Wednesday 13 June 2012

Jardin du Luxembourg

The Jardin du Luxembourg is only about three minutes walk from the hotel we normally stay in, so we always spend a fair amount of time there, no matter what time of year. Often we sit and watch the tennis, but with the French Open on this time there wasn't a lot of good tennis being played on the courts.
There is a training centre for bee keepers, and it's the first time we've seen them in action - lots of smoke in the air and a small area around the hives roped off. There was an enormous stack of frames in a gazebo, but that photo was a bit blurred.




We often see dogs, too - but it's the first time we've seen a ferret. We wondered if it was a gift for somebody - you can see a single pink rosebud in the pet-carrier, and after he'd let the ferret have a little walk through the undergrowth and given it a drink, he carefully wiped it down with a damp cloth before returning it to the carrier.


This is the Senate building. I know it looks grey - but actually it was 8.30 in the evening and beautifully warm. At lunchtime there hadn't been a single vacant chair. In the dry weather it is very dusty - you can just see it on these park keepers, getting ready to close up and go home,  and after walking through  at lunchtime with our suitcases we were both noticeably dusty!





We had a picnic lunch in the garden on our anniversary - sandwiches and patisserie from the local bakery, strawberries, little coffee desserts and a bottle of sweet Breton cider.



On our last day it was a bit windier - much more fun for all the kids sailing boats on the central pond. The second view looks over towards the Pantheon.





p.s. - the sign with the Eiffel tower in an earlier post - I think it was someone having fun with a no left turn sign, and adding their own spin to it!


Paris!!

Every time we go to Paris we walk down the boulevard St Michel and I look in the window of this shop. The display is always so beautiful to look at. This time we didn't just look, we went in on our last afternoon and  I got an umbrella as the second installment of my birthday present from C. It's the same design as the white and black one in the window with the Eiffel Tower on it, but it's a collapsible compact one. I'd have loved the regular one, but it was just a bit too expensive in our current circumstances. Maybe another time! A bonus of the compact one is that the ribs aren't metal at all, they're some fancy new type of flexible plastic and hopefully will stand up much better to wind.






Thursday 7 June 2012

Graffiti

We're just back from a short trip to Paris to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. It's going to take a while to go through the photos, but the ones with graffiti in them were easy to pick out...



This one was at the top of Rue Edgar Quinet. We were checking the opening hours of our favourite restaurant and then picking up a metro straight over to the Trocadero. We arrived just before a weekly art market finished - my favourite was a stand with metal sculptures, but we were also attracted by some music-themed paintings. The artist used to be a professional sax teacher and musician, who had taken up painting in his retirement.




Monday 4 June 2012

Favourites from May

Some favourite picks (non Christmas!) from May. It seems this was a creative month, hard to narrow the choice down...









And the two extremes that take me out of my comfort zone:




Friday 1 June 2012

Orange

From the Botanic Gardens last Saturday. My own escholzia is a very pale buttery yellow.






Monday 28 May 2012

Greenfinches

We've been seeing quite a lot of greenfinches recently - here's one adult, and  one very fearless young one I spotted yesterday.














Friday 25 May 2012

MIB5 / Chicken Soup

Men In Black 5  ~ not that I've seen 1 or 2, but I've been seeing the poster ads for 3 around the place.


Last Saturday night I took two chicken breast fillets out to defrost. On Sunday morning I remembered that we'd decided that one was sufficient for the stir-fry that I was making.
So I took out a chicken carcase (I get them free from the butcher from time to time, and stick them in freezer) and made a good stock, poaching the spare chicken breast in it for a short while...
Then we had a lovely chicken and sweetcorn soup.

Chicken and Sweetcorn Soup: (serves 4)

 1 litre good chicken stock (with sliced ginger if you like, although I found that adding grated ginger at the end was sufficient).
6 spring (green) onions
2 slices fresh ginger
12 oz creamed sweetcorn
1 chicken stock cube if you like extra flavour - I don't like extra additives
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tblsp cornflour
1 egg white
4 ounces /100g shredded cooked chicken

Strain the stock and remove excess fat from the surface.
Chop 4 of the spring onions, grate the ginger and  put in a pan with the stock, sweetcorn, stock cube and sesame oil, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil.
Blend the cornflour with a little cold water, stir it into the soup and cook for a minute till it thickens.
Whisk the egg white with two tablespoons of cold water and drizzle it into the soup, stirring continuously.
Add the shredded chicken and heat through.
Serve and garnish with the remaining spring onions finely chopped.

As I only made half the quantity, the remaining stock went into a green vegetable risotto which we had for dinner tonight.