Hold the Press!.....

 

Going over the top. Part of our Lagos walk. noting the hillside being excavated for apartments

......were not the words I heard from the Frew household on the occasion of their Patriarchs 82nd Birthday and by the time I got a few pix on WhatsApp the last Blog was leaving the Press.  Rod's Official Birthday is on 18th February

However, I have been hanging back on finishing this blog just for the very rare chance that I may get a further contribution - but the silence is deafening.

   So I will press on with the material I later received from Anthony. Saturday 20th was the family celebration and a couple of teasers were sent by Rod via the WhatsApp Gourmet group.:

He wrote: " I am sure you have all been agog to know what I had for my birthday dinner held on Saturday to give Antony ample (time) to put it all together.

       We started with a delectable Amberjack Peruvian Ceviche....quite delicious and accompanied by an exceptional Arinto from Pico, Azores.

This was followed by a beautifully presented Boeuf Wellington with an Amontillado Sauce and assorted vegetables.

This was accompanied by one of the jewels of the Douro, an exceptional 
Quinta do Vale D Maria 2010

Finally we were treated to a splendid Apple Crumble with Creme Fraiche and Vanilla Ice Cream....which served as a birthday cake too. This was enhanced by an outstanding Tokaji 6 Putonjas 1996.

    Today suffering from only mild dyspepsia, I was taken for a walk by Susan on her horse........ and so to bed.

  

A splendid celebration at home without the need for expensive eating out and massive tips to waiters.  Who knew that Ant was a potential contender for MasterChef? Is this a change of career direction?  I asked him which pate he had used for the liner and received this comprehensive reply!

"I didn’t use a pâté. I make a mushroom / garlic / sherry tapenade as my pâté (you must cook this until it is as dry as poss). I then lay some cling on counter then lay down presunto and then cover that in mushroom tapenade...smother the seared loin in Colman’s and then roll it with the aid of the cling and get it all as tight as poss by twisting the ends. Then once nicely compact...leave in fridge for 30 mins and then roll that (without the cling film!) in pastry and with welly boot decor and pop into oven 180 for 40 mins and then let rest for 10 mins before hoping that it is perfectly pink but not too much blood and fingers crossed your first carve it is booootiful!"

      Myriam's birthday is four days and 6 years after Rod's and she didn't do quite so well, especially in the fine wine department in our teetotal household!  She is a lady of simple tastes, and requested Arroz de Pato, - and who am I to argue?

A duck and chourico-rich dish, cooked in a juicy duck stock, and happily the portions were such that it kept us going for another couple of meals!

           As I noted in last week's blog, we have set up a couple of special interest WhatsApp chats and these have been flourishing, especially the Gourmet Group and the 6 Nations Group, but we won't discuss the latter in this blog !! There was a suggestion that someone should manage a Test Cricket group, (Western Algarve Test Cricket Hierarchy?) but this was vetoed by John who wrote 'Why deprive the ladies of cricket? It's just another ballgame'. Inevitably this activated Yves into making innuendos about balls, but he only knows about rugby apparently!

    What else? The vaccines are very slowly being given to the more elderly WAGS - Mike, Jyll and Peter S have reported in, and maybe others who haven't commented. Please let us know.

     We are being inundated by the media with tales of how mental health can be affected by Covid - even if you don't contract it. Compared to almost anything else, being kept off school would have been welcomed by most of my generation. This is taking 'wokeness' to a new level. (Today I heard that some wokes are demanding the demise of 'Mr Potato Head' as it is sexist, and should henceforward be just 'Potato Head' 

     Personally I have found it reasonably relaxing and stress free, to keep to the rules, but still have not enough time to keep up with all matters arising. For instance, this blog was scheduled to be completed by Sunday afternoon, but I tried to install a new Sim card in my WiFi Hotspot, and this lead to about 3 hours of online chat with a technician from the ISP and I finally gave up to prepare dinner!   Perhaps one of the penalties of outsourcing chat lines to Mumbai, and overloading the operatives with too many simultaneous chats.

     I have yet to hear from anyone else about contributions from others with a tale to tell, but much gets blurted out on the WhatsApp groups, although there is still some confusion from time to time about posting in the wrong Chat, or sending a personal message to the whole group instead of the intended target.

      My Wednesday consisted of a walk to the Pharmacy to pick up a prescription and later  a nice drive to Alvor in my new Chariot to have a Holter fitted, and a daring side trip to Overseas Supermarket (Iceland) to pick up,( or to try to pick up) essential supplies. This Brexit  has interrupted supply lines and the Facebook 'Expats in Portugal page is filled with tales of woe about shortages of Yorkshire teabags and 'proper' sausages! Apparently we are still getting supplies from Ireland, but trucks of fresh produce from UK are having their cargoes spoilt by being held up.

   However, by Sunday morning I needed some exercise to inspire me, so half of  the Lagos  Branch of the SAGS set off, for a quick loosener. We took a route that involved a few undulations, as it was going to be short!  Up the hill past Lidl and off-road up to Cerro das Mos - a route we often take towards Aldi and Continente.

Some will remember this:-

This was on an early WAGS walk on 9th September 2015.  I think it was there a couple of times when we walked up that hill on a WAGS walk, but in recent years, other items decorated with tiles have been there, or in the garden. We always wanted to meet the artist, but had never seen anyone there. Well today, when I was struggling for blog photos, we did.

   There was an artistic looking fellow in the garden, and of course Myriam immediately engaged him in a chat. It turns out he is a semi professional artist from Switzerland, Ivan Ulmann, and has been living in Lagos for about 12 years.

     After a few minutes of chat, Myriam had seduced him into showing us his store room which was a garage underneath the house.

It was a creative treasure trove. His catch-line is 'Broken tiles - United Hearts'  I won't put too many of the works he had piled up in the garage in as photos, as they were not laid out for viewing, and he has a very nice web-site HERE

He is working towards his next exhibition. he did mention where, but I don't recall at the moment.

   To produce these works of art, he must be extremely patient and painstaking as the work involved is enormous. Look at his site. You may have seen some of the works in public in the Algarve. there are some nice little vids on his well constructed site and it is well worth a look.

Meanwhile, over in the Silves neck of the woods, JohnH rues a culinary disaster, regrets the loss of a Six Nations game over the week-end, and consoles himself with yet another Latin motto. John writes:-

It made me very envious to see the pictures of Ant´s splendid Beef Wellington, etc.

Not all my cooking efforts this past week have been blessed with such success. For example, the other day I was making tattie scones – a very simple Scottish dish which is basically mashed potato left-overs mixed with a bit of flour, egg, baking powder, salt to taste....I could have done them quite simply in a frying pan but on this occasion, because I also had something else on in the oven, I decided to bake them. So I searched around among Hazel´s huge array of cooking utensils for a baking tray – I knew she had a nice dark brown one just the size I needed - selected it, loaded the wee circles of scone mixture onto it and popped it into the oven. Fifteen minutes later, I found out that what I had selected was indeed a tray but not a baking tray.

This was the result.

A pretty enough picture. Cuisine Art, dare I say. The tattie scones survived and were delicious.

On now to the Rugby, there were two games on Saturday – Italy v. Ireland and Wales v. England. I missed seeing both of them because my TV signal kept failing - did anyone else have a problem with their signal at the week-end? - so had to be content with radio, which gave me the chance to join in the WhatsApp rugby chat. Some of that sub-group seem to be able to follow a game closely on TV and to chat about it on their WhatsApp simultaneously. Remarkable skills! As for the results, all I need say was that in one of those games the French referee played a blinder.

But the game whose loss I regret was the one between France and Scotland which got cancelled because too many of the French squad developed Covid symptoms. It seems that some of them are suspected of having exited their bubble contrary to protocol (soupçonné d´avoir percé la bulle sanitaire, as the French have it). The French Minister for Sport who goes by the splendid name of Roxana Maracineanu is getting all worked up about it and is thinking of withdrawing her permission for the French team to play in the tournament at all. (Why they need her permission to take part in the first place, I am not at all sure.) Her argument is that:_

“Je ne pense pas qu'il était marqué dans le protocole que les joueurs pouvaient sortir manger des gaufres” .

That is, she doesn´t believe that it is the protocol allows the players to go out of their bubble to eat waffles. Clearly the French love their protocols as much as their waffles.

Whether the French should forfeit the game and hand the Scots 5 points in the Championship is a moot point to be debated elsewhere.

So there we are. Two things to regret: a molten tray and a postponed Rugby match.

Virgil had a memorable and philosophical sentence in the Aeneid to cover these such situations:-

                    “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit”

                “One day maybe we shall enjoy remembering even these things.”