Raspberry and rose wine sorbet

So, there's been a few blog posts I've been meaning to put up for a while now, but life has kind of got in the way. (I'll tell you more about that once things are a bit more settled...)

In the meantime, you can have a recipe that would have been very timely, had I put it up when I actually tested it out - it's lovely for the summer, and down here, that still goes on for a little bit longer yet, though the days are noticeably cooler now than they were in proper summer...

I bought myself an icecream maker this summer - I'd wanted one for ages, and summer in a hot country with some spare money (thank you former colleagues!) seemed like an excellent time to try it out.

The machine came with some recipes, but none of them particularly inspired me. So, to Google I hied. (Other search engines are available, blah blah blah...) It produced two fabulous recipes - well, two that I've tried so far, others are on the To Do list. (Stop laughing, you at the back, I do make To Do lists, even if the stuff on them never manages to get done!)

One was a basic vanilla custard icecream, which was lovely, but this post is about the Raspberry and Rosé wine sorbet the Guardian kindly shared. It. Was. Divine.

I even have some step by step photos (well, almost step by step - I missed a couple of steps because I wasn't paying attention. You get what you pay for, on this blog!)

Note that this is best made the night before you actually need it, since it will need some time in the freezer, unless you have an amazingly awesome icecream maker, I suppose...

Instructions:

First, heat up 500ml of rosé wine with 130(ish) grams of sugar in a saucepan. Make sure the sugar is dissolved, by stirring occasionally.

Then, add your raspberries (340 grams of them, or the nearest equivalent depending on the size of your punnets) to a large container (this bit's important - it needs to fit all your raspberries *and* the wine...) and pour on the wine/sugar mix. Leave to cool.

Once the mixture is cool, blend with a blender so all the raspberries are properly mixed into the wine mixture. (You can probably also do this with a fork, if you have no blender, but it will be fiddly and messy if you do.)

In an ideal world, at this stage you would sieve the mixture into another jug, to get rid of all the raspberry pips. I don't have a sieve, so that didn't happen. (I would recommend doing it if you do, though, the pips were quite noticeable in the final sorbet! Not a problem, just noticeable...)

Chill the mixture thoroughly in the fridge, so it takes less time for your sorbet maker to freeze it. I put it in the fridge for an hour or so while I did other things.

Add the mixture to the machine, in line with the instructions for your machine. For mine, that means starting it up, then pouring it through the little hole in the lid. Which always leads to spilling, because I am just that gifted. Then you can go away and do other things for half an hour or so, while the sorbet machine does its thing. Note that the wine in this sorbet will slow down the freezing time, because alcohol always does.

Once it's done, it will probably still need some time in the freezer to properly solidify, because of the wine. Pour into an appropriate container and put in your freezer for a couple of hours.

Leave it out of the freezer for a few minutes before scooping - it will soften quickly and be much easier to serve!

Eat, and enjoy the concentrated taste of summer. It is bliss.

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Summer arrives - couch 2 5k and strawberries

The sunshine has arrived! This is a momentous thing, having come from the frozen north where winter lasts for ever (especially this year!) and it has inspired me to be healthier.

I know, I know, me and every other person in the Western world. But still. I'm at least 10 kilos heavier than I want to be, and 2 dress sizes bigger than I'd like, so it's time to do something about it.

In this case, "something" is starting out with beginning some exercise and eating more fruit and vegetables (bonus: they're cheaper than eating out, so there's that) - I think baby steps are definitely the way to go here.

I've started doing the Couch 2 5k programme again (I'm sure I blogged at length about this previously) - it aims to get people who do no exercise (hi!) from that point to being able to run 5km. It worked last time (in that I went from being totally utterly unfit to being able to run for 30 minutes consecutively without dying), and I surprised myself by finding I actually enjoyed it, so keep your fingers crossed for me this time too...

The first run went well - I didn't die - and I had breakfast on the beach. Strawberries are awesome. Tonight we are having salad nicoise, which rocks.

Breakfast of champions

(Side note while I think of it: I'm likely to write a bit about food and the like on this blog - and not all of it will be the super-healthy food you probably think I ought to be eating in order to lose weight. I thank you in advance for not commenting on this.)

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Freedom!

OK, so, it's been a while. How are you all?

Me? Well, let's see. Since we last spoke, I've quit my job and just finished moving house - I'm now down south full-time again! Hooray!

All I now need is for summer to actually start... Today's not looking likely, but maybe tomorrow. It's June - is a little sunshine on the Mediterranean coast really too much to ask?

My major tasks over the next week or so are:

• Unpack
• Clean
• Work out how the French unemployment system works
• Launch the web design business I've got floating around my head
• Make lots of shiny things!

These will all, admittedly, be easier to focus on if the weather's not so awesome. But I'd still quite like some sunshine, please...

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Weekend round-up

Weekends are, it appears, unlikely to get blog updates. I'm sure this tears at your hearts with the pain of a thousand dying stars, but I expect you'll learn to cope somehow.

There, that didn't take long, did it?

Friday, I may or may not have written here- I think that might have been my day of stating the fucking obvious, where I told you how buses work. See what happens when you start to run out of inspiration? (In my defence, the sheer number of totally bewildered tourists I see daily leads me to suspect that either it's not as easy as it looks, or we get all the stupid people. I doubt it's the latter, though I'm open to persuasion.)

We went for drinks with friends in the evening on the terrace, ate dinner and watched the sun set and that was Friday.

Saturday, it rained. It's been raining a lot this week - at all is a lot, if you ask me. It's August for crying out loud. I wrote a couple of thousand words on my new story, having woken up early again, and then we went to Antibes, because Nice is depressing in the rain. Antibes is better, though trying to find a bus stop in the rain where there are lots of busy roads all intersecting each other is not recommended. If you have an umbrella, it might be bearable, I suppose... The rain got heavier, and trying to get from the bus station to our house was just nasty. I boycotted the rest of the day.

Sunday was much better. We had breakfast at a cafe on the seafront, went to Cap d'Ail and Eze and walked along the beach, ate sushi in sun in Place Garibaldi, and had dinner out on the now-dry terrace.

Yesterday was a public holiday in Monaco, for some religious thing. So we took advantage of the continuing sunshine and went to Menton. Despite my standing objection to Menton, it's nice enough in the sun. I'm slowly warming to the place, though I still wouldn't want to live there. Photos will follow, at some point, as usual.

Today is sunny, I have orders to fill, food shopping to do, and that's about it. I think I shall spend the afternoon lying in the sun on the terrace. Maybe I'll brave the beach and go swimming, even. How strenuous...

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Sorting through old clothes...

Some of you may remember the trauma it was moving here, because of all the throwing out I had to do. (My books, my poor, lovely books.) Since we're being temporarily evicted (more on which later, no doubt), I'm having to sort through my clothes again because we still have too much stuff to sensibly move.

This time it's much easier.

It's helped by there being almost no clothes I can still fit into, and of those I can, I just don't like lots of them. Sorting out winter clothes in the middle of a Mediterranean summer helps, too - even with our air-conditioning on (and I am so, so pleased we live somewhere with air conditioning - even more so that the electricity is included in our rent...) it's still not the kind of weather where you really want to think too hard about coats. Throwing out sweaters is much easier in these kind of temperatures. And summer clothes, well, I have less of them to start with, and they take up less room anyway.

I have 2 big bin bags full of clothes to throw out. 100 litres of clothes. I wonder what else I can throw out while I'm in the mood...

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Sunshine and bank holiday weekends

Sun and bank holidays have combined forces and ensured that I've been utterly incapable of posting anything here. Having friends over has meant we had to tidy - our house is spotless, and I've even mopped. Me, with a mop. I can hardly believe it myself.

My experiments into wheat-free cooking continue - I'm trying to make bread out of chickpea flour today.

The dough:

The dough sitting in the warm sun to raise:

I have my doubts, but we shall see what happens - it might work... I shall be sure to take photos of the finished product for you.

While we're looking at photos, this is the best view in the world. It's from the bar I drink coffee at in the afternoons.

You can also have some pretty pictures of flowers - the roses are out in bloom here, and I liked what Beaulieu have done with their roses around the big trees in the park. (We walk through it to go to the supermarket sometimes.)

And one of the large red flowers that grows in the street between here and the bakery:

(All photos taken with my mobile phone, so apologies for any quality issues...)

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Tarte aux pommes

I've heard lots of perfectly plausible reasons for people wanting to move to France. None of them is the correct one, though. The real reason to move to France is so that you can sit on your balcony, in the sunshine, with your orange tree smelling sweetly behind you, eating fresh tarte aux pommes from the baker up the road.

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Lunch

It's definitely summer - it's been so hot this morning, it was a relief to walk in the shady streets of the old town, to go to the post office. Any tips on wasp deterrance would be very welcome though; they like summer, and Oscar, and I'm a little worried they might decide to set up home here...

Today's lunch is fresh, warm baguette from the best bakery in the world (although the baker is a bit grumpy, sometimes, today she was all smiley!), serrano ham, chilled chevre and pesto. No one is to even think of mentioning the calorie content in this meal, else I will find you and hit you. It's summer, calories consumed while preparing to go to the beach don't count.

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Summer evenings

I'm sitting out on the balcony after dinner, writing this, watching the moon get brighter and brighter, with Oscar smelling lovely in the background. The only noises I can hear are the waves breaking on the shore, children laughing and birds singing. I spent the afternoon lying on the beach, in the sun, until it got too hot. This is the view I have at the moment:

This is why I moved here.

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Zombie Pizza Girl

First, running: Week 4, Day 1 was today and it damn near killed me. Week 4 may last longer than a week...

For lunch I made spinach, red onion and chorizo crepes. They actually worked out quite well.

Afternoon was deeply lazy, lying on the beach reading - it's been beautifully hot here; if the sea weren't still dirty, I'd have totally gone swimming. Tomorrow is supposed to be nice too, so more beach, I feel.

For dinner, the intention was to make a jambalaya type thing. But then we thought pizza on the beach would be a better idea. By the time we found somewhere that was open and ready to sell pizza, it was too late to catch the last of the sun on the beach, so we ate pizza on the balcony. From the weirdest pizza box. You know how most people put their company name and phone number and things on the box? Not this place:

She's clearly had her neck snapped - look at the angle of her face. Bonus points if you can work out what the thing growing out of her head is... Why, if you were a company that didn't *also* sell the kinds of services more usually found in Amsterdam, would you put a picture like that on your pizza box?

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Summer, it is here again

It is - today, I spent all morning on the balcony in the sun (after going to the post office to send off our applications for various pieces of paper from the embassy - fucking extortionate amount of money and hassle just to get a piece of paper that does some unknown thing...), and then the afternoon was on the beach.

Oscar is growing little flowers now, and his oranges are nearly orange.

Suicidal pigeon:

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Excitement in the skies

I looked out of my window doing the washing up this morning to see an airplane flying at me. Then another. And then a third. Quite unnerving - they were flying really, really low, just skimming the top of the houses. They were securite civile airplanes, bright yellow with red writing on, and Wikipedia tells me they are planes used to fight fires in the summer - they fly down to the water, scoop it up, fly off and dump it on the fire. Today they were practising, so it must be nearly summer. A little disconcerting nonetheless.

Crap pics from my mobile, because my proper camera doesn't have any batteries:

While I'm thinking of photos, this was last night's dinner - summer really does feel like it's nearly here:

Oh, and you're all back as far as Google Analytics is concerned. Which is nice - hello, my loyal and clearly slightly disturbed readers ;-) One day, soon, I'm going to do a post that invites you all to introduce yourselves - I'd like to know who I'm writing to!

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More photos of sunshine

Today has been beautiful weather - we ate lunch on the beach today and went for a walk to St Jean-Cap Ferrat, and then I was even productive and wrote more of my story sitting in the last of the afternoon sunshine. There were even people swimming - mad people, undoubtedly, but still. And the most adorable pair of little girls, who were playing ukaleles.

Lots of photos below, because I know you all can't possibly be sick of them yet ;-) I decided I couldn't take a photo of the people, but there's several photos of a dog who also decided swimming was a good idea, and some birds who were singing incredibly noisily, and fish. Who were at least quiet, and have an excuse for swimming.

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