Its early Friday morning and I've been woken by the crowing of a rooster and cooing of doves - as you are in rural France! Our bedroom window is right next door to the church and I'm expecting the bell to chime at 7am, a sound I look forward too, becos for me its the quintessential echo of Europe. My brain is too over stuffed with myriad detail buzzing around, so not able to go back to sleep, and seeing as how the house we've just arrived at happens to have a computor in the bedroom - I thought I'd fill in some time before the rest of the household rouses itself.
We drove over to Gourdon yesterday to spend a couple of days with friends, Trevor and Kay Mitchell, who've been staying in this house for 4 weeks - and who are going to come with us on Saturday, to help us with our 2 weeks of cookschools. The girls and Rick and I have spent the preceeding few days since we arrived in the country on Monday, getting our bearings in and around Bergerac, and meeting the people that are going to be essential to the smooth running of everything. We've had an extraodinary few days.
Tomorrow we drive back over to Bergerac and take possesion of the houses that we'll be using for the next 2 weeks to house ourselves, our guests, and our helpers. In the meantime Rick and I have to do the penultimate shopping list of all those supermarket requirements, and also finalise the menus for the week. We cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for 30 people all week - so there's a reasonable amount of organisation to be done between here and settling in - hence all the unrest in my brain. I noticed today in the supermarket I called into with Kay, that they don't offer you plastic bags to pack stuff, and I've just been lying in bed wondering how the hell we're going to get what will amount to 3 trollies worth of stuff from supermarket to car to house - if we can't pack it into bags... We'll sort it!
We've had real fun these last few days - eaten out alot as you do, and in doing so had the range of experiences from simply awful through to totally divine. When the French do food well it is stunning, with service to match - that is neither patronising nor fawning, but man, they can do bloody awful food too. Our 2 bad experiences have shared the common denominator of harrassed looking waitresses - so maybe that is what we will look for when deciding whether or not to go into a restaurant. Does the waitress look like she cares?
Today Trevor and Kay are taking us to Le Recreation - the restaurant that the book 'From here you can't see Paris' is written about, which I read a couple of years back - so looking forward to that. We'll try and find Hannah a kayak to hire after that, cos she's having withdrawal symptons, and sit on the bank of the Dordogne, and write our lists.Courteney brought her bike to France - don't ask- its a long involved story, and I was totally opposed to it coming, but its here, and driving past her riding on these country roads with a look of pure joy on her face, has somewhat abated my indignation at the hassles we encountered over it at Shanghai airport. I suspect theres more to come as we negotiate our way up to Cork at the end of the cookschools, but I'll worry about that another day.
We've also eaten this week at Le Bistro d'en Face, and Le Veux Logis, a one star restaurant that was a sublime experience - both in Tremolat. And the other superb restaurant was Auberge Lou Peyrol in a tiny little village not far from where the house we'll be doing the cookschools is situated. The couple that own the Auberge will be doing classes at the restaurant for both our weeks of cookschools - not unlike the way we do them at Somerset, and we went for lunch to meet Phillipe and Fiona, only having dealt with them by email up until then, had a beautiful lunch and informative chat and come away excited about what is to come.
We arrived in France with a sort of structure for how we wanted the cookschool week to flow, based on what we learnt in Italy, and having now got our heads around the actual physical reality of some of the distances between places, and how long it takes to go to a market and mooch around, we've shuffled around a few of those ideas. The property where the guest will be staying is truly beautiful - the owner Jane, describes it as 'shabby chic', but I think shes being a little disengenious. Its gorgeous (photos will follow at some point, I promise!), and has acres of ground to spread out under and relax in, so the thought of spending hours every day rushing around the countryside to yet another village of repute, just doesn't make sense. We'd rather people got to totally relax with us - and did the sightseeing part under their own steam. We drove thru Sarlat on our way here yesterday and there was traffic everywhere, and a sea of people, and it felt pressurised and horrible by comparison to the few days we'd just had in our little quiet part of the Dordogne. So the trip to Sarlat that was going to be part of the week has been changed, and we've redesigned that day. Flexibility is good!!
The French people have been delightful - with the notable exception of one particulary surly waitress. I've found without exception, that if you exchange greetings on arrival, and make an effort, they will more than meet you half way. And more often than not, their 'un peu anglais' is an awful lot more more comprehensive than my 'un peu francais'. So far we've managed with out any drama. I've been chuffed with how much of my school girl french has bubbled to the surface. Not at the stage where I'll be holding any conversations in French on deep philosophical matters, but I'm getting thru on the rudimentaries - something I couldn't do in Italy, becos I had no Italian at all, and I found that horrible limiting, being the verbal type that I am...The supermarket tomorrow will be an interesting challenge. I bought some clothes soap powder the other day and nearly ended up with dish washing machine powder!
The 4 of us stayed in a small gite in St Alvere for the first 3 nites here - a chance to recover from the 2 days of travel, and get our bearings. The markets go to different villages every day, so we've sought them out each day, to see what is available, and how consistent the supply is. Ricks then come home and written down menu ideas, and we've just about sorted what we're going to cook for the week. (Each cookschool week is a repeat - so what we do the first week, we will repeat the next, becos we have a new 'batch' of guests.) We're right on the cusp of the weather changing though, so we don't want to get too locked in on ideas - becos things like berryfruit which are around the first week, might well have fanished by the second. When we get back to NZ I'm going to put together a book of the recipes that we end up using - both for our attendees and for others who are interested.
The clock has chimed 7 times so should perhaps finish here, becos the rules of this house , Trevor has told us,are to assemble for a walk at 8am and I think that will be rather a good idea for moi- meme, given the bread, bread and more bread that I've been consuming this week.Not to mention the fois gras and confit...
