OLD STUFF AND LOGS

 All of the usual brocantes / vide greniers (flea markets) have taken place this year in spite of the tremendous heat.  Several of them are now very big events.  We have had five heatwaves, one after the other and haven't felt like going to all the brocantes that we usually do.  We have however, managed a few and acquired a few bits and pieces of old stuff.

In reality, very little of it is very old, just stuff that other people don't want.

We did very well at our own village brocante in Paulmy early this month.

I couldn't resist this chicken to add to my growing collection of chickens.

This one cost just 1€.

My little collection of French chickens.

No fresh eggs, just fun.

See also the little pile of serviettes.

Fourteen beautiful yellow serviettes in cotton, 4€.

Note also in the background some martini glasses.

A set of seven (!) from the brocante at Yzeures-sur-Creuse.

If ever we need to serve cocktails, we now have the right glasses.

Also from Paulmy, a rather pretty cake stand.

I need another cake stand like I need a hole in the head.

For 2€ I couldn't resist this one.

I found a space for it somewhere.

A friend had a stall at Paulmy and did rather well selling her old stuff.

I admired this classic cookbook by Arabella Boxer and she gave it to me for nothing.

She had family staying and her grandson made lots of objects using 3D printing.

I absolutely don't understand how that works but am prepared to accept that it does.

Rather like I don't know how a television works but am happy to watch it.

He did REALLY well with his 3D objects and I bought a key ring, 2€. 

The beads were, I think, meant to be two bracelets.  2€.

I shall restring them into a necklace.

The pretty green mug came from the brocante at Lesigny.

It's massive event, taking over the whole village but on a very hot day we gave up and left early.

The mug was the only thing I felt like hanging around to ask the price for.  1€.

The china cups and saucers came from the most recent brocante, a huge event, at Cussay.

You may wonder about the loaves of bread.....

At Cussay they fire up the old village bread oven.

They make and sell the most delicious bread.

We ate the white loaf, called a "boule" and froze the brown loaf, called a "complet" which means wholemeal.

There was a stall selling haberdashery and craft items which looked like they had all come from a shop that had closed down.

These gorgeous Gütermann beads were 1.20€ a tube.

I have it in mind to add some of them to the pretty bracelet beads to create a necklace.

We didn't stay long at the Cussay brocante.

There were acres of stalls but we needed to get back home to our logs.

On Friday we had had our delivery of logs.  It is, strictly speaking, a bit early in the year to be having logs but I heard where there were some for sale and decided to put in an order.  In previous years we have had trouble getting them and at one point were close to running out completely.  Hence last year we ended up paying well over the odds for the wood and a huge amount for delivery.

This time I turned up at the log man's house just before lunchtime in the hope that I would catch him in.  He never answers the phone.  We combined our order with that for a friend to make the delivery worthwhile.  The wood was a sensible price and he didn't charge at all to deliver.  It looks like excellent well seasoned wood.  The proof of the wood is in the burning.

Our friends collected their share on Saturday and we spent some of Saturday and all of Sunday afternoon sorting, splitting and stacking the logs in our woodshed.  I was on splitting using an electric log splitter, Nick was on barrowing and stacking.

It was blooming hard work but it's all done and we have wood that is ready to go all winter.

A BIRTHDAY AND A NICE LUNCH

It was Hugo's birthday last week.

He is nine years old and still such a handsome boy.

This time last year there were four places to eat in the village.  

Chez Grandma closed at the end of last year.  The owners are hoping to sell it.

La Cabane was a short lived venture.

It was a bar come tapas style restaurant.  They held music evenings and served good food.

They closed last autumn when the owners moved on to other things.

Rumour has it that it has been sold to someone opening some kind of tearoom but there is no sign of any activity yet.

Brody's was immensely successful restaurant.

It closed in mid June and the new owners plan to re-open in September, I believe.

And so now we have just one place to eat in the village.  When we first came here it was called the Hotel Savoie-Villars.  We stayed there for a few nights when we very first moved here and have eaten there frequently over the years.  It has been through several owners with different styles and now it is called L'Auberge.

The owners post a lunchtime menu which changes every day and I check their Facebook page every so often to see if it's something we could fancy.  The evening menu is a-la-carte and sometimes a little too out of the ordinary for our taste but their lunchtime menus are excellent.  Hence we found ourselves eating there one day last week. 

Because they are now the only act in town, the tourist season in full swing and the weather good, they were very busy.  We made a last minute decision to go for lunch and arrived to find it already buzzing.  The waiter/co owner asked if we had reserved and when we said no he sucked in his cheeks, ummed and ahhed and found us a table in the courtyard.  He said we would have a bit of a wait.

He was true to his word and we waited twenty minutes to have our order taken but we were in no rush.  He offered us extra alternatives to the set menu du jour for starter and dessert.

My starter was a delicious gazpacho chilled soup served with anchovies.

Nick had tarama on toasts with a cabbage slaw.

We both had the main course of poached chicken in a curry sauce.

For dessert Nick had apricots roasted with honey and a boule of pistachio ice cream.

My dessert was a pear and apricot clafoutis with ice cream.

 All followed by a delicious espresso coffee.

Total bill for lunch including aperitifs and wine, 65€.

HONFLEUR, DAY THREE.

 

On day three, the last day of our little holiday, we went on a road trip and took Hugo with us.  After a slow morning start and Hugo’s usual walk we headed south to Pont-L’Évêque, the home of the famous cheese.

We remembered, many, many years ago, going on a day trip to London and having a guided tour by our friend Gerry, who knew London like the back of his hand.  A Derbyshire lad born and bred, he had been a student in London in the 1970’s and earned a bit of pocket money by leading tourists around the principal landmarks.  Later in life he gave up his teaching career to make his passion for tour guiding his main source of income and a great job he does too.

One of the places he took us to was a cheesemonger in Old Bond Street.  The shop was supplier of cheese, hams and wines to Buckingham Palace and we learned that the late Queen Elizabeth’s favourite cheeses were Livarot and Pont-L’Évêque, both fairly pungent cheeses from Normandy.

We had intended not to fall into the tourist lunch trap this time, being so far over €160 down for very disappointing food.  We thought we’d get a sandwich from the boulangerie then pick up supplies on the way home to cook our own dinner.  That’s when we stumbled across a small bar doing snack lunches and we went inside, with Hugo.  Even large dogs are welcomed in most French restaurants and these days Hugo is incredibly well behaved.  On top of that, standard poodles are not at all common in France, very much a novelty and he attracts much fuss and attention from everyone including restaurant staff.  He politely enjoyed a tickling of his topknot by the waitress while our orders were being taken.

And so, we had one of our favourites, croque monsieur, with a topping of Pont-L’Évêque cheese, excellent chips and salad for lunch.  With a refreshing panaché (shandy) and delicious coffee the total bill was €30.  Our faith in French restaurants was restored.  You just have to know where to go and how to avoid the tourist rip-off traps.

Back at the gîte, Nick cooked us a delicious pork and mushroom dish with fresh vegetables, a decent red wine to go with it, followed by our duo of local cheeses and a small glass of calvados, the other specialty of the region.  That’s how we spent our third and last evening, under the canopy for the bbq, listening to the pitter-patter of very welcome rain.

We played another game of Scrabble and this time Nick won, by a narrow margin.  We have reinstated our “championship du monde” where we have kept the score cards of all the games played all over Europe on our numerous holidays over decades.  It makes a good reminiscing read…."do you remember that time when you beat me at Scrabble on the campsite near San Gimignano?"  We now use French rules, where French and English words can be played.

The next day we had a good run back home and arrived soon enough to collect Yvonne from the cattery a day early.  She settled back in straight away.

The house was very warm inside.  We opened all the doors and windows to let in some air and watched as the sky grew greyer and rain began to fall.  The temperature dropped by about fifteen degrees and we stood in the doorway to feel the cool air and listen to the rain.  What a joy that was after weeks and weeks of endless hot weather.

HONFLEUR, DAYS ONE AND TWO.

Honfleur is a beautiful town with its art galleries, delicatessen shops and harbour full of boats.

It’s not so great on a roasting hot day when it’s rammed with visitors.

On day one of our three day holiday (four nights in a gîte) we headed into town completely forgetting that it was a French bank holiday (14th July).  We queued briefly for a non existent parking spot, thought better of it and turned around.   The whole of Paris and Rouen had clearly gone to the coast for the day.  The French do love a day by the seaside.

On the way back to the gîte we stopped at an American burger joint style of restaurant for lunch instead.  The starter was good (onion tart) but the main course (chicken caesar salad) not so good due to the tough and chewy bits of chicken.  The pichet of rosé was rather sour and the ice cream liegeois desserts (café for him, chocolate for me) didn’t tickle our tastebuds the way we had hoped.  The bill was over €80.  Oh well, you expect to pay a bit extra when you’re on holiday, we thought.

On day two of our three-daybreak we went back to Honfleur for a second attempt and were pleased to find a parking space straight away.  Knowing it would be hot and busy we left Hugo in the gîte with the back door to the enclosed garden open, thinking that having had a good walk early morning he could settle down with the ability to go outside if he needed to.

First impressions were good,  a delicious coffee in a café near the harbour was sensibly priced.  After that we had a wander around the delightful streets then explored the harbour for a restaurant for lunch.  We settled on one where we could enjoy the view of the boats under a shady canopy and placed our order.  

A pichet of ordinary (but at least drinkable) rosé was outrageously priced but we thought “what the heck, we’re on holiday”.  The starter we both ordered, oeufs en cocotte with Pont Leveque cheese could have been great if it hadn’t been overcooked.  It was impossible to dip the toast into the eggs because they were rock solid but still, it was tasty.

That’s the point at which things went seriously downhill.

I checked my phone and spotted a message from the gîte owner to say that Hugo had been “crying” since we left that morning.  That meant he was howling.  She was around every morning doing the cleaning and changeovers for the three separate gîtes on the plot.

It was too late to cancel our main course so we wolfed it down as fast as possible.  I had ordered fish and chips, Nick moules à la crème.  My fish turned out to be a dry, tasteless portion of supermarket battered fish with a pile of greasy, limp chips and a small spoonful of tartare sauce that looked like it came from a jar. So much for the restaurant’s claim that everything was “fait maison”.  Nick’s moules were lacking in herbs and garlic, slathered in cream that was grey.  Total bill €85.  It was probably, all in all, the worst meal for that amount of money we have ever had in France.  Plus €12 car parking.

We rushed back to the gîte, which was less than a ten minute drive away and parked at the bottom of the drive.  We thought that as soon as he heard the car, Hugo would stop howling so I crept towards the door to have a listen.  The poor dog was howling at the top of his lungs, that penetrating, wolf like piercing howl that a dogs do so well.  We were mortified.

We went on a drive around the area, taking him with us.  We explored the lovely little towns and villages, with their timber framed, thatch roofed cottages and the very grand big houses presumably the homes of the more well heeled.  It definitely is a lovely part of France.

We have not fallen out with Honfleur and will be back!

Later in the evening, back at the gîte, Nick cooked us a delicious meal of bolognaise style beef with vegetables, total cost probably about €15 maximum including a nice bottle of Montagne St Emilion.  We played Scrabble (I won) and decided we would definitely come back to Honfleur but more out of season next time.  That way we could explore the streets more comfortably, we could bring Hugo with us, and we would not be seduced by the promise of a lunch overlooking the harbour into paying tourist prices for a pretty grim meal.

COFFEE HEAVEN

Most days at breakfast we will have coffee from a filter jug machine then occasionally an espresso after lunch or dinner.  

In France we have an ancient Krups espresso machine which we have had for about twenty five years and uses ground coffee.  It is a bit of a faff, although it makes nice coffee but the packs of coffee definitely go off once opened and we inevitably end up throwing some away.  In the UK we have a neat little Lavazza machine which takes large capsules.  When we got it about ten years ago there was a good range of capsules readily available in most supermarkets.  They are now much more difficult to find and very limited in range, except online, and can be very expensive.  

Last autumn we were breezing through SuperU and spotted a L'Or Barista machine on special offer.  A browse of the coffee aisle in the supermarket told us that you can get a huge range of capsules to fit it.  In fact any "Nespresso compatible" capsule will fit.  So we took the plunge.

We were so thrilled with it that the old Krups was soon put out to grass (in the barn) and we bought a second one in the UK.  The Lavazza was then also put out to grass (in the garage).

Both machines will make a little espresso or a café alongée, which we prefer, there is a large range of coffees available at sensible prices to fit them, almost everywhere.  

My only reservation with these machines is what happens to the used capsules?  In France we can in theory put them in with the usual recycling but in fact we've been saving them up to drop off at the déchetterie when we take garden rubbish.  There is a huge skip gradually filling up with used capsules, goodness only knows what they will do with them when it's full.

When we got our UK machine it came with a plastic bag into which we can put the used capsules and take them to a recycling centre or post them.  The nearest centre is at a supermarket some miles away that we don't frequent so that was never going to happen. So I did a bit of internet research.

Enter stage right the Dualit EcoPress.  For a modest price this little gadget squeezes the coffee grounds out of the used capsule into a container.  You then rinse off the capsules, assemble them in a pile and squash them flat to go into the recycling.  The used coffee grounds can be put into garden compost or food recycling.   It's a solution that makes me feel comfortable about using capsules and we can have a lovely fresh coffee when we feel like one, although we still have our filter coffee when we want a jugful in the mornings.  Coffee heaven!

A JOYOUS EVENING, A SAD GOODBYE.

Only a few years ago, the bar that was originally called the Jean Bart became Brody's, a popular bar and restaurant serving delicious pizzas, lasagne, burgers, salads and desserts.  It was also a great place to meet friends and have a coffee mid morning or apéros in the evening.  Many is the time we came for coffee or an apéro and decided to stay for lunch or dinner!

Brody's is due to change hands under new owners and this is their last weekend of serving their food.  From the very first opening night it was clear that this restaurant was exactly what the village needed, great food at affordable prices.  In the summer it would be buzzing with visitors, delighted to be able to feed the family and enjoy the ambience and hospitality of a thriving restaurant.  In winter it was always open to offer warmth and tasty food in the cosy indoor dining room.  Many times it has hosted musical events, indoors and outdoors, to an enthusiastic crowd.

We will miss Doug's cooking, Charlotte's cheery welcome and Debbie's efficient serving.  We wish them all the best and look forward to the place re-opening under new owners and presumably a new name.  It sounds like the menu will carry on in similar vein and the restaurant will continue to be popular with locals and visitors all year round.

We were glad to be able to dine there with friends for their swansong weekend.