Villereal 20/9/2008

Saturday has come round again and so, this morning we went off to the market at Villereal....

Local village markets in France, like the one at Villereal, are a trading post for all sorts of businesses...

There is a lot of food, stall after stall of delicious looking fresh fruit and vegetables, often being sold by the producer themselves, several fishmongers with their refrigerated display trailers and lots of very appetising looking fish and seafood....  This morning, one fishmonger was cooking moules marinière at one end of his stall and I stopped to watch as he poured a couple of bottles of Bergerac sec, the local dry white wine over a mountain of mussels and then liberally added hand fulls of roughly chopped flat leaf parsley.

The skillet was about 600mm (2ft) diameter and by the look of the sack and the pile of mussels I would guess he had about 5 kgs (11lbs) of cleaned mussels.. 

The word marinière in French simply refers to the method of cooking in dry white wine with garlic and some herbs....

There are also a lot of cheese stalls and today we bought some delicious goats cheese from a small producer who's farm is just outside Villereal and whose cheese we particularly like..

But as well as food, there are also lots and lots of other traders present.... During the week, working in garden I broke my watch strap, so part of today's visit was to see if the watch man could repair it for me....  Sadly, he couldn't as I had lost some pieces when it broke and he didn't have anything that would fit...  But he had a whole range of similar watches for very little money so in the end I settled for a rather nice large faced watch to replace the broken one...

One of the restaurant/bars which are in the market place was closed for annual holidays today so all the other bars were very busy but we managed to get coffee and some croissants at one of our favourite restaurants.....

Then I had to pay a quick visit to my bank before returning to the car to drive home...

Lots of people talk about excellent Farmers Markets where you can buy good fresh produce but here in France I believe we have the best of both worlds.  The farmers' stalls are excellent but a weekly visit to the market can encompass so much more than just buying fruit and vegetables

Kitchen Garden Day 2008 France

About 30 people turned up here on Sunday to celebrate Kitchen Garden day with me.

Kitchen Garden Day is a celebration of local food instigated by Kitchen Gardeners International. It takes place on the fourh Sunday in August and is celebrated all around the world.  I know that year it was celebrated in the USA, Pakistan, UK, Norway, and two states in Australia as well as here in France.

For our celebration, we organised a meal at lunchtime which was held in the garden.   Everyone who came brought some food to share, made either from produce from their garden or from something farmed locally.

On arrival, guests were served with a special KG Day cocktail which had been dreamed up by Michael, the photographer and myself.  I was looking for some connection with the earth and eventually came up with this crystal blue cocktail, which was deliciously lovely!!! but which also represented what our oceans would look like if they and the atmosphere were less polluted.  Continuing with the sea theme. we served aperitifs with farmed smoked salmon.

Here in France people tend to organise their food into distinct course and I have started to think that way myself... So although I broke the dishes down into courses, really it was just a superb buffet.  There was so much good food it's impossible to list it all and I may well have forgotten something.. but it was all very tasty and very beautifully presented.

 

 

One of the things that the Perigord region is famous for is duck.  So for our local starter we had a duck liver mousse served with some homemade multigrain and muesli bread....

Guests arrived from all directions and even the gardener turned up.

The meal continued with barbecued pork for the omnivores amongst us and a delicious mushroom  and aubergine quiche.  The quiche was made by one of our guests and the pork was reared, slaughtered and cured right here in our little community.

I was surprised at the range of ages of people attending with the seniors in their 80's happily joining in the fun with some of those a fraction of their age.  The youngest person in attendance was minus 3 months but seemed to be enjoying the food pretty well!!!!

The meal finished off about 6pm after everyone had eaten some of the delicious range of desserts, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, rhubarb crumble, fruit tart, rhum baba, cherries in juice and of course, all home made....

Thanks to Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International setting aside this day to give people all round the world the chance to celebrate together and get just a little bit closer to the planet we live on... and to think, I almost forgot my friend Bernard, who provided the wine, Bergerac AOC Rouge 2007 from his vineyard less than ten miles down the road

 

A Fun Time

I had a fun time the other day. We held a barbecue and invited several of our neighbours.

We barbecued some local pork which I had marinated in Brittany Cider, local onions, garlic and mushrooms. I used “sel de guerrande” which is a sea salt also from Brittany, that seems to go especially well in marinades with cider. The salt is harvested in huge ponds of sea water which are sealed and then left to evaporate in the sun. The resulting salt is exquisite.

Various neighbours brought dishes to share made with produce from their gardens. We had a very nice mixed leaf salad with so many different salad leaves it is impossible to list them all – in fact I’m not even sure what some of them were, but it sure tasted good.

Then another of our neighbours brought the famous Clafoutis. I posted an article about clafoutis recently. Clafoutis is a tart made from cherries and with a sort of custardy base. I don’t know how to make it, and living in this part of the world, I would never dream of trying! However, I do know how to eat it – slowly and savouring every mouthful. She had made it that day with cherries from her garden.

Sadly, I was busy trying to coax a very recalcitrant barbecue to get hot enough to cook pork so I didn’t get any photographs.

The day before the barbecue I had, once again visited my friend Bernard at his vineyard. We had some guests staying with us who wanted to buy some wine to take home and that was quite enough reason for me! We visited with Bernard and enjoyed the tour of his vines and chai before moving into his cave for the tasting. I was not on form on Wednesday so my translation was lees than perfect and on more than one occasion I couldn't find the English words for things like the Vats!

Our guests tried several wines, all from his vines from the light, fruity 2007 rosé through Bergerac Sec, the dry white to the rich ruby red 2004 Bergerac rouge. 2004 and 2005 produced very different reds in Bergerac and it is always interesting to see the look on peoples faces as they taste the two and I explain that both wines have been made by the same man from grapes from the same vines and using the same methods. The only difference is the weather the grapes grew up in!

Towards the end of the tasting I was telling Bernard about the barbecue but, sadly, he was unable to come as he would be leaving very early the following morning for a market several hours drive away. He produced a bottle of his rosé and tipped somewhat less than half a small tasting glass out probably no more than 50ml. He replaced this in the original bottle with a sweet syrup of Peach. Then pushed the cork back in and shook the bottle.

The result was a wonderfully tasty aperitif with the peach adding a very special and pleasant flavour to the rosé. I took the bottle with me and served it, well chilled, as the aperitif at the barbecue the following evening. Everyone really enjoyed it with several of our French neighbours demanding to know what secret recipe I had discovered. I was pretty pleased to be introducing people from this wine growing region to an aperitif with which they were not familiar and which they enjoyed so much.

In the garden here nothing much is happening. The weather remains awful with lots of rain and not much sunshine. Temperatures at this time of year should be up into the 30’s C (upper 80’s into 90’s F) but last week the highest temperature I recorded was 24 C (75 F) with a low of just 10C (50F). However, the weeds are growing prolifically and in most cases are far outstripping the crops. I read on other blogs that this is pretty much the same across France.

Marché Gourmande

I have another friend who grows grapes, Sylvie. She owns a very nice little vineyard whose land adjoins ours.

The other day she held a Marché Gourmande – a Gourmet Market.

This is the fourth year that she has organised this event and it has become an important day in the local calendar.

Sylvie has a large courtyard in front of her chai and the other outbuildings she uses for storing both the wine and all equipment necessary for making wine. The chai is the area where the wine is actually made.

She put up 3 Poly tunnels – the 6m (20 ‘) high sort and laid out tables and chairs under them. All around the courtyard she set up market stalls for the various vendors.

We arrived about 6.30pm and were greeted by Sylvie with kisses and an aperitif, her own sweet white wine (Bergerac Moelleux).

There were various vendors in attendance, Sylvie had a stall selling her own wines, by the glass or by the bottle, there were a couple from Champagne selling their local wine! A local pork farmer was there with his excellent locally bred pork offering Jambon Braisée – a kind of roast pork. There were people selling cheese including an excellent sheep’s cheese and people selling ever so fresh Strawberries.

We wandered around for a while meeting and greeting our friends before buying a plate of this and a plate of that and taking our places at one of the long tables to eat. For my first course I had charcuterie. In this case a beautiful mousse pate of duck accompaied by dried duck breast and some duck sausage. It was delicious and had been made within about 5 kilometres (2 miles) of where I was eating it.

Of course, there was a bottle of Sylvie’s rosé wine on the table to accompany it. I was joined by several of our neighbours who shared their foods and wine with us. We had bought a bottle of Rosé for the first course and someone else bought a bottle of red to accompany the main course of roast pork with sautéed potatoes. Bread had been bought by another of the neighbours and was also shared across the table.

We had forgotten to take our own plates and cutlery so one of my neighbours also came to the rescue providing us with both. I had carefully guarded the plastic glass that the aperitif had been served in so that I would have a drinking vessel for wine and water as the evening progressed.

Cheese came after the main course. I actually don’t know who bought the cheese but one of our neighbours bought cheese for all six of us and I enjoyed a very creamy cheese made from sheep’s milk.

We bought dessert for all six of us. It took the form of some of the biggest, freshest, juiciest strawberries I have seen this year and we all had a small glass of the Bergerac Moelleux to accompany them.

Our village is quite small. We have a council chamber and one permanent member of staff and we also have a community hall. There are 340 people in our village. I reckon about 300 people attended this evening market.

After we had all finished eating the band struck up and entertained us. As the stage had been set up across the courtyard from where we all sat under the poly tunnels, they soon abandoned the stage, preferring to come out amongst us and play an acoustic set. The three members took a poly tunnel each and climbed up on the tables to entertain us, leading the singing and dancing and trying to coax as many people as possible to join in.

It was a great evening and was well past midnight when we finally strolled back to the car for the short lift home. We ended the evening with a glass of Armagnac shared between ourselves and the two neighbours who had collected us.

Prunes and Grapes

This part of France is renowned for both it’s wine production and it’s Prune production. The hot long summer serves extremely well for "sun drying" plums as well as many other fruit and vegetables.

I particularly noticed the grape vines, all now standing up straight and clean after being visited by the local vintner for a wash and brush up. Vines, some of them 100 years old, have survived the winter as they were left after the grapes were carefully removed last fall. As soon as the weather warmed just enough to work back out in the open again, the grape growers returned to the fields, tending the vines, and pruning them by hand to leave just two short shoots with five buds on each. I find it quite astonishing that the wine production for the whole of this part of France will eventually grow from just two small branches on each vine.

Bergerac, my local wine region, produces about 42 million bottles of wine from about 20,000 acres. That’s 2000 bottles per acre. Out of interest, someone once told me that there were the same number of vines as the vineyard produced bottles of wine. So my friend Bernard, with 22 acres has about 45,000 vines from which to make his 45,000 bottles. He will have visited each and every vine over the past two or three months and pruned them by hand, cutting everything except the 2 branches with this year’s grape buds already on them, carefully selecting with his experienced eye, which buds to cut and which to leave. 45000 vines, 90 days pruning (7 days a week) it still works out at 500 vines a day! It makes my pruning look very small scale!!!

But now, the mammoth task is completed and the vines are ready for the uncertainties of the weather to encourage them to grow "just right" so that come the Fall, the grapes will be, exceptional!

This is a time of great hope in the wine communities of South West France