Croissants

Croissants are a good test. As an exotic foreign food (for my generation anyway) I realise I load this delightful breakfast food with quite unrealistic expectations - about crispness, flakiness, taste, oiliness or butteriness, about the softness of the interior, the way it pulls apart into small edible sections, and so on.   Despite their modern widespread availability, their normalness, it is surprising how very few live up to these standards, even when they look as if they are going to. The appearance of the modern croissant is almost always the best thing about it. But the eating experience is almost universally horrible, disappointing.  The trouble is that every now and then, once in a while, you find one which is perfect, and so then you know, you know in an unforgettable way, that it is possible for croissantiers to achieve perfection but for some reason or other, they don't do it.
When we were in Paris in December, staying with our friend Nathalie in the her apartment at Sceaux, she suggested we patronise a particular boulanger in the high street, and there we found and bought and kept buying perfect croissants.  There are queues outside this shop at all times of day, I may say, so our judgement is clearly endorsed by the whole of that community. The perfect croissant exists.
Here in Tenerife, we have been shopping for daily needs in the small supermarket outside the hotel complex and their croissants are - well, adequate.  Yesterday we went to the Farmers' Market at Adeje, and bought some croissants there, and these too have proved to be - well, adequate.   The farmers market is in a modern building and crammed with people. The displays of radishes, cabbages, kohl rabi, papayas, lettuces of all kinds, saffron, carrots, beet roots, loquats were superb. Whole walls of evenly arranged produce, slathered with pride and benevolence - all organic, all local, were so tempting. At the coffee bar we bought an impressive black loaf whose top had been slashed before rising so that the white coating of flour had spread into an almost heraldic design shouting 'Buy me!', and the croissants. Which were ok.
We came home, found we could after all upgrade to an apartment with a view, moved all our stuff, and had lunch on our sunny terrace.
In the property paper we'd picked up at the market cafe, we found a house for sale at the 'quaint village' of Tijoco there is a house for sale with stupendous views and incorporating a second apartment while enjoying a garden with mature fruit trees..... So we went to see it. Tijoco Alto is quite high up, and has two roads leading to it. We went up the old one, through a marvellous botanical moorland of dragon trees, cactus, prickly pears, wild flowers and rocks, which gradually altered with ancient and renewed terracing, and tiny ancient farmsteads still surviving between modern villas.  The road twists and turns, curves around important outcrops or houses, seems a million miles away from the tourist nonsense by the coast.  Four bus routes get up there every day. We went on and on up into the blessed forest of Canary pines, and heard the birdsong.   Then we came back down, choosing the newer or improved road, and there was 'our' house, looking as if it had been transplanted from Surrey. It is very nice, and looks to be a good buy - the price is reduced to €299,000 and there are two agents involved. No space for a pool but all very charming and no doubt could be bought for less. There was no-one there.
We came down the smooth road, past installations of modern rather beautiful big villas - this is going to be a millionaire area I guess and so this house is on the right side of town.  Down and down we came, into cheerful Tijoco Bajo, over the motorway, into banana-plantation land, and eventually to the sea.   One false attempt to find a bar for a sunset drink made us bicker - really all the so-called PR people who stand on pavements to lure you into a particular establishment can be very irritating - taking a stroll is running a kind of polite gauntlet.  But we pressed on, to la Caleta, a nice little rocky inlet in the.coast, surrounded now almost entirely with restaurants. From our parking space we followed a British couple - he red faced and pleased, she fantastically elegant with very high heels and a tailored jacket. (We were in tousled shorts and jeans, and for a moment I thought we'd be shamed away if all the places required smart clothing. But it was ok).  And there in a cheapy tapas bar we had a simple supper as the wind died down and the stars came out. The fish was fine, simple. The loo had paper towels instead of a blower for hand-drying. Yippee.