Sadly for the house, our Foxtel installer, allegedly a qualified electrician, was not bright enough to drill his hole for our Foxtel cable without drilling into our electricity cable, despite the fairly clear evidence of said cable on the other side of our wall.
Usually I am quite polite to people providing services to me (as a service provider in my non-Julia life) but it was difficult to contain my rage when I explained to him that he needed to fix the problem as we were having guests for lunch. While I catatonically reread Julia for lunch suggestions that involved only a gas cooktop and no oven, our Foxtel installer managed to repair the cable.... or so we thought.
Meanwhile, Le Gourmand was unable to go to the fish markets for fresh fish and we were forced to choose from the selection available at our local fish and chips shop and my three course Julia inspired lunch suffered a serious time setback.
I wish this was the reason for some of the deficiencies in our Aïgo Bouïdo (garlic soup). Our guests were adventurous so I thought they would be the perfect guinea pigs. Unfortunately the three yolk and oil enrichment was not enough to thicken the two litres of water boiled with 16 garlic cloves, parsley and thyme and strained into it. Perhaps one and a half litres would have been a better balance. As promised by Julia, the flavour of the garlic was subtle and interesting (once everyone added a lot of salt and pepper) and our french bread accompaniment was lovely.
Luckily the Rápée Morvandelle - grated potatoes with ham, onion, eggs, swiss cheese and seasoning, cooked in the oven - were a winner, as was the Sauce aux Capres (Caper Sauce) - capers added to Julia's mock hollandaise recipe went beautifully with fish, bread and gratin if you were so inclined. Julia's Tomates Grillées Au Four (oven baked tomatoes with oil and salt and pepper) were simple but tasty (although I did find my mind wandering to my balsamic glaze recipe).
While one of our delightful guests washed up, I prepared the Souffle a l'Orange. Ordinarily I find souffles not too difficult, but the base on this was a lot thicker than I was used too. But it started to rise and I sighed in relief. And then the electricity went off. In my haste to get the souffle out of the oven, I dropped it and we found ourselves eating what can be generously described as quite tasty orange flavoured cake/batter.
Could the day get any worse? Apparently yes. When the electricity finally came back on the (electric) ignition for our cook top would not stop flickering and in an attempt to solve the problem I gave myself an electric shock. Twice. Bruce found out about the emergency section of the hospital. Happily he is just fine despite his mother's bad luck and the second electrician appears to have resolved our problem. What. A. Day.
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