Clos de Gaye

Clos de Gaye (pronounced Clo de Guy) literally translates to "enclosure of joy" or perhaps "place of happiness", and it's the name chosen by my host family for their beautiful property. Today I'm going to take you on a bit of a tour!

You drive through these gates and there's the house in front of you. 

The house was built before Australia was colonised. It has enormous wooden rafters. The floor boards are a foot wide. It has a freaking tower!!!! On the ground floor of the tower is a toilet room, the upper level is bisected into a semi-circular shower stall for the master bedroom, and a semi-circular toilet for the upstairs bedrooms. You can see to the right in that photo, that's barn. The smaller out-building behind the pool (omg there's a pool!- a cheap and cheerful dismantlable pool! it's been so hot here, the pool is a godsend) is split into two rooms, one being utilised for the childrens' workshops they put on, and the other as storage for the bee-keeping equipment. 

Facing the house (out of shot, to the right in the previous photo) is what they optimistically call the Rose Garden (it's a work in progress)

... with an epic childrens' climbing frame
And a couple of hammocks under one of the many enormous shade trees

... where the kids read, and sing, and play. 

The barn itself is also divided into storage, a loft which they also use a space for their workshops, and to the left in this photo, the white door leads into what is known as a "gîte", for which there isn't an exact English equivalent word but loosely speaking is like a guest house or holiday rental. It's got a single bedroom upstairs, a living room and kitchenette downstairs (and possibly also a bathroom but I can't recall where, this was the whirlwind tour on my first day). It is available to rent out for e.g. artists' retreats.

The stonework is just stunning. 

Behind the barn live the chickens and the rabbits. 

There are four of each. The chickens get put away each night. The rabbits don't co-operate at all, they got let out once and refused ever to go back in when asked, and are mostly wild now. I think they have made a warren under the barn so they're pretty safe from predators. They all have outrageous names.

Beyond the screen of trees behind the animal coops, the property opens out to THIS:

Zoom in on that pic and waaaaaaay up the back there (follow that mowed path) are Alex's bees. He had three hives, currently only one is active, and they are being plundered on a daily basis by hornets. 

We have had some very interesting discussions on bee-keeping. Ideally, he would like me to keep an eye on the bees when he is away from home.

There's also the fruit tree orchard. 

Alex has a whole assortment of interesting fruit trees - none of which are old enough to fruit yet, give them time.

The figs are fruiting, however! There are five trees on the property, including this absolute beast: 

You can see that it's fallen over at some point, but instead of dying, it's re-sprouting all the way along the trunk. It's absolutely LOADED with fruit.

Shame I don't particularly like figs 😜

I'm going to have to work out some way to preserve them for the family. 

Up from the barn, and left of the orchard, are the "potagers" (veggie gardens). 

There's a lovely neighbour who has taken it upon herself to manage them for the family. She had been away for a couple of weeks and when I got here they were completely overgrown with all the summer heat: 

All four of them looked more or less like this! I mean, fantastic bounty, but a muddle.

Within a day of Marcelle coming home, I went up to them and found that order had been beautifully restored in at least one of them: 

... and now, things are visible which before were invisible! - beans, eggplants, capsicums, all previously hidden by (I think it was) a rampant courgette (zucchini) plant. 

The others are following suit, as Marcelle finds time. 

There are lovely flowers growing in amongst the produce - which attracts the bees, which gets your plants pollinated! 

Most of those flowers are edible. I'm totally putting them in our dinners!

Ça, ç'est un potimarron (which I'm thinking has to be a bastardisation of the words "petit marron") - bascially a pumpkin. We ate half of one of these last night, they are sweet as anything, wonderful when roasted. 

And this is a species of butternut, if I remember correctly it might be called here un courge de Naples (Napoli zucchini).  Apparently it doesn't change colour from green, but is edible at this point! Let's find out! Fun times ahead. 

Here's what the house looks like from the back:

My bedroom is the upstairs, far right, with the shutters not completely opened - from which, this is the sort of horrific sight to which I am subjected every single day now: 

Other scenes from my bedroom include this one, the other morning: 

Cleopatra had elected to not come inside overnight, and was yelling under my window early the next day, clearly having regretted her life-choices!

We eat breakfast, lunch and dinner out on the terrasse, while the weather is like this. It has a motorised shadecloth, very necessary! - this is the south side of the house and you know that the sun is in the south for the Northern Hemisphere! It gets really hot. 

You can also see in this particular picture that all the shutters and windows are closed against the heat. France had its fourth "canicule" (heatwave) this summer, over this past week - it's bee up to about 34C most days. The walls of the house are stone and THICK. Close the shutters and everything is many, many degrees cooler inside. It's kinda weird sitting in the semi-dark or with lamps on, in the middle of the day, but hey, do what works! 

Two of the five of them are vegetarians, and I'm ambi, so I'm making a LOT of vegetarian meals, with possibly a meat on the side instead of the main event. 

* Cauliflower, sweet potato and chickpeas, roasted in tagine spices

* Couscous pilaf 

* steamed green beans

The children are served a portion of everything that is on offer on the table (obviously not the meat things for the veggos), and are absolutely required to eat everything on their plates, before getting second servings of anything. 

So far I haven't managed to nail a meal where EVERYone loves EVERYthing. But the parents are very appreciative and loudly and repeatedly complimentary, which is most gratifying.  

The market had beets. I love beets, any way they come! Brought them home and trawled the internet looking for something fun to do. 

* Roasted beets and carrots

* steamed green beans (worked out very quickly that steamed green anything is a massive hit)

*Quinoa and lentils (which apparently is more nutritious together than either of those things eaten on its own = good for vegetarians)

* dressing of tahini, lemon and honey (recipe called for maple, we didn't have maple, but heck yeah we have honey!) 

Credit for this recipe: Roasted Beet Macro Bowl

Friday night is traditionally Pizza, Icecream and Movie Night around here. The kids watch barely ANY television and have no screens whatsoever. Consequently they are some of the most inventive, creative children I've met. On the weekends they get TV time but it's movies not TV. On the weekend I walked past, to find them voluntarily watching a DVD of a ballet production of Alice In Wonderland. Voluntarily!!!! 

At some point I'm going to make pizza dough from scratch for them, but last week there wasn't time in the day, so I bought ready-made pizza dough (which was pretty average, not gonna lie, but bad pizza is still pretty good, right?) 

*ham & pineapple

*mushroom

*quattro formaggi

* margarita 

* Sil's One - Lish's and my perennial favourite, from a now-defunct pizza place in Sydney, comprising sweet corn, capiscum, mushrooms, avocado and herbs. 

The margarita and the Sil's were the outright winners, might make double quantities of those next time. 

And yes, I'm in my bathing suit 😜 Did I mention it's been HOT here? 

The movie Alex picked was very very left-field - a French slapstick from 1965 😝, about a naive guy who gets picked by a bunch of smugglers to drive a Cadillac from Naples to Bordeaux. Unbeknownst to him, the car is loaded with cocaine (hidden in the rear quarter panels), gold (the entire front and rear bumpers are made out of gold and then sprayed to look like steel) and jewels (diamonds and rubies in the battery). There's also the 'biggest diamond in the world' hidden somewhere that is not specified until the very end of the movie (but I guessed it).  Shenanigans occur at all stages of the trip. The car gets banged up. He takes it to a carrossiere (Italian for panel-beater, I learned that word on my first trip to Italy!) who, when he takes a blow-torch to the bumper bar (meanwhile me, a panel-beater's wife, sitting there yelling THAT'S NOT HOW YOU REPAIR A CAR!!!) makes the gold melt, discovers that the whole bumper is made of gold, and promptly swaps out the entire bumper for a normal one and pockets the gold :) Similar things happen to the other contraband - gunshot from two competing groups of baddies cause all the cocaine to blow out of the quarter panels; something dreadful happens to the battery and it is swapped out and he throws the dead one into the ocean, not realising that it had stuff in it. 

You get the picture. 

Slapstick is my least favourite form of comedy, regardless of language. However I will say that the photography was fantastic, and one scene where the baddie is actually repairing the car himself, is done as a complete dance, to a well-known piece of music. It was gold! 

I'll leave you with a picture of what I currently refer to as "My Office".

Ghastly, isn't it. 

À très bientôt!