The Chateau Diaries #305 2 containers full of junk and off to the brocante to buy more. Weeee!

[Lady Avonlea]

Stephanie Jarvis

The Northern Lights over Lalande!​

As I'm sure you're all aware by now, last night there was the most extraordinary northern lights display over parts of the world that usually never see them. Lalande was no exception! The I glanced out of my bathroom window at 1:30am, I noticed strange pale whitish streaks in a pinkish sky. I'd heard that the lights are more visible on photos, so - not expecting much - I took a photo of the dark night sky on my mobile, and the first photo above was the result! I couldn't believe it! I threw on my dressing gown and ran out into the night. Half and hour - and one drenched pair of slippers - later, I had taken all of these stunning photos around the chateau. It felt totally magical. In spite of travelling to the arctic circle, I've never seen the northern lights, and I can't believe that my first experience of them was from my bathroom window at Lalande! Please feel free to download these photos for your own personal (but not commercial) use - I think they'd make marvellous screen savers! Lots of love to all of you from Lalande, Stephanie x​

 

[billybudd]

Derail: attention 15 hags, smart creative intuitive & multi cultural people who I find intellectually stimulating. I’ve found myself in a conundrum. And I know so many of you have many health and family issues, that I do pray for. But i need advice as many of you are in long time marriages and partnerships. I’m embarrassed to talk to my people. I’ve been married for 34 years and have been working with my husband 6 days a week for 25 years, lately he has become so disgruntled, dismissive and angry. Going as fas as embarrassing me in front of the staff. I try walking away and he hates it. Besides medicating myself to numbness I’ve no idea how to handle it!! Please advise!!!

I'd get my head together first, noting this is an aberration from 25 years of working together and living together, for which I am so very grateful. Keeping an open mind, I'd ask him if he thinks it's time for one of us to get a different job working for somebody else. Or take a vacay. Or is it bigger, and would you please get a physical to see if it's physical? Do you think events in the middle east are tearing him down (many people I know can hardly walk, they're so bereaved and so sad and angry.) I can't stay angry at you but I can't be disrespected in front of staff, it's our livelihood, and that of our workers, and bad for the business.

 

[Fennelbug]

Never... the boy with the empty bank account claims he gets car sick if he doesn't drive... yet in Africa he was in the back

He’s allergic to the back

 

[On Repeat]

Such a good question, @T Rex.
Still thinking about Marie and her pastry bag, and what story she thinks she's telling with her food.
I lived in an aspirational neighborhood, lucky me, for decades. One of the tiny chic storefronts was rented by a woman of a certain age who was going to sell pre-cooked upscale take-home meals for the many upscale non-cooks who lived in the hood, a really good idea for that space, and a good idea for a business at any time.
The problem was her idea of upscale.
There's a certain kind of blue collar small town woman who grew up in the 50s -- I have encountered her a bunch of times -- who abandoned the delicious cooking of her small town grandma, or strange uncle (hear me, Lee Bailey, Scott Peacock, James Beard, Ernest Matthew Mickler!). And she went the corporate cooking way, via the women's magazines corporate advertiser agenda. That is, canned soup sauce, Jello salad, insta-pudding cake, the mind-boggling chow mein noodle Christmas cookies made by my dear friend from Fargo, N.D. (She may have qualified as one of the strange uncles, too.)
Along with all the packaged additions to food, came the notion that adding Velveeta cheese spread (not officially cheese) to everything made it classy. Velveeta even became a sign of prosperity to the wonderful Mexican Tex-Mex cooks who could charge the gringos moar for Velveeta chili con queso than they could selling real cheese.
And so this hard-working lady in the aspirational neighborhood covered everything she made for the yuppies with Velveeta. Because it was classy and she just knew they'd buy classy home-cooking covered with cheese product.
They wouldn't touch it with a forty-foot pole, as anyone could have told her.
She was out of business in six months and seriously in debt.
I think that's where Marie is stuck.
Pavlovas are classy food to her. She seems to be stuck in a department store ladies' lunch dessert world of individual servings of lightish diet desserts, whereas what restaurant customers shell out for big time is liqueur-drenched, buttercreamed, jammed-out cake. Cake. Caketty caketty cake. With chocolate dipped strawberries AND nuts on top.
I think she has rigid and completely delusional ideas about classy food.
One is, it's classy if it comes out of a pastry bag. Please note all the incredibly skilled cake decorating ladies who decorate cakes you'd rather die than be photographed next to. She's working another one, the perfection salad one, that if you can form, say potatoes, into perfect blocks, it's classy. There's a whole book about the puritannical home ec origins of attempting to tame unruly, delinquent ingredients into Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.
She thinks Stephanie Jarvis is classy, and Jarvis' eating and cooking is completely dysmorphic. There's serious disorder in Jarvis' eating, as well as cruelty and grossness in her cooking. That cowpat she made for Marie's birthday is exhibit A at the mo, but I will never forget the gross slop she dished up for their Come Dine With Me contest at the shitoo.
I'm really not qualified to assess much of Jarvis' depravity except on food, narcissism, and fascist rhetoric. So I can go on and on. But there's something really wrong here. News flash.
---

Thank you, you summed up beautifully what I think about the food and lack of hospitality at the dump.
We know that Stephanie Jarvis was bought up by a distant, inhospitable and a non-cook mother. She lacks basic cooking skills and knowledge of nutrition. I reckon Marie is the same. Faffing about with platescapes instead of serving real food.
What Marie doesn't seem to get, due to lack of experience and childhood knowledge, is that the food she serves has to be nutritious and tasty. I can't stand all those little droplets of mush on a plate, the Nike swirl of mush, or the cover-up of flowers and the meagre portions. Just bloody ridiculous.
Last week I had a lunch for 7 ladies with several eating disorders -OMG. Then one of them started on about her kids, 2 are vegan the other vegetarian. She was so terribly proud her kids were "different", just like the idiot child and his eating disorder (dislikes). The conversation descended into 1st world eating problems and one upmanship.

 

[billybudd]

Thank you, you summed up beautifully what I think about the food and lack of hospitality at the dump.
We know that Stephanie Jarvis was bought up by a distant, inhospitable and a non-cook mother. She lacks basic cooking skills and knowledge of nutrition. I reckon Marie is the same. Faffing about with platescapes instead of serving real food.
What Marie doesn't seem to get, due to lack of experience and childhood knowledge, is that the food she serves has to be nutritious and tasty. I can't stand all those little droplets of mush on a plate, the Nike swirl of mush, or the cover-up of flowers and the meagre portions. Just bloody ridiculous.
Last week I had a lunch for 7 ladies with several eating disorders -OMG. Then one of them started on about her kids, 2 are vegan the other vegetarian. She was so terribly proud her kids were "different", just like the idiot child and his eating disorder (dislikes). The conversation descended into 1st world eating problems and one upmanship.

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I'm so crabby I can't eat with people like that, not even in a restaurant where they're disrespecting somebody else's food.

 

[T Rex]

Derail: attention 15 hags, smart creative intuitive & multi cultural people who I find intellectually stimulating. I’ve found myself in a conundrum. And I know so many of you have many health and family issues, that I do pray for. But i need advice as many of you are in long time marriages and partnerships. I’m embarrassed to talk to my people. I’ve been married for 34 years and have been working with my husband 6 days a week for 25 years, lately he has become so disgruntled, dismissive and angry. Going as fas as embarrassing me in front of the staff. I try walking away and he hates it. Besides medicating myself to numbness I’ve no idea how to handle it!! Please advise!!!

@mrsp67 - if you need a safe space, Cowboy and you are always welcome to come stay at Casa de T Rex. Or if you just want to get lunch or hang out, let me know.

 

[mrsp67]

@mrsp67 - if you need a safe space, Cowboy and you are always welcome to come stay at Casa de T Rex. Or if you just want to get lunch or hang out, let me know.

Thank you, I may take you up on this offer.
---
I am angry & sullen today so I shall sleep In guest room, thanks for the great advice I’ll Address the problem in the am! Love to all of you friends!!!! Xxxooo

 

[FecilitéJ]

Hope it's a good productive chat. Definitely better to have it out and know where you stand. Sorry I don't have words of wisdom that might help x

 

[T Rex]

Such a good question, @T Rex.
Still thinking about Marie and her pastry bag, and what story she thinks she's telling with her food.
I lived in an aspirational neighborhood, lucky me, for decades. One of the tiny chic storefronts was rented by a woman of a certain age who was going to sell pre-cooked upscale take-home meals for the many upscale non-cooks who lived in the hood, a really good idea for that space, and a good idea for a business at any time.
The problem was her idea of upscale.
There's a certain kind of blue collar small town woman who grew up in the 50s -- I have encountered her a bunch of times -- who abandoned the delicious cooking of her small town grandma, or strange uncle (hear me, Lee Bailey, Scott Peacock, James Beard, Ernest Matthew Mickler!). And she went the corporate cooking way, via the women's magazines corporate advertiser agenda. That is, canned soup sauce, Jello salad, insta-pudding cake, the mind-boggling chow mein noodle Christmas cookies made by my dear friend from Fargo, N.D. (She may have qualified as one of the strange uncles, too.)
Along with all the packaged additions to food, came the notion that adding Velveeta cheese spread (not officially cheese) to everything made it classy. Velveeta even became a sign of prosperity to the wonderful Mexican Tex-Mex cooks who could charge the gringos moar for Velveeta chili con queso than they could selling real cheese.
And so this hard-working lady in the aspirational neighborhood covered everything she made for the yuppies with Velveeta. Because it was classy and she just knew they'd buy classy home-cooking covered with cheese product.
They wouldn't touch it with a forty-foot pole, as anyone could have told her.
She was out of business in six months and seriously in debt.
I think that's where Marie is stuck.
Pavlovas are classy food to her. She seems to be stuck in a department store ladies' lunch dessert world of individual servings of lightish diet desserts, whereas what restaurant customers shell out for big time is liqueur-drenched, buttercreamed, jammed-out cake. Cake. Caketty caketty cake. With chocolate dipped strawberries AND nuts on top.
I think she has rigid and completely delusional ideas about classy food.
One is, it's classy if it comes out of a pastry bag. Please note all the incredibly skilled cake decorating ladies who decorate cakes you'd rather die than be photographed next to. She's working another one, the perfection salad one, that if you can form, say potatoes, into perfect blocks, it's classy. There's a whole book about the puritannical home ec origins of attempting to tame unruly, delinquent ingredients into Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.
She thinks Stephanie Jarvis is classy, and Jarvis' eating and cooking is completely dysmorphic. There's serious disorder in Jarvis' eating, as well as cruelty and grossness in her cooking. That cowpat she made for Marie's birthday is exhibit A at the mo, but I will never forget the gross slop she dished up for their Come Dine With Me contest at the shitoo.
I'm really not qualified to assess much of Jarvis' depravity except on food, narcissism, and fascist rhetoric. So I can go on and on. But there's something really wrong here. News flash.
---

@billybudd - you and @Hedda Hopper hit the nail on the head- FRK only knows what she knows, and is stuck in a rut. People become chefs because they are passionate about food- they eat everywhere from "hole-in-the-floor restaurants" to Michelin-starred venues because they want to experience and learn something new. They know what produce is in season, and where to source the best meats, cheeses, baked goods and wines because they've tried them. While we are not all fans of Stuart, whose personality is as big as Texas, she knows what is in season, and continually experiments with dishes.

When is the last time (if ever) we saw FRK go to the weekend local Farmer's Market? While the weekends are when she is making guest meals, she could carve out a few hours to buy produce, chat with the locals (make new friends), and discover new local products (cheeses, wines, etc.) Additionally, while she probably does not make much money (if any), it wouldn't hurt Fanny to step up and take her out to a restaurant (not Maccas) for lunch once a week so she can at least experience French cuisine and try new things. This would also provide her with the one-on-one time with Fanny that she so desperately craves, and Fanny would have an actual clue about what restaurants there are in the local area for a change. I'd rather see FRK go to the Farmer's Market than watch another Brocante shopping excursion!

 

[billybudd]

@billybudd - you and @Hedda Hopper hit the nail on the head- FRK only knows what she knows, and is stuck in a rut. People become chefs because they are passionate about food- they eat everywhere from "hole-in-the-floor restaurants" to Michelin-starred venues because they want to experience and learn something new. They know what produce is in season, and where to source the best meats, cheeses, baked goods and wines because they've tried them. While we are not all fans of Stuart, whose personality is as big as Texas, she knows what is in season, and continually experiments with dishes.

When is the last time (if ever) we saw FRK go to the weekend local Farmer's Market? While the weekends are when she is making guest meals, she could carve out a few hours to buy produce, chat with the locals (make new friends), and discover new local products (cheeses, wines, etc.) Additionally, while she probably does not make much money (if any), it wouldn't hurt Fanny to step up and take her out to a restaurant (not Maccas) for lunch once a week so she can at least experience French cuisine and try new things. This would also provide her with the one-on-one time with Fanny that she so desperately craves, and Fanny would have an actual clue about what restaurants there are in the local area for a change. I'd rather see FRK go to the Farmer's Market than watch another Brocante shopping excursion!

The local farmers' markets are open almost every day of the week. There is no excuse.

Markets in Indre Central France

list of markets showing towns and days they are on in the department of Indre in the Loire Valley,France

www.experienceloire.com

And Romain Moreau is right there in Crozon. When he's not at the farmers' markets.

https://www.lanouvellerepublique.fr/indre/crozon-sur-vauvre-indre-romain-moreau-ou-la-bonne-recette-du-maraicher

 

[MRShavershamsdress]

It's not easy finding decent tea in France. For bags easy cuppa I get Aldi own brand Westminster tea. For loose leaf tea Twinnings do a Russian Earl Grey which is very close to Russian Caravan Tea. Twinnings thé de Celyan (allegedly Scottish!) in bags is a good strong cuppa. Twinnings orange pekoe and Assam loose leaf. Pre Brexit I used to order from Whittards of Chelsea. Post Brexit, God bless the internet, Amazon. Sadly, British Corner Shop has gone into administration. Our local Intermarché in their brit section now have Tetley and Yorkshire Tea.

Never, ever Lipton tea...

Lipton is only good for American style sweet tea.

 

[Sparrowsfart]

Derail: attention 15 hags, smart creative intuitive & multi cultural people who I find intellectually stimulating. I’ve found myself in a conundrum. And I know so many of you have many health and family issues, that I do pray for. But i need advice as many of you are in long time marriages and partnerships. I’m embarrassed to talk to my people. I’ve been married for 34 years and have been working with my husband 6 days a week for 25 years, lately he has become so disgruntled, dismissive and angry. Going as fas as embarrassing me in front of the staff. I try walking away and he hates it. Besides medicating myself to numbness I’ve no idea how to handle it!! Please advise!!!

Going thru similar with my hubby. Last week he started having a go at me in the supermarket checkout. I very quietly said stop everyone around us is looking at you abusing me. Stopped him in his tracks.
I think it's a bit of grumpy old man syndrome, and also his need to be in control. I think he feels a bit insecure after my weight loss and people complimenting me about it etc. Didn't you lose weight last year too??
Anyway it's not acceptable and I was getting mad back at him, which just made everything worse. I have now decided to just say STOP and then walk away, and then talk about it later when he and I are calm. Not sure if it's going to work... but hoping it will.

Looking forward to others insight to this as well.

 

[Rory]

Does Marie speak French?

sorry to edit just saw the posts re husbands moods - my friend experienced the same - sent husband for a full medical (bloods and stuff). Nothing serious except very low on some vitamin - can’t remember what. Anyhow a slight change to diet, bit of mental health guidance, no alcohol for a month or so. He admitted later how better he felt and his manner did improve.

 

[LittleMore Cottage]

Learned something new today from Julie at Mapleton ( thought she was saying it wrong) but caschepot. is pronounced cash po..... so there you go Snorts. It's not cash pot as you say all the time. Not a smart as you think you are Mr. Pretentious..

 

[Pekey]

I think it's a bit of grumpy old man syndrome, and also his need to be in control.

This is probably true too!
When a husband has his own business they need to be "in control" all the time...... even when retired!

Wish me luck next Thursday as his other bad knee is going to be replaced finally.

 

[LittleMore Cottage]

How high do foxes jump as the garden is protected my a very tall stone wall?

If not fox, raccoons, pine martens, skunk and cats are all predators as well and pine martens can climb

How high do foxes jump as the garden is protected my a very tall stone wall?

 

[T Rex]

Lipton is only good for American style sweet tea.

Oh my beloved @MRShavershamsdress - so true! With Florida's "pre-heat of Hades Summer" on, it's back to sun tea season! (Not going to lie- this is one of my favourite American summer traditions!) And yes, it has to be Lipton! I'd never make a proper cuppa with Lipton, but this is the magical tea for southern-style sweet tea!

 

[Pekey]

Happy Mothers Day to the Aussies , USA and I think NZ??

I am off to my daughters for Afternoon Tea made by my grand daughter. she is 13.

 

[TorontoGWM]

 

[Jules100]

Sometimes husbands are dicks.