She's back(ish)

Ponderings on things in store from Dorothy Porker in France

Hello!

I took apparently about a year-long break from doing anything seriously food stuffy online, and while I hope the offerings will become more consistent again now that I appear to have settled a bit more into our new life in France I am not promising anything.

What’s in a year?

A lot of stuff has happened in a year but it doesn’t feel like it. A big difference between rural life in France and city(ish) life in the Netherlands is that everything here moves at a snail’s pace. I really had to go from a ‘same day delivery' to ‘hopefully within the next year or so’-mindset. Because things move and thus change more slowly I don’t always see the change or how much we’ve done in the past year (not that anything needs doing).

Tofu, happy spanner in the works

We put up a wall so I have a studio. We got a proper floor in the living room. We put together all the furniture. We got into a sort of living together flow and then threw a spanner in the works in the shape of a puppy (pictured). We pruned all our fruit trees (okay so maybe we hired some guys). We got better at French (though only this weekend I learned we may be lagging behind because Charentais is a lot harder to understand than ‘regular’ French, even for other French people, so I am about to cut us a whole lot more slack) and (most importantly) little over a year in I am starting to get a grasp on the seasonality of French foods and ‘eating out’ (more on that some other time).

I’m also finally getting into an alternating schedule of a weekly baking/ barbecue/ pasta/ icecream projects and now that the final Big International Move Thing (TAXES!) is almost done I am hoping I will get back into weekly shoots and bi-weekly newsletters again as well. Consider this is a soft bellied launch.

What eating?

Obviously I ate a lot in the past year so we’ll just go by the past week.

On Friday I made a semblence of Melissa Thompson’s barbecued chorizo and asparagus with burrata. I got the smoking stuff wrong and I should’ve invested in a better quality chorizo (will use merguez next time as those are easier to find here and it’ll still work by my estimation) but I’d never barbecued asparagus before and the combination of the three definitely slaps.

I still have more asparagussing up my sleeve this week as we went to the Fête de l’asperge du Blayais so I got myself a little bundle of small white asparagus (I normally prefer green, but when in Rome). It’s probably going to be a riff on Meike Krüger’s asparagus in gochuyang butter and miso Hollandaise but with trout roe because I will take any excuse.

What reading?

Obviously I read a lot over the past year but these are the best food-related books that I read. I’m not doing blurbs cause this post is long and waffling along enough as is.

That said, no matter how far behind on this I am, I’d like to reiterate that I read all my cookbooks from front-to-back and liking them doesn’t always mean I will cook from them, for whatever reason, sometimes the stories are just really good and sometimes they’re just good inspiration for cooking, photography, life or otherwise.

Ignore my dislocating thumb

In order of reading, not of preference:

• Nistisima: The secret to delicious vegan cooking from the Mediterranean and beyond by Georgia Hayden

• I hear she’s a real bitch by Jen Agg

• Diasporican: A Puerto Rican cookbook by Illyanna Maisonet

• Mezcla: Recipes to excite by Ixta Belfrage

• The nutmeg’s curse: Parables for a planet in crisis by Amitav Ghosh

• London feeds itself edited by Jonathan Nunn

• Vegan pasta night: A modern guide to Italian-style cooking by Brianna Claxton (sadly released as Vegan Pasta in Dutch, which doesn’t do the personal and expansive nature of this book justice imho)

• Mister Jui’s in Chinatown: Recipes and stories from the birthplace of Chinese American food by Brandon Jew and Tienlon Ho

What elsing?

Much like everyone else I watched The Bear (good) and The Menu (could’ve been better, very tired of media coming out that is good in concept but could’ve been far better in execution) but the most important piece of media I consumed (ew) was The Outlaw Ocean, a devastating podcast on the way we manage (again ew) our (again…) oceans. Not only is it excellent in terms of the information it provides, it’s also excellently executed and produced, with gorgeous soundscapes the back up the everlasting horror that is how we exploit the planet and ourselves.

So yeah, not a fun listen but definitely a must listen.

Till next time?

Vote in the comments on whether I’ll keep this up or not, or just let me know what you’ve been reading, or leave me a recipe for white asparagus that makes them less of a slimey mess and more of a tasty mess, or maybe just even let me know that you’re happy I am back(ish).