Will informed me today that he is on strike with regards to writing blog posts so I’m afraid you’re stuck with my ramblings for another week. My mom arrived on Friday and we had a largely uneventful week leading up to that.
I’m now in high gear with the work on my project. With help from Will, most of last week was building the HTML for the new pages for the Carbon Plan app. This also involved thinking through how it will all work and fit together; additionally, I started on some of the new infrastructure to support the new features. Aside from helping me, Will was hard at work on Sites for Homes, building a site for Sharon. He’s also been making a concerted effort to get his driving license so he’s been studying up on French highway code while at home. He also had three lessons this week, two driving and one classroom.
That more or less brings us up to Mom’s arrival on Friday. She actually arrived in France on Monday morning and then got a flight to Rabat. She has been in a gourmet lunch group for the past 45 years. One of the other members is married to the US ambassador to Morocco so she and a friend decided to pay them a visit there. Most of their evenings were spent at social functions with other embassies including the Russian and Finish. Mom and her friend took the train to Tangiers on Tues, spent the night there and them came back the following day. She got to speak a lot of French and generally had a good time there.
After Will’s driving lesson on Friday, we drove to Angouleme and collected her from the train station. Being 5pm on a Friday, we were totally unaccustomed to all the traffic. After stopping for cheap gas, we ended up nearly 30 minutes late and of course, the train was right on time this time. We made it home in an hour or so and then Will and I made spinach enchiladas in which we now use Bresse Blue and Cabecou (local goat’s cheese) so it’s extra special good. Mom brought us some cookies so enjoyed those for dessert.
We headed out to Thiviers market on Sat morning, technically our second time since we first went with Dave and Rosie in Dec ’09 but we arrived just as it was closing down so we saw very little. This time, we got there at 10 and it was bustling, despite the threatening skies. It’s a lot different than Brantome and more what I expected a French market to be. Brantome is more for the tourists and the products tend to be gourmet and therefore, expensive (akin to Borough market in London). In Thiviers, it was loads of produce plus cheese, poultry and meat. We got some veggies and somehow ended up with a lot more cheese than what we originally intended. All it takes is the offer of a little sample and then you feel obliged to buy some, at least I do. It also helps that it’s all so good. This time we got two types of Cantal plus one fresh and one aged goats cheese. We also got a chicken and back home discovered that it came with it’s head still on along with the liver and some other organ in the cavity. I’ll consider myself an honourary Frenchman the day I use the entire chicken but that day has not yet come.
It rained heavily while we were at the market but not so much back at home. It wasn’t a very nice day and didn’t get much above 17C (63F) and was cloudy all day. We got bread from the bread truck since we were home in time and had a baguette cereal along with cheese and salad for lunch that day. Mom and I did a bit of gardening in the afternoon: I weeded the whole patch; she hoed around the potatoes and onions; we both tied up the tomatoes and pruned them. We also harvested our first shallots and onions and have been using them in salads along with the basil that has sprouted massively of late. All the squash, melons and courgettes have taken hold with help from the recent rain. The tomatoes are laden with fruit although none of it is ripe yet. We’ve had most of the raspberries now and I’m pleased that there were plenty for Mom since they are her favourite.
And then of course, there are the cherries. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been in contact with a fruit-bearing cherry tree but it’s hard to imagine just how many a single tree can hold. Will took some photos that give you some idea of what a single branch looks like and then you have to multiply that by twenty or so to account for the size of the tree. We have taken off at least 10 kg, probably more. So we’ve been using them in loads of recipes and we also gave 3 kg to Mauricette who turned them into 10 jars of jam. Today we had a salad of warm goats cheese coated in almonds with cherries and fennel which was very tasty. On Saturday night, we bbq’d the chicken after marinating it in a cherry chipotle sauce that we served over it, along with fresh haricot vert from the market. It was extra special and of course, we finished the evening with cheese. Yesterday, we had the Port 80 sandwhich for lunch and leftover enchiladas plus salad for dinner, also followed by cheese.
We did a short excursion yesterday afternoon to Jumhilac le Grand and St Yrieix la Perche. The former is about 30 min drive east and we set up around 2pm which meant there was no one on the road. Actually, it wouldn’t have been much different at a different time on another day so I’m not sure why that’s relevant. We just drove through the town on the way through to St Yrieix which is a mid-sized town just over the border in Haute-Vienne, another 15 min drive east. It has a lovely medieval town centre, complete with large church and some beautiful houses (see pics for details). They sell Limoges porcelain there, but all the stores were closed, it being Sunday. In fact, the town was more or less deserted except for the one restaurant that was open. We left there and doubled back to Jumhilac where we were impressed by it’s imposing chateaux. I’m sure you have to pay to enter so we didn’t but perhaps will go with my dad when we comes in September. The town itself isn’t much but it’s up on a plateau above a river so it has some nice views from the edge of town.
Upon our return, we were paid a visit by some new neighbours. They are Peter and Maggie, retired English couple who bought a place around the corner from Nat and Jill’s. We bumped into them at the vide grenier in St Front a few weeks back and mentioned that we had tons of cherries and offered for them to come around. So they took us up on that and first stopped in to have a chat before collecting two large bowlfuls. They moved here around the same time as us having first lived in Brittany and then not too far from here for a few years. They are both lovely and we’ll be seeing them at a village fete in a few weeks.
Today, mom and I went to the store in the morning and them came home and I mowed the lawn. We stopped for lunch, I finished the back and now I’m writing this. We’re having Lucien and Mauricette over for dinner tomorrow so Mom made some chocolate cherry brownies and I’m about to try a new recipe for pecan squares. Stay tuned for Part 2, later this week.