The shape of things Last week I had a vision. I closed my eyes and all I could see were serving plates in Italian restaurants, stacked with lamb chops and veal escalops. Some of them had steamed fish with slices of lemon, others had mountains of pasta. At least one of them was held by […]

All good things must come to an end and so it was that our idyllic Christmas, complete with all our children was over. But we resisted and fought bravely right to the end, making the most of every moment until there was nothing left to say but goodbyes and love yous and till we meet […]

A taxi driver in London once gave me a first class lecture on the meaning and origins of the idiom to be “at sixes and sevens”. I don’t know how it came up, I remember he had an awful lot to say about everything and before I knew it he had given me the whole […]

When is the right moment to buy a Christmas tree? Too early and the needles will have fallen by New Year’s, too late and you miss out on what could have been an extra week of pine scented Christmas beauty. Over the years I’ve figured that around the 10th is a good moment but my […]

If Sunday afternoon had been a Grimm’s adventure this is what would have happened: A cunning sorceress (me) would have seduced a tall, dark-haired (read grey) and gullible man (my husband) into gathering some delicious fruits and nuts and bringing them to her house in the forest. She would have asked him to crack open […]

More than anything this is the story of a soup. But it has other characters. A sleeping lion, a few roses stubbornly refusing to go to bed, delicious quails, beautiful pears, a curious château and, of course, a dog. Let me take you back to last Sunday evening. It was cold and grey and humid. […]

It’s November again, and predictably the rain has started. These day Médoc is damp and chilly, the frogs are having a ball and I deal with it all by making fires. I love lighting a fire, then I make myself a strong cup of tea and let the flames warm me up as I sit […]

Once upon a time there was a prince in Médoc. He was actually a marquis but as he owned so many châteaux (all the best ones) king Louis XV declared him, “Prince of the vines”. In those days my favorite Médoc village, Saint-Estèphe, was known as Calon and the “prince” once famously declared “I make […]

“Don’t tell my husband”, Madame Petit said, with a hesitant smile, “Don’t tell him about your recipe”. I thought I knew what she meant, my recipe sounded so tempting that her husband would request it immediately and perhaps his wife had other plans for the evening. But that was not it. It was the opposite, […]

By the gate of our garden, alongside the little road that leads to the house, there is a wild patch of land that we seldom visit. It’s filled with thorns and thistles, ferns and more distressingly, snakes. The dogs like to go there to hunt for rabbits or mice and once we found Sky, a […]