Forum Hotadultdirect Mpegs Lv 1 Hot Adult Direct FRENCH LETTERS

It’s a thing that confounds English speakers, what exactly je t’aime means. It’s I love you, of course. But it’s not “I like you”, as so many people hope, and blunder into.  That’s je t’aime bien, which seems like I love you well, but is really the more prosaic, less comitted, I like you. I remember a French friend who told me “he said he loves me, he said je t’aime” and I was obliged to ask whether he’d said it in English or French, knowing that his French wasn’t up to accomodating the difference between je t’aime and je t’aime bien. As I’d suspected, he meant that he liked her, but she thought that he loved her. Thus are international incidents born, and disappointment, and heart ache.

Shel and I though, we love each other, and we like each other. Most of the time, and those other times, well, we’ve learned to live through them. Tomorrow will be our 18th Valentine’s day together. It seems unimaginable. So many times we’ve thought he was dying. A couple of times we’ve thought we were giving up on the whole thing, this togetherness thing, this for better or worse thing. It’s been better, and it’s been worse. And that’s the real life part of it all, we just hang on and stick it out and here we are 18 years later, not wanting to be anywhere else. Wherever we are, that’s home, because home is being together, whether in France or America, at the end of the day our pillows are side by side. In France our pillowcases are ironed, in America they’re not. In America Beppo and Zazou sleep on our bed, in France they often don’t. In France we don’t always understand every word people say to us, in America we don’t always understand every word we say to each other.

What I want is an ironed pillowcase with Beppo sleeping right beside it. To always be together in perfect harmony, perfect understanding. A fusion of our two lives, the best of each world. I want us to love and like each other all the time, in every language, with and without cats by our sides.

Tomorrow we’re going away for a little Valentine’s Day excursion, to Lake Quinault, on the Olympic Peninsula. Shel’s craving a Northwest lodge feeling, checkers by the fire, heavy wooden beams overhead. I’m craving a mossy rain forest, even if it is raining. And yes, a glass or two of wine by that huge fire, a car trip where we’re side by side for hours, just the two of us.

In a couple of days I’ll show you the Olympic Peninsula. I don’t think I’ll be showing you the love, I’m selfish that way. But sitting in front of that fire, under those huge fir beams, safe and warm, away from the dripping moss and the bugling elk, I’ll be thinking of love, yours, mine, ours. I hope you’ll be doing the same.

Feel free to eat it right from the spoon, although personally I prefer to have a small bowlful. No, it’s not yogurt, since as a low carb eater yogurt is pretty much off limits to me. It is, I promise you, something much more delicious, and perfectly low carb. It’s crème fraîche, (which you pronounce crem fresh) and which is France’s gift to low carb eating. It’s easy to make at home, and certainly much cheaper than buying it, if you can even find it in your store. If you’ve been missing yogurt, or wincing over the carb content, you are going to love this.

Of course, everyone can enjoy this, not just low-carbers,

and you can use it in any recipe that calls for crème fraîche, as well in recipes that use sour cream. I like to put a few walnuts or almonds in a little bowl, just like the one Zazou is using here, and smother them in crème fraîche for dessert, or if you eat berries, you could use them instead of the nuts.

It’s pure cream, cultured to be very slightly sour, much less so than sour cream. Cream has only 6.5 gms of carbs per cup, and you know you won’t eat a whole cup! To me 1/4 cup or maybe 1/3 cup is a serving, so it’s practically carb-free.

Homemade Crème Fraîche

2 cups heavy cream (the best-tasting cream you can find, organic if possible)
1/4 cup buttermilk (get one with live cultures, organic if possible)

Mix together in a jar, cover, and set on the counter in a warm room for 24-36 hours, until nicely thickened. Refrigerate and eat. Now, when you have about 1/4 cup left in your jar, add 2 cups more cream and repeat, and keep doing that forever. Your first batch will taste a lot like buttermilk, but each successive batch will mellow out until after 3-4 times you have an incredibly luscious thick cream to eat instead of yogurt.

If you’ve ever kept a sourdough starter or made your own vinegar, you’ll enjoy this process.  If you have cats, they’ll enjoy it too. And remember, your crème fraîche jar is a living thing, so treat it well, feed it often, and you’ll always have a delicious little dessert on hand.

“When you’re in Barcelona, be sure to buy ñoras” wrote my online friend Victor sometime last summer. Ñoras being a kind of dried chile pepper that I’d never seen before, and me being a pepper person, of course I followed his instructions. Speaking neither Spanish nor Catalan, a real handicap when in Barcelona, I walked up to a grocery clerk and pronounced only the word ñoras. He led me straight to a huge rack of dried peppers, and I, grateful for the universal language of food, bought two large packages. These ñoras then proceeded to cruise the Spanish coast with us before taking the train to France. While in France they languished in the cupboard for three months because the French don’t really eat anything even mildly spicy. So, luckily for me, the ñoras flew with us from Marseille to Amsterdam to Seattle, where I am now taking a real interest in them.

I d for recipes using ñoras and first up were dozens of references to Romesco sauce. Now Romesco is one of my absolute favorites, but it’s made with bread, not something I can eat anymore, and a lot of onions, which I also restrict severely. Ñoras being the traditional main ingredient, however, inspired me to make a low-carb Romesco sauce, and wow, am I ever glad I tried this. If you’re a low-carb or gluten-free eater, this will be a nice addition to your sauce repertoire. If you’re a traditional Spanish cook, please don’t laugh. This is amazingly like the real thing, even though it contains neither bread nor onions. Honest.

This sauce is rich and thick, warm but not at all hot, slightly sweet and tangy. We had it with roasted pork tenderloin with adobo spices and a sprinkle of chives and it was delicious. It would be lovely with roast chicken and if you’re a person who eats potatoes, that would be a dynamite combination too.

In the suitcase with the ñoras was also a bottle of sherry vinegar that we got when we visited a sherry bodega in Jerez de la Frontera. The sherry vinegar flavor is important here, so get the best one you can find. If you can’t find ñoras, and I’m pretty sure you can’t, (and if you can, please tell me where!), I’d use a mix of peppers. For the recipe given below you could use 3 California chiles, 2 Ancho chiles, and 1 Cascabel chile, for example.

Romesco With Ñoras and Macadamias

10 ñoras (or use pepper mix as above)
1/2 cup chopped toasted almonds
12-14 macadamia nuts
3 cloves garlic, peeled
2-3 T sherry vinegar
salt
water for thinning sauce

Place whole peppers in a large bowl and cover with very hot water. Let soak for 30 minutes. Remove peppers from water and shred them with your fingers right into the bowl of the food processor. You want to remove the stems and the seeds, while pulling the rest of the pepper into medium-sized pieces.

Add the nuts, garlic, and 2 T of the sherry vinegar to the peppers in the food processor, and whizz until the peppers are broken up. With the processor running, slowly add water through the feed tube. You may need 1/2 cup or more, but go slowly, adding it almost as if you were making mayonnaise. You’re looking for a thick, creamy sauce, and when you get there, remove the sauce to a bowl and add salt to taste. If the sauce is at all blah, add a little more sherry vinegar, that’s what makes it really pop.

This sauce keeps well in the fridge, and even tastes better the second day, so you might want to make it a day ahead. And buen provecho.

To all of our friends abroad and afar, you who have been reading about Seattle’s Storm of the Century, the storm that was supposed to set records, dumping feet of the white stuff on us and stunning us with its snowy severity, let me just say: not. At least, not here on the island.

And we’re really sorry.  Because boy oh boy did we stock up: on firewood for when the power went out, leaving us shivering,

on candles for when the power went out, leaving us in the dark, and on groceries, especially anything that I could cook on the woodstove for, you guessed it, when the power went out, leaving us kitchenless in our all-electric abode.

Instead what we got was a pretty little four inches, maybe slightly less at our house, sheltered as we are under the cedars and firs. I went out looking for signs of snowmageddon and instead found

my favorite summer garden bench deliciously frosted,

the ferns frozen in sculptural formations,

the last rose hip gently giving up the ghost,

and even, way down at the bottom of the hill, our letter carrier’s truck, proving that she wasn’t letting snow deter her from her duly appointed route.

Beppo and Zazou had evidently been outside, although when I stomped the snow off my boots and shook the flakes out of my hair, diving back into the warmth of the house,

Shel and Zazou, who were entertaining themselves by the blazing woodstove, looked at me as if I were the abominable snowperson,

while Beppo was curled into the tightest possible ball, all four paws securely tucked away from any threat of snow.