Domestic life seems to have overwhelmed me the last few days but I'm back now. Tonight we cooked. I forget what pleasure it gives me to cook with my children until we are in the kitchen together. My oldest daughter went on a school exchange to
Noumea in October last year. She was desperately home sick for the first few days but was staying with a wonderfully kind family who cossetted and cared for her and she had a fabulous ten days in the end. She also came back with expanded food tastes and tonight made baked stuffed tomatoes as Madame Limonier had made them. She carefully scooped the seeds out of roma tomatoes, chopped garlic finely with basil, mixed with breadcrumbs, some salt and moistened with olive oil and baked for about 12 minutes in a hot oven. They tasted great and we ate them with lamb cutlets we cooked on the heavy cast iron griddle pan and the last of the asparagus. We often cook out of
Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food and Real Fast Puddings (his clafoutis recipe is foolproof) I think of him of the advocate of a style of food that seems to so familiar now - the best ingredients, eating seasonally, simply assembled - but was startlingly in the late 80s when he was writing for Marie Claire. Of course, the Elizabeth Davids, MFK Fisher, Jane Grigson and the like had been writing about food like this for years but somehow it had all seemed so elitist until Nigel Slater showed that you didn't need to know the provenance of the olive oil to be able to cook well.
In relation to the visit to New Caledonia, my children attend a bi-lingual French/english school here, so the trip was to demonstrate that french is actually spoken by real people in a real country. It's not a private school though it does receive some support from the French government. I appreciate I live in a town of relative affluence and a well-educated population supporting their public schools but what is Howard on about in this
interview?
Parents are moving their children out of government schools because the state system is "too politically correct and too values-neutral", according to Prime Minister John Howard.
Where on earth is the evidence for this? The parents I know who have put their children in the private system are doing so because either a) they think the private system offers more opportunity for individual attention to their children or b) they're getting them into the "network" early. I support parental choice but I don't see why it needs additional tax dollars to subsidise it.
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