Bacon, lettuce and cannellini stew

A few months ago, I found a really lovely blog that's become really quite famous, Loveaudrey. With hindsight, finding it in the middle of exams was perhaps not the best as it meant that when I really should've been revising the history of the French language, I was reading back through her posts and feeling... Well, feeling like a massive underachiever, if truth be told.

I'm pretty sure that Loveaudrey is actually a superhero in disguise. She managed to juggle two degrees, with all the stress and essays they entail, with being a wife and a mother to two kids - and she always leaves the house with really lovely lipstick on. To say she's become something of an idol to me is putting it mildly.

As I read through her posts, I realised that I really don't have the excuse of being too busy to make a decent meal every day. If she can do it, then I definitely can.

I'd copied down one of her recipes because it had really appealed to me, and last night, with the house (read: the kitchen) to myself, I decided to give it a bash.

Here's the recipe as written up on Loveaudrey's blog:

6 rashers of bacon (or a generous handful of chopped black olives if you're craving something vegetarian)

2cloves of garlic

4 tbsp olive oil

1/4 tsp fennel seeds

1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes

200ml chicken stock

1 x 400g tin of canellini beans (I also used a small tin of pinto beans and a drop more stock)

150g lettuce (the recipe calls for cos but I used 2 little gems)

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Chop the bacon and garlic. Heat the oil in a pan and add the bacon. Cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic and fennel seeds.

2.Pour in the tinned tomatoes and cook on a high heat for 5 minutes.

3. Add the stock and the drained beans, and cook for a further 5 minutes.

4. Season well, add the chopped lettuce, and allow to wilt before serving.

5. Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with lots of black pepper.

I made a couple of adjustments - firstly I halved(ish) the quantities as I was only making it for me and I still had some left over for lunch the next day. I also added a spring onion as we had a few that were languishing in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, looking very sad indeed. We didn't have any tinned chopped tomatoes either, so instead I just cut up a big beef tomato and added some water. The final change I made was to throw in a glug of white wine.

I've really become a convert to adding lettuce to hot dishes and just letting it wilt down, but I think the trick is to pick a variety that won't just go totally soggy. Cos lettuce or baby gems have quite a rigid 'spine' (anybody know what that thing is actually called??), which means that the leafy bits go soft but there's still enough crunch for it not to just turn into mush.

It was really delicious and felt very virtuous - the fact that there was plenty left over for lunch the next day is always a bonus; and it's the kind of dish that would be perfect in the middle of winter when you're really craving something warming. It was still delicious even at the height (ha!) of summer because it's not too heavy. I cooked the sauce down so it was quite thick and resembled a stew, but it'd be easy to let it stay quite clear so it's more like a soup.

I can highly recommend giving Loveaudrey's blog a look - as long as you've got plenty of time to waste going back through all of her posts! 

Loveaudrey| loveaudrey-loveaudrey.blogspot.co.uk

De-stress your Sunday

I have been home from France for three weeks and somehow, I have managed to eat five roast dinners in that time. I think that’s something of a personal record.

The thing I find fascinating about roast dinners is how much they vary from family to family, given that they are all essentially the same thing: meat, potatoes and vegetables. Some families will only ever serve Yorkshire Puddings with beef, whereas others consider it a staple of every Sunday roast. Some people only cook chicken, while others would always choose to cook lamb. Potatoes are mashed, or roasted, or boiled – or, if you’re Irish, all three. Red sauce is either ketchup or redcurrant jelly or sometimes even cranberry sauce. Sometimes broccoli is the vegetable that can always be found on the table, in other houses, it’s carrot and parsnip.

While I don’t advocate a pub chain’s equivalent of a roast dinner over one that your mum or grandmother has made (they can never, ever cook vegetables without making them taste vaguely school dinners-y); there is something quite pleasing in that fundamentally, there is no difference between that kind of a roast and the elaborate affair that is the Christmas dinner.

Which is why I can never understand why there is always so much fuss made over how difficult the Christmas meal is to make. It’s not as if we Brits are inexperienced when it comes to roasting meat and serving it with potatoes and vegetables – a fair few of us do that every weekend. But for some reason, Christmas dinner is meant to be:

a.     incredibly stressful and demanding

b.     more complicated than any other meal you could make and

c.      a total disaster from start to finish.

My mother has always approached Christmas dinner like she would any Sunday roast. “The only difference is that the turkey’s bigger, because for some reason we think that we need three times more turkey for this particular roast dinner than we would any other Sunday,” she said to me this Christmas. At the risk of making my mother sound as if she doesn’t do Christmas dinner properly, I have to say, she takes a fairly relaxed approach to making Christmas dinner. Which is probably why she insists on cooking it for the family every year and would possibly have a bit of a wobbly if someone else volunteered for the task.

Mum insists that there are five core principles when it comes to making a roast – whether it’s a typical Sunday roast or Christmas dinner.

1.     Make your life easier by preparing vegetables ahead of time.

Prepare the vegetables or potatoes as early as you feel you can get away with. Peeling carrots, parsnips and potatoes on Christmas Eve has become as much a tradition for our family as me going to Midnight Mass and sneaking in with the neighbour for a cheeky glass of red after the service.

Even when it’s not Christmas, get ahead with doing the vegetable prep. Are your carrots really going to suffer for sitting in a saucepan full of water for a couple of hours before you need them? Cook the cauliflower before you need to make the white sauce – you don’t need to faff with making sure that’s not overcooked and that the white sauce is smooth, too. Do the vegetables, then do the sauce. It’s going in the oven anyway.

2.     The microwave is your friend.

Seriously. Put aside any snobbish misconceptions you may have. Make your carrot and parsnip, mash them, and then when everyone descends for dinner just put the bowl in a microwave to reheat it. It’ll not ruin them. Honest. If it’s good enough for a whole wealth of celebrity chefs, it’s good enough for you and your Sunday roast.

3.     Timing is everything.

Work out how much time your chicken (or turkey or lamb or beef) is going to take and plan accordingly. If you’ve prepared the vegetables ahead of time and aren’t frightened to use the microwave, it’s okay to just swan into the kitchen every so often and give your veggies a gentle prod.

4.     Let the meat rest before you carve it.

It’s much easier and you don’t end up with some bits that are the size of house bricks and others that are thinner than the slices of Tesco Value wafer-thin ham.

5.     Don’t be a Sunday roast martyr.

There is nothing more annoying than to be really enjoying a meal someone’s cooked for you, making all the appropriate ‘yummy’ noises whilst they sit and prod at their dinner, complaining about how much effort it took and how the honey-roast parsnips just taste like nothing. It doesn’t half put you off complimenting the meals – and then the cook gets all huffy because nobody appreciates the food.

The bottom line is, Sunday dinners are not complicated. Christmas dinners are not complicated. All it takes is a bit of common sense and a basic idea of how much time has passed.

The other option, of course, is to do what my mother does and just get a joint of beef, brown it gently in a Le Creuset-style pot with olive oil and herbs, pour in some wine, a stock pot and then just stick it in the oven at a low heat for some number of hours.

The Deli: A Discourse

Soon after I came away to university, I (like many of my peers) quickly realised something I hadn't quite processed in the eighteen years I'd had in my parents' house: food is expensive. It's not something you really think about when you're living at home - food just appears in the cupboards and the fridge, as if by magic. You never really sit down and wonder "how much is a loaf of bread?" until your mum asks you to nip down the shops and get some, at which point you become pretty determined to get your £1.39 back. As a child, the game in the supermarket is always to try and sneak food into your trolley and see if your mum notices; as a student, it's debating whether you're really prepared to risk it on the basics chicken fillets to give you more money to spend on vodka.

When I did my first supermarket shop on my own at uni, I very quickly became that mental woman that everyone tries to ignore in Tesco, shouting at the cabbages. "ONE POUND THIRTY-NINE FOR A LOAF OF BREAD?" I exclaimed, startling an old dear buying crumpets. "I'm going to Asda - they're on two for £2.50 and I can just throw one loaf in the freezer," I informed nobody in particular, as a group of schoolchildren backed away from me clutching their sweets and looking terrified.

Meanwhile, while I'm barging through shoppers to get yellow-stickered, discounted food and having a heart attack at the price of bread, my parents are stocking their cupboards with all manner of Nice Things - olives, fancy crackers to go with posh cheeses, locally-produced rapeseed oil, Fortnum & Mason biscuits - okay, okay, those were a Christmas present. And it's all (apart from the biscuits) the fault of "Lots of Lemons" in the village.

Timed beautifully to coincide with my second year of university starting, a lovely couple in my village opened a deli. It boasts an impressive array of food, most of which is locally-sourced. Bread from Hobbs House Bakery in Nailsworth (as featured in the Channel 4 show "The Fabulous Baker Brothers"); rapeseed oil from just down the road in the Cotswolds; local cheeses - not to mention Sarah's incredible home-made quiches and pork pies. My parents make a point of going in there pretty much every weekend. They say they're being selfless and are helping to keep local businesses afloat. I say they're just greedy and like having nice food in the house.

I went in with them on Saturday and got chatting to Sarah, telling her a little bit about my corner on the web (that's this blog) and what my motivation for writing it was.

"There's this assumption that students only eat Pot Noodles and takeaways - and that's just not me," I explained. "I like cooking, I like knowing what's gone into my food - but I can't necessarily afford to buy really expensive ingredients." Like the Hobbs House bread, I thought sadly, because it isn't cheap but it blows Warburtons out of the water and into space. "I like making food that's good for you and tastes luxurious, but doesn't cost an absolute bomb. But I'm always caught between spending a little bit more on something that's higher quality; and getting food that's cheaper, but is lower quality or less ethical."

"Take these stuffed peppers," Sarah said (which I was disappointed to discover wasn't an invitation to just take the entire bowlful). "You can get these in a supermarket for maybe 20p cheaper, but they're nowhere near as good." She paused. "The issue is whether you care more about quality or price."

Well, maybe I'm just broken as a student, but my instinct is always to go for quality. If you go to a deli like this one or a specialty cheese shop and get a really decent cheddar - okay, it will cost more than what you could buy in the supermarket, but you need a lot less to get the same amount of flavour. The products stocked in Lots of Lemons are always going to be more expensive than what you can buy in supermarkets - but you pay for what you get, and what you get hasn't been shipped halfway round the world, and is likely to come from a place where the production methods are more environmentally-conscious and use techniques that have worked with nature, not against it, for hundreds of years.


In an age where chains are absolutely starting to dominate the high street, it's still somewhat novel for me to have a place I can go to where that is its only location. There isn't one up in York or down in Exeter; I can't nip into a Lots of Lemons Express to grab a sandwich on my lunch break or order my shopping from Lots of Lemons online - and thank goodness.


A trip to the deli is a treat, not a chore. When you walk in, there is always something different to try - a new bread, or a posh new dipping sauce (I can highly recommend the Cotstwold Gold Raspberry Drizzle, in case anyone's interested). Sarah and her husband Brian are always happy to help you pick out a cheese, or just have a bit of a natter about how your week's been. They are people who know what they're selling and as such are really engaged with the food they stock - you'll get no shrugs and "dunno"s from them if you ask what would really go with this interesting jelly or whether that cheese is particularly strong. And for me, this is really the heart of why you should occasionally allow yourself a little induldgence food-wise. 

Local, small business owners like Sarah and Brian need people who love food and are passionate about local, sustainable produce to come in and be prepared to part with a couple of pounds extra for their bread or their meat or their vegetables rather than automatically going to the supermarket. They need people to become interested in the origins of their food and for them to be a little more picky about what they buy.

One thing I noticed from my time in France was that meat - especially chicken - was much more expensive than at home. But you hardly ever saw massive trays of chicken at crazily reduced prices, and all of the chicken was certified by some board for poultry. The French eat less chicken but when they do have it, they'll spend more money and get higher quality food in return.

I think we should take their example and agree to spend a little bit more on bread, every so often, and get a really fantastic loaf that you actually enjoy, rather than just seeing as an edible plate for your sandwich filling. We should eat less meat but when we do, go to a butcher and spend a little bit more for a massive difference in taste - and knowledge. Nature doesn't want us to have strawberries in January, so just wait six months and then you can go to the greengrocers and have the ones that are grown in the country rather than halfway around the world, picked before they're ripe and forced to ripen in crates. We should go to delis like Lots of Lemons because the food is better, local businesses need support - and Sarah and Brian are just lovely people who care about their stock and are doing what they can to support local producers.

And isn't treating yourself to something really nice that you take delight in eating just one of the best indulgences ever?

La fin a presque arrivé!

This entry isn’t about food, but I’m sure you’ll allow me this one.

A year abroad is one of the most rewarding experiences you can hope to have, and when employers say that they value someone who’s had experience of living in a foreign country, they’re talking about how a year abroad helps you learn truly invaluable skills. The most important skill you learn is, without much doubt, patience in the face of petty and ultimately useless bureaucracy.

My time down in Montpellier is winding down, and this is constantly reinforced through Facebook by friends who have started their countdowns to leaving; attempting to sell the things they don’t need anymore and making plans with their friends from home or university upon their return. Most, in fact, are already enjoying England’s green and pleasant lands – well, they’re putting up with the rain, more like. The number of us Erasmus students left here is dwindling as people pack up and head home. I think everyone’s feeling the same: a mixture of sadness to be leaving; a sudden need to do everything they haven’t managed in the past eight months; a desperate hurry to get a tan; and the sudden realisation that this year, the year that we all were probably the most nervous and the most excited about, the year that made a lot of us choose to do a language at university, is almost over. All the anticipation; the endless forms we filled out (both before we got here and for probably a good six months after we arrived); the rubbish landlords/colocataires/floormates we somehow managed to put up with; the unfeasibly early lectures – everything that is part and parcel of a year abroad is drawing to a close. And I think everyone is left looking around them, confused, wondering where on earth did the time go?

I certainly am.

Given that I’ve only got slightly under a week left here, part of me feels like admitting that in some ways I’m actually looking forward to going home is akin to admitting that I’m quite keen on kicking puppies. There’s enormous pressure surrounding a year abroad as people tell you that it’s going to be the best year of your university career – no, your entire life – that can often mean that your experience can feel somewhat lacking as you hold it up to the expectations you had when you first arrived.

The French YouTube star Norman of “Norman fait des vidéos” fame has one video where he talks about the eight rélous (which essentially means ‘pain in the bum’) you always find at parties, including the “râââh ça va” guy, who responds to anything from spilling his drink over someone to the neighbours complaining about the noise with “râââh, ça va” (“aaah, it’s fine”). If I had to describe my experience of life down here and the ethos of the Montpelliérain; from the way my halls dealt with increasing the security of the buildings after someone was shot at a corner shop just across the street; to the university’s attitude to letting you know pretty much anything, it would definitely be “râââh, ça va”. Montpellier is the “râââh, ça va” guy at the party – and that is something that we’ve all struggled to deal with at some point or another in the time we’ve spent down here.

Yes, a year abroad is without a doubt one of the most incredible years you will ever experience – but this isn’t always in a good way. It’s incredibly stressful and can be incredibly frustrating, and you will have moments where, despite the fact that it’s 30 degrees and it’s only May; what you really, really want is to be home, watching Jeremy Kyle and complaining about the constant rain.

I’m going to be heartbroken to leave. I’m going to miss the cafés, the buzz that surrounds the town at night, the proximity to the beach, the bread, the cheap yet still drinkable wine, and the friends I’ve made who, it feels like I’ve only just realised, won’t be at university with me next year. But being reluctant to leave doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to look forward to being home, too. I cannot wait to see my family – some of whom I haven’t seen for two years – again. I’m simultaneously excited and scared about what fourth year is going to be like, and I cannot wait to move back into a house with an oven. I have no shame in saying that I am excited about going to seminars where you’re encouraged to actually talk about what you’re working on, rather than just being lectured at by a prof for an hour and then by another student for the other hour. I’m looking forward to being at a university where they seem to have some idea of what you and they are meant to be doing.

I think that all too often, our lecturers, friends, family, and we ourselves put too much hope into the year – which is why admitting you’re really missing home or that you’re actually quite looking forward to being back can feel like you’ve cheated on your year abroad experience. You’re not meant to be excited about being back home, you’re meant to be dragged, kicking and screaming, onto the plane and are supposed to be in a sulk from the minute you get back. But actually, I think all of us have something about England that makes the idea of being back that little bit easier to deal with – and we should be honest about this. Not just amongst each other, but when we talk to the people who are about to go on their year abroad.

A few months ago, I met up with a couple of friends who had been in Montpellier a few years earlier for their Erasmus year. We got to chatting about our individual experiences and I took the opportunity to have a good-natured whinge about the university here. The two looked at each other and looked at me. “Speaking to you made me realise just how much we've filtered of that year,” one of them said. “It’s only when you mention them that we remember the really annoying parts of the year.”

So my advice, to people coming home or preparing to go away is this: it’s perfectly okay to not have the amazing, fantastic, best time of your life that you’ve been told you will. It’s okay to really miss home. It’s okay to be actually quite ready to come home by the end of it. And all the little irritations of the year? Give it time, you’ll forget about them and just remember the positives – and then you’ll be the person telling the next generation of Year Abroaders that it’ll be the best year of their lives.

An ode to Desperados

As the summer kicks in and the temperature rises, it's hard to really have much enthusiasm for food. The idea of standing over anything hot is incredibly unappealing, particularly when it's about 27 degrees at 8pm. Today was the first 'cold' day we've had this week, and even then the temperature barely dipped below 25.

With weather such as this - not that I'm complaining! - there's little incentive to cook anything that involves standing in a hot kitchen for too long. Salad has become the basis of pretty much every meal I've eaten this past week, including today's dinner.

But I'm not here to talk about my salad which was good, but nothing particularly special. No, what I'm writing about is the beer that has become my new best friend/worst enemy (delete as appropriate) and is standing just behind it.

Anybody who knows me will know that I've always preferred wine to beer, but there's something about Desperados that really, really appeals. Despite its Spanish name and obvious Mexican influence (flavoured with tequila and most often served with a wedge of lime), it's brewed in the Alsace region of France. I've always preferred Mexican-style beers, but usually I'd pick a Belgian wheat beer like Hoegaarden over a Corona if I absolutely had to have beer. However, when the weather is hot and you're looking for something that really refreshes you, I don't think you can beat Desperados. The lime that you really have to have with it stops it from tasting too bitter and makes it dangerously drinkable. It's something of a staple of the student fridge down here, and at the FISE (Festival International de Sport Extreme), I'm told there was a Desperados tent. That makes me regret not popping down to see what the buzz was about now that I've become a convert and have joined the ranks of Desperados fans.

I'd definitely recommend checking it out because it really is perfect in the summer. In the absence of Pimms - I'm devastated that it's going to be July before I get my first glass of that! - I think I've found my new summertime drink. Cheers to that.

Fruit salad

I have, as my parents will doubtlessly testify, always been a bit of a magpie. This is particularly true for food. And now that it is moving towards summer and the fruit section of my local supermarket is full of beautiful, fresh, local produce, the only logical thing to do seems to be to make fruit salad - and lots of it.

Kiwi, strawberries, mango and apple - all, apart from the mango, from France. It's the perfect thing to have in your fridge in the summer, and is gorgeous either as it is or with a dollop of Greek yoghurt on top as breakfast or even as a virtuous pudding. This was also my first attempt at preparing - or, as my friend's family calls it, "hedgehog-ing"- a mango. I had a quick look online to see what was the best and easiest method of getting the fruit out, and it turned out that hedgehog-ing it was the most popular and simplest way. Delia told me to slice down around the stone, then to score into the flesh, being careful not to cut through the skin, then push it and cut the cubes of mango off the skin and into a bowl, making sure you have something to hand to catch all the juice. 

It seemed simple.

It isn't. 

When Delia said "stone", what I didn't realise she meant was "massive flat thing that's as big as the mango itself and impossible to locate when you're cutting down through the fruit". After butchering the poor mango trying to find where the stone finished so I could have as much fruit for my fruit as possible, I then failed to avoid cutting through the skin, forgot to put a bowl underneath to catch the juice, and generally made a bit of a hash of it.

Word to the wise - mango juice stings if it gets into cuts. I found this out the hard way.

Despite my apparent inability to do something that should've been pretty simple, I did eventually succeed in getting the mango from the fruit into a bowl and then added my strawberries, kiwi and apple - all of which were much easier to prepare, poured in some orange juice, and gave it a stir.

Et voilà! Pudding/breakfast/part-of-your-five-a-day all in one very pink bowl. It is officially summer.

"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"

If I’m totally honest, I wasn’t particularly fussed about what living in France with French bread on my doorstep every day meant when I first moved here. To my utter shame, I spent most of my first term buying sliced bread; walking past the beautiful “Pavé Nature”, baguettes and similarly delicious bread on offer that had just been taken from the oven, heading instead for Harry’s American Sandwich Pain de Mie (wholewheat, I’m not an animal). That surely is grounds to chuck me out of the country. Like all sorts of things about life down here – beautiful weather, going for dinner at 10pm, sitting at a café that’s spilling out onto the streets – I’ve only really started appreciating French bread in the past few months. For a mere 29 cents, you can buy a demi baguette; and okay, if you leave it overnight it’ll be rock-solid and will cover your floor with breadcrumbs if you try to slice it – but surely that’s just further incentive to make sure you eat all of that baguette in one day. Challenge accepted. It is more expensive to buy a demi-baguette every day or a fresh loaf every week than it is to buy sliced bread – but there is a massive difference, and you know what? I’m willing to pay that little bit more every day for the two months I’ve got here.

Maybe it’s because it’s because we non-French have this stereotypical image of a French person in a striped Breton top with a silly moustache carrying a baguette under their arm – but bread seems to be as much a part of the way of life here as passive smoking and striking. Coming back from the supermarket on the tram, I heard two ladies grumbling about how the price of a baguette had gone up three cents since last week, whilst a guy in his twenties ripped massive chunks of bread from the baguette in his shopping bag and ate, head nodding in time to the music he was listening to. Any given shopping trolley will contain at least one baguette, and even the cheapest restaurant will bring you a basket of bread that will be refilled whenever it looks like it’s running low absolutely free of charge. The idea that you might have to ask for bread in a restaurant– and then pay for it – is utterly horrifying to a French person. For added shock, I suggest you also add that very few places will bring a bottle of water to your table, and only reluctantly after trying to sell you a very expensive bottle of mineral water.

No matter how you slice it (oh I’m so funny), bread is incredibly important to the French, and why on earth shouldn’t it be? Got some sauce left on your plate? Mop it up with your bread. Can’t be bothered to wash your only knife? Use your bread to push it onto your fork. Fingers a bit greasy from the olive oil on your salad dressing? Bread napkin. Need to soak up some of your Merlot? Bread. Just want to eat bread? Bread. Good luck being gluten-intolerant down here, folks.

What I’m really trying to say is – the bread in France is amazing in a way that I cannot fully explain; and the way it is entrenched in French culture only serves to ensure that it stays that way. And thank goodness for that. Forget Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – the French motto should be Vive les boulangères et vive le pain.