Reinventing the week

Posted with permission of Someecards.com

After limping through a 7 hour lunch with our French friends on Sunday, Tony and I realized that the thing we most dislike about ‘big Sundays’ are that they precede Mondays which always bring dread – or certainly used to when we had desks to report to first thing on Monday mornings and so we decided that at least for the summer we are going to reinvent the week and incorporate Monday into the weekend thereby elongating the weekend and doing away with ‘that Monday feeling’!

And so for the foreseeable future our week shall begin on Tuesday morning and end on Friday (we thought lunchtime was a civilized quitting time on Fridays) – this way we can still get in our 35 hour French work week (10 hours on each of Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday and 5 hours on Friday), which of course is easy to do in the summer as it’s light at about 6am and not dark before about 9.30pm!

This is in the experimental stage so far and should incorporating Monday into the weekend prove to be a success we may think about also including all of Friday and perhaps shortening the French work week even further – after all we don’t wish to overdo things at this early stage of the game.

So what to do with today?  We’ve had a few rainy days so sadly it’s a bit wet to be picking cherries however it’s the perfect weather for more planting as the ground is nice and soft so not too taxing to be digging holes and rotovating more of the veggie patch and so I think we’ll get our 6 new strawberry plants in the ground today (we have 3 different varieties picked up at the market last Saturday) and plan next Sunday’s lunch party when we’ll be having our nearest neighbours over – planning a bouillabaisse for them – the fish market seems to have lots of lovely fresh fish including mussels (there’s a massive amount of fresh oysters at the markets right now that all look fabulous – we’ve yet to try them) and so we shall give that a go.  If it perks up this afternoon we’ll get back into the fields to fill a few more buckets with cherries – hopefully I shall be making some more jam this evening – I’ve found a good ‘no recipe recipe’ which simply relies on volumes e.g. if you have 4 cups of cherries you add ¾ that amount of sugar (i.e. 3 cups) and then just add some zest and juice of a couple of lemons (to add the necessary pectin in order to help the jam ‘set’) and voila – after some time stirring you have cherry jam and then just before canning/jarring – add a shot of Kirsch to help bring out the flavor then pop into jam jars and store for future consumption.  There are enormous quantities of strawberries at the markets right now – large punnets for EUR1 or EUR2 each depending on the variety and so I may also try my hand at some strawberry jam for a little variety – it will be good to perfect the recipe before the peaches and plums come into season in a few months' time.

Tony had his tractor out on Sunday in anticipation of the roofers coming first thing Monday to clear up the piles of broken tiles in the courtyard – they brought a trailer and wanted to use Tony’s tractor with the bucket for scooping up the tiles and so the tractor finally made an appearance as Tony checked the engine and gave it a pressure wash – this is Sunday car washing in rural France – photo below!