Back again in France after an eventful last few weeks on The Island. We’re spoilt brats, getting the best of both worlds again. Having enjoyed a fabulous summer of sun and blue skies on The Isle of Man, we are now enjoying a late summer here in France (while UK is suffering heavy rain and high winds!).
But, before we left, it was the forthcoming winter we were afraid of because we had a leak somewhere on the roof or in the gutters that had percolated into the bedrooms and left a trail of water and mould (don’t you just love old houses!). Our neighbours, Terry and Julie had the same problem so we shared the costs and had a scaffold erected across both houses and called in the roofing guys. And, since the scaffold was already up, we decided it was an ideal time to paint the fronts of the houses too! Now, with rain and high winds on The Island, we shall see if our leaks have been cured (or not!).
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!)
Postscript: Got it!!!!…. Julie’s Salmon & Prawn with Lime
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.
Typically, a tagine is a rich stew of meat, which can include beef, chicken, fish, or lamb, and most often also includes vegetables or fruit. Bruno’s was a chicken tajine and darn tasty it was too!
The only disagreeable part of the evening was that I had taken round a summer pudding and, since it was the first I had made from our home on The Isle of Man, had used a plain stainless steel dish that I wasn’t used to (as opposed to the fluted Tupperware dish we have used for summer puddings when in France). So the summer pudding looked like a splodge of red mud instead of a nicely-shaped invitation to taste its inner delights! I’m not in competition with Bruno to beat the unbelievable apple flan he brought when they came to ours, but it would have been nice to have come up with something halfway presentable! Ah well – better luck next time, Graham!
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 Haggis, Neeps and Tatties as a starter, followed by Rich Gravy Lamb and finished with a nice Fresh Fruit Salad. All very simple but wallowing in taste!
Our trip back to France was not without its unwanted “highlights”! At Charles de Gaulle airport our suitcases didn’t appear on the baggage carousel and we were obliged to seek the help of the lost luggage office. It eventually transpired that someone down below (turning the cogs of the baggage handling machinery) had switched off whatever brain cells he might have had and had decided that our cases (and a few others) should be sent back to Manchester (our transit airport). Fortunately he was stopped in time and ‘requested’ (rather firmly) to engage brain and send the cases up!
One hour later, the lady in the lost luggage office got a big hug and we got our cases back… only to find that the railway line between the airport and Paris was being repaired so we had to get a bus into central Paris and then a train out to Acheres where we live. We eventually walked through the door just a few minutes short of midnight. However, fortune smiled on us just a little bit because I had envisaged a possible delay and had made a couple of baguette sandwiches before leaving The Island, just in case we were too late to get to the restaurant … Any port in a storm!
Since being back, we have, of course, been to our “local” – Happy Sushi – where we were greeted with kisses and big smiles (makes a pleasant change from the surly faces in the airport restaurant at Manchester!). Their maki sushi (for me) and sashimi (for M-D) with sushi rice is a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach! Though we are always happy to be on The Isle of Man, we’re always glad to be back in France so we can make the occasional foray into Japanese cuisine in relaxed surroundings. (In fact, we went again a few days ago with M-D’s sister, Christine).
Mind you, it also works in reverse; while we are in France we dream of getting an “Indian fix” at The Royal India, our favourite Indian restaurant on The Isle of Man where the owner, Jose Verananickal, is both friendly and professional and the food is perfectly balanced.
Like I said at the beginning, we’re spoilt brats, getting the best of both worlds!
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 
We’re heading back to The Isle of Man in a few days. We’ll be there for a couple of months, but we probably won’t get much relaxation! We bought a three story Victorian town house in August 2011 and it came complete with ivory-coloured fluffy carpets throughout! We have replaced the ground floor with parquet but the stairs and two floors of bedrooms still need to have something done to get rid of the ghastly dust trap underfoot! Our plan is to dump the carpets, strip the pine boards back to original state, tint them just to help the colour a little, then apply a matt varnish. On the stairs and landings, we’ll get new carpet runners and paint the edges white (a bit like it would have been originally except maybe the colour).
We had an interesting summer on the Isle of Man with three lots of visitors from France. First of all there was Pierre and Claude who stayed with us for a week (and fitted in a year’s worth of sightseeing!). There are so many curiosities to see on The Isle of Man for the first time visitor. One that amused Pierre and Claude was the Great Union Camera Obscura on Douglas Head (opened in the 1890s and is one of only a tiny handful left in the British Isles.)… I’m the lazy one with his hands in his pockets!
Of course, food is never far from the minds of French people, so we introduced them to a typical British picnic (complete with table and chairs). This time, I’m the taller one with the wine in his hand!! Included in the picnic were such British delicacies as Scotch Egg, Melton Mowbray pork pie and also we served radishes as part of a salad, which is not in the French culture (they eat them on their own as a starter, with salt and butter). Surprisingly, we also discovered that your humble Heinz Salad Cream went down a treat, since there seems to be no equivalent in France – the nearest being mayonaisse.
We were also pleasantly surpised by the warm reception our guests gave to the local eating places. The French can be a little snooty about their food, so we weren’t quite sure what sort of reception basic British “grub” would get. Our minds were put at rest after a delightful lunch at 
Our next arrivals were M-D’s cousin, Anne-Marie, and her husband, Jean. They stopped with us for a little under one week since they were then heading off for a hiking holiday in Scotland. Again, they seemed to appreciate basic British “picnic grub” like the pork pie and Scotch egg, We also introduced them the delights of 
For Jean and Anne-Marie, I think the attraction of The Isle of Man was simply the delightful country cottages and quaint streets of the old fishing village of Peel. Naturally, they enjoyed seeing all the other natural attractions the island has to offer (like 
Our final guests of the summer were M-D’s sister, Christine, and her younger son, Corentin. Christine has visited The Island before but, for Corentin, it was his first time, so we naturally did all the “tourist” bits like the electric trams, the Great Laxey Wheel, The Isle of Man Steam Railway. the horse trams, and everything else than contributes to making the Isle of Man a unique place to live and work.
During their stay, we celebrated Christine’s birthday with a visit to our favourite restaurant on the island, 
