A GOOD LUNCH AT A NEW PLACE

We recently, on the spur of the moment, visited L'Ascenseur in St Savin for lunch.  It had been recommended by several people but, being nearly an hour's drive away, we somehow never made it until now.  You can see its website here.

It was worth the wait and worth the journey!  People don't take pictures of their lunch so much nowadays but this meal was so good I just had to.  The ambience is relaxed and the service excellent and unfussy.  

A salad starter for him.

A calamari starter for me.

We both had the chicken main course.

Followed by a delicious cheese course which included a small glass of port.

A fruit meringue for dessert for him.

A chocolate concoction for me.

Finally, a very good coffee.

We thoroughly enjoyed it and will be going back soon.

St Savin is also a great  place to visit, a UNESCO world heritage site with a fabulous abbey, lovely walks and a charming old town with numerous other eateries.

 Apparently, St Savin was the birth place in 1827 of the man who invented the first hydraulic elevator, Félix Léon Edoux, which is how the restaurant gets its name. 

A TABLE EXTENSION

Two tables end to end to seat ten people.

When we bought our first house in France it was a tiny place but perfect as a second home or "holiday home".  We struggled to find furniture for it in France and soon realised that we could end up spending much of our actual holidays trying to furnish it. 

Over our first winter of owning the little house we collected furniture for it in the UK, sofas from Ikea, flatpack bedroom furniture and a lovely oak dining set in the January sales including a four seat table that would extend to six.  We hired a van and transported the lot across the channel at Easter 2008, picking up extra beds for the second bedroom and cramming them into the van on the way through France.

After a few years we downsized in the UK in order to upsize in France. The new UK house was much smaller and very little of our existing furniture would physically fit into it so we brought it all to France.  This included our dining table, sideboard and four chairs, meaning that we now have two dining sets in France.  

"Casual dining" in the kitchen.

The old UK table works well in the kitchen where Nick refers to it as "casual dining" and the oak set from the little house lives in the dining end of our living room where it serves as "formal dining" and comfortably seats six.  It’s a solution that has worked well for years and we really like it.  

As our circle of friends has grown we have been entertained by people who have the ability to throw large dinner parties or lunches where they could seat eight, ten or even more people.  We're not talking posh château dining, but people who have the room to fit in a big old table, or multiple small tables, and a random collection of chairs.  

After a while I began to wonder if we could do larger gatherings ourselves.  Our dining table seats six comfortably and we found that by putting the kitchen table at the end of it we could seat ten.  The only problem was that to get the kitchen table into the dining room we had to heave it out of the house through the kitchen door and back in through the middle door as it would not physically fit through the door between the two rooms!

It was heavy work, adding a lot of time to the hosting of any dinner party and in fact we missed having the kitchen table into the kitchen for food prep so we had to come up with another solution.  

One extension to seat an extra two people.

When we bought this house the large bedroom was also being used as an office.  There was a desk made from a couple of lengths of fairly sturdy kitchen worktop which we saved when we dismantled the office.  Having a huge barn enables us to save a mountain of stuff that might come in handy later!

Two extensions to seat an extra four people.

Nick created two extensions, one for each end of our oak table, using sections of the old office worktop, each supported by three tubular legs from Ikea.  They fit onto the table using clamps which can't be seen when the extensions are not in use.  With one extension the table seats eight with ample elbow room.  With two extensions we can seat ten.  If only the room itself was bigger we could add a third and seat another two!  

The worktop is not pretty and obviously I need a long tablecloth to hide all the joins but it works really well.  Luckily we already had enough chairs!  

Sets of matching or at least reasonably similar dinnerware are often on sale at local brocantes or vide greniers and we have accumulated a fair stash of it over the years.  The original set of six plates we bought from Ikea in 2008 has been boosted by acquiring extras from brocantes and fortunately we also have plenty of room in the barn to store it all!  We rarely pay more than two or three euros for a set of plates, bowls or whatever, the bonus being that we now have enough to afford to break a few!  Luckily mismatched crockery and glassware are still very much "in vogue".

The table in the foreground (there is a step down into the "dining room") is a side table that normally lives at the far end of the room and we bring it forward when we have a big dinner party.  It's perfect for serving dishes and plates.  It was a UK charity shop purchase a few years ago (pre Brexit when it we could bring such things freely).  I remember thinking it would probably come in handy at some point and with a coat of paint and a lick of varnish it's just the job!

SEVENTY FIVE NEXT !!

Another birthday has passed and in my birthday week we ate at some of our favourite restaurants.  The troglodyte pizzeria in Loches had had another makeover for Christmas.

On my actual birthday we went to the déchèterie!  What a treat!

We had to go because we had a lot of gardening and other rubbish to dispose of and opportunities were limited.  However, I did find a nice birthday gift on the "help yourself" table - four lovely dessert bowls, perfect for trifle or ice cream.

In the evening we had a delicious meal in the hotel in the village.  Its restaurant is called "L'Auberge".

The village looked very festive as we walked back to the car.

Later in the week we sampled the Christmas menu at Brody's.

The smoked sausage was very good.

I made a pumpkin and mincemeat cake in my forest Bundt tin for my birthday.

It was delicious!

 On a beautiful sunny day we went to the Christmas market at Bossée-sur-Claise which was great fun.

One of the food stalls was serving tartiflette so we had another good lunch!

In our art class we painted Christmas robins.

After we had deposited Yvonne in the cattery on the eve of our return to the UK for Christmas, there was a gorgeous sunset.  Such things make leaving France hard to do.   Hugo comes with us as he travels really well.  Yvonne does not travel well at all.

Soon after we arrived we continued the eating out and met up with friends who spend the summers in our part France for a get together and Christmas lunch.  It was great to catch up.

We went somewhere we had never been before, even having spent most of my life living in Derbyshire.

The Church Inn at Chelmorton.  Highly recommended.

After that, things went rather downhill.

The weather turned very damp and grey and we both succumbed to nasty colds.

All other festivities have been cancelled and we simply hope to be well enough to travel back to France on the 27th.  I am keen to fetch Yvonne from the cattery as soon as we can.

This was not the Christmas we had planned or hoped for.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, I have just turned seventy four.  It was my dad who would have said "I'll be seventy five next".  After every birthday he would add a year on, saying what he would be next, not what he was now.  It was his kind of joke.  Until the day he met his lady friend and then he started to say "we don't talk about our age" with a cheeky grin.  

It turned out that he had not been entirely honest with her and had knocked a few years off!  

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS 

AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL !!

A NEW WASHER, CHEESE, AND A VISITING CAT

Our washing machine had been on the blink for a long time.  Sometimes it would spin normally although noisily, sometimes it struggled and rattled like hell, and sometimes it just refused to spin at all.  It was a good quality Bosch machine but eleven years old and had been great until the last year.  So the question was, whether to try to get someone out to look at it and see if it could be repaired or whether to not risk spending good money on an old machine and buy a new one.  Plus the risk that one day it would simply conk out when full of wet washing, which has happened to other people I know and which complicates the problem no end.

The decision was made when I spotted a bargain in a local branch of SuperU.  700€ is a lot of money but 300€ off made it affordable.  We decided to go for it.  The old machine now resides forlornly at the corner of the déchetterie alongside other discarded machines.  Curiously, the man that mans the déchetterie seemed remarkably thrilled to take it, and didn't swipe our users card (twenty goes a year),  for which there must be an explanation but I can't imagine what.

I am very, very pleased with the new machine.  It hardly seems to use any water and washes things beautifully, spinning them much better than the old one.  RIP.

We recently discovered a number of previously unfamiliar cheeses at the cheese stall on the market.  We were having visitors and lashed out a ridiculous amount of money on an eclectic mix of hard and soft goat and cow's cheeses.  I took photos of them knowing I would never remember what they were otherwise

This one was my favourite.

They all went down well with our visitors who also were not familiar with any of them.

We couldn't resist this one, called Belper Knolle, because Belper is the name of a small town in Derbyshire close to where I grew up and a knowle is another word for a village or hamlet.  It was jolly expensive.  

I wondered how on earth cheese made in a Derbyshire town could end up on the market in the middle of France and was disappointed when the cheese lady told us it was Swiss.  However, it was worth buying as it's delicious.  The idea is to serve it grated like you would a parmesan, on salads, pasta dishes and in soups, and in fact it tastes much like parmesan only better.  I sprinkled it on the soup I served for dinner and it was much appreciated.  

We now covet the wooden cheese grating device that the cheese lady used to give us a taste.  

We have a visiting cat.  We had seen the cat in the field behind the house (once the farmer had cut down the triffid like weeds) occasionally over the last few months.  I wondered how long it would be before it ventured to our house and sure enough, I smelled the tell-tale odour of tomcat in the little barn.

Shortly after that Yvonne appeared one day without her collar and with a scratch on her face.  We found her collar (it's a quick release type) in a flower bed amongst a clump of flattened dahlias so we suppose that's where an encounter took place.  A few times she growled and hissed when looking out of the glass door and once she hurtled into the house via the cat flap and hid under the stairs, eyes like saucers, hissing and spitting.  Then we spotted the cat on the drive and found it on the beams in the little barn.  It's a handsome cat with a fluffy tail and looks nice and clean.

It is nothing like the vicious cat we had visiting before.  That one found its way into the house and terrorised Daisy, attacked both of us and would not go away, returning every night to take food.  This one seems much more friendly, is obviously well used to humans as it came towards us, purring and rolling over on the beams.  So far it has not attempted to get into the house and we therefore presume it's well fed and lives in one of the neighbouring farms, just doing the normal tomcat thing of wandering a fair distance from home every so often.  We haven't seen it for a few days now that the weather has turned and hope that it is in fact well cared for and has somewhere warm and cosy to spend the nights.