Holiday time

We're off to France for 3 weeks, so no posts for a while.

After crossing via the Tunnel, we're heading down to near Tours, where we've booked a lovely chambre d'hote for the night.

http://www.closdessources.com/Welcome.html

                                     Then we're off down to the Pyrenees, to stay with friends in their pretty village.

We're going  into Spain for a few days with them.

Then we head back up north west to where we used to live. Again we'll stay with friends, and also visit our former neighbours and more friends.

This is the river at the bottom of our friends' garden, and they're in their punt, the local 'barque'.

Then we head back up to the Tunnel, staying in another chambre d'hote en route

http://www.normandie-chambres.co.uk/

then home!

Our garden

Thought I'd have a change from baking and post a few photos of our new garden. It's a pocket handkerchief size, so haven't much room. The first thing we did was to buy a good aluminium lean-to greenhouse, so we could grow some veg. We're growing tomatoes and French beans in bags.

The beans are doing well - have lots of flowers.

We bought 4 different tomato plants, and the cherry ones seem to be ahead atm.

I grew some 'Little Gem' lettuces from seed and have planted a few in between the tomatoes.

We brought some of our plants in pots back from France with us. This rose is lovely - it has a strong perfume. Have lost its label so can't remember its name! It was given to us, in a large pot, by our neighbours. They all arrived smiling, with one pushing a wheel barrow containing the rose and several boxes of wine bottles! What lovely people, and we miss them.

This shrub was growing in the garden and I've trying to find out what it is. Now that it's got flowers, I think it's a deutzia.

We also inherited this climbing rose, which I thought was a wild one, but it's covered in flowers.

Christmas Day

Hope you had a great Christmas.

I shan't forget ours in a hurry, as I nearly burnt the house down!

I put some part-baked rolls in the oven to bake, ready to eat with our starter in the evening. Then we went out Christmas morning to visit our son and family and I forgot they were still in the oven! Luckily we came back earlier than we'd intended, as I wanted to make sure that the duck would be cooked  ready for our early evening meal. When we opened the lounge door, smoke was seeping under the door from the kitchen, and the kitchen was full of smoke! I quickly turned off the oven, and we had to open doors and windows to get rid of the smoke! My nicely-heated house turned into an ice block!
But it could have been an inferno!

Here are the rolls - blocks of solid charcoal!

Since then, I make sure everything is off before we go out!

Happy Christmas!

                                          Wishing you a very Happy Christmas.


Decided to start a new tradition and have muffins for breakfast on Christmas day. The idea is Nigella's, as is the recipe for Christmas morning muffins.

You'll find the recipe on Nigella's site here .

Hello, I'm back!

Here I am, now back living in Northamptonshire.

It's been a rollercoaster of a ride getting back here, but I won't dwell on that. Sufficient to say that we've made it, and are busily unpacking boxes and arranging furniture. We've downsized considerably, so are trying to fit a quart into a pint pot!

Here's the van and trailer that arrived with all our worldly possessions - well not quite all, as there's all Bob's tools at one friend's house in France, his motor bike with another friend and my pot plants with a third friend! All these will come back in a hired van in January!

I want to get back to baking, but now have a gas cooker, so think I will take a little while to get used to having a gas oven again.

It's nice to be back, and I'll try and keep the blog up-to-date.

On the move again

We're moving out of this house on Wednesday, so I won't be blogging for a while. We take possesssion of the new UK house mid October, so will be staying in a holiday cottage in Northants for a few weeks.

 

Will be sad to leave here and all our friends. Everyone has been so kind to us; it's been like a long holiday.

Au revoir from France, and hope you'll join me again in the UK!

Unexpected present

We were busy packing boxes this afternoon when the doorbell rang. There were 3 ladies standing outside grinning at us.
They were 3 of our lovely neighbours, and when invited in, they produced a package and said it was a souvenir of our time here. We were so moved that they'd thought of doing this.
On opening the present, we found a lovely watercolour, done by a local artist, of La Garette, a pretty village in the Marais Poitevin, our area.

It's not framed as they wanted us to choose what we wanted.

What lovely people we have as neighbours; everyone, without exception, has been so kind to us. Our little hamlet has about 20 houses and we belong to a big village.

The Marais Poitevin is beautiful. It's now an inter-regional park. It's not well known to the Brits and is still unspoilt. It has a variety of scenery, from marshes to the coast. We live in the lovely marsh area with lots of alder trees.

Have a look here.

The black flat-bottomed boat is known as a barque, and is a popular way of experiencing this lovely area.

Fruit galore!

We planted a couple of Chasselas grapevines a couple of years ago, and we've just picked our first fruit.

                                 For a small vine we picked quite a lot, and there's more to pick.

Then our friends arrived this morning to bring us some lovely plums from their garden!

We still have yesterday's blackcurrant loaf to eat, we picked a lot of Bramleys from our trees [which I've stewed to eat with my porridge] and now plums..!

I'm going to really miss this garden when we move. It's not huge, but we've become almost self-sufficient in veg.

On the move!

We've sold the house again and hope to move back to the UK at the end of September.
Have just come back from a visit to family and friends and to see our new granddaughter - Emily Kristen.
She was 10 lbs at birth and has long feet and hands. Going to take after her Grandad I think, who's 6'6"!

We also went to look at some houses, and on our return, put in an offer on a house we'd seen twice, and it was accepted. We hope to complete on both houses at nearly the same time, so we can move back and get into the new house to redecorate. We'll rent a holiday cottage nearby until we've done what we want to do.

There's a lovely big kitchen in the new house so am looking forward to cooking in it. It has a gas cooker, and I've not used one for many years. Have had gas hobs in the last 3 houses and this house, but have had electric ovens.

Don't know this area very well, so am looking forward to a new chapter in our lives.

Garden tour

As I'm still feeling rather shell-shocked about the house sale, I thought I'd have a short tour of the garden. It really cheered me up.

I grew this parsley from seed last year and it survived the snow and frost this winter.

This is the Willians pear tree. Doesn't seem to have many pears on it this year. I love the little bird house which attracts so many birds in winter and spring.The piece of wood across the front is to stop the magpies eating all the sunflower seeds. 

Looks like it's going to be a good year again for Bramleys. We brought 2 trees with us and they've done really well. Need to take off 2/3 of these little ones to get a decent sized apple.

At last the French beans have started to grow. They badly needed some sunshine. The cabbages are doing well and the beetroot.

Going to have a good crop of gooseberries. There are red ones too.

I love this climbing rose. It's Zephirine Drouhin, which has no thorns and a lovely perfume. Its flowers are prolific this year.

If you look throught the fence you can see the maize growing in the field in front of the house. The first year we were here, we thought it was the same as corn on the cob, so we snitched a couple, only  to discover that it tastes awful - it's for cattle feed! Serves us right!!

Life's a rollercoaster!

At 8-45 on Saturday morning the phone rang; it was our estate agent saying he was outside the gate and could he come in. He told us that the couple buying our house had split up, so the deal was off! We were so shocked! Only a week before they'd been here, telling us what they were going to do, and even buying a few bits of furniture from us.
In France when you want to buy a house you sign a 'compromis de vente', and in this there's a legal clause which says that you have to pay a certain amount if either party drops out. We don't know how much this is yet.
So we had to cancel the removal van, scheduled for July 8th. Three of the bedrooms are full of boxes and stacked furniture.
 The house is back on the market.

C'est la vie!

Big decision made!

We've decided to return to the UK and our house is sold. We now have to wait till mid July to sign the contract and get our money. We're moving to Northamptonshire, to be near our son and family. It's a new area for us, so another adventure! Haven't made anything worth blogging about lately, and we seem to have been very busy. We've been here 7 years and it's been like a lovely long holiday.

 This is our house. The garden goes all around the house and we're on the edge of a lovely hamlet of 20 houses. There are fields in front and behind us.We're going to have to downsize quite a lot when buying a UK property!

This is our Mairie in the local village. It's a chateau that the commune bought and restored, and everyone is very proud of it. There's are lovely grounds behind where we have open-air concerts in the summer and picnics. There are 200 different types of trees.

This is le Donjon in our nearest town, Niort. It was built by Eleanor of Aquitaine. There's a lovely market nearby every Thursday and Saturday morning.

These are our wonderful local donkeys called 'Baudet de Poitou'. They were becoming quite rare, so they began a breeding programme and now their numbers have grown to several thousand.

I'll be sad to leave, but life moves on, and we'll be able to help our children and see more of our grandchildren.

Things I like to do

Over the years I've enjoyed doing embroidery of all sorts. In the UK, my friend and I went to Evening class and we were lucky that our teacher was doing a City and Guilds in Crafts and taught us lots of different types of work such as shadow, drawn thread, Florentine etc. The only snag was that she taught a new skill every few weeks, not enought time to complete the previous one, as I was teaching full time and had 2 children, so little time to catch-up at home.

I saved it all 'for when I retired', but I still don't seem to have enough time to finish those projects!

This is a cushion I made for our bedroom.

I've done lots of birth samplers, one for each grandchild, wedding cushions etc

I made this Kaffe Fassett 'Victorian Cats' cushion for my daughter, supposedly for her 21st birthday, but actually got finished for her 30th! This is the kit before I started. All the shades of the cats were so difficult to see in the evening.

I'm making my son a Celtic design tapestry cushion; hope he'll get it before he's 40!! I'm following a chart this time instead of a printed canvas. He wanted different colours just to add complications an already complicated design; all the red is purple, the orange is another shade of purple and there are various shades of mauve and lilac; we've kept the turquoise and the black!

These cushions will be the family heirlooms!

This is one I'm doing for my French friends. They keep chickens and have a cockerel who is just like this one, strutting his stuff in front of his harem!

My next project but 2 will be this cushion - I love roses so this is a must do!

Now all I have to do is find some time!

Anniversary sampler

We didn't want any presents for our Silver Wedding anniversary, but I wanted to do something as a keepsake, so I've decided to do a sampler.

My favourite flowers are lilies and we received a lovely bouquet of them for our anniversary. So I decided to design a sampler with a lily like this one as a centrepiece. Am in the throes of designing the chart, so will update this as I go along.

Paris visit

                                       We enjoyed our Silver Wedding Anniversary trip to Paris.

       Didn't want to go to museums this time and I wanted to visit the big department stores in the Boulevard  Hausseman. This is the Galeries Lafayette. A fantastic dome.

It's such a beautiful building.

We went to the basement Food Hall and wow - what a feast for the eyes. These are a few of the delicious cakes on offer.

 Some hams and sausages.

And of course, the famous Poilane bread.

We went on a tour of the area around our hotel with our friend's son, who lives in Paris. In one of the lovely glass topped arcades I found this shop selling biscuits - can't remember its name!

 This is the famous Fauchon shop in the Place de Madeleine. They sell macarons and I bought some to try - delicious!

For our Anniversary dinner we went back to a lovely restaurant we'd found on our honeymoon. It's called 'Julien' and now belongs to the famous 'Brasserie Flo'chain.

It's Art Deco style inside, amd is now a listed building.

Here we are enjoying our meal.

Altogether a very happy time.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

My first post for a while. Lost my enthusiasm! Hope to get it back soon!.
Off tomorrow to the UK for 15 days.

Have a very Happy Christmas.

Souligne news

I haven't posted in a while because I couldn't add photos, but now it's sorted.
It's a glorious autumn here, still warm, and the trees are now beginning to turn colour. It's the time of year when we gets lots of fruit and veg. from our neighbours and friends, things we've not grown or haven't room to grow.
We've had lots of figs, quinces, cabbages, leeks and beetroot.
Have already posted about the fig and almond tart I made, and I've been trying out new fig recipes.
We loved Nigella's 'Figs for 1001 nights' and I also cooked them with honey, cinnamon and a little orange liqueur. Tonight I'm going to use them as starter with parma ham.
As for the quinces, think I'll try to make some quince jelly from Jane Grigson's great 'Fruit book'. It's supposed to be good with meat.
I love Jane Grigson's recipes as they're very straight forward and I've always had good results with them. I have her 'Vegetable book' and 'English food' and have used them a lot for inspiration.

Back again.

We came back from out holidays on Tuesday night. Had typically British weather! The caravan in Norfolk was much bigger than I thought it would be. We went to the sea a couple of times, the second time we had rain, but determinedly sat under our umbrellas waiting for the rain to stop - how British!

Got back to find the garden growing like the Triffids. No-one had picked the courgettes so one had grown into a huge marrow - 54 cms long. Lots of tomatoes, aubergines and peppers - so a ratatouille is called for methinks.