A Rainy Day

I woke up early and enjoyed the quiet while I got ready. I sat by the chickens for a while and enjoyed a few grapes. Christian and Fanny woke up soon after and I enjoyed the last of the homemade bread and I tried Fanny's grandmother's fig preserves. They were good on the toasted bread, although it was very sweet.

I cut the overgrown grass along the walkway and the chickens kept me company. Perhaps they were waiting for me to throw the clippings their way, but none the less they were good company. The one with a limp even sang me a song for a bit. After the cutting, I weeded another area of the garden, that Christian is going to finish soon. By this time it was drizzling and I headed in.

Fanny was making Ratatoille. It is good and I have enjoyed it, but I have had it for a couple of days and she is making two more recipes...I do not think I will be able to eat any of it! She is canning it though, so that is good. I helped her with the second recipe, she had two huge zuchinni, two eggplants, onion and green pepper. She put it into a giant pot with a herb holder (kind of like what you put loose tea in when you want to let it seep) filled with basil, cilantro and parsley.

It was still raining so we had to postpone the painting of the shutters. We decided that this might be a good time for me to make my lemon cake. I pulled up the recipe I found yesterday and called out the ingredients. Fanny was shocked when she saw that it called for 220g of butter, she usually only uses 50g, 100g at most. She decided this was too much butter and we switched to her lemon pie. I ground the flour and butter together until it was "sandy" and then we added just enough warm water to hold it together. Fanny rolled it out and we were ready to work the filling.

We put milk and vinilla (real vanilla) into a pot and let it boil. I took sugar and mixed it with three egg yolks. Then we added in the zest of one lemon. When that was well mixed we added the milk to it and stirred. We then added the juice of two lemons and added it to the heat again. When it was finished fanny folded in part of the egg whites that were beaten into merangue. Then we poured it into the shell crust and cooked it for twenty minutes. We topped it off with the remaining meragnge and some pie crust and let it cook for 10 more minutes et Voila.