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With this post we will again be up to date. There has been a little bit of slippage in the last few but, with any luck, we will get back to posting each week.
Sarlat is a village in the Dordogne Valley in South West France. A lovely little village in a picturesque valley If you are a tourist looking for plenty of things to do and see there is enough to keep you busy for a long time. If you are simply looking for a place where you can sit and chill out, with enough restaurants, cafes and bars to meet your needs then it will work for you. Or if you want to ignore the world and sit on top of a hill contemplating beautiful scenery and contemplating whatever it is you want to contemplate then it is a place for you. If you want a place to spend time with family and friends, eating, drinking and dabbling in the variety of things the area has to offer then you could well find what you want here. We did.
Our brother-in-law had organised the place. The family were in France and Spain for just 3 weeks and,
sensibly, were keen to spend time in locations rather than scamper through a whirlwind tour. That suited us down to the ground. The house wasn't technically in Sarlat itself. It was 1 km from town but down a nice, steep hill that was fine going down. The view was one of those gentle, peacefully rural ones that has newer housing moving into an easy little valley. The rental price was reasonable, the facilities were OK, the wallpaper a little different and the environment was great. The neighbours were friendly but the lady who handled the rental was the first French person we have struck who seemed just a bit frustrated at our lack of competence in the language. Perhaps she was just nervous about renting her place to a bunch of Australians. She did, however, give us recommendations for restaurants in town that turned out to be excellent.
The theme of the week turned out to be food, as if we haven't been eating and drinking enough. And if your theme is food then there may be few better places around to spend some time. Not a place to get into Thai or Indian or, for that matter, the
excessively healthy stuff that we often tend to eat. This is all about great sauces, rich meat and vegetables given additional taste because they have been cooked in goose or duck fat. The region is famous for its confits of canard (duck) and oief (goose), truffles (but don't call them truffles - call them 'troufs' - unless of course you actually want to buy some and then everyone understands what you are talking about) pate de foie gras, cepes (the local mushrooms that grow when the weather is right) and, interestingly, haricot beans. To round things out there are also a few wines that they produce around here and, of course, armagnac which the cookbook that I purchased called the 'King of Gascony'.
The first restaurant we tried claimed to have been in operation for over 100 years. They had spent the time usefully and had got things right. Great food, excellent service - with a waiter who charmed all of our ladies - and some very nice wines for a price that was by no means exhorbitant. We were not all that game here but still had lovely meals with slices of a kind of duck brawn for
Wall Paper +
An interesting idea particularly with the light bulb in Harrison's earan entree, with salad and bread - very tasty and quite large helpings - followed by, for me, what arrived as more or less a lamb chop and vegies but, with all possible respect to every similar meal with these basic ingredients I have consumed in the last 60 years, this bore almost no relation to anything I have ever tasted before.
Friends arrived all the way from Paris to join us for a couple of days. We celebrated with a bar-b-que. A variety of local delicacies, much meat (pretty much Australian style), salads and much good wine, good conversation and such. A very nice time where we had the opportunity to expand considerably our knowledge of things French. No rose coloured glasses on this lot, we were able to investigate the vagaries of property law, planning, the education system, workplace practices and the alleged propensity of the French to accept the word of 'authority' without too much question. Along the way we learnt how to break a baguette - rather than use a knife to cut it neatly - and were treated to a fund of stories about life in France. An entertaining time.
Food is not
Always a Market
They grow everywhere these things just about eating. It is also about being ready to eat and about cooking. To generate an appetite we spent time visiting tourist attractions. They are into the Cro Magnon man here and there are a lot of pre-historic sites. One of the major caves required our presence in a queue at, or before, 9.00 am. With the lifestyle we had adopted for the week, this was way too early so we visited a different cave. An electric train took us down into the depths of an old underground river with bear scratchings thousands of years old still well apparent on the walls and cave paintings of the humans who had chased the bears out. While some of these paintings were of the typical flat and not so inspiring type, there were those that showed a lot of talent. Well proportioned drawings of horses, mammoths, rhinoceros and deer adorned the walls and the roof.
We visited a garden developed in the late 19th century along the top of the Dordogne river valley that made a lot of use of artfully cut and trimmed hedges. The garden was interesting but the most impressive feature, in my humble opinion, was the
view that you could take in at various points rather than the actual garden itself. The chateau across the valley that, at one time in the 12 or 13th century housed Simon de Montfort was also impressive, mainly for the war machines, particularly trebuchet, on display there. There was little mention in the local commentary that appeared on the signage that Simon de Montfort had a reasonably well documented history for cruelty and murder in the name of the church at the time. He did a bit of facial mutilation that became famous for his activities even in times that were not all that gentle.
Canoes down the Vezere River required just a little more activity on our part on another day as we floated with a reasonable current past wild scenery dotted with the occasional cows and horses. There are more villages and chateaux on the Dordogne which runs more or less parallel. I'm not sure though that even 3 hours in a canoe really counts as sufficient exercise to deal with the food and wine we consumed at other times.
Even though most of the restaurants had cepes on the menu, we weren't able to find
them in any place that would sell them so one night we made a mushroom and potato mix using a variety of other mushrooms that turned out very well - if I do say so myself. When I cook it for Trish and Marika I will leave out the bacon pieces. The recipe also called for goose fat but we couldn't find that either. Turned out quite well though.
We were keen to try to cook wild rabbit with cepes but the traps didn't catch anything and there were no cepes available so we made do with cassoulet of haricot beans and confit of goose, crispy topped courgettes (zucchinis) and aubergine fritters. They worked pretty well although we could have done with oil that provided more heat. There are a lot of things in this book that I will have to try in the future.
Our last restaurant on our Friday night end of the week dinner was also excellent. I tried the real pate de foie gras and it really was delicious. It is very nice when the product lives up to the hype. The same can be said of the confit of duck that I had.
Les Eysies
Little village. Need care in saying its name Those ducks we grow back home are in for big things when we finally return.
You do miss your family and friends when you are away from home as long as we have been. It was lovely to get together and spend some real time with them. We look forward to repeating the experience with other family members as they get inspired, or silly, and join us for some parts of our trip over the next 18 months or so. We did realise that we were telling just a few too many stories about our travels and tried to keep that tendency under control. If others join us we will continue to try that.
Travelling on alone now we are on our way to Andorra and Spain. Those Spanish lessons are going to come in handy if I ever find time to do them.
Oh, and the lady that rented the villa to us had her revenge for our not always passable French. After we cleaned the place for a couple of hours so that it sparkled she announced that she would still need to keep 70 euros for cleaning. She added this to a legitimate, but
Confident
that they will make it up the hill quite significant charge for a mark of the coffee pot on the painted bench. Such is life.
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Sarah
non-member comment
Looks like you all had a lovely time!