Basil for me is the smell of summer. I absolutely adore this wonderful aromatic herb and love to grow a number of plants so I can always cut it fresh to use, it makes a remarkable difference to both the taste and smell than using pre cut stems. Basil is mostly associated with Italian cooking …
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Here are my favourite cookbooks…we often get asked what are our favourite or most used cookbooks. My list rarely changes even though we buy quite a number of books every year. 4 out of 6 of my choices are from Australian chef’s which may seem bizarre but I find the Australian food scene to be …
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Spring comes late to us in the mountains of the Portes du Soleil, it isn’t unusual for us to get snow as late as the end of May. Luckily, other parts of France experience spring much earlier allowing us to enjoy the delicious new spring vegetables before we have even sown our veggie seeds and …
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Neither of us are really jam eaters. In fact, the only time either of us eat jam is when we are staying at a hotel! We started making jam for the breakfast we serve at Chalet Cannelle in the first summer we lived in Chatel. It was July, and I remember it well as I …
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One of the first things we did when we moved to Chatel was dig up a 10m2 lawn (of monster weeds) to create a veggie patch with 8 raised beds. The beds were made from pieces of exterior walls of an old chalet that were abandoned in the back garden. We have no idea where …
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Turin, is 3 hours away from Chalet Cannelle in Chatel, France. We first visited 4 years ago by accident. We were taking a little trip through the Aosta Valley to look for providors and we weren’t having much luck. So we just kept driving and ended up in a campsite in Turin, high on the …
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After the mammoth task of creating our kitchen garden, the first thing we planted was rhubarb and the same plant has treated us for 5 seasons with no signs of decline. Rhubarb is so easy to grow, I don’t do anything at all to it and it produces beautiful fat, red stems. The only small …
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Our bookshelf at Chalet Cannelle is mostly cookbooks and buying new additions is quite a regular event. Living in the mountains, we don’t have an amazing bookstore on our doorstep so a few times a year when we go off to a city for a few days, be it Turin, Lyon or London, we will …
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If you have stayed at Chalet Cannelle you have probably eaten the eggs from our free range chickens and seen that they are completely spoilt. They sit on the doorstep waiting for treats and nibbles from the kitchen and regularly follow our guests to their cars in the hope of something to peck at. I …
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