Off the back of a wonderful birthday present* from Ash, I resolved the other night to make tartiflette. I pottered in and out of the scullery as we blethered about one of Ash’s assignments, and at the end of a pleasant hour of culinary fiddling I emerged with a magnificent starch bomb. We ate it. It was genius. Purists may scoff at using cheap camembert and grated emmental to stand in for the stipulated reblochon, but pshaw! I say to them; my arteries don’t care which cheese it is that assails them. Come ye, and cast off the cloying chains of savoyarde convention!
Anyway, it was a mighty dinner and one which took me back to many a happy lunch on the slopes, shovelling lardons into my hungry maw and deciding which digestif would best prepare us for the afternoon ahead. It is my considered opinion that an education in the physical sciences and an early exposure to alpine life should be the twin pillars of any young man’s formative years.
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This rail commuting lark continues to go mostly smoothly. The other morning I cycled up to the station through a foggy, quiet town and once on the train, watched the miniature valley slide by under a perfect carpet of mist, bushy spines of hedgerows floating there like icebergs. Very pretty, and evidently enough to move me to faux-literary pretension a second time.
Taking the car to Edinburgh though, the boot is on the other foot. I can write down that when I have to take the Trøll for whatever reason, the drive normally lasts about an hour and a half and that on a bad day it might run to a couple of hours, but that doesn’t capture the absurd, fruitless torture it encompasses. Lane changes in town have to be planned, supertanker-like, half a mile in advance, because the driver to your immediate left will be damned if he’s going to lose out on a fifteen foot head start. Once on the motorway (praise be!), there’s an invidious false dawn as the traffic spreads out to three luxurious lanes, then is funnelled mercilessly back down to two and inevitably grinds to a halt in response as a faux traffic jam ripples backwards along the road.
After getting back from one such voyage (journey doesn’t quite convey the mental and spiritual battering entailed), I locked up the car a few streets from the flat and stumbled home. At work the next day, having taken the train, I got a phone call from Ash. “Where are your car keys? I left my iPod in it.”
“I dunno,” I replied. “They should be on my bedside table.”
A few minutes later, she called back. “They’re definitely not here. Did you leave them in the car? Where is it?”
I told her where I’d left the Trøll, slightly nonplussed but convinced that I must have just unthinkingly left them in a jacket pocket or something. The phone rang again. “The keys were hanging in the car door. You moron!”
The car had been just where I’d left it, iPod, headphones and half-eaten bag of midget gems still inside, the keys dangling innocuously from the lock. Oops.
* My 30th — no flowers, please. Also, happy birthday, Devon!
2 Comments subscribe
Why, thank you. Although, what I was really hoping for in the little tag on was an actual description of what Ash got you. I am thinking either:
a) a mixture of gruyere and camembert;
b) bacon lardons;
c) some sort of appropriate pan, such as a Le Creuset hob to over fryer;
d) a Frenchy-type cookbook;
or e) something else entirely that I have not previously associated with tartiflette, like a chenille throw.
Also, if you have a crunchy salad with it, with enough mustardy dressing to cut the cheese goo, you can count it as a health food.
d) The Les Halles Cookbook (http://www.leshalles.net/cookbook.php), by heroin-chic renegade of cuisine, Anthony Bourdain.
Needless to say, there was no salad.