Salut Team Ireland! A tale of hot curry peppers

Those of you accustomed to wading through the vaguely literary blather wot constitutes this 'ere blog, may recall une crise des legumes*some months back.

Girlfriend Claire was preparing for a exchange visit by a party of Irish schoolgirls, one of whom had described herself as strict vegan.

This caused much head-scratching at the time as the French are pretty hazy about, if not totally baffled by veggie-ism in general, let alone the strict and puritanical precepts of higher veganism (hem-hem).

Anyhow the party duly arrived. It turns out that this particular teenager's definition of "strict vegan" apparently included cream cakes, and indeed any of the other myriad naughty but nice things to be found dans les boulangeries de la France, and for which they are justly famous. So small crisis, not many dead. I figure that some strict vegans must just be stricter than others . . .

Well, it could have been worse: Imagine if half the class had turned out to be garlic-phobes? I say this with feeling because I have lived long enough in France to consider la cuisine sans ail to be frankly impossible. I haven't quite got around to putting it on cornflakes but I definitely panic if I've forgotten to buy any.

Realising that starvation of the uncarnivorous kind was no longer imminent, our top team, that's to say Claire and her oppo Jo from Trim, Co Meath, found that a pleasant day off was possible while the Irish pupils spent time with their French host families.

And so it was that we spent a Sunday morning in Canet market while the sun shone, boats sailed and holidaymakers at last got a sizzling under their bottles of slap (Factors Various).

L-R, Maria from Ireland, Claire, Jo and her husband Damien are caught copping lots of intense info from an organic cheese producer who didn't quite make it onto the pic and thence to superstardom. Jo and Damien are often in Fa, and naturally the whole exchange was dreamed up, as is the way of Fa, over a beer at the café.

But it's not quite the end for meatlessness as Jo is in fact a veggie and we dreamed up a handy little dish for le grillade, alias the barbie.

I will admit to a particular loathing of veggie-burgers, veggie sausages and anything else filed under pretend-meat made out of veg. Taken to its illogical conclusion, you might as well squodge old sprouts into vegetarian fillet steak but when there are entire major world cuisines devoted to making great food out of assorted plant matter, why even try to go there?

If you'd like to try barbecued peppers stuffed with curried mushrooms, it goes like this:

*Cut the tops off a couple of decent-sized peppers (any colour) and excavate the white gubbins as usual.

*Chop up an onion, several cloves of garlic, and say four or five big mushrooms.

*Fry the lot together with a teaspoon or two of curry powder, strength to your taste, plus a dash of freshly-ground black pepper, some chopped fresh coriander or parsley if you're stuck and a slosh of soy sauce.

*Fry until the onion softens or it looks and smells done.

*Fill the peppers with the mushroom mix and stopper them with pieces of scrumpled-up tin foil.

*Place on a hot barbecue and keep turning until the peppers soften.

* Take from barbecue and remove tin foil.

*Eat.

As they may possibly say on Galway Bay: Bon appetit!

*See Alors c'est Begin le Beguine aux legumes, 9 février 2010