Since end of August and time for peach & nectarine confitures which I love to eat the same as to do, I share with lovers of the Earth and everything green flash from the garden of some La Loba, Carol Reid-Gaillard. I found her blog recently and beacouse she leads a life what i've visualized since long time reset in the life, I can not omit in one's preferences such magic place where witchcraft completes the love and mutual passion. Mutual because she shares it with her husband, Jean Francois and being Irish she delighted years ago tastes of French cuisine of his mother and captivated by them she decided to start to cook like her. After years spent in Paris, together with her beloved decided finally to leave it in some spring, packing three suitcases, fishing rods, cat and ... the final choice settling near the Pyrenees, in the French province of Béarn.
Mailhos was the first house they visited and decided to buy. Built in 1796 for the local bourgeois family owned 20 hectares of fertile land, lush forests and mountains ...
Thus begins the story of her vegetable sanctuary, culinary witchcraft, kitchen based on the wealth of hausholds crop in each season, finesse and devotion to this unique pleasures that can be food!
Sweet, fried Acacia flowers ...
20 heads of freshly picked Acacia flowers
200g plain flour
1 beaten egg
300ml cold sparkling water
A good glug of grappa
Light oil for frying
Icing sugar for dusting
... and other eatable flowers: zucchini, elderberry
VEGETABLE GARDEN
1000 m2 of vegetable garden!
As she mentions, apart from it in the past four years they planted 75 fruit trees, all the local varieties, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, installed 50 bee-hives, and became the proud parents of 18 chickens, which carry the sweetest and richest eggs. In the garden grows over 100 varieties of vegetables that grow only by using compost and plant teas that they prepare from the nettles, produced of course by yourself. Within two years they won the third and second prize for the best vegetable garden of France, awarded by the Société National d'Horticulture.
Hunt for nettles
La voz mitológica
It has always moved me how women love digging in the ground. They sow bulbs so that in spring they can grow and bloom. With their muddy fingers, they dig in black soil, planting out intensely fragrant tomato seedlings. I think they are digging so hard to reach the woman who is two million years old. They are looking for her toes. They want to have her as their gift, because they feel together they make a harmonious unity. Without her, they will not find soothing comfort. Many women with whom I’ve been working all these years, began the first session with the words ‘You can’t say that I feel bad, but I don’t feel good either’. I think that there isn’t a big secret in this state. It results from a shortage of fertile soil, shortage of a fertiliser. And the medicine? La Loba. Find the woman who is two million years old. She cares about what died, or is agonising now in women. She is the bridge between the alive and the dead. She sings hymns of creation over the bones. An Old Woman, a Wild Woman, La voz mitológica, a mythical voice which knows the past, ancient times and preserves them in tales for us. Sometimes she appears in our dreams as an incorporeal, but exquisite voice.
- Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, Run with the Wolves
I go back again to Fanny and her moods of colored silence, the natural synthesis of what appears to be of Mme Reid-Gaillard a common, organic frequency. The rhythm and the progress proper nature where the natural richness and their productivity complement the passion and senses.
French provinces tastes of life and the contours of silence, somewhere at the foot of the Pyrenees ...
Mailhos
LUXURY. Close up
recipe and photos are from the kitchen garden of Carol Reid-Gaillard,
& her blog, Mailhos - cusine de jardin, here
Polish