Help! Calling all inventors!

Today is the annual Caupenne vide grenier, the French equivalent of a car boot sale. Like a car boot sale, there are folks having a clear-out of their attic and there are dealers; unlike a car boot, and unlike almost anything else in France, it doesn’t stop for lunch, but goes on well into the afternoon. The earliest sellers to arrive get the best spots – inside the salle d’association, where it’s cool; the next to arrive have the luxury of being in the shade of the plane trees in the square; anybody arriving after them is stuck out in the blazing sun in the car park, so many people bring sun shades of various shapes and sizes. I don’t envy them; it’s cooler today, but still up to 32ºC in the shade.

I went for a look around this morning; there was the usual mix of children’s clothes and toys, old tools, bikes, books, and general bric-a-brac, but I was delighted to find a copy of Harry Potter and the  Order of the Phoenix, in French, for Alex.

This week we need to pick the figs; we have an enormous fig tree which is groaning under the weight of fruit. We’ve got countless jars of jam and chutney already, so I really don’t want to make any more, but am not sure what else to do with figs. So if anyone has any good recipes for preserving figs, please send them on via the blog or by email.

One idea I had was to dry them; my neighbour has an electric fruit dryer, but with the hours of sunshine we have here, I feel sure it must be possible to make a solar-powered fig dryer. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a fig dryer that works on the heat/light of the sun, so we can have home-produced dried figs this winter. If you come to visit, you can taste them for yourself! Please send designs/drawings/plans to me, again via the blog or by email.

Thank you in anticipation of a flood of recipes and designs;-)