Sarah Jane Butfield - Our Frugal Summer in Charente: An Expats Kitchen Garden Journal

Our Frugal Summer in Charente

An Expats Kitchen Garden Journal

By

Sarah Jane Butfield

Copyright 2014 Sarah Jane Butfield

Cover design Nigel Butfield

Photography by Nigel Butfield

First ebook edition October 2014

The people and events in this book are portrayed as perceived and experienced by Sarah Jane Butfield. Some names have been changed for privacy reasons.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without written permission of the publisher.

T his book is dedicated to my late Mother Muriel Maud McDonald.

Always in my thoughts.

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank my extremely tolerant husband Nigel, not only for his contributions to this book, but also for his hard work in our secret garden in Charente.

Thank you to my family for their continued support of both my writing projects and my new publishing venture. Social media sharing is a key component to building an author platform, so every tweet and status share means a great deal. Friends who have shared and interacted with us on book promotion events are also very much appreciated, so thank you.

Finally I would also like to thank beta reader and proofreader Martin Papworth for his valued feedback and input to this book which has enhanced its production.

W elcome to Our Frugal Summer in Charente: An Expats Kitchen Garden Journal.

I have a passion for living simply, and I believe that it can lead to a more sustainable and healthier lifestyle. In this book I wanted to capture the process that Nigel and I went through, as well as describing the results we achieved. In reality it was not a lifestyle decision to live a more frugal existence, it was a necessity. However, we enjoyed the challenge. On a tight budget we did not always have the correct ingredients, so a degree of improvisation, which is my specialty in the kitchen, came into force. I am not well known for my cooking abilities, although I am renowned for my culinary catastrophes. Many of my friends and family find it amusing that I not only managed to cook in a house with no kitchen but that I made and adapted recipes without poisoning either myself or Nigel in the process. Although I admit we came close with the wild mushrooms, but more on that story later!

Welcome to the Charente.

Sarah Jane

Our Frugal Summer in Charente: An Expats Kitchen Garden Journal.

T his book details our journey through the summer of 2013 in the Charente, South West France. After relocating from Australia to France in September 2012, we soon found ourselves enduring desperate times. We realised that the only way we could continue our new life in France was if we lived in a frugal, more conservative manner. Our plan was to save money by any means possible, to enable us to invest any money we could earn into renovating the house. There were prolonged periods when Nigel was unable to find regular work and we were living in a house that needed upgrading into some degree of habitability. Our savings or renovation fund was evaporating fast into the proverbial money pit, which is an expat term for a renovation project. On a practical level my contribution to our situation was by utilising every inch of our garden, in true Good Life style. I would achieve this by keeping some chickens, ducks and growing enough vegetables to feed ourselves and the animals. The learning curve to ensure that we made the most of everything we produced in our garden was huge. We also utilised foraged foods from the hedgerows for making teas, jams and nutty delights. I can say with all honesty, without meaning to sound as if I am bragging that we have had some delicious food and drink as a result of our efforts and resourcefulness.

The idea for this book came from reviewing some of the recipes in my journal that I adapted over this thrifty period living in our new French home. We were surviving on a minimal budget, trying to feed ourselves from our vegetable garden, five chickens and two ducks. A cookbook written in wartime inspired some of my frugal adaptations of family friendly recipes. The Come into the garden cookbook by Constance Spry gives the feeling of extravagant recipes while adhering to and speaking of, wartime rations and availability. Some of the content for this book comes from my journals, just like my two travel memoirs Glass Half Full: Our Australian Adventure and Two dogs and suitcase: Clueless in Charente. Therefore, it is probably no surprise that this has turned into the story of my kitchen garden and other animals rather than a recipe book. The feedback received while preparing this book made me realise that some of the recipes I added had funny anecdotes and stories behind them and so I have shared some of those with you too.

Our potager week 1: Grass cut ready to start our Good Life project

T he French tradition of using produce from their potager, or kitchen garden, is renowned for enabling French families to create meals that are healthy, cost effective and simple. They select the plants they grow with skill and precision based on years of knowledge passed down through the generations. The result is a variety of fruits and vegetables that can provide year round nutritious meals for their families. In my last book I shared with you recipes for; wild boar marinade, green tomato chutney, Chirac cheesy scones, pizza dough, radish relish and courgette cake. The interest in the recipes and our garden activities led me to change the layout of this book. Therefore, I decided to arrange this book in a month by month format to incorporate some of the practicalities of our kitchen garden setup. As promised in my last book I have included the recipes for chestnut loaf, pumpkin curry, pumpkin pie and pumpkin dumplings together with luxury fish pie and fig biscuits. I have also added others that I hope you will enjoy.

I have no formal catering expertise, other than that learned in my school and adult life, and this is purely my guide. It details how we grew, foraged and cooked with home-grown fresh fruits and vegetables over the spring and summer of 2013. It describes how in our small potager we produced enough food to survive in France, while still eating a healthy nutritious diet.

I learned new skills in bread making, cooking and preserving, which in turn reduced our expenditure in the supermarket. It also had an environmental impact as we produced less packaging waste for the fortnightly recycle truck. I think at one point they thought we had moved away! The art of enjoying the simple things in life like family, friends, and a home-grown and home-cooked meal is very rewarding.

Therefore, I hope that if you bought this book for the recipes, that you enjoy making them. If you are curious about how an English woman in France made a very small food budget go a long way, then I hope you find it informative and at times amusing. If you just like reading about anything and, everything to do with France then enjoy the ride. As a longstanding fan of the 1970s television show The Good Life we have often tried to create our version of the good life in small ways in various locations. However, it was not until we moved to live in rural outback Queensland, Australia that I had my first large scale attempt. Here in France this is my second full blown attempt at a more organic, self-sufficient lifestyle. We have eaten organic produce, whenever possible, since our vegetarian and vegan days in Australia. Once you experience organically produced crops the differentiation in flavour is hard to ignore, especially when you return to eating mass produced vegetables in particular. Therefore to be able to grow our own near organic produce was an exciting challenge.