Winter sunshine

Following a tip-off I drove to Grand Frais in Carcassonne this morning to snaffle some Seville oranges along with some untreated lemons. GF is a chain that started about a decade ago. I remember people raving about it when a branch opened in Narbonne. "But it's just a vegetable shop," I thought, baffled, until I visited. They pioneered large shops with huge, brightly lit displays of all the fruit and vegetables you could wish for, including exotic and sometimes out of season ones (almost unheard of in France). It was the first place I saw salad items being sprayed with a fine mist of water.

It's not just fruit and veg though -- around the edges are grocery sections, including a good selection of spices and Asian ingredients, and at the back of the shop is a big dairy section -- lots of cheese, a large selection of different types of butter, and -- another tip-off -- tubs of Swiss double cream with a fat content of 48%. It's expensive -- 5 euros a tub! -- but by and large French cream is useless for whipping. That said, when I got home I put some on one of the scones I made yesterday, and it was so thick that whipping would be superfluous. Absolutely delicious. I'll be heading there the next time I make a trifle.

Anyway, the oranges and lemons are now simmering on top of the wood burner. I use Fiona's recipe from the Cottage Smallholder. I'm sad that she doesn't blog any more -- hers was one of the first blogs I followed, back in the noughties, and a real community developed around her daily posts-- we even met up at Fiona's cottage in 2011 and 2012. She's now selling it to fund her pension.