Why farmers need rain and chefs need scales

Tony "tractoring"

Having just returned from our travels “abroad” as they say in this part of the world, we were keen to get back to pretending to be farmers and so decided to start the day by rotovating the vegetable patch that had been so expertly mown before we left France mid May...........after getting covered in dust (the shiny nearly new tractor too!) we realised that the ground was just too hard and there’d be no rotovating done today :(   For those out there that have any farming experience I'm sure you'll wonder why we were surprised to find that the ground was too hard after a month of sunshine with no rain.....we're living and learning!

Apparently there were many other tractoring type things to do (the farmers wife only gets told things on a need to know basis!) so Tony continued “tractoring” the day away whereupon I decided to harvest the remainder of the rhubarb to stew and can so that we might enjoy rhubarb crumble well after rhubarb season was over - the canning went well and we now have a cupboard full of stewed rhubarb to enjoy.

The elderflower cordial I started yesterday was ready for bottling and thanks to a brilliant contraption given to me by my mother, the straining of it was very straightforward -  sadly having made almost 4 litres of it, I’ve discovered I used far too much sugar which was easily done as I was trying to figure out 3 kilos of sugar from a 20 kilo bag without kitchen scales so yesterday I could be found weighing myself on regular scales, pouring an estimated amount of sugar into a bowl and then holding the bowl and getting back on the scales.  That didn’t seem to be working too well so I realised I should simply weigh the 20 kilo bag and go from there - unfortunately I’d already used some sugar from the bag and had no idea how much the bag itself weighed - suffice it to say we have exceedingly sweet elderflower cordial (and lots of it) but we’ve learnt another lesson and  I now have a set of  scales making their way to me via amazon.fr!

Deciding that we really need to get on with practising our french, and having gotten a little carried away after our neighbours not only gave us a box of our walnuts they’d collected for us last winter but also inviting us to use the “tu” form with them (I was of course thrilled to be invited to get “familiar with the neighbours”! - Tony’s quite annoyed about it all because it just means more to learn!), much to Tony’s horror and with no prior consultation, I asked them if they’d join us for lunch once a week for the month of June so that we might practice our french on them (they of course speak no English) - so I am left wondering what on earth to prepare and how formal or not it should be (especially given we’re now allowed to be “familiar”!) and whether or not we’ll survive the experience - Tony’s still debating whether or not he’ll be too busy “tractoring” to join us...........!