Amis

- anciens et nouveaux

Lish has arrived!!!!!!! They did spectacularly with a whole bunch of unfamiliar challenges - solo international travel for the first time, thirty-six hours of it in total; navigating cross-Paris transport; the absolute shitfight that is Montparnasse Station; and not the least, getting off at the correct station with all their luggage!

I'm so proud! And so happy to have them here. 

Package acquired!! 🥰

Half a day before Lish turned up, my hostess's parents also arrived from England. They are staying here at the house for a week. The kids are delighted to have Mouse (grandmother) and Gordo (step-grandpa) here. 

There was frantic house-prepping in advance of everyone's arrival. 

I enjoyed dusting off my flower arranging skills!

We served tea and cake mid-afternoon: Caroline's Victoria sponge, and my Nagi chocolate cake. 

I had prepped over the previous couple of days, to make lasagnes - one with beef and one mushroom+puy lentil. Caroline's mother graciously said that it was the best lasagna she had ever had! - which I can't quite believe, but I'm grateful for the compliment! 

Credit: all me! But with thanks to TAFE for teaching me to make an absolutely banging bechamel sauce. 

For dessert, Caroline made a lemon-and-Greek-yoghurt cheesecake, topped with warmed honey and fresh thyme. It was fantastic. 

Credit: Ottolenghi - Honey Yoghurt Set Cheesecake

Previous to the weekend, I made a spectacular Friday morning brunch for one (me) - Sausage & Egg on toasted baguette buttered with home-made aioli, with a side of pan-fried leftover mashed potato. Add that divine view and a cup of tea, and it doesn't get much better. 

... followed by lunch, also on the terrasse, of Jambon de Bayonne and saucisson, chèvre and Comte cheeses, vinaigrette of tomato and cucumber, red cabbage coleslaw with aioli dressing and cornichons, hard-boiled eggs, and fresh bread. 

... followed by the usual Friday night Pizza, Icecream and movie party!

Saturday night was a nice simple collation of veggies roasted in pesto, with haloumi, and a side of couscous.

Lish slept spectacularly well on Sunday night, and woke pretty well refreshed and pretty well in the correct time zone. I showed them around the farm, and they enjoyed meeting the chickens. 

We drove down to Lasseube - the village where Lish has booked accommodation - and checked out the lay of the land.

Their AirBnB is SO CUTE. 

Lish has the upstairs of this little building. It's a studio apartment - bedroom and living room in one room; tiny but sufficient galley kitchen and small but adequate bathroom. Sun-filled front courtyard. Four cats on the premises (who to date won't have a bar of Lish, but the month is young!)

This is the property next door. 

Hopelessly picturesque!

So, Lish and the grandies are the old friends mentioned above. I have been busily making new friends!

We were walking up the main (the only) street in Lasseube, talking away. I had been impressing on Lish how particuarly in this tiny village, everyone that passes you in the street, you have to say 'Bonjour'. So a guy goes past us, I say 'Bonjour', he says 'Bonjour' back. 

He's not French!

I stiff-arm point at him, and say AMERICAN.

He says guilty as charged!

And we had a lovely exchange! He's married to a French national, and they are now living here. He's worked out how to get a year-long visa, which he is able to renew year by year. They are living their best lives!

He was absolutely delightful and now he's friends with me on WhatsApp! 

Unfortunately I don't have a picture to share with you, yet. But I will!

So we continue up the street, checking out the salon de thé (must partake of that, some time soon!), the cool bar, a bunch more very cool door-knockers 

(I need to find the door-knocker shop; I most desperately want a French door-knocker as a trip souvenir!), 

some cute shops

Finally headed home, to a dinner of roasted capsicum and ninja zucchini tart with eschallot and cherry tomato garnish.

I am trying not to repeat any recipes, the entire time I'm here! This was the same taste.com recipe I did a week or so prior; but I changed the veggies up, so it doesn't count :) 

Artistic decoration by Lish!

Alex had been in London over the weekend, and came home bearing gifts of crumpets (which you can't get here) and golden syrup (which you also can't get here). It occurred to me that I could MAKE crumpets, if I had egg rings! So I asked Lish to bring me metal egg rings from home. There was a minor mix-up in the communication and Lish brought my silicon poffertje rings, which are way smaller, but hey, they're rings! So on Tuesday morning, I mixed up a batch of crumpet batter and made crumpets! Mini crumpets! 

We had these for late breakfast on Wednesday morning, and for a prototype, they do not suck! I think I've ironed out the kinks in the process now. Will give them another go.

Credit: RecipeTin Eats - Crumpets

On Tuesday Lish and I went up to Pau for the day. 

This building was built in 1896

We went into the Église St Jacques:

beautiful stained glass work; and the organ pipes (I am assuming the choir register) at the front of the church and right at the altar. 

There is a surprising amount of Irish presence around and about! Alex told me why but I can't remember.

We had been struggling to work out how to do the 'They/Them' pronouns in French, and Alex did some research and came up with this usage: 

Il = he

Elle = she

Iel = they (non-binary)

And we found, in a friperie (thrift) shop, THIS on the wall!

Alex and I are getting quite good at using 'iel' when speaking about Lish.

We had a delicious brasserie lunch - I was craving meat, as we have been eating about 90% vegetarian for the last four weeks! I had an absolutely excellent steak with Maître d'Hôtel butter (divine) and chips

Lish had bruschetta and burrata on brioche, with extra chips

We did not need that many chips 😛

Our waiter was called Gwen, which we learned is a Breton name. He comes from here but his father is a Breton. He was super-sympa! I'm going to count him as another new friend!

Then we went to see about hiring a cello for Lish to use while they're here. They had located a luthier who does rentals. We bowled up at the door to his atelier, and Lish said, in carefully-rehearsed French, 

Bonjour, je voudrais louer un violoncelle pour un mois, s'il vous plaît. 

The guy looked slightly perturbed and responded that usually he only rents his cellos out by 6-month blocks. 

Obviously Lish looked crestfallen, and I'm not sure how many of you can resist a crestfallen Lish - this lovely man certainly could not! - and after a moment's thought he shrugged gallically, and said Pourquoi pas, and got out a rental contract! 

The next roadblock was where he needed a security deposit. He asked me if I had traveller's cheques. I sort of stared at him and said, Uh, NO, are they still even a thing? ... I have cash, or I have carte bleue (all credit cards here are called cartes bleues, whether or not they are actually blue). After another moment, he shrugged again and just waived the whole deposit. Lish must have a really trustworthy face!

We came all the way back from Pau to Lasseube (it's about 30 minutes) to meet up with the AirBnb guy and get the keys to the accommodation, and drop the cello into the cool - then back past the house to pick up Lish's passport, and then back up to Pau to the airport to collect the rental car.

... Which, because of all of the to-ing and fro-ing, had been let out to someone else! 

Again with the crestfallen look. 

The lady at the counter was super nice. She said she'd tried to call when the appointed hour for collection had come and gone. Unfortunately calls aren't going through, because the phone is on an e-Sim for the duration of the trip - we are not using our Australian numbers.

She fiddled around in her system and found a car, slighly bigger, slightly more expensive, then fiddled some more and managed to get the surcharge down some. 

Lish is now the proud driver of a spanking new, deep blue, VW Golf five-speed manual. 

There was a certain amount of freaking out in the carpark (not me!), not the least when we couldn't even get the thing to turn on!!! I finally worked out that it's a push-button ignition, but it won't ignite UNLESS you have the clutch pushed all the way in. Then freaking out at the gear stick being on the wrong side. Lish kept trying to change gears with the driver's door-handle 😝

Lish drove around the car park a few times, just to get the feel of it, but then eventually it was time to just bite the bullet and actually go out into the traffic. With the roundabouts that go anti-clockwise instead of clockwise. In peak-hour traffic, by this time. Oon the wrong side of the road. With a gear-stick for the wrong hand. What could possibly go wrong??? 

I drove slowly in front and Lish followed. Actually the peak-hour traffic was probably a good thing, because everything was slower than usual. 

Aside from driving too close to the gutter, which I totally also did when I first got my car, Lish did really well, and we made it back without incident. 

Grandpa Gordo had opted for dinner duty, and made mushroom risotto! We were not hungry after our big lunch, but I did sample the risotto, and it was very decent. 

After the kitchen had been cleaned up, Lish and I headed down in two cars to Lasseube, where we had a cuppa and watched a couple of episodes of our TV programmes.  Then I came back to Clos de Gaye - narrowly missing what looked like a weasel, on the road!!! Add that to the list of creatures I have met on this trip!

*   *    *

I will write another post of the rest of this week, after tomorrow (or more likely after Sunday). For now, I need beauty sleep, before we welcome some more new/old friends (new to me, old to Caroline) for lunch tomorrow. I have an early supermarché and boucher run first thing in the morning, and then a ton of cooking! 

Bisous!

BLURSDAY

It looks like they live on a golf links

It’s been a week of a whole lot of not-very-much-at-all. Which has been lovely! - it is doing me so much good. I feel like I'm on holiday, even though technically I'm working. 

It is the calm before the storm - we’ll be making up for it, starting Sunday, when a whole bunch of folks descend upon us.

I’m heartily and heartfully looking forward to the arrival of Lish, who hopefully won’t be discommoded by all the Papal stuff going on in Paris, as they attempt to navigate from the airport to the Gare du Nord (in the north of the city, obviously) to Montparnasse, which is in the south of the city, to get the TGV down here. No idea what the crowds are going to be like. 

Also my hostess’s mother and step-father arrive the same day. So we will go from dinner for six to dinner for nine!

Lish will stay Sunday night with us, then on Monday I will help them go get sorted into their own accommodation and their rental car. 

In the interim, I had to return Manuel Poo-Got back to the rental location, as he was due for recall for something or other. We swapped him out for his identical twin - I say identical, though as with all twins, it is helpful to have distinguishing features to be able to tell them apart. In the case of these guys (ok, cars), the new guy, I have decided to call him Miguel Poo-Got, is obviously the twin who got into a bar fight, and had his nose broken. 

I’m trying not to mind but really I just want a sticker on it that says CE N’EST PAS MOI QUI L’A FAIT! I liked the pristine and well-behaved Manuel. 

Dinner pics - photo dump

I've been calling for inspo from the kids this past week, as it has been so difficult to please them all. I think I've worked out that Zach doesn't like sloppy (saucy) food. Leah despises eggplant - which is unfortunate because it's one of the go-to's when you are cooking for vegetarians.  She's a dedicated carnivore. Chloé is the easiest - just a vegetarian. Also she doesn't like gnocchi. 

Fajitas, with
* chicken breast, dry-marinated for half the day in cumin, coriander, sweet paprika, oregano and salt & pepper. I bought it from a proper butcher and it was honestly the most tender chicken breast I've eaten In.My.Life. Better farming practices??? - or did the long marinade play a part?

* pan-fried capsicums & onions

* kidney beans

* Old El Paso (yes they have that here!!!) store-bought salsa

* sour cream. OK, crème fraîche. 

Yum! Five stars from all punters.

Beetroot & lentil rissoles, roast potatoes, garden green beans, nasty packet gravy that I found in the pantry

Credit: Vegan Beet Burgers

They were a bit dry. To be fair, I don't have a decent food processor here, so I didn't blend them as per the recipe - although I think that blending them would make them too baby-food-y. If I were to do them again, I would use a can of refried beans (not that you can get those here) to bind the rest of the ingredients. And I would  pan-fry them - I baked them and I'm not a fan. But the recipe is solid as a springboard. 

Noodle stir-fry, with Nagi "Charlie" brown sauce, and backyard egg omelette

Credit: RecipeTin Eats: Real Chinese All-Purpose Stir Fry "Charlie" brown sauce

Bangers and mash! These kids are half-English, after all! 

* Proper little chipolata sausages from the butcher

* celeriac and potato mash with heaps of butter

* steamed green beans (we are coming to the end of the season, but everyone just loves them) and broccoli

* mushroom and thyme velouté sauce

* bonus round of the nasty packet gravy for Leah, who is a Philistine, not gonna lie. We spent the entire meal referring to it as 'the horrible sauce', as opposed to the lovely mushroom sauce. Leah was unbothered. 

* Nagi's chocolate cake and chocolate ganache, made with crème fraîche instead of plain cream (because I can't find it in the supermarket), which gave it a lovely Zing!  

Credit: 

RecipeTin Eats: Easy Chocolate Cake

RecipeTin Eats: Chocolate Ganache

Usually we don't have dessert mid-week, apart from a Yoplait and/or a piece of fruit, but I let loose tonight because the parents were away 😜 And also Marcelle is so lovely and so helpful, that I wanted to do something a bit nicer for her than Yoplait.

Oh! - bonus round - I can't take credit for it - Alex made Pain Perdu for breakfast yesterday!  We know it as French Toast. 

Literal translation is 'lost bread' - it means leftover bread, that is now too hard to eat as-is, but you don't want to waste it. Soaked in milk and backyard eggs and pan-fried, served with the Golden Syrup that he brought back last week from his trip to London (you can't buy it here).  Super yummy! I don't usually have breakfast, but for this I made an exception!

Gan

I’ve been saying for days, or weeks, that I will have a walk down to the town, and this morning I finally did it. I find myself getting busy with things in the mornings, and by lunchtime it has become far too hot to go taking a walk (today it got up to 32C again). But the mornings start around 12C and they’re gorgeous. It's about 2.5km each way - downhill on the way out, uphill on the way back. 

Here's some of the pretty houses just in the 1km stretch of road from the main road to us (our driveway is one of a collection of driveways at the end point of the road, like a bunch of fingers off a hand). 

These chickens spend most of their days actually playing "Chicken" on our street! There are four of them. I could only see two when I took this, and at this point I was driving, so it was point-and-pray out the window to get this shot 😜

Here followeth a photo dump of of the Bastide of Gan. 

What’s a Bastide? I hear you asking.  Well, a Bastide is a planned medieval fortified town in southwestern France, built during the 13th and 14th centuries in regions like Gascony, Languedoc, and Aquitaine. It is designed around a distinct grid or checkerboard pattern, centered around an open market square surrounded by arcaded (covered) walkways.

Only one porte remains of the fortified wall. 

The only church in town - St Barthelemy (cool name!)

With a very cool ornate coat of arms!

... and that's basically it! - apart from the town square, which you've seen, from the pictures of the market day. It has a café/bar, and an Italian brasserie looking out onto it (I'm interested in trying the Italian joint some time), and some little shops. 

The advertising blackboard is all in Italian :) 

I walked some of the residential streets, nothing really much to see or report. I'm astonished at how unpopulated it is... where is everyone??? It was 10am and I think I saw four people out and about! I mean, it has a population of some five thousand.

On returning to the house, I unfortunately managed to forget the right security code to turn the house alarm off. I am sure that the siren inside oversteps the safe decibel range! Lucky I had my noise-cancelling AirPods on me! 

I had to phone my hosts, who had nipped over to Spain for lunch (as you do!), to get help to turn it off. Then I set about prepping for tonight’s dinner - the hosts would be out til bedtime, and the lovely neighbour Marcelle was to come in again and help with the kids’ homework/bedtime routines, while I managed the catering. 

I had the oven running, kitchen French doors open to the terrace and the sunshine, making a delightful chocolate cake mess of the kitchen, and a sweet inoffensive looking man in a SECURITY vest showed up.  This must be the least burglar-looking person he’s ever had to investigate :D  He was very nice, accepted my deep apology for making him come out. I explained about the problem with the code. We phoned my hosts who confirmed to him that yes, I’m supposed to be there. HIs base called them. It was all okay. 

We had a lovely chat. He was bouleversé at the notion of me coming all the way from Sydney just to hang out here! 

Then he left, and then THE ALARM WENT OFF AGAIN.  I’m never putting it on again. To be perfectly frank, I’d prefer that we were burgled.

The other MAJOR excitement of today was that the cat, Cleopatra, came into the kitchen and then suddenly started showing Extreme Interest in the kitchen broom. When I investigated, there was a Creature. I figured, Mouse. (In actual fact, we did later this afternoon also find a dead rat, thoughtfully placed for us at the front door. Thanks, Cleo! Also, Ew.) 

Oh. NOT MOUSE.

MOLE !!!!

Moles don't photograph well! He was scared silly, squirmy as anything, FAST, and most importantly STRONG. He was maybe 10cm long. Super soft fur! - but really SHARP claws! I could not get a grip on him at all. I ended up scooping him up in the dustpan and clapping an oven mitt over him, to be able to carry him back outside.  When I put him down, he disappeared amazingly fast into the leaf litter and presumably also dug away down. 

I was hoping to see a hedgehog (still hoping!) but this was actually just as cool! 

Fun fact: the French word for mole is 'taupe'. So when we are talking about the colour taupe in English, we are describing something as mole-coloured. I am enchanted! 

In other nature-related news, the kids found a deer antler and somebody's jawbone (I thought also deer, but Alex thinks sheep)

In other kid-related news,
here's a sample of the homework
that Chloé (age 9)gets from school
 - memorise this poem.

French schooling places emphasis on learning things by memory. I am constantly being surprised at the things they can recite by heart. I love that a lot of things are poems! 

6km recorded walk, total 14km in my day. I do buzz around a lot! 

 

These are the things I brought from home, for decoration for my room. Death is one of my favourite characters in the Terry Pratchett Discworld series. He's so chill with his cup of tea! That adorable knitted kitten was made especially for me by Astrid to bring. Apparently she's never making another one! (I think the pattern is really badly written). And the origami swans are made of cello sheet music, and they remind me of Lish. They all sit under a desklamp (like a streetlamp), and I can see them as I write here. 

Bonne nuit!