Like I was saying in my latest story “The Juice”, the last time I have done this recipe, was eighteen years ago; I was a cook in Galway’s Nimmo’s Wine Bar… Eighteen years, boom! That went in a flash! I don’t really know why I haven’t done it again until last week, and today, I decided to share it with you. A personal creation when as a young cook, I realised that Monkfish goes very well with Earthy flavours. On this beautiful Friday evening, I hope you will enjoy it as much as “Long Walk” wine bar’s customers did all these years ago…
Service please! ( photo shoot at The Forge – Meath).
You’d be thinking, with a title like that, we are going to get another kale smoothie or a healthy drink for guilty January… Not a chance! “The Juice”, is the French slang word for “busy”. It can be used in two different ways: “I am in the juice”, meaning that you are very busy, loads of work, bang-bang, can’t talk too much but you can manage, you are in control… On the other hand when you say ( and this could be very Breton) “ I have taken a juice”, means that tunnel vision has taken over, you have lost that control and start focusing on the one thing, while the situation around you gets more and more critical. Right now, I can only think of three professions where “Juice intake” can have various consequences. If you “take a juice” while at the helm of a plane, you and your passengers better hope that your co-pilot spots the symptoms early, or it could have a dramatic outcome. Same with air traffic controllers I guess. If you work in a call centre and start to feel overwhelmed by the volume of people treating you like a human carpet, you might want to take five, before you tell someone to go eat a lemon, which could get you an early P45 ( the end of employment form in Ireland). Then they are the cooks and the chefs; “Taking a juice” is just not an option, even if you might hear stories, it’s not ok… The phrase “it happened to all of us” is not ok… That sentence of fake empathy echoing “it’s not your fault… It’s not your fault” … You don’t know what it feels like, but I know… It happened to me once, eighteen years ago; time to face your demons Franckie Boy, time to share it with the world…
I think I have been sleeping for the passed three days; I know that when I went to Dublin last Monday, I wasn’t feeling too hot and by Wednesday, I was migrating from bed to sofa. A simple bug, nothing serious, but all the fatigue I had accumulated in December finally got the better of me. In my diurnal oneiric deliriums, I had some pretty crazy adventures; I roamed far and wide, met interesting people and discovered wonderful lands only known to me. I travelled back in time revisiting simple moments of peace and happiness, the beach of Erdeven and the glistening of its ocean when the winds come from the East, an apple cake cooling on the kitchen windowsill of the old school we lived in, my little sister falling in a ditch while playing hide and seek in the forest of Broceliande… I woke up feeling temporarily restored, recharged like an I-phone after hours on life support, refreshed but hungry. While I was dwelling about the reality of the irrational, another memory came back to me. When I was a kid, and only if I was sick, the recovery dish was always rice, with butter and lemon juice. Sometimes with a bit of fish or ham, but often just like that; it made me smile and I started thinking.
The storm has come and gone, all is still and quiet, time to get out there. Breakfast is very important to me, but recently I have been diagnosed with I.B.S and I have to give up bread and even coffee. It sucks a bit, but I am of the creative kind, not ready to let this inconvenience affect my favourite meal of the day. Porridge is great; you can mix a lot of things in it, fruits, nuts, even if it looks like a bowl of gruel straight out of a Charles Dickens’ nightmare, it is actually quite enjoyable if you can pass the visual hurdle. Eggs are good too, I love them, scrambled with a bit of cheese, but to be frank, I was missing something. I went back to my origins, where I found an answer in our traditional buckwheat crêpes. This is a quick version as I have to go to work and waking up at 6 am to make breakfast is just not going to happen. You can use this recipe for sweet or savoury, it doesn’t matter.
Hungry Breton 