Category Archives: Dordogne

Amazing food in the Dordogne from our March 2015 trip!

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As I mentioned in the post about our house hunting trip in March we have been wowed by the quality of the food in the Perigord and I though some of our finds during that trip deserved their own post!

Joël and I manage a lunch out on our own one day while house hunting. We found a great little restaurant in Issigeac called Casa Del Seyrat, they did a fantastic lunch menu and even though we arrived at the very last moment to be served the owner and staff were lovely and had a great chat with us as we were leaving when they heard we were here to find a home!:

For entrée I had a lovely selection of crudités (salad bits) and J had a soup. For main we both had the steak with an incredible red wine and shallot sauce, carrots in a cream sauce and of course frites!

For dessert I nabbed the last piece of the tart made with the local (ish) ‘prunes de Agen’ (J had to manage with a gorgeous chocolate mousse which I was too busy to take a picture of!). It was amazing!

At the end of another long house viewing day trip across in the area around Sarlat we were driving back along the river and decided to stop for dinner.  There is an amazing village in the rock overhanging the Dordogne river called Beynac-et-Cazenac (look it up it is really amazing!).

We wandered up the hill and found a restaurant called ‘La Petite Tonnelle’, they had a set menu for 2 courses for just over 20 euros so we decided to try it as it looked lovely. I’m so glad we did, it was the nicest meal I’d had in a long long time. We all decided to go for the main and dessert, except for my mother in law who chose the fish soup starter (which I forgot to take a picture of!). The boys had the confit de canard (confied duck) with a pesto, white beans and puree (artichoke maybe, I can’t remember), I was jealous when it came out and hoped I’d made the right choice with mine:

Hubby and my mother in law had the veal which looked divine as well:

I chose the lamb and I was wowed over when mine came out:

The little pyramid was filled with spiced butternut and a red capsicum / pepper sauce it was really really delicious and the lamb just melt in your mouth.

Our little man wasn’t eating yet but enjoyed being out with us!

The wall of the restaurant was the wall of the cliff with water seeping out right next to us – very cool!

The meal finished with divine chocolate fondants – a picture says 1000 words!

It is a shame we didn’t get any photos of the village in the light but this was our walk back down the hill from the restaurant back to the car:

We also enjoyed all the local produce and cooked up a storm! One night was one of my all time favourite meals, magret de canard (duck breast) with green beans and potato gratin – delicious!

And my MIL made a lovely homemade tarte tatin which we had with crème fraiche:

And finally with the arrival of spring it was a real pleasure to stop one Sunday and not go house hunting and have our first meal of the year outside:

I did manage to put a few kilos on between staying with my MIL in the UK and the month in France but thankfully have got them all back off over the summer!

House hunting in the Dordogne – March 2015

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A quick recap of what we have been up to this year. We left Oz at the beginning of February and flew into the UK so we could stay at my mother in laws while we found our feet and bought a car. After three weeks we headed off to France for a house hunting trip (with grandmére in tow to help with the kids).

I wanted to find somewhere central to stay and we found a lovely gíte mid way between Perigueux and Bergerac. If you are ever in the region Thomas and Marion were just lovely and the gite charming and really well equipped http://www.gite-mamet.com/ . If you are there on a house hunting trip or off season it has a lovely wood burner as well as electric heating and they are happy to do long winter lets. It was perfect for our house hunting which took us all over the Dordogne, we clocked up about 2,000 km in the month we were there.

We saw some lovely properties, some out of our price range and a lot that were in our price range not habitable enough for us. We wanted a property that needed a lot doing that would therefore be affordable and that we could make our own but with at least a kitchen / bathroom / 2 bedrooms habitable even if basic. I had a list of what we needed from our new French home and it was something like this:

  • On the edge of a village or hamlet just outside a village
  • Village to have all the basic amenities, primary school, shop, baker, bar as a minimum
  • Not too far to bigger towns
  • Garden big enough to have veggies, chooks etc
  • Preferably a detached property

We started feeling a bit overwhelmed and worried when we hit the final week of our house hunting trip at the end of March and still hadn’t found anything. I went back through all the properties that I’d discounted (mainly due to price). There were a few in and around the same village so I made some appointments in the final week. One agent who showed us a property that we loved the location of, in a hamlet on the edge of a village (with all on my above list and more!). The house wasn’t right for us (no where near enough stone for our liking!) but the location was amazing, great views, set among houses on decent blocks of land (half to a couple of acres), only a kilometre out of the village, I even said to J I’d be tempted to consider the house due to the location. As we drove away there was a lovely old stone barn next door with gorgeous stone work and garden all around and I said to the other half ‘I wish that was for sale’, it was ticking all the boxes! When we got back to the gite I checked our appointment for the next day and I couldn’t believe it but it looked like it could be the same building. We met the agent the next day and sure enough he drove us to the same barn but all the photos had been taken from the back hence why we weren’t sure when we first saw it. Things slowed at this point with negotiations to buy it as it was slightly above budget and the agent went away for a few days and we went back to the UK for our family holiday with my family. It looked like it wouldn’t happen but after a couple of weeks of negotiations from afar we managed to come to a deal!

The trip itself in March was great, we had a lovely time with the kids and the MIL, I particularity loved having a wood burner again and sitting by the fire with my crochet!

We visited the amazing Château de Castelnaud with it’s museum of medieval warfare, the long climb to the top of the stairs gave us an amazing view:

One of my favourite parts of the castle were the lovely herb garden with 4 different areas for aromatics, medicinal, and not sure what the other two were now, that they had found plans for and recreated. In the centre was an almond tree which was just coming into blossom when we were there.

I also loved the kitchen which was set out as it would have been back in the day:

The boys favourite part was all the to scale medieval trebouchets and other war equipment (Louis enjoyed running around with the wooden bow we bought him!):

Of course we couldn’t resist a photo opportunity at the end:

I’m not sure the baby quite knew what was happening bless him!

Other days out included the famous caves at Lascaux with their amazing cro-magnon cave paintings, some of the oldest in the world. During the month we also had some amazing meals and lots of yummy French bread, cheese and patisserie and enjoyed spring arriving while we were there (it was bleak and freezing when we arrived but by mid March we had some lunches outside with the temperature getting up into the 20’s!). It was such a pleasure being back in France but also discovering a whole new area with it’s own amazing culinary and historic wonders! A successful trip all around which found us our new home!

Home made pesto!

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Finally some bounty from my garden in the form of lovely fresh basil which is doing really well! The boys love pesto so we decided to make some with the basil.This is after I harvested what I needed to make the pesto:

I used Jamie Oliver’s recipe as I’ve yet to not like any of his recipes I’ve tried. I didn’t have any pinenuts so used cashews instead. When our walnut trees unload the tonnes of nuts on them I’ll be trying another recipe I spotted using walnuts so it will be even more home grown!

The parmesan was pre-grated (although fresh not dried) but next time I’ll make sure to have a block as I think it will be even nicer:

I’ve never made pesto before and the smell was amazing!

So of course for lunch it had to be spaghetti!

The flavour was just incredible, I’m so pleased I made it and will be doing so whenever I have enough basil. Louis and I planted about 10 more this evening I’m hoping it isn’t too late in the year to get good crops from them too. I’ll let you know how I go with the walnut recipe when I get a chance to try that.

 

Another Year in France – 2015!

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I’m so excited I could pee my pants (or maybe that is just being nearly 29 weeks pregnant!) but we are heading back for Another Year in France in 2015! The tickets are booked and paid and plans are being made!

We have so much drawing us to Europe at the moment. We have one new baby just born into my family by my lovely sister Lucy and her hubby Neil and brother James and Naomi due just a few weeks after my blue bundle! How can we stay on the other side of the world with all that happening? Being able to see more of our parents and all the family is always a massive drawcard, even more so now dad can’t travel to visit us in Oz.

Other than the family, there are other reasons too. Being bi-lingual is such a gift and we’d always hoped to head back for a year at some point to get the kids bi-lingual (again in Josh’s case). With the new baby on the way we realised that maternity leave would stretch further in Europe than Oz and be a fantastic opportunity to enable us to live some of the dreams, see more of the family and friends over there, enrich the kids and do some cool renovating again!

Can you guess where we are planning to head? Yep the Dordogne! This area is so stunning with so much rich history, gorgeous architecture and fantastic activities on and off the river and quite a few big towns offering good facilities. When we first moved to France way back in 1999 it was out of our price range and as a result we didn’t really look there and of course ended up in the Aude. These days there are bargains to be found with a lot of property on the market, we are pretty excited by what we have seen in our on-line searches. We still love the Aude and our friends there but the Dordogne is that much further north, making it closer to the UK for us to visit and to be visited without ending up too far north for my sensitive Aussie grey sky meter!!

We hit Europe early next year so hope to find something and be installed by spring! Watch this space for more updates, I’m hoping to do a lot more blogging as we get closer and certainly next year. I’m even in the process of upgrading my camera so I can get some amazing shots of it all!