You may notice a slight anomaly with the photo:

I know! It's sunny, right? In Manchester!

Only kidding, y'all. Yep, there's a big ol' pile of fence panels on the lawn. Could it be - perhaps - that we have finally - begun work on our driveway?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to confirm that having suffered the indignity of being the proprietors of The Most Hideous Front Garden On The Street for the past four years, we are finally doing something about the situation. I'd like to say that the contractors are busy beavering away even as we speak, but what they've actually done is dig a huge muddy hole and bugger off. The swines. Still, I suppose a huge muddy hole is actually an improvement on what we had before. More deets coming up soon!

Anyhoo, back to the garden. We have tomatoes:

Cosmos:

Lavender:

And fluffy Jack Russells who like to carry around large stones between their jaws. Yeah, it's pretty weird.

You can check out all the monthly photos (well, apart from the errant July) in a gallery here.

Here's what you need for the pastry: 170g plain white flour, 70g unsalted butter, 1 beaten egg, plus sea salt. And for the filling, you'll need 3 large white onions (sliced finely), 50g unsalted butter, 1 tsp caster sugar, 2 egg yolks, 150ml half‐fat créme fraîche, a handful of fresh thyme leaves, and freshly ground black pepper.

To make the pastry, rub the butter into the flour and salt until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the beaten egg and a small amount of cold water (around 2-3 tablespoons) and mix until you have a soft dough. Place into a bowl, cover, and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Next up, melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add the onions and sugar, and cook very slowly over a low heat with the lid on for 30 minutes. Then add the thyme leaves.

Once the dough has finished chilling, roll it out and place into a lightly buttered tart tin. Having just watched the Jamie's Kitchen episode where Kerryann's chocolate tarts all get stuck to the tins cos she buttered but didn't flour them, I dusted some flour around the tin as well and it worked a treat. The recipe from Abel and Cole suggested a 20cm tin, but mine was 30cm and it worked just fine. Place a circle of greaseproof paper on top of the dough, cover it with baking beans (or regular large dried beans) and bake at 180 degrees Celcius for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and discard the beans and paper.

By the way, I have no clue what this business with the beans is supposed to accomplish, but I am nothing if not obedient, even though it feels like a fairly bonkers thing to do.

While the pastry is baking, mix the egg yolks with the créme fraîche and some pepper. Drain any fat off the onions, spoon into the pastry case and spread the egg mix across the top. I added some grated parmesan at this stage on the grounds that cheese improves literally everything. Turn the oven up to 190 degrees Celcius and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden on top.

This tart tasted fantastic warm from the oven - and even better cold the next day. Serve with new potatoes and salad, or maybe just rive it out of the pan with your bare hands, as the mood takes you. Abel and Cole think it should serve six people but there's no way I'm sharing something this good with five other peeps. So I'd say it will feed two at a pinch, but only if you really, really like the other person.

What have you cooked recently?

Oh, and if anyone can come up with a foodstuff that would not be improved by the addition of cheese, then I'd love to hear about it :-)

Andre and I drove from Manchester, England to Provence, France at the start of July - here's how the mammoth journey went down.

And if you have no interest in driving to France then hey, you can just skip the text and look at the pretty pictures instead.

The Rhone Valley - unsurprisingly, there are quite a lot of vineyards

First up, take the eurotunnel. It's three times as fast as the ferry, and is the only really valid option if you're travelling with dogs. You drive directly into this space-age train, get mildly jolted around for half an hour, and bam, you're in France.

Don't even think about driving in France without sat nav. It takes away all the stress of driving in a foreign country. The first time we went to France we casually rocked up in Calais with no maps whatsoever, confidently expecting to see signs directing us to Brittany - er, nope. When you exit the ferry and hit the autoroute, you have two options - Boulogne, or Paris. That's it. And if you're not going to either destination? Cue long diversion round Calais while we tried to find somewhere that sold road maps. Yeah, I'm pretty embarrassed just thinking about how clueless we were. By the way, you should choose Paris. That will take you down south.

Provençal lavender

I'd also recommend taking a French road atlas (buy it from Amazon in advance) in case your sat nav goes on strike.

Driving to the south of France isn't really that much cheaper than getting flights. By the time you've paid €1.45 for a gallon of fuel (which at the current glorious exchange rate works out at about £1.20 a gallon), the petrol alone costs basically the same as the flights. On top of that you'll need to pay for the toll roads.

People - take it from someone who knows - just take the toll roads. On the map, it looks as if you have two options - one toll road, and then a free road that runs parallel to it. Except what the map doesn't tell you is that the toll road is a motorway, and the free road is at best the equivalent of an English A-road, and at worst a country lane. And these dinky little roads have low speed limits to match, so unless you fancy driving all the way to Provence at a stately 60 kmph, then you need to take the toll road.

Gordes

We were forced to exit the motorway at one stage due to a crash and get on the free road instead (and being obedient English people, it didn't even occur to us to ignore the 'sortie obligatoire' signs like all the French peeps did) - I kid you not, it took 4 hours to drive 10km. Never again. My advice would be don't exit the motorway unless it's literally on fire. Ignore the signs telling you to exit - you'll get there faster just by chilling in your vehicle and waiting for the motorway to open again.

Anyway, the tolls from Calais to Provence (one way) cost in the region of €75. Totally worth it.

French service stations are way nicer than English service stations. There are lots of places to stop along the way, called aires - some just have picnic tables and toilets, others also have petrol, shops and playgrounds for the children. The first couple of times we drove to France we took a large picnic with us in a coolbox - not a good plan. Large meal plus warm weather = need to take a siesta. Not ideal when you're, y'know, driving n all. You're better off buying a nice freshly made sandwich au jambon and a can of red bull from an aire shop.

Avignon

So the big question is - how long does it take? Hmm. I can't lie to you, it takes a loooong time. The section from Calais to Lyon is pretty speedy, with the traffic gradually increasing the further south you get - but once you get past Lyon (for goodness sake, don't even think about driving through Lyon even though the sat nav will try and convince you that this is the preferable route), what appears to be a short distance on the map takes ages and ages and ages, due to the massive amounts of traffic.

It's not so bad out of season, but in July it took hours - numerous bouchons (a bouchon is a cork, and also a traffic jam), trucks on fire, and so on. Particularly because as soon as the traffic comes to a standstill, all the French dudes promptly spill out of their vehicles and start wandering up and down the motorway. So it takes a while to round everyone back up, identify their vehicles, drive for a couple of miles before you reach the next bouchon and everyone immediately does exactly the same thing.

Bonnieux rooftops

To give you an indication of how long it can take at peak season in July - on the way there, it took 10.5 hours, including lots of short breaks for the purposes of human and Jack Russell leg stretching. On the way back, it took a majestic 14 hours. Nice. I'd advise you to book the latest chunnel crossing you can, because even though you're allowed two hours on either side before they make you pay extra, it's impossible to predict how long the journey could take.

On another important note - attention, English drivers! The fast lane in France is not for you to park your Range Rover in and cruise at a steady 80km per hour! It is strictly for overtaking only, and the French get very upset when they find an English moron blocking the fast lane the way we're all accustomed to doing back home.

L'Isle sur la Sorgue

Wow, turns out I had a lot to say about driving in France. Who knew?

Anyway, it's all totally worth it cos it means you can take these:

To see this:

And do this:

Yeah. Loving it.

You'll need 115g butter, 115g brown sugar, 2 eggs, 5 tbsp crème fraîche, 200g nectarines (apricots, cherries and peaches would also work well), 125g self raising flour, 1/4 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp nutmeg:

Blend the butter and sugar together until evenly mixed. Add the eggs and beat enthusiastically. Then add the crème fraîche and mix well.

Chop the nectarines and add them to the batter:

Quickly fold in the flour and baking powder until smooth, and then transfer to an 8 inch cake tin:

Dust with nutmeg, and then bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celcius for 25-30 minutes. The cake will be ready when you can stick a fine skewer into the centre and it comes out clean.

The cake has a lovely dense, moist texture - and thanks to the crème fraîche it has a lovely sweet tang. Great with a mid-morning espresso or a late afternoon glass of Prosecco!

Have you tried any new recipes lately?

A while back, I decided to upgrade my wardrobe to include a fabulous shoe storage/display unit, inspired by the Christian Louboutin store in Paris.

So I drew the design. Andre and I made the shoe storage unit. I painted the unit. I choose (and purchased) the wallpaper. Ariound three months went past when we did absolutely nothing. And finally, last weekend, we got around at putting up the wallpaper. "This isn't proper DIY", grumbled my husband, the wallpaper-hating power tool-lover, but he was eventually galvanized into action by the promise of Donald Russell steak for dinner once we got the job done.

Here's how the wardrobe was looking before we got started:

We (gingerly) pulled out the unit:

Pasted paper onto the sides, and the back:

And finally the rest of the back, the ceiling and the floor. Dead simple.

Actually, it wasn't dead simple. It took six hours. There was some cursing involved. Especially when we realised we somehow had to find all the pre-drilled holes for the door hinges and the shelf supports through the paper once it had been pasted. Nightmare. Paste went EVERYWHERE. And it turns out that the only way to wallpaper the ceiling of a small wardrobe is to hold up the paste-daubed strip with your head while simultaneously pressing it into place. Nice.

Andre pretty much didn't think it was worth the effort. I totally thought it was worth the effort. Men, eh.

So anyway, here's the before shot:

And here's the Big Reveal:

Man, I love my new wardrobe.

And yeah, I totally can't walk in the nude platform CLs. Those be-yotches are FIERCE!

Presenting - two weeks in Provence as interpreted by The Mighty Hipstamatic...

Le petit déjeuner:

Freakin' delicious apricot juice:

Man, this stuff is so good. And you just can't buy it in the UK. Well, you can, but you have to order it online and it costs mucho dineros, whereas the French stuff is available in every grocery for about £1.50 for a large bottle. I cleaned out the local shops before we went home, and now have a large store of it in the kitchen cupboards. Sweet.

Tarte aux fraises:

Travelling Weber braai (yeah, it's all about the food):

Obligatory new holiday-flip-flops-from-Accessorize:

Obligatory huge bug-eye sunglasses:

Lavender:

The view from the shady vine-covered pergola of Cottage Number Two:

And the vines themselves:

Sleepy boy Jack Russell:

And sleepy girl Jack Russell:

Le sigh. Je t'aime, Provence. We haven't had a drop of sunshine in Manchester since returning home two weeks ago. Boo, English summers! On the plus side, I have another two weeks of holiday right now, which means that although it's only 10:30 am, I'm feeling a little bit sleepy so what the heck, I'm going to gather up the Jack Russells and go take a nap. Liking it.

À demain!

Contains: Gorgonzola, cheddar, parmesan, mozzerella, cheese flavouring....

Um, pardonnez-moi? Cheese flavouring? On a four-cheese pizza? Why, pray tell, is it necessary to add cheese flavouring to a pizza that is literally festooned with cheese?

It would be nice to round off this story by saying that I immediately pulled the pizza from the oven, tossed it into the bin with a shudder of horror, and went out to buy some nice organic sausages or something instead - but hey, we were starving, so we ate it anyway, and it tasted great.

But shortly after that, we started gradually switching all our food to organic, cutting out all processed food, tearing up the take-away menus, interrogating the unsuspecting local butcher Jamie Oliver-style... fast-forward to a year later, and all our fruit, vegetables, meat and fish are delivered from Abel and Cole, I would never dream of ordering in a take-away and if we ever fancy having a pizza, well, I just make one. Here's how.

There are dozens of ways to make pizza dough, and usually I alternate between various recipes depending on how much time I have (good ol' Jamie has one in Jamie's Italy that only calls for 15 mins rising time, for example). The following recipe is taken from The Food of Italy.

Mix one dessert spoon of caster sugar, one 7g packet of yeast, and 45ml warm water. Leave for 5 mins to activate. Meanwhile, put 225g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, and two table spoons of olive oil into a bowl. Add the yeast mixture, and start mixing with a fork. Gradually add around 60ml warm water - do this slowly, mixing as you go along - don't just dump it all in at once cos you probably won't need it all, and you'll end up with a big ol' sticky mess.

Once the mixture has become too dense to mix with your fork, turn it out onto a floured surface and knead it for five minutes, adding more water or flour as required, until you have a firm, springy dough that is not sticky.

Rub the inside of a bowl with olive oil. Roll your dough ball around the inside of the bowl to lightly coat it in oil, score a shallow cross in the top of the bowl with a sharp knife, cover the bowl, and leave it in a warm place for 1-1.5 hours.

While the dough is rising, make your tomato sauce. I usually sauté some chopped garlic and basil leaves in olive oil, chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes, add a splash of balsamic vinegar, and then leave to simmer for 15-20 mins over a low heat.

Once the dough has risen, punch it down to the original size. Roll it out on a floured surface to around 0.5cm deep, and transfer to a baking tray. This amount of dough should make a pizza around 15 inches in diameter - and you can always freeze any left-over dough.

Brush the crust in olive oil, and spoon the tomato sauce over the entire base. Add whatever toppings you feel like (I used parma ham - probably cos we didn't have anything else in the fridge at the time), and arrange a sliced up mozzerella ball over the surface. I also grated some parmesan over the top.

Cook in the centre of a 220 degrees Celcius oven for around 20 minutes. Depending on how ferocious your oven is, how thinly you rolled out the base, and how crispy you like the topping and the crust  to be, you may need a little longer or a little shorter, so keep an eye on it.

The final product - yummy. Nice n crispy. And if you have pizza dough and tomato sauce in the freezer (which I usually do, cos I always make double amounts) then you can get a homemade pizza on the table in under 30 minutes, which is less time than it would take for a take-away pizza to arrive. And no cheese flavouring in sight, thanks very much.

Any other take-away/randomly unnecessary artificial ingredient haters out there? Do tell :-)

Bonnieux is a gorgeous hilltop village in the Luberon:

Source: www.balades-de-reve.com

It overlooks the the entire Luberon valley:

And it has a very popular market on Friday mornings:

Most of the peeps in these photos are French tourists - you know you've found a nice part of France when the French themselves come on holiday here.

Would you like a little view to accompany your pomme de terres?

Sporting a fancy hat is apparently a prerequisite to fish-mongering in Provence:

I bought a kilo of cherries from this lady cos the sign said 1 kilo for 3.5 euro.

Turns out 1 kilo of cherries is a LOT - but that actually worked out well cos we got stuck in a two hour bouchon on the way home (a bouchon is a cork, and also a traffic jam) and I whiled the time away by munching my way through the entire box of cherries and tossing the stones out of the sun roof. I'm sure that in ten years time people driving down the Autoroute du Soleil will marvel at the cherry tree grove growing in the central reservation.

À bientôt!

If you've ever fancied becoming the temporary proprietor of a Provençal olive grove, then Les Cigalles is the place to be. It's an ancient stone cottage set within a large olive grove - and I don't just mean there's a few olive trees here and there; it's literally an olive grove that is farmed out of season by the property owners, who will also sell you their organically produced oil.  

Here's the driveway leading up to the cottage:

And the maison itself:

One of the things that makes Les Cigalles so special is the complete and utter silence - well, apart from the cicadas, bien sûr! Because the house is 1.5km from the nearest village, Cabrières d'Avignon, and set in the middle of two acres of private land, it's completely secluded and tranquil, which makes for a highly relaxing holiday.

And of course, you also have the beautiful mosaic pool:

Which comes complete with A View over the valley, that can be admired from the comfort of your lounger:

The pool is set on its own gated terrace, so if you're heading out there with your dogs (or dog, I suppose - I keep forgetting that there must be peeps out there who think one dog is plenty, thanks very much) you needn't worry about them wandering off and accidentally falling in the pool. In fact, the property is walled in on three sides by the dry-stone olive terraces, so you can let your little rascals wander around among the trees without coming to any harm.

The property owners are charming - they provided a vase of fresh flowers from their own garden, plus a bottle of local wine (I find that most French landlords often want to basically get your deposit and get out of there, so the attention to detail in this respect is lovely). Cabrières d'Avignon is a 5 minute drive away, and you could probably walk it in about 20 minutes if you really wanted to, although personally the thought of walking all that distance in 36 degree heat filled me with horror - um, I'm on holiday! Yeah, I'm basically lazy. I read a comment in the guest book from some dudes who walked from Les Cigalles to Gordes and back in August (8km), and highly recommended it - nutters.

The Olive Princess:

Here are a couple of photos of the interior - white-washed walls and wooden beams, plus tile floors (excellent for cooling down fluffy Jack Russells):

I think my only caveat about Les Cigalles is that the interior is very small. Although there are two double bedrooms, there is no way that four adults could fit in the house comfortably. Two adults is perfect, and you could probably squeeze in a couple of young children as well - but definitely not four grown-up peeps.

The kitchen comes with all the basics, but you'll need to bring any specialist equipment ie sharp knives, bbq utensils (the roofed, shady outdoor dining area has a little outdoor oven/bbq with a chimney), kitchen foil, cling film, olive oils and spices - the usual.

We loved our stay at Les Cigalles, and would definitely recommend it. Olive trees, a gorgeous view, immaculate pool area, utter peace and quiet, and Jack-Russell friendly - nous aimons beaucoup!