She’ll make you live her crazy life ….

After a drought, let there be a flood.  Well actually not.  In reality neither is an appealing option but I use the metaphor to witness the fact that I seem to be pedalling a rather large volume of twaddle this week.  Two days on the trot after a post last Tuesday AND another on Saturday is unheard of chez Half Baked.

I have decided that Tuesdays for the foreseeable will be devoted to Taste.  This will mostly be something edible, but some weeks it might be something beautiful.  Always with the caveat that taste is entirely subjective.  I do love cooking, I do love tinkering with interiors.  I have had a food shop in my chaotically careening life and I have had a house-rescuing business for the desperate to sell and needing a budget savvy person to help them turn their sows ear into a silk purse.  And right now, as seems to be a constant theme in my life, we are renovating our home.   Actually strictly speaking two houses – the one in France which will again take centre stage when I resume the Coup de Coeur series and the one we live in, here in Massachusetts.  Positively the potential for a frisson-making wave of excitement, no?

Whatever it is you can be sure it will eventually form an eclectic whole because I do not have a set taste either in food or in surroundings.  I am influenced by many cultures and by many experiences.  But there is one absolute.  Life  forced me to be frugal for a very long time and I am fortunate for it.  The habits are ingrained and I am the better for it.  So the food we make is not extravagant.   I say we, because some of the delights I intend to entice you with are the work of HB² himself.

I have long expounded the good sense in eating food that is reared or grown as close to the ground I walk on as possible.  I recently discovered when strolling back to my husband’s office after lunch with a table full of boffins and mentioned my theory to one of them, that I am defined as a locavore.  I had no idea.  I guess everything has a label in this hashtag day and age.  Perfect I am not and here and now I do my best to adhere to my principles but I must admit that I do buy things that have been flown or trucked a pretty substantial distance to tickle my palate.  When we eventually settle into retirement and a forever home, we intend to grow as much as we can, raise chickens and ducks and geese for their eggs and possibly sheep and goats for their milk so we can make cheese.  HB² will have some vines and we will make some wine.  For this reason we have to survive several years …. vines are not viable for a minimum of three years and most wine-makers will tell you that white varieties need five years and the reds seven.  And a pig.  The Brains thinks I am joking but there will be a pig.  And that pig will never be eaten.  Actually, when he was newly courting me and met my eldest daughter for the first time, she said to him ‘if you want to win mummy, forget diamonds and flowers.  Get her a pig’.  She was deadly serious.  That’s the dream.  For the moment we are here and after a rather faltering start I am ready to embrace all that this place offers.  Which is much.

So there you have it.  Let the feast commence.  Next week … for now I need a lie down after this flurry of activity.  And tomorrow, there’s even more!!

PS, the essential PS:  The title is from Ricky Martin’s 1999 hit ‘Livin’ The Vida Loca’ which is an appalling attempt to link to my discovery that I identify as a locavore.  Dreadful, no?

Here’s the man himself enthusiastically recanting the story of the devil-red lipped temptress who who forcibly enticed him to ‘live the crazy life’ which is the correct translation of the title.  Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the script.  Poetic licence, please.