24/03/2009 by Brigid.

You can tell John is away. I am eating my dinner while typing this, while all around lies the debris from today’s unfinished projects and, on the table in front of me, is a large steel pressure canner, just arrived by mail order from the US, and still in its box.  There is just about room for a place mat and cheese board.

I’m having soup again. It is my own fault. Whenever I make minestrone, I always make too much, and John and I end up eating it for days. This time, with John not here to eat his share, it might, feasibly, not get finished. The recipe calls for a huge quantity of neatly diced vegetables, as well as bacon, chickpeas and tomatoes. Though I say so myself, it’s not a bad soup. Quite tasty, actually. But there is something rather off-putting about the colour of this week’s offering. The addition of red, instead of green, cabbage, initially gave the broth an unusually rich brown colour. Against the tomatoey background, the contrasting colours of the chickpeas, red cabbage, leek, carrot and courgette, looked surprisingly appetising. But, after a day or so, the purple dye from the cabbage started to leech into the broth, and most of the vegetables are now a uniform grey purple colour, the sort you expect to see when you wash your undies on the wrong cycle.

The canner is for cat food. Having read one too many horror stories about what goes into commercial pet food, I now prepare fresh meat for our two little carnivores. The trouble is, being away for several weeks this summer, one cannot expect the good folk at the cattery to spend hours chopping up chicken carcasses. Dry food is, well …. dry. And the only time I ever tried them on tinned food, they turned their spoilt little noses up. So, one day, looking at all the bottled pâtés and cassoulets on the supermarket shelves, I hit upon the solution. Home canning.

The French are mad for home bottled fruit and veg and bits of duck and goose preserved in fat but, otherwise, don’t go in much for ‘canned’ meat. In fact, I couldn’t find out very much about home canning at all from European sources. You cannot even buy domestic pressure canners this side of the Atlantic. But search the Internet and you will find a plethora of advice from the backwoods of America, where well-fed, round-faced, jolly-looking women, regularly can anything from squirrel to venison!

Did I say the canner was big? At 23 quarts, it is enormous. The box says I can process 7 quart jars, 20 pint jars or 24 half-pint jars. I can only imagine what the cattery owner will say, when I turn up with a box full of bottled cat food and instructions to keep the jars. Still, cats aside, I am reading the instruction and recipe book, and getting quite excited about the prospect of filling the shelves of our cave with home made stews and pâtés. Perfect for those occasions when my own backwoodsman unexpectedly brings home a posse of hungry, lumberjack-shirt wearing, mates for dinner.

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12/03/2009 by Brigid.

You will have noticed that we have been conspicuous by our absence for the last couple of months and, to be frank, we have started to get complaints. The truth is that things have been fairly quiet.  As Marriot Elgar once wrote, “there was no wrecks … nobody drownded, ‘fact nothing to laugh at, at all”. I suppose we should be quite grateful.

My enthusiasm for writing has also been tempered recently by a disobliging computer. In fact, as I sit here, cheerfully tapping away on my new laptop, I realise that the frequent losses of hours of work have had a profound psychological effect – possibly permanent! Even now, I find myself looking for the tell-tale signs that this new machine might be about to close down, freeze or self-destruct. I am almost willing it upon myself.

That said, I am not sure which is more nerve-racking: a computer whose only predictable feature is that it doesn’t work properly, or the veritable roller-coaster ride involved in setting up a shiny new one.

I did take the precaution of asking John to start the process of installing Windows Vista, partly because I know nothing about the dark art of setting up the router, and partly so that I would have someone else to blame when it all went wrong … as it soon did. It took just two or three clicks of the mouse to irrevocably set the primary language to French: “France French” to be precise, presumably to differentiate it from Belgium, Djibouti, or Vanuatu French. To be fair, this did come as something of a surprise to us both, as the menu option suggested that he was about to set the time and date. 

The router connection successfully established, I was now, worryingly, connected to the Internet. The pre-installed anti-virus software helpfully informed me that my computer was already at risk, and Windows, reassuringly, insisted that there were “multiple problems” with my security. I moved the cursor and hovered over the Security Centre icon. “An unknown program is trying to access your computer. Accept vi*gra4u.exe? Yes. No.” NO! I tap the touchpad. Another window opens. “Reset homepage to luciouslucys*xysingles? NO! At this point the glossy widescreen resolution shrinks the image to 10% and the menu bar disappears off the page. Not to worry, my next action expands everything to 500% and the cursor vanishes completely.

I go looking in the Control Panel for the touchpad sensitivity settings. “Ping!”, goes the computer. “Initializing Babbletwat instant messaging … connect with friends you don’t know and have never met …” NO! NO! NO!

There used to be a time when new computers were packed in polystyrene chips, and delivered in boxes so large that they could easily have housed two or three vagrants under Waterloo Bridge! At least half of the fun of getting one, was the time spent finding the English-language portion of the owner’s manual, and thumbing through a dozen or so freebie CDs to see what was worth keeping. Not so anymore. My laptop came in a disappointingly small, laptop-sized, box, without so much as a quick start guide. Not that there wasn’t plenty of freebie software pre-installed, it is just that one had to consent to the licence agreement before it would actually tell you what it did. Suffice to say, most of it has now been meticulously de-installed.

Still, we’re getting there now. With a bit of jiggery-pokery, I eventually managed to convince Windows Vista to accept a backup file from XP, and most of the system menus are back in English. I feel almost at home. Even the machine’s remaining Gallic quirks are beginning to grow on me …

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