We stared at the rock-hard, small potato when it came out of the microwave. “What did you put it in at, Miriam?” I asked as she poked and prodded it without any give.
“Thirteen minutes,” was the reply.
“But that was for two, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was, Miriam. Chuck it.”
Miriam and the microwave will never be friends. It may as well be a nuclear plant. She forgets from one time to the next how to switch it on and I hide my irritation as I tell her once again.
She is, I suppose, an early advocate of slow cooking – everything fresh and made the hard way from scratch.
I am an advocate of no cooking. Of the ready-made, bunged in the microwave. Of the easiest way possible.
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For example, she will put nothing in the oven unless the oven has been warming for at least 15 minutes.
The other day she brought around one of her kitchen gadgets, of which she has many, to cook a steak hache.
I told her to just stick it in an ovenproof dish and throw it in. That way the juices might import some sort of flavour to a tasteless meat. Oh, no. So it came out a dried-up old piece of leather lookalike which she looked on lovingly.
At least the tomatoes were juicy now that I’ve persuaded her to cut them in half and just stick them in.
Trying to explain doing butter only cooked mushrooms in the oven took some time.
She wanted to peel the mushrooms and we had a bit of a stand-off. The fact that I then wanted them on buttered toast horrified her, but finally I got them. Plus, a day without meat for Miriam is a scandalous day on which I’ll waste to nothing.
The next day, to make life easy, I ask for a simple chicken sandwich. There was a cooked chicken breast in the fridge – 10 minutes of explanation how to make the sandwich later, she was ready to proceed.
When it arrived, I could barely get my gob around the hunk of chicken. She had simply split the breast in half and walloped it between the bread and butter. I chewed my way through half of it, lamenting the lack of refinement.
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I know, I know, I’m an ungrateful woman who should be down on her knees thanking Miriam every day for her help.
But when you’re not interested in food at the best of times, you need all the help you can get.
At least we’ve got beans on toast down to a fine art although she’ll never understand it.
I’m building up to scrambled egg – slowly.
It’s not just her. I asked the younger aide if she could make a cheese omelette.
“Of course,” she said, and I sat back. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – what she turned out resembled more a skinny brick and even the cheese had done a runner.
Both have agreed separately that we have very different food tastes, particularly to those of La France Profonde.
All the locals I’ve known can swallow prodigious amounts of food but often the same menus of monotonous regularity, usually featuring green beans or gloopy aubergine.
Potatoes are rare and when served are mainly done in a puree – no salt – or occasionally sauteed with too much oil.
Chips are obviously special and saved for rare occasions when even oven chips get a ceremonial blessing of the oil.
I suppose I’m mildly obsessive, for the first time ever, about food for I had such plans for when I thought I was going to England.
To pick up a phone and arrange for a delivery of ethnic food seems unimaginable to me now after so long without.
I know some of you will think – what is wrong with this woman? In the home of the finest cuisine in the world and she wants oven chips and fried eggs? Peasant.
The fine cuisine, as I’ve said before, is a myth put around to disguise the fact that it’s often repetitive, unimaginative and frankly, even here in the marketplace of France, tasteless.
All those sauces? Done to disguise the inferiority of the product. Who on God’s earth wants to eat boar? Even the cook doesn’t know if it will be any good and tender until it’s served. And as for the bits of pigs served up as pates or hors d’oeuvres….
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And the sausages – fatty, indigestible gristle in a condom smelling faintly of the urinal.
Veal is good, the foie gras the same but both are now considered so inhumane that liking them is akin to admitting to child cannibalism.
You have no idea of the food snobbery – from the Brits. From the Brits who serve English food when praising French cuisine.
Right, rant over.
I don’t each much at night, but tonight I’m having two Weetabix with milk and sugar. I’ll mush it all up.
I just can’t face explaining anything more difficult.
I know, life’s tough in the south of France.
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