August is here

After a long wait and some frustration, our latest furniture purchases arrived from IKEA. In all 16 cartons were delivered and needed to be “assembled” in the inevitable IKEA fashion and for those of you who have complained about lack of instructions, missing parts and other complications let me tell you that it took us nearly 3 days to put everything together successfully. For those of you who think that IKEA is swedish, some of our pieces came from Lithuania !

In that time we put together three sofas, three chests of drawers, an entertainment unit plus two Danish chairs and it is fair to say that we made it without any real problems ( the secret – always read the instructions at least 3 times, then discuss between you, and read the instructions again ). In fact, we even discussed setting up a business here to contract out the construction process for the many people who buy from IKEA. In the end I was a little uncertain whether Kerrie could take that amount of swearing and yelling. Oh well, we must look for other opportunities.

On the relaxation side of things, I was permitted to start buying some wine for my cellar and have so far purchased 12 x bottles of Bordeaux rouge, 12 x bottles of Montravel rouge (2006), 6 x bottles of Pecharmant rouge from Bergerac and 6 x bottles of blancs des blancs sparkling wine. While it is not a lot, it does give me a start and now I have to just learn not to keep going down to the cellar and coming up with a bottle each night. I need some cheap quaffing red for that purpose.  Just an excuse to get me to drive while Graham  tastes at all the caves ( wine shops) and co-ops ( producers groups) in the area.

To go with the very pleasant (and warm) weather that we have experienced recently, we decided to try out the existing BBQ set up in our hangar, which is an open sided barn. The BBQ requires an open fire with the ashes and coals used to grill the food on a low level grill (see our photo). We have tried this with some basic steak and rounds of chipolata sausages and to our surprise, they have cooked well while maintaining their moisture and flavour. No doubt we will need to explore this process further and it will be harder when cooking for more than the two of us.  Good options for future cook-outs include prawns (crevettes) which are quite cheap here as well as rabbit, for which we now have some interesting recipes. Should all go well with the expanding wine collection.

Steaks are not too bad here......just a different cut.

Indeed while on the cooking side of things, it was an ideal opportunity for me to buy a Kg of local mussels (moules) at our local fish market and put on a great batch of Moules Marinieres for myself as Kerrie does not eat shellfish. The mussels are a little smaller than the Australian version, but strong on flavour and also cheap (about $4 a kg). While Kerrie had to get by on a salad, I had no difficulty in putting away a good couple of bowls of moules and to be honest they were easy to prepare and cook. Another excuse for Graham to buy some more kitchenware.

We've been enjoying figs everyday from our tree to the point where we can’t use them up fast enough despite racing the birds to get them first, so today I made my first pot of fig jam. A great fresh taste and easy to do  so I guess I’ll have to keep making fig jam and, when they ripen, mirabelle jam as there’s thousands of them on our tree. We have planted out a herb garden near the back door and are planning a potager ( vegetable garden) down behind the pool. We did have some tomato plants there, but a bad storm on Friday night including two lots of hail made a bit of a mess of them and shredded leaves on everything in the garden. Not a total wipeout luckily, but messy. Even the grapes survived  ok, so we are looking forward to those in a couple of months.

not quite enough for a bottle of wine

the birds beat us to this one !

mirabelles

Our handyman, Richard,  has begun the long list of jobs around the house, and the painter has agreed to start in 2 weeks  so it feels, at last, as though we are getting somewhere with our plans for improvements. Now how do we get the French electrician to come back ?

Our French classes are now "en vacances"  for August so there was a “picnique” on the evening of the last day and both French and anglaise were invited to bring food and wine and celebrate summer together. Any excuse to share food and drink in this country. 

can you spot Graham ?

For those who thought Graham’s Peugeot in Sydney was a bit “lairy”, here’s a picture of a Peugeot that lives around the corner.

A few of our readers have suggested that they can tell the difference in our writing styles. Just to show that it is a collaborative effort, in today's blog we have one section in italics and one section in plain text. We will let you work out which sections are Graham's and which are Kerrie's.

A bientôt