Isabelle and Steve run a full house: three sons, one hamster, two dogs, three cats, walls lined with shelves lined with picture books and Beatles anthologies, cabinets brimming with colorful antiques, and best of all, a tire-sized fruit bowl that never empties of nature's sweetest gift to womankind: oranges and clementines.
Isabelle and Steve are English (Isabelle is an English teacher at the high school). Chez eux (literally, "at their house," but - I love this - chez can also refer to personality or preferences, as in, "according to them"), tea means black tea with milk, cheddar cheese comes from Cheddar (not Vermont, as the Sharps had me believing), and David Bowie is no joking matter. Oops.
They live happily à la campagne - out in the country - a good forty minutes from Roanne. Fifteen minutes out and we're passing fields of happy cows and clucking chickens in front yards. Thirty minutes and the roads are dirt or gravel. By the time we reach their narrow lane, farm houses dot the rolling hills on all sides. Well-trimmed hedges form even squares that, viewed from a distance, transform the landscape into an oil painting. A quiet calm, accentuated by a soft soundtrack of lazy mooooooos, blankets the land.
Inisde next to the woodstove, it's cozy and ... less quiet. Joshua, age seven, circles like a whirling dervish - can I eat this? do that? go there? Let's play a card game, or read a book, or make Play-Doh spaghetti! And it's all in Little Boy British English, which triples the cuteness factor.
The house is a delightful mélange of French and English cultures. The language spoken at home is English, but at 8 o'clock it's off to school where the boys turn into little French school children, and off to work where Isabelle converses with her French colleagues. Steve, a stay-at-home dad, says bonjour to his French neighbors. When French company comes for dinner, French is spoken and no one blinks an eye. But when company leaves, the BBC or "Antiques Roadshow UK" resumes, and the wine is replaced by tea.
Bilingual children are a beautiful thing; bicultural children are the raspberry on the tart. I was hugely pleased (ah, British English) to walk into Josh's room one morning to find him reading Franklin - a picture book about a turtle named Benjamin - in French, while listening to The Police on his Fischer-Price cassette player! I reckon the beauty of this trio was lost on him, but I was happy watching him and he was happy with his book and his music. Win-win-win (one for Roxanne).
I mentioned a woodstove and citrus fruit - this combination may be my favorite part of weekends à la campagne: standing next to the stove, peeling orange after clementine after orange, putting the peels on the woodstove, and smelling the citrus fill the room. Yuh-MEE! in the words of Isabelle.
Whenever I spend a weekend chez Isabelle, we visit neighboring villages and I discover little regional treasures. This time we went to the tiny town of La Clayette, home of Les Chocolats de Bernard Dufoux - one of the top chocolatiers in France. And now prepare yourselves.
You've got your chocolate bars, your chocolate truffles, chocolate ganache, chocolate-covered marzipan, your pistachio, almond, and hazelnut chocolates, caramel chocolates, chocolates with ginger, jasmine, cardamom, lavender, thyme, rosemary, or red pepper, chocolate bars filled with rhum ... and that's about it (Bubba Gump style).
My favorites were the Barre anti-stress (praline, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, raisins, orange peel) and the Buchette aphrodisiaque (marzipan, pistachio, praline, ginger). Who needs meds or cupid when you've got chocolate, eh?
You were probably wondering what's so great about expensive chocolate stores. Unlimited, guilt-free samples is what. I bought twenty-two euros worth of chocolate, and ate about five euros worth in the store. So it's like I paid seventeen euros. Cha-ching.
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