January 2024 Newsletter
My birthday month and Earl Grey blood orange madeleines
To try:
Le Fleuri Figues Amandes
Creamy bloomy rind cheeses are as French as cigarettes and melodrama. Thing is though, Brie and Camembert are the seductresses of the group, they’re the ones that catch your eye and end up stroking your leg under the table. But once we drag ourselves away from Brie and Camy, we can turn our attention to their charming friends. There is Brillat-Savarin, mild-mannered yet knows how to show you a good time seeing as it’s extravagantly indulgent, and the earthy Ecrou, an outside-the-box thinker considering it is literally hexagonal, and then there is the local siren made at Deux Chavanne fromagerie in Toulouse of which I simply cannot eat enough.
Le Fleuri is usually the name of any bloomy rind cheese, but in this case, it’s specific because Deux Chavanne has worked some magic. They split a creamy wheel in two and fill it with a mascarpone, fig and almond mixture, like a cream cake. This sweet center balances the cheese’s funky salty chew, and I had a guest on a Taste of Toulouse tour recently describe it as cheesecake.
Deux Chavanne are devils and make another variety in this filled-cheese category, the other being with fresh truffle. As this costs over 100 euros a kilo, I jealously watch those lucky customers splash the cash, but at least I have fig and almonds to tide me over.
To watch:
La Belle Verte (1996) directed by Coline Serreau
Possibly the first and only ‘utopian’ film ever made. Hollywood has a problem with dystopias. This could have wider-reaching reasons, possibly reflecting a general sentiment on the state of humanity what with all our wars, contagious diseases, and natural disasters. Although the French have a reputation for the dark, the depressing, and the plain unwatchable, this means they are open to experiment with film genre. Hence La Belle Verte.
Life on a distant planet is idyllic and harmonious. Money doesn’t exist and telepathy and acrobatics are daily pastimes. One woman (who is also the film’s director, almost a meta take on a documentary-within-a-movie) heads to Earth to learn from earthlings, and in doing so, teaches them and us the audience to examine and laugh at our own absurdities. This film confirms our deep-rooted suspicion that human life from an outsider’s perspective is a peculiar thing. It is witty and charming and I didn’t want the film to end. Starring a very young and very beautiful Marion Cotillard.
Here’s to January - a month of highs (my birthday! restaurants! Tony visiting!) and lows (tractors blocking the motorway!)
January has been a month of Plan Bs. It’s made me start to strategize around the Plan As, to treat them as the intentional back ups they should have always been. First was that night of lasagne when Tony visited and all the electricity suddenly outed. This has happened once before when I used an electric juicer - I was hungover and only freshly-squeezed OJ could have possibly soothed my frayed nerves. Sadly those nerves were stripped ragged because practically every fuse in the box needed replacing. Orange juice is never worth this amount of drama. This time, said juicer having blown the last time, I can’t say what caused the electricity to blow (were we all charging our phones or something?), but Gaylord switched everything back on with a flick of button. However, in that surge, the oven had given up the ghost. With a lasagne inside. So, rather that crunch lasagne sheets, Plan B was naan-wrapped kebabs of chicken and shawarma from the takeaway down the road. A friend visits you in the culinary capital of the world and you show him a good time at the local kebab shop.
The second was on my birthday. Birthdays, like other events such as weddings or funerals, usually require steering clear of any and all Plan Bs. But, no doubt because they are sacrosanct, all of these milestones come skipping along, hand in hand with mischief. And in my birthday’s case, the farmers’ strike.
The farmers have been raising hell, or should I say hay bales, for a few months now and the other week their tractors were parked slap-bang in the middle of the main roads of Toulouse, or charging down the narrow alleyways as they blasted music from da club, and by all accounts, creating a successful amount of chaos.
On my birthday, Gaylord and I innocently set off for a spa in the Alps. This place is like a mystic temple to inhabitants of Toulouse, its name dropped in whispers to gasps of delight (“We’re going to… Balnea…”) - we couldn’t wait to be blessed by its infinity-pooled holiness. Unfortunately, I cannot testify to have been born-again because we never got there. Those hay bales blocked the motorway. To all the people who wondered why we didn’t get out the car and just move the hay bales, I’d like to see you move a seven-tonne tractor too. Behind that trench of hay, there was a blockade of tractors and combine harvesters lining up like army cadets. The farmers meant war and if that meant no spa for the birthday girl, so be it. We swung around and drove home, Gaylord first quickly picking up chocolate in case I needed appeasing. That Plan B involved hot chocolate, twinkly lights, and the sofa bed, to make a sitting-room cinema to hibernate in for the rest of the day.
And the third Plan B, well that was the night Gaylord and I planned to to see Poor Things at the cinema and, when we scanned our QR codes, armed with our cinema snacks to enter the movie theatre, we discovered that Gaylord had booked the tickets at a cinema in Clermont-Ferrand - a four-hour drive away.
We all have good intentions and most of mine are planned to give you good content, dear reader, but those curveballs are inevitable - even if three in a month feels like a record - and well, very little in life ever goes to plan.
Apart from the food. That did go to plan. Mostly.
The 3 Meals of the Month
The great, the divine, and the one that missed its mark