My birthday was a typical day here at the chateau. I got up and started working on our painting project in the morning. At around 1pm we stopped for lunch. Since it got sunny last week, we have been having lunches out on the back patio under the columns. Mike made a tomato sauce (tomato, red pepper, eggplant, zucchini) with an egg in it over pasta and we had a mache salad with beets, kiwi and tomatoes.

For the “special” birthday dinner, we started with Kir Royals on the patio with creme fraiche and smoked salmon and caviar (caviar is pretty normal here, cheap and easy to find). Even though it was just the six of us, we still ate in the fireplace room, since I love it so much.

Mike made a chicken caccitore with potatoes and I made an unsuccessful Oeufs a la Neige (Eggs in snow?). The neige turned into a baked pancake when it should have been a fluffy snowy thing that sits in english cream. Luckily, Linda had made a walnut and chocolate flat-cake, so we put that in the creme. I drank Negrita and coke all night, the others had their choice of red or white wine.

After dinner, we talked by the fire and I got some beautiful soaps and some stiff french linens from everyone. Mike got me treats, popcorn, the Negrita and coke and some mache seeds for taking home. It was a lovely day to add to the list of lovely days here. It feels like everyday is my birthday!

by Azure

After the first attempt at making brocciu failed, Mike called the farm to get more supplies for my birthday. Do you want to good news or the bad news first, he asked me after he got off the phone.

It turns out, the milk they had given us was pure, unpasteurized, whole goats milk. Which, on another note explains some things about the bowel movements that were happening on the days when I thought I was drinking 2%. The good news was that they had all the supplies, so Patty drove Linda, Cryus, Mike and I to go get more milk and petite lait.

It was 6pm when we arrived and she happily gave us all that we needed for only 3 euros. This time I got enough for two more trials, one slow cooked and the other faster cooked. She filled the buckets we had brought and sent us on our way.

When we got back to the chateau we realized that we had forgotten the fresh milk. Linda, Mike and I piled back into the car and drove back out to interrupt their dinner and retrieve the milk for brocciu.

After dinner, around 11pm, we started the first trial. This one was slow cooked. I added less salt this time and the proportions were perfect. It got hotter and hotter and finally when the bubbles parted we waited longer and sure enough the brocciu arrived! I scooped in out and put it in my little pot and couldn’t wait to taste it. I got a little spoonful and put it in my mouth and it was so so bad. It tasted just like curdled milk. I had to spit it back into the pot.

Try number two, we figured we had overcooked it time before, but being almost 1am by this time, I had to heat it quickly. It went faster this time, I didn’t spend as much time watching it. I feel like I am getting to know the milk, so I don’t need to. Anyway, when it heater up, I didn’t want it to sit in there too long again, so I turned off the burner as soon as it split, but the brocciu never arrived at all. It was just foam! Again I was so disappointed.

Perhaps it is actually really difficult to make brocciu like people have been telling us. Mike could see that I was getting really down. He told me that when Phillipe had asked how many times Mike thought it would take us to get it right, Mike had answered 10. That made me feel a little better, but I am just not good at this whole persistence thing. That’s Mike’s department. I guess I need to learn that too. I’m counting down though, only seven more tries until I eat the sweet brocciu.

Cyrus and Patty wait patiently while the supplies are bought at the cheese farm.

by Mike

We’ve lucked out again and found ourselves staying on the grounds of an 11th century chateau near Poitiers – it’s in the middleish of France. Azure’s cousins (hi!) were caretakers here back in 2002 and Azure stayed with them for what’s become a legendary stretch of three months of roaring fires in the medieval fireplace and drinking games and long dinners and various other shenanigans. This year, having nothing to do and no more scooter, we decided to head to the chateau for the end of our trip.

The chateau seems to collect characters, one of whom is Patty, an American ex-ish-pat who’s living on the chateau grounds for now but nothing’s ever really declared here. Where will you live next year? Eh. What did you do for a living back home? It doesn’t really seem to come up. What’s the latest on the financial cri- don’t even think of bringing that here. Here’s one thing I’d love to share about her, though – she collects bones for soup stock. She boils the bones “to nothing” over days, mixing them with lettuce or brandy or whatever’s around and adding water as needed. Her last stock was 72 hours of boiling. We haven’t tasted one yet, but I’ll write about it when we do.

During the days we walk the treed trails on the grounds, we work in the garden, we cook a little lunch, we investigate mysterious buildings on the 50-acre property. The days are great. Night, though, surges onto the place. It paints the windows black, it suffocates flashlights. It squeezes my ribcage until it itches and it makes footsteps sound like faint music. Night sneaks into every empty room, making noises along the way, and waits, and you can hear your breath the whole time. The chateau is enormous, it’s too big for the night.

At dinner Patty talked about the ghosts. There’s one that sits down on the edge of her bed while she’s sleeping, she can feel the impression. Someone else talked about a man in a long coat coming into the room at night and speaking French. Apparently the long coat man has been seen a couple times here – he belongs to the chateau, the story goes. I was wondering what I’d do if I came face-to-face with the man in the long coat one night, too late, maybe too drunk. I’d like to think I’d talk to him and find out what he’s about. But that’s not what I’d do.

After the ghost stories I stayed up to take some night photos of the chateau from the entrance. It was midnight and clear, a moonless night. Here’s how night photos usually go – I click the shutter and start counting. I look up at the stars, I look for other angles I could try, I listen to the night until I get to whatever I’m counting to and then I close the shutter.

Here’s what happened last night on this ancient property: I clicked the shutter and started counting. I was counting to 50. When I got to 10 I heard footsteps in the trees that never materialized into a person. I noticed that the vapor from my breaths wasn’t disappearing and I wondered how many breaths the air could accumulate. When I got to 20 I could sense someone was behind me. I looked over my shoulder into the thick darkness but I kept sensing they were behind me after I’d turned. At 30 my heart was racing and I was taking shallow breaths so I might be able to hear anything coming at me. My ribcage was itching and I was imagining my death. At 40 the tree I was under burst into noise as an owl decided to flee right at that moment. At 50 I closed the shutter, grabbed the camera without looking at the photo and sprinted back to our room where Azure was waiting for me.

So that’s what I’d do if I saw the man in the long coat – I’d sprint.

(this was written on the wall when we got here….)

by Azure

I attempted my first unassisted batch of brocciu today in the kitchen of the chateau. Everyone else had gone to the brocante (a big flea market) in Chauveny and Mike and I stayed back to have a leisurely lunch and make the brocciu.

Patty had introduced us to her cheese man who is impossible to get near at the Chauveny market, but parks his cheese van by the Abbey on Fridays and is available for chatting. We had asked him for some “petite lait”, pronounced “petite lay” which, coincidentally, Patty would also love to receive from the cheese man, though not for the purposes of making brocciu.

He brought us two buckets of it to the market (for free) and told us where to go to get the fresh milk. We went to the farm and asked for some fresh milk and they brought us 2 liters for 2.50 euros. A cheap project!

When I started the process today, it looked like everything was going well. I figured out the temperature conversions and did everything right on schedule. We figured out that at the exact same moment that the pot boils, the brocciu arrives. We watched and watched and it started to smell like cake, just as it should. It arrived. The foam on top began to part and we turned off the flame and I dipped my ladle in the pot to scoop it out and there was nothing there. What happened to the brocciu????

We had done everything right, I checked and rechecked the proportions and couldn’t figure it out. The tough part was that I could see the brocciu in the pot, but every time I tried to scoop it out, it went through the holes. I then realized that the woman, instead of giving us fresh-from-the-udder goat milk had given us normal drinking milk. Sure enough, I took a sniff and it was so mild. I drank a little and tasted normal, 2% or maybe even fat free.

Mike said that he hadn’t thought it would go smoothly the first time. I was disappointed, but with the discovery of the wrong milk, I was relieved that it wasn’t human error. I could at least have hope that I could still make brocciu given the correct ingredients.

I have decided to try again. I’ll have Mike call the farm ahead of time and ask for all the correct ingredients. I am determined to get this right before leaving here, so I can be confident that I know how to make it. Stay tuned for its arrival.

by Mike

Patty scatters flowers around the chateau.

by Azure

We woke up yesterday morning feeling some of the residual effects of the night before. After resigning ourselves leaving the scooter at Jean Paul’s house and selling it for whatever price we got on ebay (I truly would have been happy to get half of what we paid for it) we went out to see the only American we know in Paris–a bar owner from Florida whom we met because he was the guy who bought the bar that Mike worked at in 2001. The night only ended with a reinvigorated hope and some good old American can-do attitude. He thought we could sell it here or there for this much and our eyes lit up and we thought that maybe we’d sell it easily again.

Nope. And luckily this revival of ambition didn’t last longer than 9am the next day. We really had to leave Paris ASAP and kept telling ourselves, we’re leaving today, we’re taking the scooter to Jean Paul. We’re leaving today, we’re taking the scooter to Jean Paul.

We packed up our bags and loaded the scooter for the real last time. It was a little nerve wracking because we didn’t have insurance and it was registered under Jean Paul’s name, so he was liable for us. And, as I pointed out to Mike, driving through and around Paris put us in contact with more people and police than we had seen the whole rest of the ride. We looked it up online, however and saw that the fine for driving without insurance was a mere 1500 euro fine, but no jail time. Of course our motto of the day was “No jail time!”

We made it ok, of course. We drove past the Palace of Versaille and I caught my first glimpse of the enormous place, up the side roads and made it to the “Buffalo Grill” parking lot where Jean Paul would meet us. There was one random checkpoint at one of the roundabouts, but we made sure to exit the roundabout before we got to the checkpoint. Of course my heart raced.

When we parked the scooter in Jean Paul’s garage and he said we could leave it there until next year when we came back to pick it up, I paused and thought, well maybe… My mind appears to be completely incapable of remembering pain or fear. We still had our helmets on when he mentioned leaving it, my heart was just slowing down from fearing the police, and I actually considered it. Of course we wouldn’t do something like that because that would be a pain for him, but now I think why wouldn’t we buy another scooter? We would just go about it differently. No lesson learned.

He invited us in for a glass of wine, we got to witness the most incredible being on the planet, Morgane’s dog and later, Jean Paul took us to the RER. The next part was shockingly fast, coming from a vehicle that went a top speed of 70km/hr, but averaged more like 50. To ride the scooter from Paris to Poitiers would have taken us about 14 hours, we would have scheduled two days for it. When we fell asleep on the train out of pure emotional exhaustion, we woke up to find we were over half way there. The whole ride only took 1.5 hours. (on another note: I just don’t think you see the country the same way when your are going that fast)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QHZFdDLx-Q&hl=en&fs=1]
“The most incredible being on the planet”

Nash picked us up in the old white chateau car. It was good to see that some things don’t change AND that some people appreciate good old vehicles. We pulled up to find many of the flowers in bloom and the place to be just as tranquil as I remember it. I feel like we’ve been put out to pasture here to spend the remainder of our time roaming about and doing projects on the grounds.

The Chateau car

We had dinner (Salmon topped with creme fraiche, caviar and mint, sides of potatoes, broccoli and salad and of course cheese and wine and chocolate) with Nash and Linda (the owners of the chateau), their son Syrus (sp?) and Patty, a woman I met my first time here who also cooks for guests and has made a really great part-time life here. We had great, easy conversation, though afterward I feared we talked too much about ourselves-oops. It turns out we have a lot in common, not only our living proximity to Greenlake, but our love of food and slow life and gardening and just the ability to live part, or in their case all of our lives over here.

We are staying in the building that is the back side of the chicken coop (this reference is probably only good for Kim and Adam). The chateau grounds house a small abandoned village, where all the work used to be done. There is a barn, carriage house, paper press building, a place to house the farm equipment, the list goes on. These buildings go about one city block along an unpaved road. All of the buildings are being turned into either living spaces (ours has been turned into a 3 bedroom apartment) or spaces to house events. Our room is lovely and the bed is the most comfortable we have had in a long long time.

When we walked back from dinner in the darkness I felt so at peace, so opposite of how I had felt the night before — we are already a whole world away.