A Thing That Goes Bong

I was just going to call this post 'Bong', but as someone who spent their early twenties in a household full of surfers, I figured that might get me some unwanted attention. Anyway, it's on the roof of the gatehouse section of the chateau of Fougères sur Bièvre. It is connected to a clock and does indeed go 'bong' every quarter of an hour. The flaming hearts and arrows finial is fairly snazzy too.

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A la cuisine hier: Pasta with puréed vegetable 'Alfredo' sauce. The recipe comes from Pinch of Yum, and is their most visited page. I'm always ambivalent about recipes like this, which trick something 'virtuous' up to be a pseudo-sin. It smacks of eating TVP bacon if you are vegetarian. The 'Alfredo' sauce picks up on a cauliflower meme that is currently doing the rounds of the low cal recipe circuit, where cauliflower is used to replace a fat or a carb, simply on the basis that both ingredients are white. I'm dubious about cauliflower rice, but thought that if I didn't restrict the veg to just cauliflower, the thinned flavourful purée as sauce idea had merit. My version had pumpkin and spinach in addition to the cauliflower. I imagine just about any root vegetable would work well too. It is indeed quite tasty, but don't expect not to notice the cauliflower (ahem...one way or another...). Lindsay, the blog author, has the grace to acknowledge that there is no getting around the fact that the sauce contains cauliflower in a later post about the sauce.

If you've never encountered Pinch of Yum before, it is an interesting blog. Not so much for the recipes, which are good, but not anything you might not get on a dozen other food blogs. What makes this blog stand out for me is their total openness about how they've monetized the blog, right down to declaring their monthly itemised income to the world. There are also some very useful tips on photographing food, and no doubt other intriguing snippets I have yet to discover.