Last Night's Dinner - Saturday 30 June

We're cooking dinner every night this week. I thought I'd share this one...

Leek feuillettés

followed by

Chicken breasts stuffed with lemon and sultanas, wrapped in jambon cru with green beans and new potatoes and a yoghurt, lemon juice and olive oil dressing

followed by

Chocolate and orange mousse

Chicken Breasts stuffed with Lemon and Sultanas, wrapped in Jambon Cru Serves 6

1 onion
2 lemons
6 bay leaves
A handful of sultanas
3 slices of stale bread
6 chicken breast fillets
6 large slices of jambon cru (parma ham or similar)
Salt, pepper, olive oil

Preheat oven to 200ºC

Chop the onion to sultana sized pieces. Finely slice the rind (not the pith) of the 2 lemons and fry with the onion, bay leaves, and a pinch of salt until soft. Then add the sultanas, a good grind of pepper - enough to make the finished stuffing properly peppery - and squeeze in the juice of one lemon and continue to cook until the liquid is reduced. Finish by removing from the heat, taking out the bay leaves and stirring in the juice of the other lemon and the bread crumbs.

Bash out the chicken breasts until flat and about double in size (cover with cling film as you do this to stop the fillets breaking up). Spread the fillet out on its back and pat a sixth of the stuffing into its centre. Roll it and then roll it again in a piece of jambon cru to hold it together.

Cook for 20/25 minutes.

Baux is for Bauxite

Les-Baux-de-Provence (as well as a stunning medieval cliff-top castle and village listed officially as one of France's most beautiful villages) is where, in 1822, aluminium ore was first discovered and mined and thus Les-Baux is the place from where bauxite takes its name.

Massive blocks of limestone were hewn from these hills to be processed into aluminium - at that time one of the most precious metals on Earth. The ore is long mined out, leaving these strange geometrical caves in the rock face.

The quarries are abandoned, but can still be clambered up to.

The only part of the quarry to continue to be used houses an astonishing sound and light show in what is called the Cathedrale d'Image - the image cathedral. But that's another story...

Les-Baux Rocks! - The Eagles and The Faces

Les-Baux-de-Provence (the place that bauxite takes its name from) is a rocky old place - a medieval castle ruin and cliff-top village set above a ravine called the Valley of Hell and said to have been the inspiration for Dantes seven(?) cirles of hell. The Mistral wind cuts through the soft limestone rock to create incredible sculpted shapes, some abstract, some weirdly not...

So here they are, The Eagles...



... and The Faces...



I'll post more about Les-Baux later.

Aliens Spotted Over Ventoux!

Having posted my shot of a storm cloud over Mont Ventoux recently, I was reminded of this shot that I took last summer.

Apparently this classic flying saucer cloud effect is caused by nimbus cloud getting caught in a whirlwind at high level. Strangely I'd read about this in the newspapers only a couple of days before and how such photographs have traditionally tricked people into believing in imminent alien invasion (more convincing in black and white). And then just a few days later I went and saw one!

Chicken Girl

Here she is. The girl who cooks the delicious 'rotis poulets' in front of two full height gas burners on the market at Chateaurenard every Sunday, whatever the weather. And it is regularly over 30ºC(86ºF) during the summer. (I posted about the great chickens that we get from the market, last Sunday - see Sunday-Gone-To-Market Chicken.)


Anyone agree that she has a touch of Zoe Ball about her? Working in that heat would keep any fat boy slim!

Arrival Meal

Saturdays are our busiest days and so we can never cook for people in the way that we would on other nights. That doesn't mean that it can't be either pretty or tasty, though, We offer a simple meal to guests who ask for something on the evening of their arrival. The trick is to combine stuff that can be prepared in advance with things that are simple and fresh. For the guests that arrived yesterday I did this...

Individual asparagus quiches with a salad of mixed leaves, apple, minted cucumber and toasted pistachios...


... with a tomato salad...


... followed by 'Summer Tiramisu' - a cross between summer pudding and tiramisu

When the Rain is Over

Well, we'd always talked about putting a pond in, so yesterday's storm passing created a pond-visualisation-opportunity.


But gardens look great after the rain too. The dust is washed away. The greens are greener. And there's that little droplets of water thing that is so tricky to get right in a still life. So here are a few 'After the Rain' shots.

The First Lily


That's a Lily Lily (Lilium) as opposed to an Arum Lily - see May.

And the First Olives


These little fellers won't be ready until the end of October.

Periwinkle and Pansies



Rustic Corner - with extra rusticity!


This corner of our garden, just as you enter the gateway, has come to be known as 'Rustic Corner'. It's a little more rustic than usual as I really need to set the strimmer on those dandelions!

We inherited an old seed sowing machine when we bought the house. Lindsay's mum, Moira, cleaned it up and varnished it and then we parked it here. A couple of weeks later, a neighbour, Toto (another of those double names that you find around here), dropped by with a tray of marigold seedlings as a house warming present. We planted them in old pots that I'd found abandoned behind a shed and grow them on top of the seed sower. Four summers on, I'm still growing marigolds from the seeds gathered from those that Toto brought us, and they're still doing well, I'm sure that you'll agree...


In the centre of the marigolds is a lantana, which Lindsay's parents bought us. The combined yellows and oranges grouped on the red seed sower work very well here.

Actually, we don't have many yellow/orange summer flowering plants as I find that they can look pretty garish in the full sun of Provence. Take sunflowers for example - there's nothing subtle about them, is there? However they are so over the top and Provencal that I can always find room for them. I grow them in the vegetable garden as they work well in rows.

Generally I prefer cooler blues, whites, purples with reds and pinks as highlights.

Oh, by the way, the little tomato transplants made it through the storm...