieces
Onion
Mushrooms
Frozen peas
Garlic clove
Herbs
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Cornflour
Milk
Cup a soup
Cheddar cheese


First make some pancakes.  I usually cook mine a day in advance, making twelve for this dish which I fridge until the next day and extra for eating straightaway with sugar and lemon juice, or butter and maple syrup.

Fry bacon, mushrooms, onions and a crushed garlic clove and then add chicken, peas, herbs, salt and pepper. 
If using fresh chicken put this in at the same time as the bacon.
In a mug mix some cornflour with a leek and potato cup a soup and half a mug of milk.  Add boiling water to top of mug and stir well before pouring over the contents of the frying pan. 
Stir gently and allow the sauce to cook through. 
Cool the mixture a little and use it to fill pancakes. 
Fold in the sides and roll into neat packages. 
Place them in an ovenproof dish and cover with cheese sauce, finishing by sprinkling grated Cheddar cheese on the top. 
Cook in the oven until heated through and cheese is golden and bubbling.  
Enjoy!

Extreme gardening and new birds

My Breton neighbours have been working hard all week clearing up the back garden, visible from the lane, of a neighbour who hasn’t been to the property for more than four years.  It looked like Sleeping Beauty’s garden out there - completely impossible to reach the door of the house.

The only good thing about it were the blackberries that the huge quantity of brambles produced around September each year.  Cooked down gently with sugar they make a wonderful sauce for vanilla icecream.  Some of them must have been domesticated plants because the huge, sweet, juicy lobes were nothing like the smaller, harder wild ones.    That same area now looks like this:

 because of the hard work of my two neighbours

I helped them yesterday afternoon and we removed the old, leaning fence between the driveways of our two properties.  

 

This then meant I could reach the ivy roots which have been eluding me for so many years, and pull as many as possible of them out of the soil with Paulette and her husband, Christian raking and mattocking too.  He then arranged the stones we’d disturbed into a neat surround to the area and the plan is to put wild flower seed in the newly cleared and dug soil in March/April.  I am so pleased with it all.

Underneath one of the old tarpaulins half buried in the ground were two bright and  shiny salamanders.

We covered them up again with a pieces of old wood and soil leaving an exit for them.  This afternoon we attached the trailer to the Land Rover and took all the non-burnable rubbish to the déchetterie, including rubbish from another neighbour's property over the lane.  The aim is to have a much prettier village and they've certainly made it look so much cleaner and tidier.

This is my neighbour's tower, in a rare moment of good weather last Friday.  I like the way the shape of the trees echo the tower roofline.

 

I like the cloud formations too in this photograph and here is one of a red morning sky here this week.

 

 

On Sunday morning I went to collect a trio of Araucana chickens from a French friend who breeds birds.  As always when I visit her, I came away with more than I went for.  I bought another pair of Orpingtons, Splash Orpingtons and they have settled in well with the Black and Blue Orpingtons and other mixed hens that I have in one area.  The Splash Orpington hen is in the centre here with a Grey Orpington to the left and a Black Orpington to the right.

Here's the Splash Orpington cockerel in all his glory.

 

The photos I took of the Araucanas are poor - they're very nervous and it's hard to get them all standing still at the same time so I won't post them.  Maybe I'll have some decent ones for the next posting.

 

I also bought one Araucana and five Cream Legbar eggs to incubate.  They are now tucked up in the spare room in the incubator with ten mixed eggs from my other hens, so come 20-21 February, hopefully chicks will be emerging from their shells.

 

 

Three things I like:

 

1.   The ginger and golden sultana cake I made this afternoon and can't stop eating.

2.   Catching up with the Writers' Group on Monday - first meeting of the New Year.

3.   Winning the Pub Quiz at St Mayeux on Wednesday.  We each went back home with a bottle of cider or red wine - result!

 

Changing weather and changing hens

Apart from last Sunday, the weather hasn't been good this week.  We've had lots of rain again and hard frosts on the non-rainy days.  I've been taking photographs across a neighbours garden first thing in the morning when I go up the lane to do the animals and also photos of the calvaire.  If you tip your screen back slightly you wil get the full colour saturation.

 

 

 

 

 

I've found the clouds interesting this week too with the changing weather they've been producing really strange patterns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the lane a couple of mornings ago.  I love this time of year when the sunrise coincides with when I am out with the animals.   

 

Frozen raindrops on the stems of the acer in my garden.

At the end of this week my gorgeous grandson, Charlie, will be seven years old and my first born, Matthew, will be thirty-one.  How are the years passing so quickly?  How is this year passing so quickly, already 24 January it hardly seems possible.

I have been moving the hens around into different areas as this coming week four red hens and one black bantam are arriving  courtesy of a friend going back to England for two months and I'm also getting a trio of Araucanas - blue egg laying hens.  There are too many cockerels on the field and as they are maturing now they are looking for trouble amongst themselves.  Sunday will see four of them going to a hen keeper from Normandy who is looking to expand her gene pool and I may, in the future, get some cream Orpingtons from her if they incubate and grow successfully.  One Cream Legbar cockerel will go to the breeder who's selling me the Araucanas, again to give new blood to her stock.  I do love my hens and it will be good to enjoy new ones settling in.  Here are two of the Cream Legbar cockerels who will be leaving me.

Three things I like: 

1.   Going for a Chinese with a friend for the first time in ages.
2.   Sitting outside in the sunshine on Sunday to read my Book Club book.
3.   Booking into the diary in early summer, the first visit for friends from England. 

 

Counterfeit currency and blunders

 

This morning I drove the short distance to the field and having fed and watered the animals I then went on to the Post Office in the next village to send a large envelope to England.

I didn’t recognise the youngish woman behind the counter and asked if she was new since the summer. She replied that she had changed from glasses to contact lenses and had cut her hair and changed the style, so that explained that – I wasn’t losing the plot completely then.  Carolyn, for that was her name, reminded me of the conversation which we had in the summer when I said that after my gastric bypass people who knew me didn’t recognise me after losing half my weight.

I handed over the envelope and she weighed it. I also asked for four stamps for letters to England and handed her a ten euro note. She passed it under a security light and it failed the test. Having filled in a set of forms to pass the dodgy note to the right department she handed me my copy and I handed over a twenty euro note. This too failed the test. We looked at each other, both surprised. Then the penny dropped.  

On 3 January I had a morning of blunders – I should have stayed in bed that day.

First, while feeding the rabbits I fell in their grassy area because of all the mud. I stripped off, dressed again and put all my dirty clothes into the washing machine on the way to the car to go shopping. After about two minutes of driving I thought I had left my mobile in the pocket of my fleece I came back to the house and quickly stopped the machine but the pockets were empty thank goodness.

Next I drove to SuperU and when I got out of the Land Rover I realised I didn’t have my wallet with me.  Luckily, a search of the vehicle yielded €40 so I was still able to do some shopping. 

When I returned to the car park with my shopping trolley I found I didn’t have my keys.  I hadn’t locked the vehicle fortunately, and there were another set of keys hidden in it.  I went back into the shop and reported the loss of my keys giving them my ‘phone number in case they were found.

I drove home and having unloaded the car I went into the utility area to empty the washing machine.  I took the clothes out and as usual swept my hand around the interior for the sock that usually sticks to the drum and found my wallet.  I had been carrying it with the laundry  earlier and must have just put everything into the machine.

I dried out the paper money and the wallet over the woodburner and the only things to have suffered terminal damage were some non-laminated membership cards and my new 2014 Mutuelle health card. 

About half an hour, SuperU called me to say my keys had been handed in to the Information Desk.  So all was well that ended well – but all this happened before 10.45am – I was frightened to do anything else during the rest of the day just in case!

As soon as I told Carolyn the story she destroyed the forms she'd completed and handed me back the twenty euro note, using the ten euro for payment.  She was sure that the washing the notes had produced this false result.  One of my friends on Facebook suggested I had been money laundering - lol.

While she was doing all this a man entered the Post Office. I knew him but couldn’t remember his name – he told me it was Gilda. Ah – the plumber who did the work on my house renovation back in 2006.  He looked at me and gasped, astonished at the difference in my appearance for he hadn’t seen me since before my gastric bypass. It was extraordinary that we had just been talking about this before Gilda came in. He talked to Carolyn for a few minutes but kept looking back at me and shaking his head in disbelief. It’s lovely when you know you’ve changed so much for the better that you are unrecognisable.

Here’s yesterday's beautiful loaf, home made soups - mushroom and ratatouille - which I've been enjoying this week.  I love comforting soup with crusty bread or hot-buttered toast when the weather's bad.

 

 

 

Three things I like:

 

1.   My grandson, asking to talk to me on the 'phone when I'm chatting with his Mum.

2.   Skyping with friends holidaying in Tobago even though I have to look at the sunshine and the blue, blue sea from their balcony.

3.   Working my way through the freezer and coming up with new recipe ideas.