One of the best ways to indulge in a totally relaxing weekend is to hop over to a friend’s house in another country and spend the whole weekend eating, sleeping, playing cards late into the night (or learning anyway!), relaxing in the garden, and acting like a kid again. The latter was achieved thanks to Nate and Caro’s very active son Gaspar, who is reaching that age where he wants to be part of everything and play everything, and their not-quite-crawling-yet-but-trying-hard-to baby Cesar. It is honestly astonishing how smart Gaspar is just a few months past his 2nd birthday he already knows how to switch on the TV (though this skill is yet to extend to realising that he should only put one DVD into the player at once ..) and, even more astoundingly, he already knows how to search for his favourite videos on youtube on the iphone! On the flip-side it means that you have to be on your toes in terms of keeping his attention! Cesar is pretty easy to handle at this stage – basically hold him and he’s happy! He is actually a very endearing baby and at the moment is very low-fuss 😉

I have to publish these photos of Gaspar though. Cracked me up and shows he has that modeling instinct in him!

The reason I was in Chateauroux with Nate and Caro was that basically they were introducing Cesar to extended family and friends. It was quite a party and the cooking and preparation was quite extensive. Aurelie, Caro’s sister, is quite the baker and it seemed like Caro and Aurelie were cooking and preparing non-stop for a couple of days!

In the mean time I was lucky to just sit back and take it all in, especially the delicious food that included:

Gourmet pizzas. Leave it to the French to put foie gras on their pizzas available for delivery! Even better, for me, is that the particular pizza place we ordered from had a number of crème fraiche (as opposed to tomato sauce) based pizzas which are right up my alley.

Fresh rotisserie rack of ribs, paella and pate from the local market. The ribs were Nate’s choice and were incredibly good. Tasty, tender, juicy and just oozing from the drippings of the roast chicken. So good. The pate was massive – the terracotta tray?bowl? not sure what to call it – was easily the 40cm in length. Caro said that she didn’t even have to pay for it until she returned the container to the market!

Tarte flambée – so yum.

And this is a treat that shouldn’t be overlooked. An incredible pastry … not sure why I thought it also needed ice-cream. It was pretty delish on its own. Caro’s family were very lucky that at this stage I was over-stuffed from the ribs and paella!

The weather was incredibly nice in Chateauroux whilst I was there. So nice that Caro even set up my laptop so I could sit in her garden and work on this blog! Heh heh. The good weather continued to the day of the lunch where more food and whole lot of alcohol was consumed.

There was literally a whole box of champagne that was consumed right at the end of the day. And, as happens when people have imbibed, the natural next step is to try and fit a latex glove over one’s head! LOL.

There was sooo much food that surprisingly one of the crumbles wasn’t even touched at the end of the day. I soon took care of that problem … and I’m not ashamed to admit that on my last day in Chateauroux I had some of the rest of the crumble with salted caramel ice cream for breakfast! A perfect end to my visit!