Last night, our friends Bruno and Jill came for dinner and we followed a sort of loose “sea & salt” theme throughout. We kicked off (as we always do) with an apéritif. “Apéritif” is a French word derived from the Latin verb aperire, which means “to open.” So an apéritif is an alcoholic beverage usually served before a meal to stimulate the appetite, and is therefore usually dry rather than sweet. Common choices for an apéritif are vermouth, champagne, pastis, gin, rak?, fino, amontillado or other styles of dry sherry and any still, dry, light white wine. The word also refers to a snack that precedes a meal. This includes an amuse-bouche, such as crackers, cheese, pâté or olives.
Our own apéritifs will always include a light, dry wine (or champagne) which we often flavour with ‘Crême de Something’ (depending on the person’s choice). We discovered a long time ago that ‘Crême de ….” costs a bomb in UK! We searched hard and all we found was a Black Raspberry Liqueur made by Chambord. A bottle of just 20cl (about one-third of a pint) cost us over £10 (€12 – $16). So now, when we come from France by car, we load up with 50cl (¾ pint) bottles which we buy for about €3 each (£2.50 – $4).
We have a great selection now of Crême de Pamplemousse Rose (pink grapefruit), Crême de Pêche de Vigne (Vine Peaches), Crême de Framboise (Raspberry), Crême de Mûres (Blackberries) and Crême de Fruits Rouges (Red Fruits). Curiously, what I don’t have is the all-time classic, Crême de Cassis (Blackcurrant) which was the original drink.
White wine with Crême de Cassis is known as “Kir” in France and is a popular apéritif drink named after Félix Kir (1876–1968), mayor of Dijon in Burgundy, who popularized the drink by offering it at receptions to visiting delegations. Besides treating his international guests well, he was also promoting two vital economic products of the region – blackcurrants and white wine.
So, due to our collection of different flavour liqueurs, we can offer guests a choice and, in fact, outside France it can be a great talking point as guests sample first one and then another! Last night, we served our Kirs using a lovely crisp Chardonnay that we happen to have sitting in the fridge. And as an amuse-bouche, we also served large green-lipped mussels from New Zealand. We buy these already cooked from the local supermarket and I then finely chop garlic, sprinkle it over the mussels in their shells and drizzle a generous amount of Salad dressing over them. They are really delicious and our guests certainly seemed to appreciate them.
For a starter course, we once again resorted to Julie’s Salmon & Prawn with Lime which has become a real favourite. Jill cleverly guessed all the ingredients in the salad dressing and also spotted the horseradish and crême fraîche mixture for what it was. The salmon was wild Pacific Keta Salmon (sometimes known as chum or dog salmon for its dog-like teeth). It has a lower fat content than other salmon but is a really rich, tasty and healthy fish. With the fish starter, we served the same Duc de Morny 2012 Picpoul de Pinet that we served last week when we had “the Steves” with us.
The main course was the “salty” end of the recipe with Chicken in a salt crust otherwise known as Poulet a l’ail et aux Fines Herbes en croute de Sel Parfumée. This is a great way to serve chicken since it always comes out tender and succulent and the taste is just out of this world.
In fact, you start with a chicken (nice corn-fed, free range one for us) and you insert Boursin Soft Cheese with Garlic and Herbs (Boursin Ail et Fines Herbes) between the skin and the flesh. During the cooking process, this “melts” into and around the flesh leaving a taste that has to be tried to be believed.
Once the chicken has been treated with the Boursin, you build a complete casing for it using coarse salt, flour, rosemary, thyme, baies, peppercorns and egg whites. It ends up looking like a bomb, but part of the fun of this recipe (and, yes, food should be fun too!) is, prior to serving, showing your guests the cooked “bomb” and seeing if any of them can guess what’s inside. Then, of course, you take it back to the kitchen and remove the salt crust (which takes a certain amount of brute force and muscle!)
Once you have opened up the crust, you will find (every time without fail) a perfectly cooked golden brown bird, ready to be segmented and served in portions or, very simply, placed on a serving dish and carved at the table. We served ours with mini Brussels sprouts and new potatoes. No need for any sort of sauce or gravy, the moist chicken meat was more than enough – particularly when helped down with a couple of bottles of Domaine du Landetran, L’Ame des Schistes 2010 (well, come on, be fair, there were four of us!).
After the cheese, we had planned serving M-D’s “Parfait” but Bruno had made a chocolate cake so we got stuck into that instead… and very good it was too. (Particularly washed down with a glass or Maas a Miel).
And so passed a very pleasant evening in good company. Bruno and Jill found their way home at about 1:30am and I eventually got to bed at 2:45am after clearing the mess I had made in the kitchen (better that than face it the next morning!)
Entertaining is fun, particularly with people you like… and we really DO like all our guests. They are all different. They all have different tastes. The conversations are always different. But the one common factor is a convivial evening spent around the table with good food and decent wine. It makes life worth living!
For the main course, we took an easy option (for us) and served 
After a selection of cheeses (with a little more St Emilion!), dessert was a Gâteau Creusois and a Carpaccio d’Oranges à la Cannelle (Orange slices with cinnamon). Together, a nice simple, refreshing and tasty way to finish the meal (particularly since it took a new bottle of Saint Emilion to help it go down!).
Meanwhile, a combination of storms and high tides has given The Island a real pounding with many of the sea walls damaged, some shops and homes flooded and everybody huddled indoors waiting for summer! Fortunately, the island is hilly, so we don’t get many places where water lays on the land for long periods such as they are experiencing in Somerset.
However, all’s well that ends well because Penny is coming round tomorrow night to help us finish the raclette ingredients that we had with Terry and Julie last week! We have just enough for three people, Steve’s away and Penny’s not on call, so it sounds like a good excuse to dig into the wine cellar and see what’s available – I love it when a plan comes together! Who cares about the weather?
Obviously, we didn’t buy a 50kg block of cheese, light a fire and start scraping it – we used a more modern way of serving raclette that involves an electric table-top grill with small pans, known as coupelles, in which to melt slices of cheese. When we do this, we bring the cheese to the table already cut and sliced, along with a plate of charcuterie like Grisons (which is what we used last night) or pastrami or salami or cooked ham (or whatever floats your boat) accompanied by a big dish of boiled or steamed potatoes and a bowl of cornichons (small gherkins).
Even eating didn’t stop her talking, though it did slow her down a little as our lunch started with foie gras (as you do!) served with a lovely crisp 2005 Sauternes from Chateau Roumieu. Even M-D’s aunt showed a bit of respectful silence for that one! Following that, we got stuck into the main course of 
At this time of year, Vitelotte Potatoes (also called Vitelotte noire, Négresse or Truffe de Chine) are available in France. Vitelotte is a gourmet variety of blue-violet potato that has been cultivated in France since the early 19th century. In fact, they come in white, yellow, pink, red and violet, but the violet variety are the most common and, though they taste just the same as ordinary spuds, they are fun to use, offering a great alternative presentation on the plate.
The main course was served with an excellent Menetou-Salon which, though a red wine, is very light and can easily be served with fish. We skipped the cheese (having filled up on succulent monkfish) but Susanne had brought with her a hand-make chocolate cake from a pâtisserie near Versailles so we did some wilful damage to that, served with a glass or three of Mas Amiel Vintage.
It had to be simple and straightforward, so we opted for foie gras as a starter, 
The day before, I had prepared a 
We kicked off with a starter that our neighbours, Julie and Terry, on the Isle of Man had made for us just before we came back to France… 
Our main course was 
After the cheese, we finished off with M-D’s famous 
Before leaving the island, Terry and Julie invited us to theirs for a splendid roast dinner. Never has so much good grub been served to so few without collapsing the table! It was delicious and, for me, brought back great memories of pork crackling and roast spuds and parsnips and oh so much more. I suspect we also did some considerable damage to Terry’s stock of wine. There seemed to be a lot of empty bottles rattling round at the end! (Reminder to myself: I need to get Julie’s recipe for the starter… a lovely little salad with a vinaigrette that was as light as fairy wings and as tasty as … well, anything you can possibly imagine!)
Also, before leaving the island, Bruno and Jill invited us to theirs for a dinner. Bruno had prepared a great tajine for us. A tagine is a dish from North Africa that is named after the special earthenware pot in which it is cooked. The traditional pot is formed entirely of a heavy clay and consists of two parts: a base unit that is flat and circular with low sides and a large cone-shaped cover that sits on the base during cooking. The cover is designed to return all condensation to the bottom. With the cover removed, the base can be taken to the table for serving.
Also before leaving, we had a pleasant evening with my brother Steve and my sister-in-law, Jeanette. They’re great at keeping an eye on the house while we are away, not to mention forwarding the mail, looking after my car and much more. For some reason, however, the whole summer had passed by without the four of us having a quiet evening together. So, since Steve and Jeanette had been to Scotland earlier in the year and had brought us back a haggis, I decided to do my famous 
Since being back, we have, of course, been to our “local” – 
First of all, the name Cavellec is typically Breton (from Brittany on France’s Atlantic coast). Secondly, Bruno was a really approachable guy with an easy-going manner and a contageous smile. Third, being French, he and Marie-Danielle could stop talking English for a few minutes and relax into their own language. And fourth, I fell in love with (and bought a copy of) his giclée print “
And, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing, so we carried on with the duck theme and served 
We decided on a 
The verrines we made were stupidly simple. The first was tomato with fresh goat’s cheese. We placed two 400g tins of chopped tomatoes into a pan, crushed in a garlic clove and a bit of salt and freshly ground pepper, then brought it to a gentle rolling boil until all the juice had evaporated and only the pulp was left. This, we left to chill. Once cold, we placed about two teaspoons of the tomato pulp into the bottom of each glass. On top of that we crumbled about 1-1½ teaspoons of fresh goat’s cheese which we had broken up with a fork. Drizzle a tiny bit of olive oil over each and dress with chopped fresh basil – and yummy … lovely as an apperitif or, as we did, with a tapas selection.
All of this, of course, was washed down with several decent-sized glasses of sangria which M-D had made three days earlier (it tastes better when it’s prepared in advance). Depending on your guests’ ability to quaff the fruit of the vine, you can change these quantities to suit yourself. This time, there were just four adults but I know that both Terry and I can manage our way to the bottom of the glass without too much difficulty! So we used 3 x 750ml bottles of 14.5% red wine (a rather palitable Bordeaux – 2010 Coteaux du Languedoc called L’Ame des Schistes). The actual recipe is as follows (ingredients below are for 1 litre of red wine. For 4 people, use at least 2 bottles, i.e. 1.5 litre – quantities of fruit etc. can then be adapted accordingly). Since the fruits in particular are going to water down the sangria, the wine used should be at least 13% volume. Never use the so-called “sangria mixes” to do this recipe, since they are already watered down.
The Isle of Man is only about 36 miles x 12 miles at its longest and widest points. Today, about 85,000 of us perch on this rock in the middle of the Irish Sea, and every summer we are subjected to hundreds of motorbikes racing through the streets of our towns and villages and around the island on the 37.7-mile Snaefell Mountain Course. Their average speed is over 130 mph and in places they exceed 200mph!
Never mind the visitors, the TT races themselves are extremely dangerous (over 250 rider deaths to date on this circuit). Imagine riding at over 200 mph on tiny, narrow, twisting streets, roads and lanes flanked by stone walls and buildings, dodging manhole covers and stray dogs! Some, including a few former competitors, have called for the race to be banned, but for the most part the riders love the TT. They know it’s dangerous, but they also know it’s the absolute pinnacle of motorcycle racing. It’s the ultimate, and if you’re good enough – and you’re brave enough – then you go for it, regardless of the risks. Personal responsibility and the love of speed triumph the desire for safety here.
Oh yeah – I almost forgot about “Mad Sunday.” One day every year at the TT, they open up the 37 mile course to the public. That means anyone on a motor bike can try his or her luck trying to match the professionals for speed (and insanity!). Imagine, if you can, a Formula 1 or NASCAR event where they let 50,000+ fans onto the track, charging around in whatever vehicle they came in. In recent years, to try and reduce the carnage (and maybe also to give the visitors even more thrills!) the roads have been made one-way for about 8 miles over the mountain section of the course. Big, powerful road bikes hitting their top speeds of 170mph-180mph is not unusual on this section.
Last Saturday evening, we invited our neighbours, Terry and Julie plus Dominic and Kate from over the road for a meal. We decided to mix the best of the Isle of Man with the best of France (as you do!) so (after polishing off a couple of bottles of Champagne with the aperitif) we started the meal with one of our favourites – beautiful fresh Manx scallops, and prepared the excellent 
As we always do, we served the meal French style (dessert last) and I dug around in M-D’s wine cooler and came up with a really nice bottle of 2008 Côtes de Bergerac. The Côtes de Bergerac is a deeply smooth sweet white wine that complimented our