I give you the Pain de Campagne recipe

Hold on to your hats, adoring readers and/or fans!!! Today is the longest post in recent history - yes, here are (detailed) step-by-step instructions for the making of Pain de Campagne, which, when you translate it, becomes the screamingly dull-sounding "Country Bread". Yawn.  This is also the first time that you will see actual moving footage of me (from the elbow down), so it is an exciting day for you all, no doubt.

The recipe looks far more time-consuming than it is because every single little step has been explained in detail so that idiots (i.e. me) can understand it, but once you've done it a couple of times you'll breeze through it.   It is also so delicious (assuming you don't wee in it/forget to put the oven on) that it's worth the effort (and if you want to feel thrifty in your underpants, this is the sort of bread that costs about $13 a loaf at the Farmhouse Organo-La-La Store.)

(Press firmly on the header for the whole thing)

I wish you a happy Friday

Christ on a bike ! It is here again: yes, it is Friday, which means that tomorrow it is the weekend.

It is also a month since I became officially non-working again, and so to celebrate these 'dual facts of happiness', I offer you, my adoring readers and/or fans, a dual round of happiness in the form of two more Bollywood clips with excellent title additions (from me).  I know for a fact you will like them.

Cuddle



Motorbike 



I don't think I've got any readers from India, but if I have: would you find this funny the other way round?  Probably not as funny 'cos you'd understand the English anyway, so what about old Swedish films?

I will post the thing with the bread tomorrow. Yes indeed. You will see.

Pip pip!

NWM

I do not know why I do this with my socks

Watching television forces me to remove my socks and throw them across the room. They will stay there until I have an external reason to pick them up off the floor (e.g. visitors from the abroad, health and safety inspectors, the mayor, etc), or until I run out of socks. Whichever comes first.

The French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist to whom I am married 'does experiments' on me; most of them involve watching (like the Snowy Owl, official bird of Quebec), how long it will take me to pick something of mine up off the floor. So far, the record is 3 weeks and 2 days for "a feather, a piece of cardboard ... and a string", which he moved now and then to see if I noticed them.  (I did; I just chose to ignore them.)

I do not know what it means if I only remove one sock, as I did earlier this evening.

Socks, eh? Who'd have 'em?!

Yours mysteriously

NWM

I prepare you for bread

Some of you, my adoring readers and/or fans, have expressed an 'interest' in my super-good bread recipe that requires no kneading. It is a little bit more work (i.e. time) than the very brilliant Artisan Bread In Five Minutes a day, which I still use, but this is just a little bit more ... Oh, I don't know. I just like it more.  In this post you will find informations on:

1. Ingredients you need to get
2. Bowls, spoons, shower caps etc you need to get
3. Time you need to put aside.

I am going to write down the bread recipe tomorrow with photos/film of how to do special kneading thing - unless it already exists on the internet (I have not yet even considered how to do a kneading thing, turn the bowl and film myself at the same time, so we may have to wait for the pathologist).

Warning:  If you are hoping for revelatory shots of me full-body, with freshly brushed fur, pipe put aside for health and safety reasons and fez hygienically covered with a hairnet, you will probably be disappointed: I will be concentrating on my tiny little monkey man-hands and what they are doing. We shall see.

(The 'next page' thing still isn't showing up, so click on the header for the full post.)

I learn about Chatroulette

We are in the pub drinking beer and trying answer questions in the 'pub quiz'.  We are very bad at it; despite me remembering the lyrics to "Fly Me To The Moon" and someone else knowing the name of the biggest lake in the Prairies, we are really quite bad; in one round, we are able to answer only one out of the ten questions, possibly because those questions are about hockey and Uranus.

Conversation turns to the special toy my very clever designer friend made for some monkeys when she was at art school (of which more another time; I need another day to digest it as it really is one of the best stories I have ever heard), and then to Chatroulette. 

"Don't do it when you're alone, do it with other people", says my other friend, A; "there are A LOT of cocks".  "True", says our clever designer friend, "but when I did it with Scott, we just put a shrunken head on a stick in front of the webcam. And then Scott won a staring contest with another person, who didn't have his cock out."

I am with my very clever designer friend again today. We walk more than three miles to buy some chickpea flour and a fascimile of Michael Schumacher's latest cap, and have a discussion about whether spending $149 on a pale blue Le Creuset cast iron sauté pan is a good use of an extraordinarily generous wedding present voucher.  

We look for chestnuts to deter her spiders (marrons glacés will not do); we talk about her pet hedgehog; I buy the unsuspicious preserved lemons in a jar; we have a splendid lunch and an English lady sitting behind us tells me that she couldn't go to Paris, and so came to Montreal instead, "because it's the same!". 

I do not know how much travelling she has done up until now, but I do not have the heart to tell her that Montreal is not that much like Paris and nod at her and say "yes, it is very pretty in Montreal (in the summer)!".  Still, she is nice and her girlfriend tells everyone within earshot (i.e. one mile) how "spicy fresh" everything is; we are given free drinks and the sun is out and pavement only smells a little bit like wee. It is the most excellent of non-working days.

We are walking back when the conversation turns to Chatroulette again. "So what you're saying is that most of it is cocks?", I ask, probably too loudly, because an old Italian lady in a red wig looks sharply up at us as we limp by,  and blows her fag smoke scornfully into her crinkled bosoms.

 "No", says my clever designer friend, "It's more ... cock-cock-cock-cock-cock-normal person, cock-normal person-cock- cock-cock-normal person,  normal person-pair of girls looking a bit confused-cock-cock-person staring, cock-cock-cock-normal person. Something like that."

Time passes. We are home! We say goodbye both knowing, beyond all things, that the very first thing we will all do after we have finished our planned Three Fondue Dinner* is get out the big laptop and hang over the back of the sofa, having a go on Chatroulette. 

* Meat, Cheese, Chocolate, stomach pump optional