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

 

Kitchen Garden Day 2008

	Sunday is Kitchen Garden Day... and here we are expecting about 20 people to celebrate it with us. As this is France we thought we would celebrate in the traditional way so we are having a meal.    Our meal will be in the garden at midday on Sunday and everybody who is
coming is either bringing something made with produce from their own garden or something farmed locally.  A neighbour has provided some wine made from his own grapes and "My Friend Bernard" is also providing some wine. I had my first full day in the garden today for several weeks...  and realised what a mess it had  become....I wonder how much tidying up I can get done by Sunday......

Villereal - 21st June 2008

It was market day again today and as usual on a Saturday morning we went. As it happened, this week, we didn’t need to buy any fruit or vegetables but I did need to go to a couple of other vendors and the bank.
The sun was shining and the temperatures were up into the higher 20’s C (mid 80’s F)





First stop, as usual, was the coffee shop for breakfast

We wandered around looking at the wine stands and the flowers. There are usually between about 6 and 10 different vineyards selling their wine at the market. My friend Bernard doesn’t come to market every week and he wasn’t there this week. However, there are plenty of other vineyards about and the photo shows a different vineyard which makes that same combination of wines that I spoke about recently.

I was unable to take many pictures of fruit and vegetables today which were absolutely stunning as usual. Some regular readers will know that my accomplishments do not yet stretch to mastering the digital camera and today the sun was incredibly bright and all the fruit and vegetable stalls were under deep shade to protect the produce. I tried a couple but even though I remember taking them I cannot even recognise them on my camera!!!! However, these tomatoes, which did come out give you a sense of what it’s like. I’m afraid, to get a more complete picture you’re going to have to come here, or, with a bit of luck, wait till I master the camera!! Don’t hold your breath waiting though.



Several stalls had flowers out in the open and I did manage to get a picture of those.







Then finally I got to Yousef!

Yousef runs a goat farm a few kilometres outside Villereal.






He has invited us to a gourmet market which he is holding at the farm every Wedneday evening through the summer. This sounds very like the one I went to a couple of weeks ago at Clos de Pech Besous. We buy his gorgeous tasting goat’s cheese virtually every week.



One of the great things I like about markets here in France, is that you never quite know what to expect. The markets I go to are village markets. Traditionally, this is where the French housewives would go and buy everything they needed for domestic life. As well as food, in all it’s shades, there are pots and pans, clothes, jewellery, books even watches, sunglasses, thermometers rainfall gauges etc.


This week, this guy had set himself up in a small alley and was weaving baskets. He was selling the ones he was making right there at the market. He made just 3 different designs, all fabulous spiral things and if you wanted one, he wove it, and you popped back and picked it up later.
Now, how simple a form of trading is that?

The Wine Connoisseur

I noticed recently that
The Wine Connoisseur had linked to us.

Whilst looking at their site I found an exellent article on

French Wine and wine producers

I'd like to thank them for the link and invite you all to learn a little more about wine production here in France.

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