Quailing in the Road

At the end of last summer my friend Paris Bruno rang me up. He and his wife Sylvie had been coming home the night before and in the middle of the road as they drove past the police station there was something small, white and fluffy looking. Sylvie insisted Bruno stop and they realised it was an injured bird. They didn't feel it would survive if they simply moved it to the side of the road, so they bundled it up and brought it home.

Yolande and Michel's little flock of Silkies.

The reason they rang me up was because they couldn't figure out what the heck it was! It looked kind of like a small chicken, but not quite. When I got round to their place the bird was sitting listlessly in their backyard. Every now and then a fly buzzed by and it perked up, but didn't manage to catch one. Nevertheless, I thought it was a good sign. I also thought it might be a quail, and a quick internet search by Bruno confirmed this. It seems it is a Japanese quail, presumably an escapee from someone's aviary.

The chook shed -- formerly a dovecote.

It looked like its wing was broken, but it had survived the night, so we thought it might recover. The problem was that Bruno and Sylvie were returning to Paris the next day. So we decided to ask neighbours and friends Yolande and Michel if they could take the bird. We knew they had poultry, so I was a bit worried that the hens might peck and bully a helpless newcomer.

Clean straw, wine boxes to lay in and homemade hazel ladders and perches. 

What more could a chook want?

Anyway, it turns out that the quail is now living happily, in splendid isolation in its own little cage on the other side of the garden to the hens. Some of the wheat it has been fed with has sprouted and given it a lovely little tuft of green to hide in. On very cold nights it gets moved into the hen house, but otherwise it is just left to its own devices. It remains a rather nervous little bird, so the least disturbance the better. Yolande keeps a stern eye on the neighbour's cat, who is a little too interested.

The neighbour's cat, who makes himself quite at home with Yolande and Michel.

The quail in its new home.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

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How to Build a Fairytale Castle

The Chateau of Rivau that we see today was constructed in 1420 and was part of her dowry at the time of her marriage in 1438 of Anne (or Annette) de Fontenay, along with land at Champigny sur Veude and Ile Bouchard. Her husband Pierre de Beauvau used her dowry to finance the fortifications that were completed in 1442. The couple chose to focus on this property because of its proximity to the main residence of the young King Charles VII at Chinon, only 15 kilometres away.

Pierre de Beauvau du Rivau (to distinguish him from his grander cousin, who was also Pierre de Beauvau) was a counsellor and chamberlain to Charles VII, part of his inner circle of friends and advisors. Anne de Fontenay was an heiress, in her own right the Lady of Saint-Cassien (a small community in the Vienne). Pierre died in 1453, of wounds received at the battle of Castillon, the last great battle of the Hundred Years War, where the French decisively defeated Henry VI of England. It was the first battle in which artillery was used on a large scale.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Walking From Abilly

On Thursday 16 January I went out with the local walking club. It was a beautiful clear sunny and surprisingly warm day, with no wind. This was only my second walk since October as I have been forced to spend months resting my tendonitis. I can't tell you how happy I am to be able to manage a ten kilometre hike with just a dull ache rather than absolute agony and a leg that goes rigid. So here are some pictures from the other day. Not vast numbers, because with the low winter sun the photo I wanted was often looking into the sun, so I didn't bother taking the photo.

Water mill at Abilly.

Church, Abilly.

Sign advertising a rabbit and poultry farm. 

I buy most of our chicken, guinea fowl and rabbit from this producer.

Deep wheel ruts in a field.

The lodge, with the Chateau du Bois d'Aix in the background.

Coming upon the newly installed gates of the Chateau du Bois d'Aix.

We think the chateau must have new owners as these ostentatious gates have appeared. Several of my French friends are convinced they are 'anglais', as they appear to have ignored regulations about the distance hedges can be planted from the edge of the road. According to them a French person would never do such a thing (ha!).

Detail of the new wrought iron gate. 

Sadly, they've used gold paint, not gold leaf, so the effect is not as good as it could be.

Chateau du Bois d'Aix.

Babette and Fabrice walk down a rural track. 

One of my companions revealed that this was the spot she had her first fall from a horse.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

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Stuffed Mushrooms

We are really lucky here to have access to cave grown mushrooms. Because they grow slowly they are completely unlike supermarket mushrooms in texture. Cave grown mushrooms are meaty and flavourful, like a wild mushroom. They cost a bit more, but it's worth it, as they don't reduce much in quantity when cooked. Best of all, they are clean, with no leaf litter to wipe off and no maggots (unlike wild mushrooms). 

Ingredients:
2 large mushrooms (Portabello type)
A pot of soft fresh cheese with herbs and garlic (such as Boursin)
Breadcrumbs
Butter
Olive oil

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 180C.
2. Snap the stems out of the centre of the mushrooms and chop them finely.
3. Lightly brush the mushroom caps inside and out with oil.
4. Mix the mushroom stems into the cheese and fill the mushroom caps.
5. Sprinkle breadcrumbs on the cheese, generously enough to give complete coverage.
6. Dot the breadcrumbs with butter.
7. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Serves 2.

The mushrooms came from Loches market and cost €10/kg. Hendrick the mushroom man is there every Wednesday and Saturday, and at Amboise on Sundays. He sells button mushrooms (Fr. champignons de Paris), chestnut mushrooms (Fr. champignons rose), portabello (Fr. champignons gros or galipettes), shiitake, grey oyster mushrooms (Fr. pleurotes grises) and yellow oyster mushrooms (Fr. pleurottes jaunes), all cave grown. In season he will also have wild chanterelles (aka girolles) which come from the pine forests around where he lives in the Sologne.

The soft fresh cheese I used came from a local dairy farmer who delivers twice a week to my home. In French it is called fromage aux fines herbes. She also supplies the EpiServices in Preuilly sur Claise and Le Grand Pressigny as well as the Intermarché supermarket in Yzeures sur Creuse.

The breadcrumbs I made myself by taking old hard leftover baguettes and putting them in a calico bag. I then bash the heck out of them with a meat mallet before tipping them into a colander and shifting them. Any bits that don't go through the holes in the colander go back in the bag for another bout of bashing and the process is repeated. After two goes at bashing and sifting any bread still left goes in the compost. The resulting crumbs are fine and dry and make excellent crunchy coatings for mushrooms or meat.

Yum

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

What's in the Water?

Australia is a big country. Alice Springs, in the centre of the country, is 1901 kilometres from Kalgoorlie in the west and 2316 kilometres from Wagga Wagga in the east, so it stands to reason that the water is different in all those places.

Wagga Wagga is the largest inland city in New South Wales, home to a big military base and a transport hub. Sited on a large river it is the centre of an agricultural area.

Alice Springs, frequently referred to as The Alice, is named after the wife of the pioneering head of the telegraph department in the 19th century. It is geographically positioned in the middle of the country, in the desert, and is the third largest town in the Northern Territory.

Kalgoorlie is officially Kalgoorlie-Boulder, as today it is two conjoined towns, but nobody refers to it as anything other than Kalgoorlie. It is in the goldfields of Western Australia.

I've been to Wagga Wagga and Alice Springs, but never made it over to Kalgoorlie.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

A House in Ascain

This distinctive house is near the Roman Bridge in Ascain, in the Pyrenees. I have been unable to find out anything about it.

Update: Based on information gleaned from the link to the Momentum website provided by Carolyn, here is some background on this house. It has been a listed monument since 2000.

Film set designer Ferdinand Pinney Earle (born in New York in 1878, died in 1951 in Hollywood) became famous in Hollywood in the years 1910 to 1920. In 1930, he moved to Ascain and built a house whose appearance is reminiscent of the adobe houses built around Santa Fe around 1920. The floor plan in the shape of a revolver is a particular feature. The elevations and decoration incorporate many elements of the pueblo style.  Many show business and arts personalities were guests of Earle there.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Wood Pile or Wall?

This creative use of firewood, an existing stone boundary wall and a mill stone is at the entrance to a property near Blois.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

It's Been a Bit Wet

On 15 December we drove through the Aigronne Valley, one of the tributaries of the Claise, to discover it was very flooded. It shouldn't have been a surprise -- after an exceptionally hot dry summer, much of our normally evenly distributed rainfall fell in a period of a couple of months at the end of the year. It finally brought us up to our normal annual average rainfall, but a lot of it sat around on the fields for days and weeks. Newly planted wheat seeds rotted in the ground and farmers couldn't get on to their land to work it.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Theatre in a Goods Wagon

About 15 years ago two professional performers created a space for live performance in the most unlikely of places. Tucked out of the way down a side road in the unremarkable village of Saint-Branchs, in three former railway goods wagons is the Théâtre de Novocordie (usually referred to as Les Wagons, or Les Trois Wagons sometimes). It is run as a not for profit organisation, and events held there range from plays, stand up comedians, open mike evenings, music of all sorts, dance, readings and lectures on subjects as diverse as the history of eating and the art of the table (includes a wine tasting in the interval -- we are in France after all...) to seasonal migrant workers in the strawberry fields of Spain -- quite simply, live performance of all sorts and anything you can imagine. In addition there are weekly workshops for actors and writers.

We've never been to a performance there, and only discovered the place last year, when there was a detour through town due to road works that took us past the wagons.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

A Few Highlight Details of the Chateau of Candé

The little known Chateau of Candé, at Monts on the outskirts of Tours, is full of delightful architectural details.

Tile panel depicting Saint Martin, over the front door.

 In 1857 anglo-spanish owner Santiago Drake del Castillo commissioned Italian artist Guiseppe Devers to create the enamel panel above the front door, depicting Saint Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar.

The 16th century ceiling in the dining room.

 The French style ceiling has the beams set at an angle.

16th century Cordovan leather wall covering in the dining room.

 An elegant portrait of Fern Lombard Bedaux c1930.

American born Fern Lombard moved to the Chateau of Candé in 1927 when her French born husband Charles Bedaux purchased it and returned to France from America where he had established himself as a business consultant. Fern regularly made the list of the ten best dressed women in the world between the Wars. Widowed in 1944, she left the chateau to the French State when she died in 1972.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Venison Cutlets and Colcannon Cakes

You would think that with all the wild game in the forests here venison would be in plentiful supply, easy to get and frequently eaten. But in fact you rarely see even farmed venison available for sale and if you want to get your hands on some wild game you need to be friendly enough with a hunter that he offers it to you. The hunters all have freezers full of the stuff, but they are not allowed to sell it because it is butchered in the field or at home. So hunters tend to have a repertoire of charcuterie, at least one outbuilding full of freezers chockablock with game, and their friends and dogs sometimes get lucky. So, last winter I was lucky enough to get my hands on some venison cutlets, and this is what I did with them.

Ingredients
Venison
6 venison cutlets
Olive oil
1 tbsp butter
A clove of garlic, crushed
1/2 cup white wine
1 tsp prepared mustard
Salt and pepper (ideally, a peppercorn mix that includes pimento)
Colcannon
1.5 cups mixed celeriac and potato mash*
1/4 of a small cabbage, shredded and steamed
A leek, cleaned, sliced and sweated in butter
An egg, beaten
2 tbsp wholemeal flour
1 tbsp butter (for frying)
Olive oil (for frying)

Method

1. Colcannon -- mix all the ingredients for the colcannon together and form into 4 patties. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
2. Venison -- place the cutlets on a plate in a single layer, season with salt and pepper. Leave them out about 30 minutes to get to room temperature.
3. Melt butter and olive oil in two frying pans over medium heat.
4. Add the colcannon cakes to one and the venison cutlets to the other. Fry for 3 minutes.
5. Turn the colcannon cakes and reduce the heat to low.
6. Turn the cutlets and fry for a further 3 minutes.
7. Remove the cutlets and set aside to keep warm.
8. Deglaze the cutlet pan with the wine, add the garlic and mustard, boil until reduced enough to have thickened slightly into a sauce.
9. Serves 2.

*I make mixed mash in batches for three meals for two people ie 6 servings. Peel half a celeriac and cut into 2 cm dice. Scrub three large potatoes and cut into 2 cm dice. Cook them together until soft then mash with some butter and milk. Freeze  whatever you don't need for this recipe in two batches for future meals. Mash can be reheated in the microwave (from frozen or thawed) by cooking for a couple of minutes, stirring with a fork, and returning to the microwave as necessary. 

As always, I sourced the vegetables for this recipe from my local organic market garden, Le Jardin Verger de la Petite Rabaudière, who sell from the farm on Monday evenings, are at Preuilly market on Thursday mornings, and supply the Maison des Producteurs in Loches (near Noz and SuperU).

Yum

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

The Rabbits Invade

A display acknowledging the presence and history of rabbits in the country at the 

National Museum of Australia, Canberra.

Rabbits, which are native to Spain and southern France, may have been delicate creatures that needed cossetting by a warrener to survive in Northern Europe, but once introduced by the British to nice warm Australia, they had no trouble colonising and indeed over running the country. They remain a great menace to farming livelihoods and the natural environment, despite decades of the most extreme control measures being applied.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

The Roman Bridge at Ascain

Simon and I are suckers for anything Roman, so when he read that there was a Roman bridge near where we stayed in the Pyrenees, we obviously had to visit it.

The three arched bridge is in a park in Ascain (Azkaine in Basque), spanning the Nivelle River (Ur Ertsi in Basque). It was built in the 5th century but a flood destroyed the central arch in the 1990s and it was subsequently rebuilt. The bridge is about 40 metres in length and three metres wide.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

A French Cake Tin

This pressed metal cake tin belongs to one of my neighbours. She thinks she inherited it from her grandmother. I've looked on the internet to see what I can find out about this sort of tin -- where they were made, why the pattern, and so on -- but with very little success. It's well made and good quality.

I came across a single flan tin with an identical pressed pattern, for sale on Ebay. It was brand new old stock and was described as French, from the 1950s.

My former boss in the UK tells me that her mother had a similar tin, which would have dated from the fifties and may well have been a wedding present. She doubts it was French.

My brocante (flea market) loving friends haven't seen anything similar.

And that's it. I can't find out any other clues. 

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. 

Christmas at Chenonceau

A bizarre series of events, this one...

Susan and I had made plans with Antoinette and Niall to visit Chenonceau on Christmas Day. A Christmas expedition has become a bit of a tradition in the past 5 years, ever since we visited Chenonceau 5 years ago. As it happened, Antoinette and Niall didn't feel like they had the energy after a big Christmas evening dinner so we rearranged the visit for Saturday. Then on the Friday, Susan and I were stricken by Norovirus (the winter vomiting bug) and all plans were off.

The Christmas tree in the long gallery was themed on birds.

Luckily, we had accepted a very rare winter booking, not something we normally do as the Tractions aren't set up for winter - no heater, no demisting, and you have to keep the windows wound down slightly the whole time. We decided that as the visitor was a friend and neighbour of Susan's uncle in Australia we would accept the tour but hire a comfortable modern car.

A life sized table ornament

This meant that we were able to see the Christmas decorations at Chenonceau, surely the highlight of winter in the Touraine. I have no idea how much time and money is spent decorating Chenonceau at Christmas, but it is certainly well worth it, as the effect is spectacular and even on a midwinter morning there was plenty of people visiting.

The theme in the chapel was owls.

Eeek! A red Christmas tree in a red room.
Not the most sucessful of the decorations.

If you are in the Loire Valley at Christmas remember that some of the chateau are open every day, so Christmas afternoon is a great opportunity to see some of the iconic sights of the Loire Valley without the crowds

Cooking With the Kiné

One of my neighbours is a kiné. That's short for kinésithérapeute or physiotherapist. We have come to a friendly arrangement that involves him giving me the occasional physio session for my knee, in return for me teaching him to bake.

Chopping hazelnuts to top the cakes with.

Our first session of baking was making chocolate cakes. This was a decision based on what he had in the house in terms of ingredients. He kind of sprung it on me,  but the cakes turned out fine using what we had on hand. The black silicone cannelé mould that we used to make cupcake sized cakes was found by him at a recyling centre.

Creaming the butter and sugar.

Sifting the dry ingredients, flour and cocoa, into the batter.

Apparently he's keen to learn how to make short pastry and a layer cake, but they may require a bit more planning.

Hamming it up.

Baking and physiotherapy are conducted in English, as Raphaël has a Masters in English, but lacks people to keep up his language skills with. 

The finished cakes being plated.

Raphaël took some of the cakes to work the next day to share with his colleagues, and gave me some.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos.