Bastille Day in the Balcony Garden

Hi folks, and just a warning that this is more of a cooking post than a garden post and alas the only things that went into our lovely Bastille Day meal from the balcony garden were these greens, one tiny yellow carrot, a snow pea that seemed to end up lost (so it is not just you Hurricane J that misplaces snowpeas!!!) and coriander.

And this single, measly lemon, which was added to the dessert.

Now I am by no means French, or French origin or even distantly French. I'd love to be but my spoken French is lousy and I'd hate to deny my Cornish heritage (at least that's where Dad is up to on his quest to do the family tree and I'm happy with Cornwall as my place of ancestry, after all cornish pasties were my total undoing when living in the UK, just heavenly but probably still attached to my thighs!) But driven by ample amounts of spare time (I am on leave from my PhD thesis) and inspired by the latest Gourmet Traveller. (I know I mention the magazine ttwice in this post, and I do enjoy it, but if I didn't get it relatively free as a trade in on my credit card points then I am not sure I'd shell out the money.) I roped Lovely Miss J and Mr M in for a Frenchish meal at my place. It was fairly simple, just a lovely Gourmet Traveller French onion soup, the recipe is here. It takes a long time but is well worth it. Just work with 2kgs of onions, probably supposed to be brown, but I, um, misjudged how many 2kgs would take so was forced to use red spanish onions and leeks. The substitution made it très sweet but très delicious.

I served it with cheesy croutons on top (luckily Mr M popped to the shops on his way over as I had forgotton the baguettes) and a side salad because it was very, very, very strong soup.

I think everyone enjoyed it ... don't you?

Dessert, as you know, involved a lemon, and it was - lemon souffle! It actually managed to rise, a little.

But after only a very short time it was reduced to this.

It was only two of the three diners that were drinking and we worked in reverse order, starting with a bottle of fine red, obtained at the cellar door during my jaunt back to Adelaide in March (not the recent one, the 10 bottle from that trip are in transit.)

Followed by a Grandin, a French sparking white!

What a lovely night. Mr M and I obtained slight hangovers but Miss J came out the total winner as I palmed off half of my seed collection to her. It mostly consisted of things I just can't grow from seed (like 9 types of greens), things I wont grow from seed but obtained in seed mixes like watermelon, cauli, random bushy flowers and very long orange carrots and some other extra seeds like tomatoes and carrots. I am looking forward to seeing how they go in her proper garden. All in all a great night, if only the balcony garden could have starred more.