WEBSITE

I have been beavering away for the last few days setting up the new website … for me this is a whole new world and being untrained in all this sort of stuff, it is a long and complicated process – no, long and very logical, needing total concentration.  After three hours I find the brain just closes down and smoke starts coming out of my ears (instead of my mouth!!).  Fortunately the New Husband has gone out into the big city of Brussels for the afternoon so the house is quiet – his office is at home and apart from sneaking into the kitchen every now and then, he does manage to stay in his office most of the day without bounding into the drawing room where I work to tell me of his zillionth brainwave of the day – however when he does, all my work has to stop as I can’t work and listen at the same time!  So I should be continuing with the site, but I need a break!

Gardening would be good but the lovely weather of last week has been replaced with cold and unrelenting rain, so we’ll give that a miss this afternoon.  Saturday we took a trip up to the Belgian coast in glorious sun – I am getting quite fond of these enormous sandy beaches – shame about the wind though.  That wretched dog of mine, Angus, disgraced himself totally on the beach.  The beach is about 4km long and about 1km wide when the tide is out (it was) … the dog rushes round like a demented soul (he is) and then spies the only kids making sandcastles on all of the beach.  He rushes up to them (being a very sociable  sort of dog and fond of small children who invariably have food in their hands which are approximately the same height as his mouth) and there and then craps on their sandcastle … embarrassing?  Not for him – he just rushed off to chase gulls or some other stupid thing, leaving me to rush up, apologise and whip out a doggy bag to clear up after him.  Fortunately the man with his two grandchildren was very nice about it – thank goodness it wasn’t in England – I would probably have got a £200 fine, a 6 six month sentence and the dog would have an ASBO.  By the way dogs are allowed on the beach apart from mid-June until mid-September.  Anyway the walk continued and I spied hoof marks in the sand – do riders stop and pick up their horses’ offerings?  Probably not.  However, if one had to choose, I don’t mind walking in horse droppings but hate walking in dog poo (who does?).  Sat outside a café having a drink and when we walked back along the beach, guess what?  The sandcastles had been abandoned!

The Rock Thrower will be up here in a couple of weeks, shuffling around, talking text speak, emptying my purse and asking when supper is ready – he doesn’t know that the day after his arrival the council are coming around to take way all my monsters in the garage – everything has to be on the pavement by 2pm, ready to go.  As the New Husband will be in England, RT and I have to empty the garage and I might well chuck out some old stuff belonging him when he isn’t here!  La Fée Verte and the Bébé Fée Verte might be coming up too over the Easter weekend, so I should be working hard on the website now as the next couple of weeks will be out of the question – especially as my children are computer junkies and need mega daily fixes on the Internet, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc.  The only time I get near my computer when they are here is around 4am and then it is so cluttered with their junk I need an hour to get it back into some sort of working order.

This is about the only house left on the beach front – the rest are horrid blocks; the only advantage – between the front and the beach there isn’t a road, just a promenade.

READY, STEADY …

Gigi (see link on the right) asked for the recipe for Poulet au Citron – the only recipe that the New Husband has as yet mastered.  We shall therefore assume that you can prepare and serve this without absolutely no knowledge of cooking whatsoever.  Don’t expect photos as 1) during the preparation the kitchen takes on Hiroshima proportions and 2) I am not that sad to take photos of the completed dish before eating it!  The recipe is originally in French so I have vaguely translated it so if there are funny words use your imagination.  It is easy, cheap and seems to be idiot-proof.  It will take 30 minutes and is enough for 4 people.

You need

700 g chicken breasts (I bought organic)

1 bit of fresh ginger (1cm or 2cm)

2 shallots

2 lemons preferably organic

20cl of oil

3 soup spoons honey (acacia is best as fairly neutral in taste)

3 soup spoons rice wine (we left this out as we didn’t have any)

3 soup spoons of soy sauce

5 cl chicken stock

Salt

Coriander leaves (chopped)

Rice to accompany – the cooking of which I will leave to your imagination …

How to go about it

Cut up chicken breasts into 3cm squares, dry them on kitchen roll so they don’t spit at you during cooking.  Peel ginger and cut into thin strips.  Peel shallots and dice finely.

Wash your lemons in hot water and dry.  Peel one of them finely leaving behind the white inside which is too bitter.  Cut into very fine strips.  Juice the two lemons.

Heat up oil in wok or a pan – when hot fry the chicken for about 3 minutes until golden – take it out of pan and put on kitchen roll to absorb excess fat.

Empty pan of fat, just leaving 3 soup spoons of fat; quickly fry up ginger, shallots and lemon rind in the oil.  Add honey and leave it to melt, then add lemon juice, rice wine, soy sauce and stock.

Let this bubble away quietly until it starts to thicken slightly.  Then add chicken, salt to taste and at the last minute the chopped coriander.

In the meantime you have cooked the rice – just put all this together on a plate and serve.

As easy as that!

DOG DAYS

Today I am totally pissed off and bored, so perhaps it is time to have a little blog therapy.  Firstly the weather is totally awful – damp and dark and sad – I had forgotten how depressing weather in northern Europe can be … I left England thirty-odd years ago and lived in the south-west of France where the sky is lighter in the winter and then I moved to Switzerland high up in the Alpes above the clouds so in winter if it wasn’t snowing, we had brilliant sunshine.  Since my move to Brussels a year ago, apart from May last year, the weather has been overcast and gloomy.  Added to which for our holidays last year we decided to do a rain theme – 10 days in Brittany and 10 days in Co. Mayo, Ireland – both met our expectations!  One day of sun in Brittany and one in Ireland.  I like to think I am not a lying on a beach all day person, but at the moment four or five days of sun wouldn’t go amiss.

We could of course just shut up the house and whisk ourselves away to a week of sun and bugger the footprints we would be contributing to the Earth’s demise – unfortunately the recession is starting to be felt quite seriously and although the New Husband beavers away, clients are being sluggish in paying up.  He has in fact just whizzed to the shops to buy supper as I think he is fed up with my menus on a shoestring … however at least it gets him in the kitchen doing other things than raiding the ‘fridge!

A couple of days later …

Although he doesn’t cook, the New Husband turned out an enjoyable dinner of chicken with lemon and ginger – this is his only recipe, so I think in a couple of months’ time, I will hate the sight of it!  We won’t talk about the state of the kitchen after his culinery efforts.

Yesterday, to add to my general gloom, I looked out of the drawing room window and noticed a flat tyre on the car – odd, as the tyres are only a couple of months old.  On going to investigate, found that a second one was flat … some sod had either let them down or slashed them.  Rang the garage who said ‘Unscrew the valve caps and see if there is anything inside’ … bingo! a peppercorn in each valve cap.  Better than having them slashed but a stupid bloody thing to do.  I normally just get in the car and drive and never check the tyres.  I admit to having a large gaz-guggling SUV which I love.  Now that I live in Brussels I no longer need it, but of course it is totally unsaleable so I am stuck with it, and even if I did sell it, the money from the sale would only buy a horrid little car, totally unsuitable for long journeys.  We also have a small car for the town – what makes me so cross with all these idiotic people who take it out on SUVs is that in fact the big car gives off less CO2 than the small, ancient car.

I do try and do my Save the Planet bit – we recycle everything possible, I buy as much as I can food-wise that doesn’t come from the other end of the world, our house is pretty chemical-free, I walk to the local shops and take the tram when I go into the centre – all that kind of stuff, but when some idiot does this it really gets me angry.  If they want to be eco-warriors, that’s fine by me, but do it in a more intelligent manner.  Because of their bit of fun I had to drive to the garage, get the compressor, drive back and then go back to the garage to return the compressor and get the tyres checked and THEN drive home again, and not forgetting the time I had to run the compressor to inflate the tyres.  So how much extra CO2 did I put into the atmosphere?