Le Couvent Diary

Crikey, is it that long since I last found a moment to write? With less than a month to go before we re-open for the season we have a ton of things to do. I love the improving weather and so I enjoy working on the garden here at Le Couvent. With all the rain of this past winter everything has grown like triffids, so big chopping is involved. I and my full trailer are a regular sight at the local tip. But the garden is coming on a treat and we'll be taking the winter cover off the pool in the next fortnight. Frankly getting in the water is unthinkable at the moment, but it will soon warm up as the sun gets to work.

Meanwhile Ali is repainting large swathes of the house and generally making sure everything is in tip-top working order. She fastidiously checks every light, tap, flush, hairdryer, shower and bed-leg to make sure they're up to scratch. The boiler has been serviced ready to supply oceans of hot water for the showers. Every sheet, duvet, pillow, curtain and towel has been to the laundry and each sits wrapped in cellophane waiting for its debut.

Yesterday we made dozens of pots of strawberry jam ready for the breakfast table. It was also the day of the Roujan Foire. Traditionally it rains, but yesterday was dry and so there were squillions of people wandering up and down the eighty or so stalls selling everything from cheap watches to goats.  I already have a great watch so I wasn't tempted, but the goats almost won me over until I remembered one we had the misfortune to live with when i was six. It ate everything including the washing from the line. And it was hideously aggressive. So no goats.

 

 

Tomorrow we set about bottling and labelling our last vintage. We have two different wines this year - Cuvée Solèsio, a straight peppery Syrah and Cuvée Chocolat, an assemblage of Carignan and Cinsault which tastes like those maraschino cherries, dipped in kirsch and wrapped in chocolate.  Our lovely wine writing pal and Master of Wine, Rosemary George, has declared them delicious so I'm choosing to believe her, since I can't be objective. We lost one of our wines to a leaky chapeau flottante that let the air in when the tube deflated. I had hoped I'd caught it before the air did any damage, but I hadn't so our meagre harvest has been further reduced. Lesson for next year - check the cuves every day - even in winter.

 

 

 

 

 

A thousand thanks to the illustrious and delightful Henry Steadman for designing our wine labels for us.

The vines are looking fantastically strong and healthy and are just beginning to throw out their first leaves. It's lovely to see those first signs of the next year's fruit on its way, but I do dread the constant round of fortnightly spraying. It's a very long walk with a back pack sprayer full of organic treatment against mildew. I find it exhausting. Just thinking about it. Anybody up for lending a hand?

 

 

Our vegetable garden is groaning with cauliflowers so, as our joint imaginations haven't come up with anything more interesting, we've had a cholesterol-rich diet of nightly cauliflower cheese for over a week and I'm not sure I can face it again for a while. Roll on the salads, cherries and asparagus.

 

 

 

Oh, and thank you to nice Anthony Peregrine, whom we've never met, for giving us a kind mention in the Sunday Times. Just in case he reads this blog.

 

 

 

Happy Easter everyone.

A few years ago we had a lovely jazz singer to stay.  She has a friend who lives close by here who makes soap and she told us that her friend's soap was exceptional.  Now, I don't know about you, but to me the notion of making soap seems somehow rather arcane.  It's a process I know practically nothing about, I just know that like anything that's good, it takes effort, knowledge and skill to make it terrific as opposed to ordinary, and, hey, we all know that most bars of soap do the job in a wet and suddy kind of way but, basically, ordinary is missing the point.  Isn't it? 

So.  Ripple, lather, dissolve.  For the last couple of years we've bought our delicious organic soap from the Savonnerie de Saint Privat.  (Her lavender soap, by the way, is the very same gorgeous, purple stuff sold by Neal's Yard.)  Anyway I phoned the savonerie yesterday to find out if she or her partner were going to have a stall at Clermont market.  She told me she'd just had a baby and wasn't going to be making any soap for the next year or two.  Eekamouse.  PANIC.   

So today, on her advice, I headed for the Olive Oil Co-operative at Clermont l'Herault which is where all the local growers take their olives to be pressed.  I discovered that it also has rather a fantastic shop, which apart from olive oil also sells regional artisanal products like wine, pottery, honey and wine.  And soap.  Lots and lots of soap.  And also our girl's soap. 

I bought it out.

 

 

 

So, when you arrive, you may find in your soapdish:

Lavender (lavendre)

Honey and Geranium  (miel et geranium)

Rosemary and Spirulina (romarin et spirulin)

or

Orange and Cinammon (orange et cannelle)

I drove back with the car heavily, headily, drowsily pungent with all of the above.  Oh my, oh my, it smelt good. 

We can't actually afford to give you a whole big bar of these soaps because, like most things good, they're pretty expensive and it would be enormously wasteful to throw out almost all of a bar each time.  So we hope you enjoy trying a taste of something that couldn't be more real or more local. 

Wow, it seems ages since I last wrote a post. Meanwhile Ali's been to Western Australia to see her family - and I took the opportunity to organise a couple of surprises for her return. We have a friend who says I move the house three inches when Ali's away, but this time I managed 4 metres. Yep, the bridge between the convent and the garden has finally been constructed, some three years after we first thought about it. It is just wonderful to be able to walk from our apartment straight to the garden. We're both thrilled. Huge thanks to the Welder-Beast and Teddy.

 

 

The second surprise has been installed in the vineyard and is a real treat. Whenever we have a bit of time during the closed season Ali and I camp in the mazet (Chateau Malaudos ). But, to be frank, sleeping on a stone slab has quickly lost its appeal. So I've bought an ancient caravan to keep hidden in amongst the olive trees. She's 25 years old - at least - and we've painted her the colour of the surrounding foliage and soil. So now she's called Olive. Best of all she has comfortable beds and a gas cooker. I love having the open fire beside the mazet, but it's a fag to light a big fire when all you need is a quick coffee whilst working on the vines.

There's nothing better than breakfast in the middle of a vineyard in the warm sunshine of a March morning. Can you smell the bacon?

 

 

 

 

On Thursday we returned home to Le Couvent, the best B&B in the Languedoc (shameless plug), to find vast bag full of wild asparagus on the doorstep. Our kind neighbours over the road had been out foraging and had left them for us as a thanks for some eggs we'd left on their doorstep. Oooh, they are sooo delicious. We had lots gently steamed with a smoked salmon bake the other evening and I made a couple of Wild Asparagus and Cheddar quiches for the freezer - using our hens' wonderful eggs of course.

 

 

 

 

 

Cooking has been made even more pleasurable this week as the lovely Teddy made me a new chopping board.

 

 

 

 

I'm sure he'd make you one too if you like. Just let me know what size and I'll ask him.

In the evenings we can now hear the Scops Owl doing its impression of a car alarm and I've seen my first Hoopoe of the season. Ali and I both have agricultural tans from pottering about in the vineyard kitchen garden and the temperature hovers around 21 during the day. So Spring has definitely sprung.

We now have a Le Couvent, Roujan toolbar which you can install to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and so on). It's fast to install and safe. Once you have installed it you will have a new toolbar that includes a search module, weather wherever you are, an automatic mail checker, a to do list, translation tool, link to the BBC learn French site, a calculator and lots of other gadgets, right from your browser. Give it a whirl eh?

We've also reinstated the recipe pages by popular request and I'll be adding new recipes when I have a moment. Ali's currently in Australia so I have a heap of jobs to do here at Le Couvent and also at Chateau Malaudos.

This morning I went to feed the hens, one of whom seemed to be missing. I found her crouching under one of the hen-houses, sitting on a disappointing clutch of 24 previously unnoticed eggs. Disappointing? Yes, because if I break and sniff them all I can't possibly get through 2 dozen on my own, and how can I give them away when I don't know which are the freshest?

 

 

I'm going to crack enough to make the dogs an omelette each then ditch the rest. If you have any better ideas you have until the end of today to let me know - after that the eggs are for the chop.