Nelly

So we have this friend named Nelly Luzinski, or maybe it's Luzinsky, who is from Belarus, a former member of the USSR, except that her family managed to get out about 1949 or 1950; she was born in 1950 in Australia. Owns a house in Belves over here up the road (couple of roads, actually) with a couple of friends. We met Nelly when we were sorta walking around here up the hill in Couze, and she was there visiting with some Australian friends who had a house up the road. She teaches in Sydney off and on, and spends her money traveling to France and other parts. Didn't manage to get together with her last year (although we saw her at a night market in Cadouin), but she was over yesterday for dinner.

It was a lot of fun, and I had decided to do my "specialty", e.g., veal scallops with some sort of cream sauce, this time bleu d'auvergne cheese along with shallots, broth, white wine, and a couple of other things. When I went to the butcher's to buy the veal, the stuff he cut off was amazingly WHITE; I've never seen veal in the US anywhere close to this pale, and I told him so. It's very young veal, you see. Not sure it'll come through, but here's a photo: I trust you can tell how very pale the stuff is. I pounded it, like always, but don't think I needed to. Even cooked, you could have cut the stuff (without pounding) with a spoon...and I had had this bright idea that I would do a starter/hors d'oeuvre/whatever that was those lovely anchovies from the market that are in garlic and oil, enclose them in puff pastry, bake it, and pretend I was brilliant...So I bought some of them, and bought a box with a packet of puff pastry (e.g., not the frozen Pepperidge Farm puff pastry we get in the US) in it. Spent ever so long trying to figure out (a) where I was going to roll it out and on what and (b) what I was going to use to roll it out. All set after I had a solution to (a) and (b), I opened the package, and here's what was in it: well, I can't get the stupid photo to come down here. HOWEVER, it was already rolled out, and rolled out thinly into a circle. So I just cut the stuff into pieces, put anchovies in the pieces, turned them into pockets, etc., baked the stuff, and called it a first course.

In the end, the meal sorta didn't hang together, but all the pieces individually were pretty good (this is mostly par for the course, actually, but that's another story). And also, Nelly had brought dessert, which was some sort of amazing cake that involved no flour, but ground hazelnuts, and oranges that were first boiled and then ground and used in the cake. It was really, REALLY good, and I have the recipe. Stay tuned.