Our place in France Chapter 23

Well, this has been one of those weeks that I warned you all about. Absolutely nothing to talk about and no pictures to show either.That's not to say nothing was achieved during the week. We learnt a few things which, to us, were quite interesting but surely not earth-shattering to a lot of others. For example, in the very hot weather, we discovered, it is better to keep the windows closed even if the sun is blazing down on them. The double glazing works both ways - keeps the cold out and also the warmth in, in winter, but keeps the heat out in summer. We keep windows open all night to allow the cool breezes in and then close up at about 10.30 the next morning. It is amazing how much difference it makes. Never to old to learn!
Something else I learnt this week was that I really cannot multi-task any more. Nowadays, with no Ouma's Rusks on the supermarket shelves, I have taken to making my own. Early morning coffee just wouldn't be right without rusks. The mixing and baking is not a problem - I can now bake them without a recipe - but the drying is complicated. I can't dry them in the gas oven as I can't set it down low enough, but my microwave/convection oven has a maximum time of 90 minutes on the timer and they really need to dry for three hours. So the process is :- set the convection oven to a very low heat; set the timer to 90 minutes and pop the rusks in. Ninety minutes later when the beeper goes off, do it all over again and this time I can go away and forget it and just let the oven cool down with the rusks still inside. Well, this week there was something we had to do; a place we had to be, at a certain time,
But I was sure there was time to do both - bake the rusks and put them in to dry AND be where we had to be. After all, everyone can multi-task, can't they?! Phase One was a doddle and in no time they were baked and semi-cooled. I put them into the oven to start Phase Two and just before that was over, Neels was saying 'Come on! We have to go!' so I rushed to the oven which had just beeped, reset it all and left in a bit of a whirl. Well.......of course we stayed longer than I expected we would but it shouldn't have been a problem, except that when I reset the oven I forgot to reset the temperature to the very low heat that was needed, so it stayed at it's default heat of 180 degrees, and when we returned, we were greeted by a nasty smell of burnt cake and an ovenful of charred remains! Oh dear! One for the garbage bin. The next day I started again and with no distractions, managed to produce a decent batch of early-morning-coffee-rusks. Eat your heart out Ouma!
The thing that we had to do was to go and fetch a bicycle from a neighbour. No, don't fall about laughing, it isn't for me, but for Jenny, in preparation for their holiday here in September, but the neighbour was due to leave the next day and apart from collecting the bike, we wanted to say goodbye too. The bicycle duly came home and for a couple of days Neels had great fun cleaning it all up and adjusting the gears and brakes so that everything worked well and smoothly. Another thing to tick off the list.
Apart from that, we really didn't do anything. Keeping cool kept us occupied us for some of the time and then relishing the one unexpectedly cool night. A foretaste of things to come, perhaps.