Surrounded by wonderful sun ripened fruits here in France I am able to practice freely my passion for making Liqueurs.

They are begining to build up now on my shelves so I thought it was time to provide a Carte des Liqueurs for my clients , complete with tasting notes.

White Peach with Cinnamon

I found that the evanescent flavour of the White Peach was a little overcome by the alcohol so added some Cinnamon Bark to provide backbone.

Vin de Noix

More of a fortified wine than a liqueur the spirit from this bottle came from friends in the village who found a bottle in their cave labelled 90% and dated 1943.
This along with red wine, crushed green walnuts, oranges and sugar is now macerating away nicely.

Apricot with Bitter Almonds

Again I found these fruits needed a little help to shine , the almonds seem to be doing the trick.

Sloe

Irish Sloes picked in South Kilkenny carried out frozen and then steeped in French Marc rather than Gin (and none the worse for that)

Elderflower

Picked just this May, and a bit of an experiment , these have proved a winner.
The flavour shines through

Cerises Jaunes

These were my first experiment in France and have a lovely soft almond flavour.

Bigarades

Seville Orange, made from one imported from Ireland and hung over the spirit to slowly infuse it and then, when I found three on my own Bigarade tree I added these in too. Cointreau also use bigarades for their liqueur.

Plum

This was also one of the early experiments and is down to the last bottle,it is a little sweet but rightly plummy.

Quetsch

This plum has a much higher acidity so is doing much better, I’m going to let it macerate for another year.

Raspberry Pip

How could I possibly discard the Raspberry pips having strained them out of the fruit to make the jam ?
This one also wants more time.

I recently found a book of French recipes (220 of them ) for liqueurs so am looking forward to more experiments.
How can I resist making a liqueur from the kernels of Apricots ? Or one from flowers of Fennel ? Or even one that first requires me to catch a snake ?

I was buying apricots in the supermarket this morning when I became aware of a very pecular conversation happening behind me.
As soon as I decently could I managed to get a look at the couple who were talking , she was blondly English, he was darkly French , they were about my age or younger.
Aware that I might have just heard a momentary aberration I stalked them through the olive oils and the cheese sections and indeed my first impression was correct.
They spoke together amicably, fluently and idiomatically, he always using French, she always using English.
I know quite a few mixed language couples and have never heard any of them using this particular method of conversing before.

I saw one of these in vide grenier a couple of years ago but when I went back to get it some cute hoor had gotten in ahead of me.
Yesterday in Lunas (Possibly the best vide grenier I have been at to date) I saw one for sale. M. wanted €30 for it , steep enough but he could see I really wanted it- he wouldn’t accept €20 so we finally compromised at €25.
By that stage a small crowd had gathered to see the outcome and as M. wrapped up the article a woman asked me “Was it something from a hospital ?”

It is , of course, a really efficient wine cooler.
You fill the glass marsupial pouch with ice and chill the wine so without diluting it.
We tried it last night, it works a treat.

We rented a house in the Provencal village of Rasteau for the first time in 2000, (we liked this house so much that we rented it again the following year).
The house was in the centre of the village, yet had a garden big enough for a pool, but our bedroom window looked out on the village square.
On the day we arrived I looked out the window and saw a game of boules being played and took this photograph.

In the course of this holiday and the next we made friends with a couple in the village ; Marie José and Jean , and some years afterwards they came to Ireland on holidays. When they visited us I showed them the picture I had taken many years before.
“But that’s Jean ! ” said Marie José, “I recognise him I even remember that tee-shirt !”
Le Monde est petit.

We dropped into Beziers Cathedral yesterday with Ano and Dee who are staying with us.
There was a woman at the organ and a few stately bars were played.
It sounded like Bach but rather more familiar.
Then as we were wandering around the nave the organist started up again.
This time there was no mistaking the tune it was a stately and slow version of the most hackneyed Itish Jig: The Irish Washerwoman (the Dubliners do a version here)

There was a sudden but supressed desire to shatter the peace of the cathedral isle by throwing the legs into the air a-la-Riverdance.

Apricot Jam is up there with my favourites , Seville Orange and Quince being there too, so it was upsetting when my entire stash of this jam was finished off by hungry French breakfasters before Christmas last year in Le Presbytere.
Obviously I needed to do better this year.
The Apricots have just started to be sold here in the last couple of weeks , as always the first to arrive are the rosy cheeked Rousillion variety, very pretty and sweet but not the housewife’s choice for jam- too expensive for one and not tart enough for another.
I should explain at this stage that the making of Apricot jam is a strong tradition here in France. It is the breakfast confiture of choice , to the French what Seville Orange Marmalade is to the Irish and English.
Apricots carry the requisite amounts of both tartness and flavour which we all desire first thing in the morning.
Anyone raised in Ireland whose only contact with Apricot Jam has been through those nasty little packets of individual servings which taste of absolutely nothing could be forgiven for wondering what I am going on about. (that I was once offered this abomination in a four star hotel in a border county in Ireland showed a sort of contempt for customer which I can only hope no longer exists in Ireland)

We deposited the grandsons and their parents at Perpignan airport last Saturday and decided to meander home through Cathar country on the way back to Thezan. There , in a farm under Queribus Castle , we saw a sign for Apricots for sale. We headed off up a very bockety lane and got to a stylish barn where Monsieur was selling Apricots. There on display were some red Rousillon Apricots and another shiney looking variety. Both were an extremely reasonable €2.50 a kilo.
“Which” I asked him “would M. recommend for making confiture ?”
” Ah for confiture you need these ” said M. leading me to another part of the barn where some small underripe Apricots were stored.
“You will need to keep these for four days in a cool place to ripen properly , You have such a place ?”
I told him we had a cave.
He nodded in approval , he was willing to let his apricots go to a good home.
These cost only €1.50 for a kilo so I bought a large 10kg box for €15 and headed home.
Having kept the Apricots for their ripening time I went downstairs this morning, while the house slept, to make my jam.
They had indeed ripened up in the remaining days , even though I hadn’t put them in the cellar as instructed , but then we have been having an unseasonable spell of fresh weather lately.
I reckoned that about 6 of the ten kilos were ready to go and so I made up six potloads of jam. (I always make my jam up in kilo loads , I find larger amounts don’t work as well )
For every kilo of stoned apricots I added the juice of one lemon and one kilo of preserving sugar (this is freely available here , and back in Ireland, and is sugar with added citric acid and pectin)
My method is nearly always the same, I put the halved stoned fruit with the sugar and lemon juice into a large pot on my lowest possible heat and stirred it gently from time to time on this heat until the sugar was melted.
Then I put the pot on to my fastest ring and brought it to the boil, then when it was at a rolling boil I timed it for a precise five minutes (I tested the first batch for setting after that time so didn’t bother testing the remaining five) so after a couple of hours I had potted and shelved roughly 12 kilos of delicious Apricot Jam- about 24 jam jars full.

And to my immense satisfaction my Jam Shelves are again laden.

A couple of weeks ago I was waiting in the car in the village for Síle to get some bread at the Boulanger.

In the Place de la Marie there are the usual threatening group of French adolescents , doing wheelies on miniature bicycles , running their scooters at each other and yelling at each other loudly (and to me ) agressively.

Then I noticed this wimpish young boy enter the Place from the opposite corner , about eleven years old and obviously – from the basket he was carrying-on the way to the Boulanger for Maman.
My heart sank.
He was certainly going to have to run the gauntlet.

Au Contraire.

He walked up to the first teenager, the one on the bicycle, and lifted up his face to be kissed, the cyclist bent down and kissed him , thus the young lad proceeded through the place, being kissed or shaking hands as he went.