Adeus a Portugal; Bonjour encore, la France

Our six weeks in the western end of the Algarve in Portugal just flew by, one glorious day after another where I more often than not sat inside working instead of enjoying the sun but was still happy to be there. We did take the occasional walks together on the beach, my friend and I and our brother-and-sister dogs. The promised heated pool never materialized, sadly, as there had been a cold spell when we first arrived and they just couldn’t get it up to temperature fast enough to make it cost-effective—we were only paying to heat it once it got up to the promised temp, which it never did, despite trying for about 10 days. Still, that didn't stop us from sitting around it, soaking up the sun during the warm afternoons.

Bienvenue à Portugal

God has a sense of humor. Or at least He has a way of drawing contrasts in order to amplify our appreciation of certain creature comforts that we may have been taking for granted.

Saturday morning, my friend and I packed the car with our suitcases and the dogs and began our seven-week sojourn with a four-day amble down to the southwest corner of the Algarve in Portugal, spending our first two nights at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, by Biarritz, followed by another overnight seven or so hours south of that, before arriving here in Lagos yesterday evening.

La Nouvelle Année the French Way

This year I received what I've been told is an inordinate honor — an invitation to spend New Year's Eve at the home of a French family over dinner. Even to be invited for simple aperitifs on any given day is an honor if you're a foreigner (or ex-pat, as the Brits prefer to refer to themselves) but a formal holiday?

Joyeux Noël

This is why I don't make New Year's resolutions. I not all that long ago resolved to maintain my blog weekly (what was I thinking?) and yet here it is about six weeks since the last post and two months before that. This is why my New Year's resolutions typically boil down to one: don't make any New Year's resolutions (particularly after a glass or two of Champagne).

Finding Peace

November 11^th is Armistice Day in Europe, marking the day the Allies and the Germans signed the peace treaty ending World War One. It was deliberately scheduled at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. An 11-11-11 to signify that it truly was all quiet on the western front. So it’s a national holiday here.

Remembering Fallen Friends

   A number of years ago when I was working in downtown Manhattan, a co-worker offered to give me a ride in his helicopter. I met him that Saturday morning at Linden Airport in northern New Jersey.
   "There are no doors on this thing?" I asked, as I struggled to secure the seatbelt.
   Richie gave me a wicked smile. "Let me know if it gets too much for you," he taunted. I'd have to fall out, I decided, before I would scream and at that point he probably wouldn't hear me anyway.

Boulangerie Bread Baked by Me!

Someone explain to me why, here in France, surrounded by myriad wonderful boulangeries, I've taken to baking my own bread?

It started when Anthony, one of my clients, asked me to write yet another set of cooking articles for him. One was on artisanal breadmaking. I mean, what better place to be to understand about the advantages of artisanal breadmaking than France, right?

I Can Can, Can You?

Canning is always something I relish having done (no pun intended) but rarely look forward to at the time it needs doing.

For the uninitiated, potting up preserves, relishes, sauces, pie fillings and the like means a delicate dance between boiling/preparing the food itself, while simultaneously sterilizing the jars and lids — separately, of course, I mean, why make it easier, right? — and boiling the water in the canner so it's ready to pop the jars in, as well as orchestrating the transfer of the product to the jars with minimum mess and contamination, then placing the jars on a rack in the canner with sufficient boiling water to submerge the jars at least an inch so you can boil them 20 minutes or so before carefully extracting them, all the while praying that the seal is intact; otherwise you're relegated to dozens of jars taking up precious freezer space ...