Oyster Farming Village & Steak, South-West France

I got to France for the last weekend in August, and went on a road trip to the beach for a mate's birthday celebration. A big load friends that go waaay back got together for a couple of days of sun, sea, camping, booze, oysters, steak and booze. It was iconic.

One morning, feeling hungover, we cycled in the fresh morning sun to an oyster farming village, made up of lots of tiny wooden houses, with sand-filled alleyways serving as streets. After exploring the nooks, and chatting to locals, we settled at a seaside restaurant that serves only oysters and wine. My 25 or so oysters went down such a treat. After them and a few glasses of crisp white, my hangover was much more manageable, and the beating sun was calling me to the white sand beach for a nap.




One evening, we cycled through the pine woodland of the Landes national park, to go to the outdoor steak-and-chips restaurant that is a regular beach stop-off for a few of us. 20 round a long table, we were served a selection of different barbecued steaks that had been cut off the carcass just before going on the grill.




Thick, juicy, full of flavour, tender and very rare - everyone loved it! It's so refreshing to be with a big bunch of people, including a lot of Brits, with no-one being fussy about eating beef or the level of cookedness. We just ordered steak and chips for everyone, and let Fred (owner and chef at Chez Fred) do what he does so well.



After putting away my own body weight in meat, chips, ice-cream, wine and cognac, the cycle home in the dark, through woodland, on a narrow path, with no proper lights was a challenge. I wobbled around, couldn't manage to cycle in a straight line, squealed a few times and might have had a tiny tantrum, but I was glad of the ride (and sober) by the time we got back to the campsite.

The food and setting for those couple of days were heavenly, but the best thing was catching up with so many good friends. :)

September in France

...was lovely, as usual. But France Telecom (or France Teleco*ks as I like to call them) managed to mess up both my phone line and internet connection for the whole month I was there - quite an achievement, I know, but inconvenient when you work freelance entirely online. That's why I've been very quiet on the blog and twitter recently.

Anyway, I consoled myself with the endless supply of those juicy garden tomatoes, along with courgettes and aubergines from the garden. Creamy, homegrown aubergines are far more enjoyable than shop-bought ones, both in terms of the unctuous texture and a more fragrant flavour. Courgettes are nuttier. I enjoyed lots of both, roasted, fried and barbecued, often with garlic (raw or cooked with the veg), sometimes with lemon juice, usually with garden herbs.

As for the tomatoes, see my previous post. I just gorged on them as anticipated, and it was fabulous.

Tomato Fest, France

I'll soon be off to catch the end of the French tomato season. However much you pay, wherever you shop, whatever you grow, it is literally not possible to have a true tomato experience in the UK. Toms in Britain are more acidic and the textures are all broken up into skin, seeds, liquid, and solid flesh. In France, in season, they are juicy, fruity, smooth and soft. Not pappy, mind, just with synergistic textures that are tender but satisfying.

Tomato jelly with goats' cheese, France

Anyway, there are some growing in my garden in France, so I am very excited about making the most of them while I'm there. They are the montfavet variety, and I am also looking forward to buying some luscious marmande ones from the village market - they come in all shapes, sizes and colours, and the stall owners ask what you are going to use them for, before selecting suitable specimens from the pile.

Here's what I did with homegrown French tomatoes one year, when I had a glut (see photo above). Now, though, they will be a novelty again, so will probably all end up as tomato salads, which are a completely different and a stupendously delicious dish, if made with the French tomatoes. Hmmm and atop pizzas, and maybe a few gazpachos, and in more imaginative salads. Yeah, well I might play a bit, but no jelly - I'll need all my time to eat tomatoes, and won't have any left to fiddle around with them.

Snail Feast

June spent in France was wonderful; catching up with old friends, enjoying the novelty of the amazing produce, re-acquainting myself with my kitchen and garden, and proper hot summer weather.

When I first arrived, my herbs were being munched by a plague of snails. So I decided to resolve the problem by munching them. Previously, I had been put off by unsuccessful snail-cooking attempts, and there were never that many of them to cook. This time there were dozens and dozens, and I was determined to make them delicious. I had three weeks to purge them (fed only on bread followed by days of nothing at all), before serving them up to friends as a goodbye meal at the end of my stay.

Three weeks of culinary adventures and good times went by. The day of the feast arrived hot and sunny, and I drove my blue banger to the village to get some still-warm baguettes, wine, salad, a massive bunch of parsley and butter. Then, back to my little beauties...

I boiled a huge jam pan of water, rinsed off the snails, shook them to make them retreat into their shells, and winced as I chucked the lot into the boiling water. Job done, the worst bit over. After a few minutes, the snails were draining and cooling and definitely dead. I extracted each one from its shell and removed its twirly gut end, before boiling the meats with herbs and stock veg for 3 hours. The shells were rinsed, boiled in fresh water, and left in the sun to dry.

Meanwhile, I chopped the mountains of garlic and parsley, stirred them into soft butter, and seasoned the mixture with plenty of salt.

Then came a few hours of stuffing each snail back into a shell, each squadged in with a load of the persilade (garlic and parsley butter).

Preparing snails

Next, I dressed the table, mixed the salad, opened the wine, and set out nibbles. Once my guests had arrived, and were having aperitifs, I put the snails in a hot oven for 20 minutes. Out they came, sizzling and smelling fantastic. I dished them up at the table and finally found out that my snail adventure had been a success - they were absolutely delicious, and this was confirmed by my guests, who were Dutch, English and French. The Frenchman commented that he hadn't had snails in ages, and it was funny that this time they had been cooked by an English person. The Dutchman had never eaten snails, and was delighted by them. The Englishman had tasted my previous attempts and was relieved that these were not only edible but extremely palatable and moreish. Hmmm even more salt with the butter next time, though, I think.

Tasty snails

I was thrilled that I had been able to make these slimy creatures tasty at last, and that I had put my snail glut to such extremely good use. All the effort and man hours had been worthwhile. I will definitely be making this a regular pest-control exercise/snail party.

Homegrown Strawberries

Hmmm... well, I mentioned that I'm excited to get back to my kitchen and to garden produce in France, as well as to the superb local strawberries. So it's of a bummer that the strawberries in my garden are ready right now! Hopefully there'll still be some late ones ripening by the time I get home, but in the meantime I'll have to make do with this juicy photo of a small proportion of the strawbs from my garden, and console myself with the fact that my kind friend who tends the garden is getting a well-deserved reward. (Photo courtesy of gardening friend.) I must plant some more varieties so that there are always strawberries whenever I arrive between May and September.


Juicy, fragrant, delicious, organic, homegrown strawberries.

Elderberry Wine and Friends, South-West France

Not really cuisine from the far corners of the planet, but definitely a gastronomic triumph, and some might find it adventurous...

My best mate Perry's been cosying up for autumn and having some culinary adventures in his own kitchen in France, with the help of wood-burners (yes, plural) and Unglum the cat (whose fave food is tomatoes, by the way). Italian heart stew, pizza dough flatbreads puffed up over a barbecue for kebabs, Moroccan meatball and egg stew, blood sausage omelet and freshly-collected oysters have been some of the mouth-watering delights on the menu over the last couple of weeks.

This is the elderberry wine the dude's been working on for two months, after collecting the berries in his garden. Perry carefully completed each stage exactly by the book, to avoid the risk of his precious potion turning to vinegar instead of alcohol. Success! It was all worth it. Now he has litres and litres of potent, fruity wine to get through. Lucky he's got good friends to help him out! See tasting notes below.

The beautiful results of weeks of careful work.


"It tastes really fruity, but not in a dodgy way, a bit like really weak ribena, but it smells wonderful. I think it should become amazing, because everything I've read says it should be undrinkable before Christmas at the earliest - maybe it's just my vin de table standards! It is certainly pretty strong even at this early stage - all I had was the glass in the picture and I really felt the effect strongly as you can probably tell from my email." - Perry Lancaster