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Posts tagged ‘artisan products’

So, how was your trip?

Open roads, rugged mountains, wandering long-horned cows, winding river valleys, terraced vineyards, sparkling seas, ice lakes, snowy peaks, colourful markets, majestic cities – these are just some of the sights we encountered on our recent tour of Europe. Read more

Roquefort cheese – mouldy bread comes good

It’s hard to imagine anything tasty resulting from a piece of mouldy bread. But the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a small village in Southern France, have managed to turn mouldy bread into France’s second most popular cheese thanks to some ingenuity and some 160 million year old cracks in the earth. Read more

Ibérico Ham School – Day 2

We returned to La Posada the following morning for an enormous breakfast, full of Lucy’s homemade Andalucían delights, before setting off with Angel to an organic pig farm nearby. The farm is set in a huge oak forest (known as a “dehesa”) and has goats, ducks, geese and chickens as well as over one hundred black Iberian pigs. Read more

Ibérico Ham School – Day 1

Sometimes things work out much better than you’d hoped. Having driven for miles through areas of both Portugal and Spain that are home to the famous black Iberian pig, I wondered if we would ever get a glimpse of these wonderful animals. I’ve dreamed of someday owning an Iberian pig farm in Andalucía and really wanted to experience them in their natural habitat. Alas, they proved elusive. Read more

Sweet cheeses – the Normandy quartet

Few places I’ve visited have struck me as more insignificant that the tiny village of Camembert in Normandy. Having travelled a considerable distance to visit the birthplace of the iconic cheese, I was incredibly underwhelmed. Read more

Seafood, Apples & Cheese

It would appear that life in Normandy revolves, gastronomically speaking, around three key ingredients – seafood, apples and cheese. Thankfully, I’m partial to all three. When we rolled off the ferry into Le Havre we headed straight for the beautiful fishing town of Honfleur, where I’d heard the seafood was fantastic. Read more

Les Escargots (Snails)

I don’t know what I expected a snail farm to look like, but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t it. As we rolled in the gates we could see a small, rustic farmhouse and what looked like a few raised vegetable beds covered with weeds. Read more

Sunny Somerset

Is 11am too early to start tasting cider? On a gloriously sunny morning in Somerset it seems like the logical and sensible thing to do. We plan on doing the cider / Calvados route in Normandy, so I feel it would be good to do some research here, for comparison. Read more