Need for spice

I'm suffering from spice deprivation at the moment, as you will know if you've already read the Fox's blog. The cause is two-fold. The first is that we've only recently returned from our holidays in France; the second is the bitter cold here at the moment.

In France it seems to be virtually impossible to get good spicy food, unless you cook your own. What cooking we do if we're self-catering, as this time, tends to be pretty basic & quick. On holiday I need my energies for exploring the region we're staying in, not cooking. The French will happily add some of the sweeter spices such as cinnamon - a reflection of their having ex-colonies in North Africa. Ginger they are dubious about but you do see it occasionally in more eastern ethnic food. But hot spice is very difficult. The only area of France where we've found the use of chillies has been in the Basque country, just north of the Pyrenees on the Atlantic coast. I find this surprising. The British discovered their love of hot spicy food in India & Malaysia, their ex-colonies, why didn't the French ex-colonies of Vietnam & Laos equally inspire the French?

We have some French friends. Their son came & stayed with us for a while one year. We introduced him to the delights of our local Indian restaurant. He was smitten. The next time we stayed with them, I was asked to make a curry. Earlier in the visit, Marie, his mother, had made something "au curry", i.e. she'd added a pinch of curry powder. I'd stared in disbelief. The time came for me to make the bhoona gosht for 6. Her jaw dropped as she watched me put 9 teaspoonfuls of curry powder in. Her disbelief was compounded when I then reached for the chilli powder to add a further teaspoon of that. It was with great trepidation, having watched me cook the meal, that she sat down to that meal & began to eat. She was surprised to find it wasn't nearly as bad as she feared.

This time we left France after a week, basking in temperatures in the thirties. The second week was cooler, but even so it never got much below 20C. When we arrived at Manchester airport we were told the external temperature was a glorious 8C. Since then it's just got steadily colder. On Monday, after our meal out, the Fox had to scrape the ice off the windscreen before we could come home. Even mid-morning the temperature just hovered over freezing point. Yesterday we were told it was to be -8C that night. When we'd got home, around 5pm, we looked at the thermometer on our garden shed. It already read -8C, & you could feel it was still getting colder. This morning, when I got up around 8.30am, it was still -3C. These temperatures are way below the norm for this area at this time of year. It looks as though we're going to have a very cold winter ahead of us.

All of this left me yearning for hot spice. Which is why, on Saturday, when we came home, we went for out for a meal at the local Indian restaurant. On Sunday, the Fox made us his special Spicy Spag Bol. Yesterday it became chicken fajitas. And today I've prepared a chicken curry for this evening. Oh for some heat!!!!