The Quiche that Kicked my Butt, or Je Suis Une Quiche

Last month, to celebrate the change of season and all the nice produce that comes with it, I wanted to cook something supremely autumnal: le cèpe. A cèpe is a mushroom that reaches giant proportions in forests in France. As the French seem to love this mushroom, I thought it would be a good idea to cook some up for my inlaws, who were coming for the weekend to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday.

So I went online to my favorite French recipe website and found a recipe for quiche aux cèpes. Perfect, I thought. A quiche. This will be easy peasey.

The recipe called for four big cèpes. Hubbie picked up some impressive ones from our local LeClerq supermarket. With a very serious expression he said, "Do you know how much they cost? [Dramatic pause.] Over six euros EACH." I stuck them in the fridge as he muttered, "It better be a good quiche."

The next morning, I started to prepare my ingredients. Suddenly, while watching me turning over the cèpes with a quizzical expression, Hubbie became filled with fear and told me to wait while he googled how to handle the mushroom.

How to handle the --? But it's a mushroom, for crying out loud! Okay okay, I'll wait until you find some guidelines.

Little did we know what a pandora's box that would open.

First of all, we should not have put the mushrooms in the fridge. Not sure why, but that's what several people said.

Secondly, we should not have picked cèpes that have greenish spores. Looking under the caps of our four benign-looking cèpes, we saw two had greenish spores. Perhaps they turned green in the fridge, I suggested. Hubbie shrugged. At any rate, the spores need to be taken off before you cook the 'shrooms. This I did with no problem.

Thirdly, big cèpes are most always home to a few maggots. Maggots??? Yes, maggots. I shivered. Again proceeding as recommended, we wrapped the 'shrooms in cling film, turned them upside down and waited for the worms to come gasping out. We waited twenty minutes, and...

Nothing.

The pressure was mounting. What to do? ETA of the inlaws: one hour. Hubbie found additional advice, which we followed without reflection. We were asked to exhale into the plastic so as to reduce the breathable air for the worms. We waited another twenty minutes. About two nearly-strangled worms came wriggling out onto the plastic of one mushroom. No worms came out of the others.

What to do? I got a creeping suspicion there were more worms to be found. Putting on my sushi-chef/samurai/extremely anal attitude, I decided to go ahead and chop them up, examining each piece to annihilate each and every worm in my precious cèpes.

Gone was my ever optimistic, over-confident assumption that cèpes were as wonderfully tame as your friendly button mushrooms.

I worked on three mushrooms until they looked like they had been butchered by a madwoman. Finally, I sheathed my sword. Looking at the score, I had pried out about six worms from each cèpe. Yes, six! It's the stuff of nightmares, believe you me.

Then, I came to the last mushroom.

It looked like a white sponge. There were holes all over it. And now that I had three cèpes under my belt, I knew that did not bode well.

That is when it hit me. How far was I willing to go for taste? The Japanese risk their lives eating blowfish. Would I risk my life serving maggoty mushrooms to my mother-in-law?

I cut up the last mushroom, just as an experiment, without the slightest hope of it being edible. Of course, each hole in its white flesh meant that a worm had marked its path. It was infested. I shivered and started feeling itchy.

What could I do? I thanked heaven we had at least three good cèpes. The recipe then called for a few champignons de Paris (button mushrooms). Whew, I could relax.

Little did I know, my kitchen blunders had not ended there. The quiche was in the oven, but 45 minutes later at 200 C: Noooo! My $30 quiche is still liquid! What is going on?

In all my quiche-making, never had I come across a quiche that needed to be cooked at anything higher than 200 C. But this quiche, which contained plenty of water from the mushrooms, really did need to be cooked at 250! Rather than trust the writer of the recipe, I had automatically glossed over the 250 C and put the oven to 180 C.

I served the "quiche" to my inlaws and my husband said, "I told her to do an omelette aux cepes, but she wouldn't listen..." Thankfully, they have good senses of humor and stomachs of iron. Later, my mother-in-law magnanimously pointed out my fatal flaw: "It says 250 C."

Yes, I thought I had mastered the humble quiche. But instead I got a hefty serving of humble pie.

Crime and Punishment - Part II

Mom came to visit for two weeks and after she left, we took stock and realized Lulu was out of our control. He had basically treated his poor grandmother like his slave. On the last day, I spotted a wound in my mom's leg and asked her about it, and she said, "I didn't want to tell you. Lulu bit me the second day I was here." My reaction: WHAT??? Since when does Lulu bite people??? Did he learn that at school? Probably, blessed "education" system!!

After I calmed down, I told Mom that because she didn't tell us, we weren't able to teach Lulu biting was wrong, and she let him get away with it... and several other things, which made him think he could beat her up, which he had basically done the whole of her stay. I think the behavioral boundaries were all off because, as she only sees her grandson once every year or two, she wanted to keep the peace. Lulu had clearly taken advantage of her silence to misbehave anytime we weren't watching.

So yesterday when we came back from church and he refused to eat lunch, we relaunched the "naughty corner." We had discussed it a couple of times during the previous week and Hubbie had suggested we had used it too early, when Lulu was too little to understand. Now, especially as he loves to be the center of attention, we thought he might understand the concept. The punishment basically denies him any interaction with us and he is neither seen nor heard (this takes some acting skill).

So he sat in the corner just next to where we were eating. Should he be allowed to sit? Good question from Hubbie. Not sure what the answer is. However, whether sitting or standing, as we moved to the living room to watch Gaby playing in her Leapfrog DJ Station, he started turning around and moving away from that ninety-degree angle he was sequestered to.

Poker-faced, I walked over and turned him around and put him back in a sitting position in the corner. I didn't even look him in the face. As soon as I left, he went soft as an overcooked noodle and came creeping out. So I had to do this several times.

It was annoying.

This is the reason we started slacking off on the "disinvolvement" punishment. It is tiring and time consuming. And poor Hubbie ended up having to do everything! I had also gotten to spend more time with Lulu while Mom was here, so it was no longer an issue of not having my attention.

Now I am wondering if a naughty bench would be a better method. Would he be more likely to stay on the naughty bench than in a corner, which is not delineated? A bench provides a clearer boundary than a corner -- he knows whether he is on or off the bench. It is not clear at what point one is in or out of a corner.

Another question is, how long should he stay in the naughter corner/bench? Five minutes? Ten? More or less as appropriate to the crime? Or at three years old, do they too easily forget the crime if left alone too long? And will the punishment itself start to fail if we leave him punished too long?

We will have to keep trying. I suppose consistency is key...

Crime and Punishment

One of the hot issues in our household the last few months is how we should discipline our three-year-old son, Lulu. Overall he is a good kid, even adorable. He has a good sense of right and wrong and what's dangerous for him. He loves telling us to call the firemen when he thinks something has gone wrong ("apelle numero 18!"), and he is not shy in telling us when he thinks Mama and Papa have not been nice to each other. However, on any given day, he mocks us, he deliberately ignores our warnings and he laughs at our attempts to punish him.

Up till last week, we were at a total loss as to what to do. We had just tried the yellow card/red card punishment system (based on rugby sin bins) in which he gets sent to his room for a yellow card and he gets a spank on the bottom for a red card. That didn't really work because his behaviour following the punishment didn't improve -- he went right back to disobeying us. Before that, we had tried negative incentives, positive incentives, the naughty bed, the naughty corner and the naughty bench. We had also tried keeping him emprisoned in our arms for two minutes as a punishment (as he is so active and hates to sit down). What hadn't we tried?

I shared the problem two weeks ago with the women's bible study group I attend, and then Hubbie and I talked about it again last week when I broke down in tears. It became clear it was with me that he was especially naughty.

It wasn't that we didn't do things together. I went swimming with Lulu, just him and me, without Hubbie or Gaby. But at the end of that he acted up again. On several occasions I did creative activities with him whilst Gaby was sleeping. None of this seemed to help his behaviour improve.

Since he turned three, or possibly since his little sister arrived in June, he has been extremely disobedient. Yet he has not demonstrated any jealousy towards her; he is affectionate and protective. It is evident that the relationship between Lulu and me has changed, though.

That was when we thought, hold on, when he disobeys, he gets me to spend more time with him, to insist for the umpteenth time he do what he refuses to do, or to scold him for what he shouldn't do. To dress him because he suddenly goes limp. To help him use the toilet because otherwise he'll have an accident. To feed him because otherwise he won't eat. Even if I am angry with him, he wants that extra time with me. He wants me around him, even if it's negative. He wants me, he wants my time.

So clearly then, what is now the most effective punishment for his crimes? Ironically, I just needed to go limp and disappear, to remove myself from the situation completely, or to threaten to do so, in order for him to stop being so naughty. When Papa is around, I ask him to do what I would have done, and Lulu loses that time with me. When Papa isn't around, I use the threat of disinvolvement.

Poor Papa, at times, still needs to use the Papa Prison. His arms are a lot stronger now because of it.

For me, the "disinvolvement" is working. At least for now. The great thing is, Lulu grows so fast, he will outsmart us. So the punishment may not fit the crime come next week!

...and back again

It has been over a year since my last blog. If you are reading this, THANK YOU for making the effort.

In a nutshell, here is what I can remember from the last year, in (nearly) chronological order:

- From Aug 2009 to May 2010, I worked in an office environment that gave me the opportunity to practice my French, to work with French people and even to make some friends
- We moved to a village just outside the city and are now in a 3-bedroom apt rather than a 1-bedroom apt
- I attended my first rugby game, and am now a fan! Hubbie goes regularly to watch matches live at the small stadium near our home.
- We had a baby girl in June (good reason for moving!)
- Lulu started school (ecole maternelle) and is enjoying it

Over the past few weeks, blog ideas have popped into my head quite effortlessly. Now all of a sudden something like stage-fright has taken hold and I can think of nothing to say. So, perhaps later today something will come to me. In the meantime I will work on putting up a new photo...