Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

No school today but I visited the Bread Shed at 6:30 or so to begin preparations for a sourdough loaf to be baked on Saturday, my last one of the course. As the dough needs stretching and folding every 20-30 minutes for 3 hours or so, packing seemed a better co-activity than revision. I wasn’t the only one in the cottage making preparations to leave and our rubbish and recycling bins are rather full… There’s also an extensive range of little jam jars and various bottles in the kitchen to which I’ve contributed. I still had a good few full jars to wrap carefully and pack, though, and I’ve some water kefir and kombucha bottles to worry about yet.

Talking of kefir, I decanted my final batch this evening, which I flavoured with tayberries “foraged” from the farm crop. The jar with the next batch is also now in my room for future fermentation in Valréas and/or Gex.

That’s getting a little ahead of myself, though. Once the future sourdough loaf had been returned to the Bread Shed to rest overnight I did spend some time revising for tomorrow. Specifically, I learnt the list of the 14 EU allergens off by heart. This is knowledge I’m never going to need in the future but it is pretty much essential for anyone going into the food industry in Europe so there are sure to be questions on that.

Then it was off to Youghal for lunch. There was a good excuse reason: the car needed filling up for the long trip home and, given the latest developments in the Iran conflict it seemed wise to do so before the prices go back up again. I paid just €1.71/l, some €0.25 or so cheaper than when I’ve filled up previously in Ireland. I wonder how much I’ll be paying when I need to fill up at a French motorway service station on Saturday.

After more study in the afternoon (and the aforementioned water kefir activities), I took a farewell tour of the gardens. As Darina predicted on our first day, much has changed in the three months. One interesting sight was flowering artichokes, something I don’t think I’ve seen before. The first one, in the garden by our cottage, certainly wasn’t flowering yesterday.

Weirdly, this purplish colour doesn’t really reflect the colour I saw with my eyes, which was rather more blue. The picture of another artichoke below is a truer representation of the colour I saw, but a little darker.

The two were a good way apart in distance and time but I remember them as both being the same colour to my eye so there’s something going on with the camera and the lighting; the bottom flowers in this picture from https://wildyards.com/artichoke-flowers/ are a good match to what I remember seeing.

Anyway, enough about artichokes. I wasn’t aimlessly wandering about the gardens, I was definitely heading to the greenhouse to harvest my sweetcorn. I wasn’t the only one with the same idea in mind; luckily I’d planted mine neat the edge of our “field” and knew where it was; a number of my fellow students had to venture into the field and look at the labels to find theirs. Perhaps that was part of the fun, though!

As you can tell from the tassels at the top, it wasn’t fully ripe…

but the kernels that were developed tasted good both raw and cooked. This is not going to convert me to a lover of sweetcorn in salad, though!