Noirmoutier-en-l'Île - France

I'm afraid to say that I have recently been very slack in updating this blog recently. The end of the School term, coupled with various business trips and a summer holiday all combined to demand more of my time than one laptop could handle. But having now completed all of the above, I am back to the day job and after filing* five hundred odd emails I can find a few spare moments to update you all** on my culinary exploits over the last few weeks.

I have many tales to tell, but here I will concentrate on my recent time in France. On a French campsite to be exact, wherein I discovered that modern tents, while quick and simple to erect, do tend to suffer somewhat when confronted by the arse-end of hurricane Bertha. Seriously, if it wasn't for the fridge we had hired from reception, we would have unexpectedly gate crashed the Dutch tent next door. As it was I was re-pegging several times a night, and our very kind neighbours also did it for us when they saw we were a gnats chuff away from taking an impromptu wind surfing lesson in our pyjamas. 

Anyway, this is just a mix of all the food related stuff I snapped over there; there seem to be three things this island is famous for: salt, mussels and oysters. I bought a bag of salt from the salt pans, (a kilo for 95p), I ate an awful lot of these:



Mostly very small and packed with the flavour of holidays by the beach, but the oysters...

I thought I had struck gold with these beauties in the supermarket, what's that? €5.75 per kilogram? An entire box for eleven Euros? Umm, yes please, load me up for two, but then. Then, on an early morning stroll to the patisserie to get Mrs P her regular morning sugar high, I saw this:

I returned that same evening and dined on twelve of the freshest, slimiest little buggers that ever slid down my throat with a squeeze of lemon and splash of tobasco. The fella runs a shack at the bottom of his garden with his wife and mother-in-law, freshly collecting then dishing out those bad boys to anyone who happens to be passing at the right time. The most expensive of his offer was twelve for five Euro. At home, you would be lucky to get an empty shell for that cash.

A beer my delightful camping companions bought for me. It tasted like... lager.

We also visited a creperie, which we intended to only supply us with a snack to keep the hunger pangs at bay while we found yet more mollusc related foodstuffs, but actually, this kept three of us going for hours:

This first is a savoury one filled with cheese and salty ham (everything was salty here, we were by the sea and next door to a bloody salt pan for goodness sake). It was a mammoth undertaking, I think it was the cheese that did it for us and it was just so heavy - delicious but serious fromage territory. The sweet was much better with a nice salty (again) caramel sauce. The French crepe is really a thing of beauty and we had several on our trip, this being the poshest but I can just go with one rolled up in a bit of tin foil out of the back of a street van. Lovely stuff.

This was the two Michelin starred restaurant that we found but didn't go into with our shorts, flipflops and overwhelmingly English accents. I'm sure it's very nice though.

This is what we actually ended up eating that night and I honestly don't think I had ever eaten so much shellfish in my life. A whole crab, whelks, oysters (of course), mussels, winckles, cockles etc etc. I was stuffed to the max after - a steal at twenty eight quid. Also pictured is the terrine that The Child ordered. Nice and roughly textured, a bit salty (of course) but it went down well, unlike the cornichons. But I was more than happy to help with those.

Finally this is a shot of a sausage that we cooked up on the beach. It was labelled as 'Toulouse flavour'. Now, I'm not too sure what Toulouse is supposed to taste like but these sausages were great; meaty, well textured with a big whack of pepper into the bargain. Sausage, a bit of baguette and some tommy sauce meant all was right with the world - well until the hurricane hit that is...

*and by 'filing', I of course mean deleting.

** Haha