Saturday Morning Market in Cahors

After our morning "chores" (feeding the dogs, moving the hen house, cleaning the nesting boxes, replenishing hen feed and water, and watering the pot plants and garden), we headed out to Cahors for the Saturday market.

We just love the French markets - over the years we have been to many, some tiny with only half a dozen stalls and others much larger with everything from donkey sausage(!) to the latest music CDs!

Last year we didn't get the chance to go to the Cahors market so this visit we were determined to go and as we only have one weekend left here (how quickly has June passed?), we were keen to go along this past weekend.

We were not disappointed. There was all sorts of produce on sale, the usual selection of many different types of cheeses, locally produced and smelling well, quite frankly gross but we know it tastes divine! All sorts of meats, spices, wine (of course!), prune juice, numerous varieties of lettuce, garlic (red and white), strawberries, raspberries, cherries (by the ton!), flowers galore, breads, the list goes on.

We are big fans of the local farmers markets and the market at Cahors whilst similar to most up and down the country did have a touristy feel about it (including the prices being charged!). Nonetheless, the smells, the quality of the goods on offer and the hustle and bustle of a busy market all contributed to a very pleasant few hours shopping and browsing.

Trip Tracker

For the alert among you, our dear blog followers, you will see that we have discovered how to add links (with pictures!), and as a result currently there is a direct link now to our house and pet sitting website (with our logo!), and also a link to the Trip Tracker website - this is another format for a type of travel blog - we are not using it as a travel blog/journal but, we hope to record the places and countries we have visited together with the total kilometers we have travelled since we embarked on our travels some 3 years ago now.
Obviously this will require some considerable input on our part so may take a while! Watch this space.....

Recipes - French Toast

Okay, as indicated in our previous post we had hoped to include a separate section on the blog for vegetarian/vegan recipes we have particularly enjoyed....however, nothing is ever that straight forward and we are struggling to find a page element to add to our blog which will allow us to do this! So, for now we will add the recipes under separate post headings and hope that it works until we can find out how to add a separate Recipe section - don't hold your breath!

Below is our fave French Toast recipe from Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone".

FRENCH TOAST

INGREDIENTS

2 eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon orange flower water (optional)
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup milk
4 slices bread
butter or oil for pan

METHOD

Whisk the eggs with the sugar and flavourings, then stir in the milk. Pour the batter into a pie plate and put in two pieces of bread. Let stand for 3 minutes, then turn it over and let stand again to absorb the batter. Really stale bread will take longer. Press on it with your fingers - you can tell if it's still dry. Melt a little butter in a large nonstick pan. When it's bubbling, pick up the bread and put it in the pan. Cook both sides until nicely browned. Repeat with the remaining bread and batter.

We enjoy the toast plain or, served with maple syrup and jam, yummy!

Cooking eggs and picking peas!

As previously mentioned we have delightful hens here and they are excellent layers. We initially thought that we would struggle to eat all the eggs and for sure we are definitely eating more than we would normally consume however, it is surprising what you can do with an egg (or 10!), as we are finding out!!

This morning for example we started the day with a gargantuan breakfast of French Toast (2 eggs - see Recipes), piled high with the most delicious and the yellowest scrambled eggs (4)! Having broken our fast by consuming half a dozen eggs we felt satisfied that we were making inroads to the oeufs accumulating in the fridge, alas we had forgotten the 3 beauties the girls had provided for us this very morning replenishing our egg stock to more than half a dozen!

Ah well, onward and sunny side up! We're off to visit friends on Thursday......wonder if they'd like a dozen eggs??!

Some physical work was required today after our not so petit dejeuner! We decided to tackle the potager, weeding, thinning and harvesting! We spent several hours working on the raised beds - it was a warm and pleasant morning with birds singing and bees buzzing all around - the fragrance from the various herbs and garden veggies was lovely! We managed to pick a couple of pounds of garden peas and similar amount of snow peas - there were raspberries for picking and a couple of containers of cassis (blackcurrants) for freezing. All in all a good mornings work! Now, what's for lunch? Did someone say omlette??!!

Changes to our blog...

Having recently changed the template we are using for our blog we have decided to make a couple of other minor changes which we hope will improve it - we have already included a link to our house and pet sitting website and now we are going to remove the list of books we've read and instead, just mention books we are currently reading. In addition, we have decided to include some of our favourite recipes. As we enjoy a vegetarian diet (increasingly more vegan), we thought it would be both useful and interesting to incorporate some of our more tried and tested recipes and meals - we hope you will agree!!

Looking after chickens...

This is the first time we have had responsibility for hens during a housesit and it is proving to be very interesting!

There are 3 "girls" here, Fanny, May and Freddie. They are Limousin hens and quite beautiful. We have been surprised at how "talkative" they all are, calling in the morning to be let out, clucking amongst themselves during the day and, a soft little cooing-type sound when they are in their house or pecking around the ground. We talk to them (of course!) and they seem to respond (or that could just be our wishful thinking!). All three seem to get along well and they are very curious, watching when we are pottering around and keeping a watchful eye on the dogs and cat!

They are great creatures of habit. They spend the best part of their day pecking around, scratching at the ground, resting and eating of course! They put themselves to bed when it gets dark (or a tad earlier on cooler nights), and usually rise around 8am. When they come out in the morning the first thing they do is poo! And it has amused us (we are so juvenile sometimes!), at how large their poo can be! So much for the nice, clean area of grass!! They then head for their feed and spend some time pecking, sifting and eating their pellets and corn.

These particular hens are semi- free-range and are kept in a mobile hen house - a wooden structure with a fenced-run, wooden ladder, nesting boxes, perches, a galvanized bell drinker and a feeding plate. We crank up the wheels first thing so that the hen house can be easily moved to a new patch of grass, the run part is easily detached from the house which makes it easy to move. Once in the new location, the house and run sections are reconnected and after refilling the drinker and filling the feed dish the hens are let out of the house.

We have been lucky enough to have 2-3 eggs most days from "our" girls - warm, freshly-laid eggs, what luxury! Having collected the eggs we clean out the nest boxes, replacing the soiled shavings with fresh and once we reopen the hatch the girls generally pop back in, have a look around and then come back out again clucking what we hope is their approval!

As the sun sets the girls take themselves off to bed and we simply have to close the hatch so that they are safe and secure for another night.

Starry nights and sunny mornings.

We choose not to close the blind on the huge velux window in the bedroom here as it gives us a great view of the stars at night.
The warmer nights mean that we can leave our little window open (thanks to a new screen no nasties can come in!!). The sound of the frogs croaking and the stars twinkling is a fabulous way to drift off to sleep.

As day breaks, the light from the window bathes the bedroom in watery sunshine, the birdsong replaces the croaking frogs and so begins another day................our day starts early usually around 6.30am but, yesterday I was up earlier than usual, the sun newly risen provided great light for some early morning shots of the gardens and surrounding views. A fine, low-lying mist obscured the forest first thing but soon lifted as the sun became stronger, a heavy dew covered the lawns and glistened in the early morning sunshine. Wandering around in my PJs, camera in hand, joined by "our little helpers" (the two dogs and the cat!), I felt privileged to share in the delights of "La Dame Nature" at the start of a brand new day.............

Le Jardin.............

Today it has been pleasant enough to do some pottering in the garden. The recent showery weather has served to encourage everything to flourish so we have been busy mowing and weeding. The gardens here are so lovely it is a real pleasure to be able to spend time outdoors simply enjoying the colours and scents that are everywhere. A lot of shrubs are flowering and some are laden down with sweet blossoms attracting several types of bees (honey bees and bumble bees that we recognise), the air is heavy with their scent especially in the early evening. The mimosa trees are in bloom and the lavender will soon be flowering. The herb garden and rosemary border is looking (and smelling!), fabulous. The "potager" continues to thrive despite some high winds at the weekend in which the snow peas and mange tout suffered along with some root vegetables which parted company with their stems!! Delphiniums, poppies, pinks, chrysanthemums, carnations to name but a few provide an array of vibrant colour in the cottage garden and succulents, palms, and potted plants including some glorious geraniums soften the front terrace under the shade of the vine-covered arbour.

There are a number of wild orchids here (337 to be exact!!), and it was our task to compile a comprehensive breakdown of type and number for the annual orchid count. To this end we spent a very pleasant couple of hours this evening walking the land (well, not all 100 acres of it - just the gardens!), and totting up the number of orchids we could find. There appear to be 3 distinct varieties; a tall green type, (we are still researching the correct names for each type!), a stubby pink version and a beautiful specimen that we called the bee kind as it looks like a bee is pollinating the flower! It has been a pleasantly mild evening with the birds singing and now the frogs croaking - the orchid count was just another marvellous opportunity to truly appreciate La Dame Nature at her best!

Coucher du Soleil

Irrespective of the weather we have had during the day, when the sun sets here we get the most fabulous views from the rear terrace. There are panoramic and far-reaching views of the surrounding countryside and, on a clear night the sunset is nothing short of magnificent. On less fine evenings the late evening sky is still something to behold, the clouds are different each night and the formations, colours and setting sun provide us with our very own magical end to the day - it is quite simply, spectacular.

Visit to Villeneuve Sur Lot

We had been invited by our dear friends Catherine and Jacques to spend the day with them at their new home, so, as it was a 2 hour journey, we got up early to see to the chickens and dogs before we left. The "girls" had supplied us with 3 warm eggs, and we put these with the others we had been collecting for the past few days to give as a gift to Catou. Tracy cut some carnations from the garden and I obtained a bottle of the Elderflower champagne from the cave, that Hannah and Will had left for us to drink. These items were loaded carefully into the car, and we set off around 10am.

We were expecting rain for our journey, it had poured down the previous day, with heavy thunder storms, and we were due more of the same, but, luckily it was dry and the sun came out as we continued on our way. We practiced our French en route, especially our numbers. The previous night we rang Catou and left a message, letting her know our phone number. As we recited the number we had a mental block on '80' so the message was a lot longer than it should have been whilst we "ummed" our way along until it finally came to us. So as we passed any road number, or poster with numbers on, we said them out loud. Great practise!

We were about 30 minutes into our journey when we heard a slight hissing noise coming from the back, Tracy wondered if it was a snake, as we had seen a few over the past few days. We pulled over and discovered it was the champagne about to explode! We managed to remove it from the car and release the top before it exploded all over the car. The liquid shot out and we were left with half a bottle of champagne to offer our hosts!

We got to Villeneuve a little behind schedule, and we explained the cause of our delay, but of course they didn't believe us!

We were able to see Catou and Jacques' new house, well they have been in it a year now, but we had already left for Australia when they moved in. It is quite large, and backs onto the River Lot. A very peaceful spot, with no-one overlooking them. Elise, Catou's niece and Max, Catou's son, joined us for lunch. The conversation was lively and varied, swinging between the recent Air France crash, Susan Boyle and a Brazilian (the wax kind not the footballer!).

They showed us some photos of Geneva, where they had visited recently, then we showed them some of ours from New Zealand. We have so many it was just a selection.

We all drove to Agen to visit Mme Begue who was recovering from a lung operation in hospital. She was well on her way to a full recovery and due to be discharged on Monday, it would have been sooner had they not left a piece of equipment still inside her when they performed the operation. She had to have a 2nd operation under another full anaesthetic.

When we left the hospital we made our way home. The drive was very pleasant, especially with the unexpected sunshine. We drove passed vineyards, following the River Lot most of the way, along windy roads through the gorges.

We tried to sum up how we feel about France, what makes it so dear to us, and we could not sum it up in one word. We love the charm of the country, the architecture and the french ways. We love it's quirkiness.
We concluded that for us, it definitely has the 'X' factor.

Our home for June

We are pleased to be able to sit again in the lovely village of Senaillac -Lauzes.































We have been welcomed by Clovis and Loki the two dogs, who seem to remember us. Elmo the cat took a little longer to acknowledge us, in true cat fashion, but he is our best mate after 3 days, lots of dribbling and kneading being done!









We have 3 additional foster pets this year. Three Limosin Hens. They are lovely girls. We keep their little house
clean, feed them and change their water, and they reward us with 3 eggs daily.