Today's recipes are: Corned Beef 101; and American Corned Beef Dinner

We generally spend St. Patrick’s Day (the 17th of March) in the USA. For those of you who have had the (mis)fortune of receiving group mails from me over the years, you would know this. But I am relying on the fact that most of my friends won’t remember this (alcohol, age……and no, I haven’t quite finished reading “How to make friends and influence people”). We were in the mid-west for the celebrations two years ago and our barman wore a green wig, our waitress had drunk far too much of the green beer (yes, all beer is green on this particular day) and brought us warm beer, cold corned beef & cabbage, and the Irish soup (should have been stew) after the pudding….. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Today's recipe: Asparagus Goulash

I don’t know about you, but we love asparagus. We used to have a very prolific asparagus bed, but it had past it’s sell by date and was delivering less and less each year. And then it got overgrown and I forgot where it was and mowed over the bed a couple of days ago. Oops. You could smell the asparagus, but you couldn’t see it. So I decided to put some in a vase and take it into the garden. If you can’t make the garden come to the asparagus, then you have to take the asparagus to the garden…or something like that.

Today's recipes are: Fruity Moroccan Lamb Tagine; and Couscous 101
Sally, my bosom buddy, and I went for lunch in Auch last week. Auch is our department/state/province’s biggest city and is the birthplace of d’Artagnan, the 4th of the 3 musketeers. I don’t get it either. I thought that there were only 3 but it seems I was wrong. Maybe he was like a reserve one or something, incase one of the others got hurt and couldn’t do whatever it was they did. Hey, it’s been a while since I read the story.

Today's recipe is: Paella
One would think that living on a farm with your nearest neigbour almost a kilometer away would be “oh so boring”, but this is so not the case in the south west of France. We have to fight for a night in, in front of the telly. And this last week has been no exception - in fact the last 3 months have been no exception. We’ve had visitors or been out 9 times in the last 2 weeks!! I need some time to lie on the sofa, I mean, write this blog, for goodness sake. Well, that’s it. This week I’m here to stay and finally post some (hopefully) interesting stories and recipes. Just have to answer the phone quickly and I’ll be right back………….