I arrived in Ireland exactly four weeks ago today, touching down at Dublin airport with 74 kilos (Kilos! not pounds! Kilos!) of baggage, managing to pay for just 14 of them as excess over the 20 I was supposed to be allowed to bring with me. The worst bit was not the weight – my employer had already agreed to pay the excess baggage charge – but the fact that Aer Lingus (and, I presume, other airlines too) limit individual suitcases to a maximum weight of 32 kilos. Did you know that? No, me neither, so the fact that one case weighed 42 kilos meant I had to buy another bag and put 10 kilos of books into it. And where do you buy an additional bag at Lyon airport? The only source is the excess baggage counter where they’ll let you have one of those fibreglass laundry bags the Pound Shop sells at three for a quid for a mere 10 euros. ‘Arnaquage,’ I told the clerk who perhaps then took sympathy on me by mis-calculating the overage I was to be stuck for. My employer had already booked and paid for me to bring two suitcases with me, and the check-in clerk had, mistakenly, taken this to mean that I was allowed 40 kilos of baggage so I had an excess of 34 kilos (she was wrong but I didn’t intend to correct her – your allowance is 20 kilos no matter how many cases you pay for). Then the clerk at the payment counter who’d already sold me a 50 cent bag for 10 euros looked at the slip demanding payment for 34 kilos excess and said, “Right, so your allowance is 20 kilos so that means you owe for 14 kilos”. At 9 euros a kilo it was still plenty, but plenty less than the 486 euros I should have paid. Then she slipped in a wobbler by announcing that they didn’t take cheques, cards only – not even cash; I was pretty sure my Visa card was maxed out but we gave it a go and, miracle of miracles, it coughed up the requisite 126 euros and I was on the plane.
Phew.
So I settled into my cottage halfway up the highest mountain south of Dublin that evening after Paul the estate’s resident taxi driver stopped to let me buy a six-pack of Guinness and some eggs. Day one I spent driving round our various suppliers – butcher, fishmonger, green grocer, wine merchant – with my boss, setting up accounts where necessary and getting to know him and them a little better. They’re all very good suppliers, top quality stuff and the fishmonger sells plenty of decent cheese and olive oil to make me a little less homesick for France than I would if I were forced to stick to Irish block cheddar and Flora ‘genuine’ sunflower oil.
He and his various guests have loved everything I’ve cooked, and I’ve been having fun with the local produce and ingredients; that first day driving round with my boss I cooked him some of the fantastic locally-caught Dublin Bay Prawns, langoustines, in dry Martini; normally I’d have done this in Noilly Prat, but that seems to be taken as some sort of insult round here and no one has heard of it outside Dublin’s posh cocktail bars. The Martini is sweeter but that goes nicely with the Prawns, it turns out. Just get your pan hot, chuck in some coarsely-ground black pepper and a little salt, glug in the Martini and, when it boils (pretty much straight away) throw in the prawns and cover with a lid. Shake well, leave a minute or two, shake again, leave another minute or two, serve. Easy and delicicious and quick, three words all cooks like to hear together.
Day two I cooked the white asparagus I’d, erm, bribed out of a friendly chef back in Avignon (still not available in the shops here in Ireland a month later – I know that was the very first of the season back in Provence but really – only crappy green Spanish stuff is on sale here at the moment) with a vinaigrette and served yesterday’s prawn heads made into a nice little creamed consomé or bisque, please yourself which.
I’ve cooked a few old favourites since then – pumpkin and crab soup with tomato cappucino (an original Jean-Rémi recipe although I do mine by whipping cream with some tomato purée stirred in, rather than putting cream and tomato powder into a soda syphon – works just as well either way) , plenty of poached fish and risottos, kedgeree (excellent home-smoked haddock from Caviston’s, our fishmonger), carrot and ginger soup (the one thing I’ve cooked that the boss didn’t care for), chicken and mushroom casserole (made with what our greengrocer labelled ‘king oyster mushrooms – they were actually ceps with giant stems and tiny, unformed caps but which actually tasted like ceps, just a third of the price), sea bass tagine (with rice instead of cous cous), stuffed pineapple, lots of olive oil mash, vanilla rice pudding, twice-cooked cauliflower (make a purée with half the cauliflower and deep fry breadcrumbed florets from the other half), crumbles, beef bourguignon, fish pie, belly of pork (roast it slowly covered with foil, about 150ºC, sitting on a bed of veg or the spare ribs trimmed off it, for two or three hours then blast it at 180ºC for half an hour to crisp up the crackling – don’t forget to slash the skin before cooking to facilitate the carving later; also, rub plenty of good salt into the skin and leave it for an hour or overnight, even 48 hours, before roasting), tarragon chicken and lamb leg steaks – although I didn’t just fry/grill these, I browned them quickly to start with then added a good slosh of port to the frying pan along with lots of fresh rosemary and cooked it gently for about six or seven minutes, allowing the port to reduce down to a nice thick sauce while leaving the lamb nice and pink.
I’ve made a few new dishes too, some which I’ve been very pleased with indeed. Top of the list comes chicken liver pâté with raspberry vinegar; or rather, vinegar with raspberry pulp in it. This gives a slightly acid, very fruity taste to the pâté and renders it completely delicious. No really. I’ve added a couple more soups to my repertoire: duck and cabbage, made with half a leftover duck breast sliced very, very thinly and some leftover cabbage, again shredded very thinly. Warmed through a little and allowed to infuse in decent chicken stock, a decent amount of coarse-ground pepper (poivre mignonette, actually) and wow, it’s a good ‘un. Second great soup was crab and chestnut, something that I wasn’t as confident would work as I was about the duck and cabbage, but it’s another winner. I’m no real fan of chestnuts but found a sous-vide packet at the fishmonger/deli and planned to use them with some brussel sprouts, but then couldn’t find any brussels. So I took half a packet of left-over crab meat (oh please, I can’t be doing with cooking and messing with whole ones), mixed the chopped chestnuts with it in some more good chicken stock and away we went, adding a little fish stock too to beef it up a bit. Really a great surprising combination. Another nice discovery was how to cook a filet mignon of pork without drying it up. Pork filet – the same cut, but from a pig, as filet steak in a beef animal – is very tender but can dry up horribly if you roast or fry it. Marinades aren’t much help if they’re alcoholic – that just dries up the meat even more. I made the mistake the first time I did this of browning the filet and then cooking it in a port, mushroom and apple sauce. Which was very nice, but the meat remained too dry for my tastes. The second time I browned the filet as before, but then wrapped it in clingfilm and steamed it for about 20 minutes to cook it, returning it, sliced, to a – this time – mushroom and mustard sauce to serve it, and deliciously moist and tender it was too. Recommended. I may try this next time I get a beef filet too, although the traditional Wellington will do more or less the same thing. And ages ago I read about someone making a pea purée from pea pods, which appealed to me as I hate throwing anything away – shell the peas then blanche the pods until they’re soft, throw into the Robochef with a little cream and force through a sieve. Very nice, but you need TONNES of peas to make a decent amount, so I ended up just stirring this into an oyster mushroom sauce and serving with grilled sea bass. Very nice it was too.
And I’ve been extending my pudding repertoire too, something I’ve always thought to be my weakest area – I’m definitely no patissier and have stuck, in the past, to a fairly simple repertoire of rice pudding, chocolate mousse, stuffed pineapple, fruit salad, poached pears, crêpes suzette, profiteroles, Grand Marnier soufflés, clafoutis and, er, that’s about it. Now I’ve mastered fools, if ‘mastered’ is the right word to describe working out how to mix pulped fruit (rhubarb, caramelised mango and blueberries, that sort of thing) with whipped cream. Too simple to even merit a ‘good grief’. I’m also pleased with a mango cream and crunchy chocolate mousse confection I made last week – make a cream as in crème brulée, chop up your mango as small as you can, mix and allow to infuse for as long as you can, spread chocolate mousse on top. I make a nice, light chocolate mousse using just whipped egg whites and melted chocolate and, if the chocolate has cooled enough, instead of mixing smoothly with the egg white it forms tiny blobs of chocolate which give a crunchy effect on the palate. Which is nice.
So now I have a couple of days off, the first I’ve had since I arrived – although I did spend one day in bed with what at the time I thought was food poisoning (it came on exactly 4 hours after eating beans on toast so I assumed the can was ‘blown’ and I just hadn’t noticed) but now think is more likely to have been a bug that’s going around, since others have had the same vomiting-and-diarrhoea; and I didn’t really feel like eating much at all for most of the next week, so a bug seems more likely. But everyone here was amused to find out that, when he cooks for himself, chef eats beans on toast. Well, they’re good for you and you just can’t get them in France. And I like them.
Today I’ve just been cleaning out my cottage and moving the furniture a little to allow me to make better use of the space, although there’s a distinct lack of cupboard space (as in, there are NO cupboards at all) here. So I’m effectively still living out of suitcases, albeit two mightily-stuffed ones.
Tomorrow I’m planning to go into Dublin; I spent one day there towards the start of my stay, visiting potential suppliers – most of which turned out to be ‘delicatessens’ selling a few manky olives, some biscuit crackers, the same few Irish blue cheeses and, erm, that’s it. The wholesale fruit and veg market was interesting but normally available only to professionals buying by the wagonload. The area round Connell street looks interesting though, and I plan to get there in the morning to see the food market and Chinese supermarkets.
Apart from that, Delphine’s doing very well, thankyou; the baby’s coming along nicely, even though D does have a light case of gestational diabetes; Scarlett will be a big baby when she arrives some time in the next month.
I had an interesting moment with the UK Inland Revenue, from whom I haven’t heard in four or five years since I started earning money exclusively in France. I told them this back in 2004 but recently received a bare ‘statement of account’ from them saying I owed £2006.34. Eh? So I called them and the rather unpleasant young lady to whom I spoke said that this sum is for assessed tax due on my UK rental property. Eh? And Eh? again. When we first moved to France we did indeed rent out our old London flat, but sold this in 2001, as the Revenue well knew since we’d told them this. Well, she said, this sum due is for the tax years 2003-4, 2004-5 and 2005-6. Ah, I said, well the flat is sold so I wouldn’t have declared any income for those years. And anyway, I paid tax in France those years, as I’d told them. Well, she says, I should still have filled in the tax demand forms for those years when I received them, even if I was declaring that I’d earned nothing. But, I said, this statement is the first bit of paper I’ve received from Her Majesty’s Tax Inspectors since 2003. “Well,” she declared haughtily, “not receiving the forms is no excuse for not filling them in.”
I’m afraid I cracked up laughing at this point, something which only hardened the heart of Unpleasant Young Lady. I could hear her lips pursing and her brow furrowing in anger even from a thousand kilometres away. I didn’t help my case by replying, “Well not receiving the forms and not even knowing of their existence because I’d told you I was now declaring my income in France seems like the perfect reason for not filling them in to me.”
Clearly, even after 10 years dealing with the world-class bureaucrats who staff the government offices of France, I am not ready to deal with the Inland Revenue’s own special branch of logic. “It is not an acceptable excuse to the Inland Revenue,” she said. The telephone stuck to my hand as it frosted over at the glacial tone in her voice. “You should fill them in now and send them back, and we will consider whether or not to continue our demand for these sums and further penalties too, if necessary.”
I don’t have the forms, I told her. Never have had. No, I can’t download them from the Internet either, no Internet access here. Eventually she agreed that I could try writing a letter, explaining the situation and throwing myself on the mercy of HM’s Inspectors of Taxes and Revenue. Well I did, and I just hope my letter finds a grown-up who understands simple logic. I rather feel, though, that this one will run and run.
Cheers.