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From the château kitchen

our favourite seasonal recipes

Apple tart normande - a crisp pastry tart filled with apples and a calvados spiked custards

apple tart normande

Apples in a calvados custard in a crisp, buttery tart – the perfect autumn pudding. You can leave our the booze of course – but

Freshly baked almond croissants topped with flaked almonds and icing sugarped with falkes

almond croissants

Almond croissants are super easy to make and are a great way to use up leftover croissants. You definitely don’t need to be a pastry

apple and blackberry clafoutis

I love a clafoutis – it’s a properly comforting nursery pudding. A soft, sweet batter with slightly boozy fruit nestled into it. I make it

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Château de la Ruche
72290, Teillé, France

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Sun and birdsong stream through open windows, the

Sun and birdsong stream through open windows, the breeze blowing in through the sky lights in the gîte as we work our way through changeover day. Making beds, cleaning bathrooms, sweeping corners.

There is a hint of summer in the air, the rhythmic trilling of the crickets telling tales of warmer days to come. It’s a balm after all the rain. Sunshine to welcome our guests at last.

It’s hard not to linger in the gîte once the work is done, soaking up the peace of each room. Standing at the windows, watching shoals of fish skim just under the surface of the lake, the light playing on the water ripples. Listening to the birds sing and the wind in the trees. It’s always a calm place to be.

But there’s no time to waste, before long it’s time to hand over the keys again, time for another family to make Maurice’s House a home again for a week or two, time for us to tick another job off the list.

An energy buzzes through spring, it hustles you up

An energy buzzes through spring, it hustles you upwards and outwards. Everywhere you look things are growing, moving, greening. It starts slowly in early April, a tentative unfurling, the first few pink tinged leaf buds testing the air, loosening their grip, tender leaf edges feeling for the light. And then comes the explosion, the leaves flinging themselves skyward, reaching towards the sunlight, dancing in the breeze, filling the countryside with every shade of green.

Birds are everywhere, their voices swelling in harmony from first-light until dusk. They weave in-and-out of the hedgerows, darting tree-to-tree, flirting, chasing, coupling and fighting. Their chorus loud in your ears, the alarm clock of spring after the dark silence of winter.

Before dawn the nightingale sings, its trills and whistles, curling melodies and at times almost sad songs, call from the tree-tops for a mate. A love song sent into the sky, I hope he finds someone soon.

There are flowers everywhere you look. Tiny pink herb Robert on the verges, blue bugle in the lawn, buttercups glowing in the meadows. In the woods the white stars of wild garlic shine in the gloom. The bluebells too are sprawling, casting a blue haze into the dappled shade of the woods.

In the garden the roses are budding, getting ready to burst as we turn into May. Wisteria and clematis Montana climb the walls of the house, twining upwards, as if trying to peep in through the windows, throwing their sweet floral scent into the air. It’s a beautiful time of year here in our little corner of France, one of my favourites in fact.

The winter months are our quiet time. When we say

The winter months are our quiet time. When we say quiet we don’t really mean it, because often they feel as busy as the crazy summer months, when the bed and breakfast and the gîte are open. Our quiet months are a change of pace, the house is closed to guests and the days shorter. Time spent caring for the house and grounds, taking on jobs that we just don’t have time for the rest of the year.

We spent this winter renovating the boot room. For such a small space it was a lot of work. We’d made do with some ramshackle shelves and a whole lot of mess for six years, the ceiling was held up with an acroprop, the walls dark and crumbling, there was a trench in the floor from the removal of an old wall and no where to wipe our feet.

We filled trenches, re-plastered walls, fixed and waxed beams, sanded, painted and tiled. Tim cleverly recreated the look of the bespoke cupboards I’d imagined for the space using Ikea kitchen units and runs of worktop. We painted cupboards for days, brushing on layers of paint to get the finish we wanted.

We made the most of every inch of space. Building boot racks and a wine rack to fill gaps left by heating pipes. Heating pipes there because for the first time in its history this space is warm, a reclaimed radiator finally in place, giving us the opportunity to dry out damp coats and boots.

It took a whole winter to create (you can read the full story of this room and see behind the scenes video of the renovation on my Substack journal) but we are so happy with how it turned out.

Each of us has a separate cupboard and drawer for coats, shoes, bags and boots. There’s storage for bulbs and batteries, shoe polish and tool kits. And a whole overflow larder cupboard where we keep back stock for the chambre d’hôtes so we never have to worry about running out of essentials when we’re busy.

I think it might be my favourite room in the house. Perhaps our best renovation to date? Certainly the one that has made the biggest difference to our day-to-day life. Our winter work done.

The house is full of flower lovers, so I’ve fill

The house is full of flower lovers, so I’ve filled the house with flowers. I foraged in the hedgerows for hawthorn, elm and hornbeam and tucked them in vases with ranunculus, anemones and daffodils from the garden and greenhouse. A few extra bits and pieces brought in to bolster their ranks; snapdragons and guelder rose made ready by the experts, long before mine have had time to ripen.

I’m always slightly nervous creating flowers for people who work with flowers everyday, people with so much more skill than me. But then I remember how grateful I am when anyone cooks me a meal, gives me somewhere lovely to sleep or makes me breakfast. When you do something for a living, you rarely take the time to make the effort for yourself. So I put flowers in every corner for them, and filled the table with blooms - simple flowers for the florists, to welcome them to our home.

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