I made some rather good hedgerow jam today from roughly equal quantities of blackberries, elderberries, plums and apples, and matched the weight of the fruit with sugar. I boiled it well for about ten minutes and it’s the best jam I’ve made for ages! My jam tends to be a disaster which is why I usually make chutney, but we have a backlog of pumpkin chutney and apple chutney from last year, and I do love a dollop of jam on my breakfast croissant. So I’ve gone back to the sticky stuff. But given the quantities of fruit lying around, even I can’t eat that much jam, so I’ll be stewing and slicing for the freezer. For quite a while …

Katrina, Caitlin and visitors

We’re in today’s La Montagne newspaper (Creuse edition)! There’s a nice little article about our llamas. We’re building up quite a collection of cuttings now. We’ve been in four different papers (and fairly regularly in one of those, L’Echo du Berry), on the radio and on two different TV channels.

It’s fun, but it’s a mixed blessing publicity-wise. Up to now we certainly haven’t made our fortune from people rushing to see us as a result of finding out about us via the mass media. All that tends to happen is that carloads of elderly people turn up on at Sunday teatime wanting to see the llamas for free. In the early days, we obliged but no longer. I mean, I don’t think people turn up at the wolf park in Gueret or at the bison farm in Bourganeuf asking if they can have a quick look for free! It simply doesn’t seem to occur to them that we have to buy our animals, and look after them, and feed them, and insure them, and vaccinate them, and put fencing around them, and so on. Or feed our children. So we’ve hardened our hearts and turn the freeloaders away these days!

We do free guided visits on a Tuesday morning, but people are happy to  buy a few souvenirs from our stall, and some have made bookings for a trek as a result of coming, so that’s proving worthwhile. However, we’re never likely to make a living out of our little woolly troupeau. They’re an interesting and lovable sideline to the gite business.

Elrond, the baby alpaca, is now a full-time member of the herd. For the first ten days, he and mum stayed in the stable most of the time, but they now live out full time, apart from when it turns wet and cold. It’s a bit scary to see him running around with Georgie, Vicky and Lulin – they are enormous compared to him and look sure to squash him. He’s learning to be quite nippy. We’re embarking on a field-construction programme, so we’ll factor in a separate field as an alpaca nursery, to be on the safe side!

August begins with my birthday, which the rest of the family are generally much keener to celebrate than I am! But you can’t stop time, so you might as well enjoy its passing. Caiti cooked up a lovely birthday feast for our evening party. She made goat’s cheese and tomato flan

(recipe at http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2010/05/french_tomato_tart_recipe.html), one of her awesome pizzas, and a truly delicious coconut and mango cake. Here’s her recipe:

400 g flour

I teaspoon vanilla flavouring

100 ml coconut milk

200 g butter

125 g sugar

Fistful of shredded/desiccated coconut

4 eggs

Heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease and flour two 20 cm (approx.) cake tins.
Mix the sugar into the softened butter, then add the eggs. Add half the flour and mix well.
Now add half the milk and beat well. When it’s smooth add the rest of the ingredients.
Pour into the two tins and back 50 mins or so until golden brown and springy to the touch.
Sandwich together with jam or butter icing, and add icing on top of
100 g icing sugar and 50 g shredded or desiccated coconut with enough water to bind.
Add some chunks of mango too.

Every household needs a cook like our Caits!

The celebrations continue. Yesterday we got some very good news. Every gite gets its guests from hell, and ours came last year. They walked out within the hour complaining that just about everything wasn’t up to their ‘expectations’.  Anyway, we have had to put up with a lot of ghastly unpleasantness which culminated in them making a claim against us through the European Small Claims Court on the grounds of misrepresentation. The judge dismissed their claim – totally, completely and utterly. There is justice in the world after all.

Our wedding anniversary is on its way on the 9^th. We’ll have clocked up 24 years. A search online tells me that traditional gifts for 24^th anniversaries are musical instruments. (I have no idea why, though, nor how authentic this might be.) But I’ll be OK as I have a good stock of South American musical instruments in my llama souvenir shop. I’m sure Chris will like some panpipes or a rattle made with tree seeds or maybe even a tarka (not an otter, but a Peruvian wooden recorder)!

Family and friends are arriving this month, either returning to their holiday homes or staying with us. It will be lovely to see familiar faces again. And of course any longed-for non-French groceries they may happen to bring with them! And another public holiday on the 15^th. So plenty to smile about in August.

Caitlin made a gorgeous cherry clafoutis for us a few days ago. Clafoutis originated in Limousin, our part of France, sometime in the mid nineteenth century. The name comes from the French verb ‘clafir’ which means ‘to fill’. It’s a dessert consisting of fruit cooked in a sort of thick batter. Pretty much any fruit can be used, but cherry and plum are the most usual. The secret with cherry clafoutis is to leave the cherry stones in when you make the dessert as it adds an almondy flavour and also stops cherry juice from making the batter too soggy. It’s a bit tricky to eat though, with all the stones, but worth the effort. Obviously it’s not something to give to small children like that.

Here is Caiti’s recipe. I really recommend you try this. Absolutely delicious.

200g flour, 120 g sugar, 3 eggs, 75 g melted butter, 250 ml milk, 400 g cherries

Combine flour and sugar. Mix in the eggs, one at a time. Beat well. When the batter is smooth, add the melted butter, then slowly add the milk. Keep beating well so that there aren’t any lumps. Spread the cherries over the base of a bowl and then pour in the batter mix. Bake for half an hour at 200 degrees C.

Happy eating!

Pool with a view

I always find it a bit of a slog to blog in summer. It’s not for lack of things to write about – summer is our busiest time. The trekking season has got underway, our gite and lakes have had clients since March and are booked through to October, we’ve celebrated the end of term and excellent exam results, we’ve had Ruadhri’s birthday, we go cycling as often as we can and swim every day in our swanky new pool, we’ve sheared an alpaca, we’ve got two new goats, there have been a lot of awesome thunderstorms … there is loads going on. In fact, I think it’s because there is so much happening that I tend to dry up creatively-wise. Add the hot weather and lassitude tends to strike every night about 9 when I settle down to a bit of computing. Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

It’s certainly hot at the moment. I’ve had a good trawl around on the Net but can’t  conclusively determine whether July is hotter than August in France. Some sets of figures suggest July, others August. My own feeling is that July is warmer. The days are longer and nights certainly seem hotter. But it’s great. When you live through Creuse winters, you deserve the summer sunshine, and you’re ready for it. We’ve adjusted our daily routine so that we get up and outdoors early, get things done then have a siesta from 1 till 3 or so, and then get busy again later in the day.

However, I’ve discovered something interesting in my temperature-related surfing. A lot of weather and climate websites show the times of sunrise and sunset – and also twilight. Did you know that are three different types of twilight? And, that twilight happens twice a day – just before sunrise and just after sunset. Now I always thought twilight was an evening thing, and pretty much the same thing as dusk.

So, first of all there is civil twilight. That’s what most of us would think of as twilight  – when you can still see things clearly but it’s getting dark (or starting to get light). The precise definition is when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, either before rising or after setting.

Nautical twilight is the next type of twilight, which is when the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. It’s a good bit murkier than civil twilight and only vague outlines of objects can be seen. It’s hard to make out the horizon at all.

Finally, astronomical twilight is when it’s completely dark – ‘still’ in the morning, and ‘just gone’ in the evening. The sun is now 18 degrees below the horizon.

Twilight is crépuscule in French. It has a Latin root. Another derivative, crepuscular, is used in English to refer to animals that are active at both twilights, such as fireflies, owls and bats. Talking of fireflies, Chris and Benjamin have seen some down at our big lake. Ruadhri and I have looked a couple of times, but with no luck. I think we went searching when it was only civil as opposed to nautical twilight i.e. too early! Rors can’t quite stay up late enough. But as the evenings slowly draw in, our chances will improve. I’ll keep you posted.

Gasoline planter is designed for drilling and grubbing of yam and burdock planting holes, holes of radio detector, holes of fencing poles …. holes of trees fertilizing and winter whiffing on the ice, ect.

Full attention and gingerliness are requested for using of this machine.

Users must be in the state of regain consciousness while seperation.

Utterly prohibited the using of the machine after drinking, drug-talking or in the stat state of tiredness and sickness.

Never operating this machine in rainy days, because it possible cause operator slip due to slippery ground.

Upright the machine,on hand grasp the framepress it downwards.another hand pull the recoil starter start the engine.

Please pay more attention when operating the incline rock ground surface.

Somtime,pullthe drill bit upwards, then press it downwards is recommended.

All suggestions for what ‘winter whiffing on the ice’ means are welcome!

The llama bike arrives

There was a good turnout. They all cycled round the village twice.

Round the bend

There was a ‘gouter’ afterwards of brioche, sweets and fizzy orange – good healthy stuff! It was a great event – let’s hope they’ll do it again next year!

The final strait

I love fetes, and always have. The highlight of the year when I was a child in Ipswich was the Co-Op Fete in Christchurch Park. It was brilliant! The French ones we’ve been to have been mainly very small-scale affairs, but there’s something about the atmosphere I love. The stalls are often tacky and, these days, hideously expensive, but who cares! The refreshments are usually 99% sugar but my system can take it. The children tire of wandering around aimlessly way before I do. They just don’t get fetes.

Now, I need help please. One of the children’s activities at Nouzerines is fancy dress for bicycles. I cheerily signed up a month or so ago, thinking I’d have loads of ideas, but my creativity has completely dried up. (Hence no blog for nearly a fortnight either.) If anyone has ever done anything similar, or has a brilliant suggestion, do please let me know! I’ve thought about a dragon or the World Cup mascot Zakumi (a green and yellow leopard – I was convinced he was a lion till I came across an official description of him!), but hmm, they’re not particularly awe-inspiring.

Au secours !

Anyway, Georgina is almost pure white, which is quite a surprise given that dad Bernard is black and Gabby has apricot mottling. You’ll remember Victoria was born just over a fortnight ago. Georgina is both Victoria’s aunt and half-sister. But there’s not much family resemblance.

Here are some photos. Georgie was rather floppy to start with, but after Benj and Caiti dried her and warmed her up in the sun, she perked up and was soon up on her feet. In no time at all she was suckling and investigating the world. Tonight she’s tucked up with mum in the stable in her cosy coat.

She’s a very tall baby llama, a good few centimetres bigger than Victoria. We’ll take some measurements tomorrow – if she’ll co-operate!

Benj and Caiti dry Georgina in the sunshine. Victoria looks on.

Georgina and mum Gabby