Rural Life

Restaurant Review - L'Oeil de Boeuf at Auverse

Our mission continues, and today we tried a very newly opened restaurant at Auverse, on the road between Noyant and Bauge.  L'Oeil de Boeuf (translates as The Bull's Eye) opened three weeks ago, having been closed for we reckon about 5 years, and is situated opposite the established Le Relais - a familiar haunt of truckers doing the run between Angers and Tours and points beyond.

The menu is 10,50 Euros and includes a pichet of wine (red, white or rose), cider and naturally tap water, and a coffee - bottled water is extra, which is only fair.  As with all menu ouvriers, there is limited (or indeed no) choice, but you do get all four courses recited to you by a charming waitress.  Today's offer was a fish terrine with bread and a marie rose sauce, steak and chips (I'll explain), cheese and a fondant au chocolat.  We chose to have a pichet of white with it, which was fresh and welcome.

The fish terrine was nice and portions were generous - I know that particular terrine of old (Epigram for those in the know).  The steak was a really good bit of meat, full of flavour and tender though a little overdone for "a point" - perhaps I should have asked for saignant?  It came with a small dish of English mustard rather than the darker French variety.  The chips were real English chips, not thin frites.  The cheese selection was a bit limited but the camembert was very good.  The fondant au chocolat was excellent - I would guess the base was bought, but it was cooked to perfection so that it really was fondant in the middle and also had some caramel in the middle which made a very interesting change.  The coffee was filter rather than espresso - that worked for us, as we are not big on caffeine.

Our hostess is English and talking to her as we paid up, we discovered that they had only been open three weeks and that due to the chef having to attend a course, they were on a substitute chef for the week and were a bit dismayed at so many people coming in for lunch!  This means of course that we will have to go back when the proper chef is in the kitchen and does explain the starter.

There are two dining rooms, and tables to seat four at a go, so less intimidating than the long tables of some more basic establishments.  You pay at the bar on the way out.

Overall, we reckoned it was good, but had a way to go to compete with Linieres-Bouton, but that was before we knew about the main chef being on a course, so not really a fair comparison.  It is certainly convenient for the main road, and for the English passing through or staying in the area.  Good luck and carry on the good work!

A spot of gardening

It's that time of year when the garden gurus tell you to stay off the lawn and put your feet up in front of the fire with the seed catalogues to plan the next growing season.  When you have chickens and a workshop at the bottom of the garden, that advice is useless, and the best one can do is to ensure that you don't keep walking on the same bit each time (handy tip - put plastic garden chairs over routes that have got a bit soggy so you have to walk round them and thus let the grass recover, plus if the chair is white, you can see it in the dark and avoid falling over it!).

Round here, if you are in the country and don't have fences, you find that enthusiastic wildlife will do what it can to scarify the lawn.  I'm not talking here about the gentle progging that a green woodpecker or a blackbird will do searching for worms and insects, nor in the Southern Hemisphere that a friendly Ibis will do for reasons that the Southern Hemisphere will have to provide.  No I am talking serious earth works here - see below!

 

This delightful sight met our eyes at one of John's gardens near the river before Christmas.  The owner was concerned that someone had raided his grounds for wild cyclamen.  While they are prolific there, the French are not into nicking them as they are so widely available everywhere; they just enjoy them where they are.  Indeed our lawn is starting to sprout a number of patches of cyclamen due to the lawn mice that find seeds, bury them and then either lose them or get eaten by the cats themselves.  I think I am up to a dozen such cyclamen plants, and ours is not a huge garden.

So what had done all that damage, if it wasn't itinerant pilfering peasants?  The ultimate vandal was to blame.  A beast that, if it sees a fine lawn, just has to go and make a mess of it.  A beast that trashes woodland roads and verges (and sometimes cars too) and is growing in numbers in our part of the world despite the huge numbers of hunters that try to track it down.  The wild boar is a very shy animal - I have only ever seen a live one once, and that was living at a farm rescue centre.  John has seen a couple at night but only fleetingly.  We have seen their traces in the damage however and know exactly who to blame!

Foot prints and tusk marks - could the clues be any clearer?

 
 

New Year traditions

Apart from the January sales, and then only if I could find something I wanted and could afford, the after Christmas period in the UK used to be quite depressing for me.  Twinkling village lights were more a symbol of how cold and alone I was as I drove home after work, than of communities with a life of their own, and the days didn't seem to get any longer until the end of the month at the earliest.

Here in France we find it very different.  Firstly there is the importance of wishing EVERYONE a happy new year - something that can go on until the end of the month.  Then there are the formal ceremonies for wishing people a happy new year - first the President does his, then the Government visit him and present their wishes and after than mayors and elected leaders all over the country are making New Year's wishes to their voters.  Particularly in the villages, these ceremonies are taken very seriously, with formal gatherings noted in the papers, people dressing up smartly to go along, listening politely to the words of their elected leaders and then sipping cremant and nibbling on small sweet things.  The one for our village was this morning and it was great to see people, interesting to hear the news, including changes in the village staffing, and it was a very fine cremant.

Finally, there is the whole question of gallettes.  Epiphany is either counted as the first Sunday of the New Year or (more properly in my view) the 6th January.  Whatever date it is, there are gatherings to eat gallette and find the feve and crown the king or queen (who ever finds the feve or bean).  Gallettes come in a variety of flavours and types - most common around here are the brioche-style ones, where you are given a HUGE slice, but it is very light and fluffy or the frangipane ones, which are two layers of flakey pastry with a rich mixture of almond paste in between.  For the month of January, any gathering is blessed with eating gallette - next weekend we have two bouts of that, with the Comite des Fetes AGM and with the walking group.  It makes January that much more special.

One of the local bakers has upped the ante this year and on Epiphany itself was selling gallettes where the feve (normally a small porcelain figurine - highly collectable I'm told) was taking the form of a small gold coin.  How special was that?

Firewood

Happy New Year - or as we say here Meilleurs Voeux, et pour la sante surtout!  Of course in the current glacial climate, while health is very important, staying warm is totally fundamental.

For Christmas, John got a book on native British trees and their uses, including a section on how to deal with firewood and make a fire that will light first time.  It is extraordinary the difference between the opinions in the book, based around we assume a Middle England experience, and what we find here, in a middle but westerly France.  I guess the distance between is about 500 miles, but is enough to affect how trees grow, and therefore the properties of the wood.

Neither the author nor we would disagree with oak making a fine firewood if you don't have any other uses for it, but we do disagree about chestnut.  He didn't distinguish between horse chestnut and sweet chestnut - the former we would agree is a lousy firewood, but the latter is very good, with an excellent thermal content, albeit that it spits badly.  In fact firewood vendors here have to get you to sign a confirmation that you have a closed fire in order to sell it to you.  We have a woodburner insert and it is wonderful in that.

Poplar is something else we disagree on.  The book said that it was slow to burn and difficult to light - here we tend to regard it as kindling, or something to use if you need a short, quick, intense burn.

The book allows for a one year seasoning period.  I would say that if you are felling living trees, then they need a good 2 to 3 years depending on the tanin in the wood.  If the tree is long dead when you felled it and isn't a pine, then the wood really just needs to dry out a bit in order to burn.  Pine is a problem due to the amount of resin in the wood - the dead pine we felled in the One Acre Wood is useless for burning indoors but is lovely in the chiminea, as it is full of resin which would bung up the chimney, but smells lovely outdoors.  Live branches that fall in gales should still be left for a couple of years, as they were green when they came down.

The oak tree we had to fell at a work site shown below will not be ready to burn until the winter of 2012/13 at the very earliest.  The haze in the picture is not camera wobble by the way, it is pollen.  The tree was felled to make way for a swimming pool, but we didn't get the order until late spring.  It was about 200 years old, but the usable trunk section (for construction) was disappointingly short (12 feet) as the tree had not been managed.