Cours de Cuisine at the Auberge de la Camarette, Pernes-les-Fontaines

It's nearly Christmas and in Provence that inevitably means thinking about food over the Christmas weekend. This year I was lucky enough to have a friend offer me a cookery class at the fairly sublime Auberge de la Camarette, just outside Pernes-les-Fontaines in the Vaucluse, as a Christmas present. La Camarette seems to be a bit of a secret around here - it's excellent and almost always fully booked and yet I've mentioned it to a number of people - even a couple of Provençal chefs - who don't know the place. It's set in its own large vineyard, in a former medieval silk farm, with a lovely view of Mont Ventoux - and fabulous, light, well-judged cuisine. The set menu each day uses the best local produce and wine from the vineyard is included in the 32 euro 3-course menu. No wonder the place is always booked out - it offers just about the best value in Provence.

The last time my friend and I went to cook with the talented young chef, Hugo, in May, we made stuffed quails with velouté d'asperges as an entrée. This time we made foie gras, brioches and pineapple chutney. At each stage, Hugo demonstrates what needs to be done and then helps you realise the dish. The first thing to do with the foie gras (duck, not goose, in this case) was to open the foie, trace the nerves delicately with your fingers and lift them out. Then you season the foie using black pepper, salt, a prune liqueur and cognac. (There are several different alcohols that work well depending on your taste, including muscat.)

Then we put the foie into terrines, compressed them to force air out and put them in the fridge to rest. We started on the brioches, making the pate for customers who'd dine at the Camarette during the evening. As the pate needs to rest for hours, Hugo had made our brioche pate the evening before. It was simply made with flour, yeast, water, eggs, salt and a touch of sugar. A mound of butter was then added and the mixture was left to rise. We took the dough that was already risen and rolled it on a floured surface to make round brioches which we packed in aluminium cases and put in the oven.

The fois gras was then cooked in a bain marie for around 20 minutes.

While the brioches and foie gras were cooking, Hugo made a pineapple chutney explaining the possible variations. He used fresh diced pineapple, fresh chopped ginger, raw cane sugar, wine vinegar and garlic cloves. (The garlic was left whole, just to lightly flavour the chutney, and then removed.) The result, once he had made the mixture meld and brought the flavours out, was delicious.

Now, everything stopped for a while to make a fuss of Hugo's small son who came trundling into the kitchen holding a cane far taller than he was. He announced that he wanted to see daddy and had a bit of a chat with everyone, then beetled off outside again. Hugo gave us an update on the progress of his baby daughter who is now five months old and the image of her mum.

The terrines of foie gras were now taken from the bain marie and we put weights on them to force out the melted fat. This needs to be melted on a low heat and then poured back on to the terrine to solidify. The dish can be kept for up to two weeks in a fridge but the five of us who were cooking today planned to serve it over Christmas.

The brioches came out of the oven. Hugo glazed them quickly with a little of the duck fat on a brush. He cut one brioche which we all tasted. Heaven. It was subtly flavoured and very light.

Throughout the morning, we learnt a hundred and one cooking tips as we went. Hugo is a terrific teacher as well as a terrific chef. At noon, as we worked, he served the Camarette's lovely apéro epicé - rosé or rouge as you prefer. And the kitchen, which had seen three dishes made by six people over four hours, looked as pristine as it had done at 9am.

Hugo is a very talented young chef who can teach while he cooks, help others cook all morning and then cope with a restaurant full of diners at lunchtime and in the evening. Somehow, he does it as if it's an effortless exercise!

The Camarette is rather hidden away just outside Pernes-les-Fontaines, but well worth finding. The vineyard's wine is pretty decent but the real show is the restaurant and the food. The cookery classes are really good fun and informative and make a great present for yourself or a friend, or both. Here's the website, below, if you feel like spoiling yourself while you're in the Vaucluse - at 32 euros all in for an evening meal, the value really couldn't be better.

www.domaine-camarette.com or tel.: 04 90 61 60 78.

The Camarette has rooms available too, by the way, but I don't really want to recommend them as I have a lovely apartment to rent out at my place near L'Isle-sur-Sorgue!

Hosting holidays in your home in Provence

OK, I've had it with people coming to stay in summer.

Let me tell you about the downside of owning a home in Provence. The downside is guests coming to stay. Or rather, unwelcome guests. Every summer, all summer. There are good guests and bad guests and it seems there's no escaping the bad ones.

When I first moved here in 2004 I came across an article in French Property News that said "within a few years you'll be sick and tired of people coming to stay in your house in Provence." How very negative, I thought. My home would always be open to friends and it would be a pleasure to have people visiting me in Provence from other countries.

Seven years on, however, I get the point. There are without a doubt friends I like to see and have staying. But there are many other people who rather ruthlessly, or just unthinkingly, take advantage. It's amazing how many people you haven't seen or been in touch with for years will contact you out of the blue once you live in the south of France and say "We're thinking of coming to stay with you."

Really? You won't wait for an invitation then?

And it's only when you live in a beautiful region like Provence that you face the issue of people wanting to come and stay for a week or two. Normally, you invite friends for dinner, say, and after four or five hours they go home. But imagine friends coming for dinner and then moving in for seven nights.

People will contact you with their schedule and their demands and expect that you'll simply be available and on site when they plan to descend.

Unfailingly each individual, family or group assumes that they're the only ones planning to visit in summer and unfailingly each thinks single-mindedly of their own individual holiday in Provence.
"We're planning to come for seven nights" people say. Or "It'll be expensive to hire a car but you'll be able to pick us up from Avignon/Marseille/Nimes, won't you?" "It won't be a problem that I can't eat bread, pasta, cheese, milk, tomatoes, chick peas, bananas, nuts or meat will it?"

Once people arrive it becomes obvious that they expect a taxi service to and from the station/airport, a catering service, information and a cleaning service. Only the good guests (the invited ones) ever seem to realise that they're part of a long line of holidaymakers trooping in and out all summer. To the others, their holiday is the only one. To me, though, they're the sixth, seventh or eighth bunch who've descended with their luggage, demands to be driven around Provence, inability to put their hands in their wallets and reluctance to buy food or cook a meal.

At the end of each visit, I have to clean the place, launder sheets and towels and prepare rooms for the next lot arriving. This year I've already been horrified to return from dropping a guest at the station to find she'd left a huge carrier bag of rotting rubbish overflowing and falling onto the floor in her room. As I cleaned up after her I found myself muttering that she wouldn't have come to visit for five days if I lived in Wolverhampton....

This year I've already changed my plans to fit in with a very old acquaintance I hadn't been in contact with for years who demanded to come and stay over a weekend, then changed his plans to come during the week, then announced at the last minute that the flight was too expensive and he wasn't coming after all. Thanks! By then I'd missed a weekend on the Cote d'Azur. Then another acquaintance arrived, demanded a lift in from the station, announced she was staying for a week when I'd already told her it wasn't possible, required to be driven around the region to sort out various problems with her laptop, insisted on a lift to Avignon so she could buy clothes for herself and presents for her family and firmly refused to contribute even a few centimes towards a bottle of red wine on her last night.

Today I had three different people requesting that I help them with plans for their holiday in my home or in the nearby village. "It won't take you a minute to check out local gites and recommend one" I was told. "Please check the pools are big and the bedrooms are light and airy. Bear our budget in mind too." "How will I get from Nimes to your place? Can you check train times? Maybe it'll be better if you just pick me up." "What's the best low cost airline from my place to Marseille?"

And the trouble is that whenever I get it together to make a suggestion I risk the person being disappointed in which case I invariably get the blame and the guest gets huffy. "Are you kidding? Their flights leave at 6am." Once they're here it'll be: "I don't know why you suggested that restaurant. It didn't have nearly have enough fish on the menu."

I even get the blame for bad weather. "You didn't warn us that the mistral could blow in summer. We wouldn't have come this week if we'd known."

No-one ever seems to realise that it costs me money and ties up my time to host their holidays. It also disrupts my own plans every summer. Each party or group seems to imagine that it's nothing really, using my home, my electricity, my food, my shower, my car and my petrol for a week or so. And they're right. It's no big deal when it's for one week. But it's not for one week! They may only be staying for a week but there were probably people staying for the six weeks before them and people due to come in the six weeks after. My summer becomes one long round of fetching guests from the airport, ferrying them around the sights, helping them organise their itineraries and onward journeys, getting them medical care when they need it, being on stand-by to bring them back from town when they've done their shopping and of course planning their meals from dawn to dusk.

And then there are the breakages. I've rarely had guests who don't break things. It's normal, I know, because they're not in their own surroundings. So they tend to yank at door handles, wrench the shower attachment off the wall, knock furniture against windows as they move things around to suit themselves, break plates and glasses and crack the toilet seat. Invariably, they blame the things they've broken. "Something wrong with that kettle" they'll say sternly. "I just touched it and the handle fell off."

I gloomily add the kettle to the list of broken things I need to replace.

And then there are gifts.

Mysteriously, I have hardly ever had a guest arrive with a gift or leave a gift on parting. Guests can stay night after night, make full use of my unpaid taxi service, help themselves to my rosé wine, elbow their way to my laptop so they can check their email, shower twice a day till all the hot water's gone and leave their sheets and towels in a heap for me to deal with when they leave - and yet hardly one of them has ever thought to arrive with a bottle of wine or leave so much as a bar of lavender soap when their stay's over. In contrast, almost every guest takes great pleasure in showing me the gifts they've bought for their child/mother/husband/boyfriend/self. "I got these terrific sunglasses for Bob" they'll say. "And I thought I'd take this champagne home for dad." "Clothes are cheap here" they say. "I bought myself these jeans, this hat, this shirt and these boots. Bit extravagant but I thought - well - I'm on my holiday!"

Great. Meanwhile I'm standing there cooking the food I shopped for and paid for after they called to say they wouldn't be able to get to the supermarket because they were having so much fun spending money on themselves.

So there you are. That's a snapshot of summer when you own a house in Provence. You can easily end up running a free hotel and working as a full-time, unpaid holiday organiser. I'm not kidding. If I accepted every request for accommodation, advice and help with holiday organisation I would literally be working full-time, for free, all through the summer. And subsidising dozens of holidays out of my own pocket.

I've called a halt to it this summer. I had to. I don't have a 3 to 4000 euro fund spare with which to subsidise other people's holidays. I fear some friends and acquaintances will take offence but, as the French say, tant pis. I've done it for 5 years and I'm not doing it any more. There are certain friends who are still very welcome and they know who they are. The others will have to manage their holidays by themselves because this hotel in Provence is closed!