Desserts and Blues

St Frédéric
Yesterdays weather: lovely

Happy Birthday to James. 21 today!

Poor Jazz was so exhausted that she stayed home all day and only stirred occasionally to eat. Which is one of her favourite hobbies. Sitting near a mouse hole patiently on guard is another. She has gone out now but already returned for a snackette this morning.

We are having people to lunch tomorrow and this always causes me a problem because I can't 'do' puddings. I'm a hopeless pastry cook. I read somewhere that you need special hands to make pastry and unfortunately I just don't have them . Even shop bought ready-rolled pastry goes wrong for me and tarts come out of the oven with over cooked edges and soggy bottoms.

It is the done thing in France to buy a dessert for such an occasion, but they are always so huge that Jon and I are left eating it for days after the lunch party and we don't really like desserts that much. I will probably fall back on my old favourite, chocolate mousse or crème caramel, I don't think I have done either of those for these visitors yet.

We will be starting with an old favourite, melon and ham. The local Quercy melons are just on the market now, late this year because of the awful weather. Only in France would such news as this make the front page of the newspaper, but it did yesterday. The Tour de France was relegated to the back page for the first time, and the Cahors Blues Festival, the biggest music festival within striking distance of us was somewhere in the middle pages. We won't be attending, not because we don't like blues (although, it isn't one of our favourite musical genres) but because Cahors is such a mess at the moment. They have dug up the entire main road through the town and won't finish until December; this makes parking virtually impossible unless you get to town before 8am - fat chance!!!

Of course, as we have planned to have people over for lunch tomorrow, the weather is about to break and the forecast for tomorrow is..... rain. The sun won't come back until Saturday, but next week looks good. We're not holding our breath though!