Cooking in South-west France
. . . share a little bit of paradise

Whether you need a base to discover the Lot-et-Garonne in your own time or wish to book a course, Le Gargantua is your answer.

Your holiday is "à la carte": come to cook or paint and organise your holiday at your own pace, or indulge in a gastro or romantic short break and let your hosts take care of you.

Based in a rural location, Le Gargantua is a haven of tranquillity, but still only eight minutes drive from Casteljaloux, a pretty market town, with shops, restaurants, cafés, swimming pools, lake, golf course, etc.

The region has so much to offer, there is so much to see and do!

Le Gargantua is run by British husband Marc and French wife Marlène, at their 1850 farmhouse which they have beautifully renovated. They arrived from Calais (North of France) to Anzex in 2004 after falling in love with the house, the region, the region's laid-back way of life and its wonderful food. It represented the ideal place to start a family, leaving behind the rat race and the grey skies.

Marc and Marlene cannot wait to share with you their little paradise.

French cuisine is rich in history and tradition, but South-West cooking in particular is one of the most diverse, thanks to the geography and the climate. The culinary heritage is very much alive, being passed from one generation to the next.

Our cooking holidays are designed to make you discover and practice South-West France cuisine. It is all about fresh seasonal ingredients and local produce, and mostly rustic, heart warming food . . . no fancy nouvelle cuisine here! Half of the holiday will consist in going to local markets and farms to sample and learn about the local specialities, and the remaining half will be spent in the kitchen, producing local dishes for our meals.

You will leave le Gargantua having learnt many of the basic techniques for preparing French dishes amongst which are mayonnaise, omelette, pâté, quiche, finger-licking gravy, confit and various stews and gratins, without using any measuring instrument. The goal is to teach you so that you have a feel for the food, and thereby increase your confidence so you can improvise cooking a French meal without a recipe book.

This totally informal workshop is run in English or French by Marlène, your host. Passionate about food, experienced both in teaching and cooking, she is dedicated to sharing with you traditional French home cooking techniques and recipes.

Experience cooking from scratch - pick aromatic herbs from the garden, collect fresh eggs every day, prepare home-bred poultry, smoke salmon, trout, meat or cheese, pick fruit and mushrooms (in season) . . . ingredients are sourced from local producers, farms and markets. You will be making bread, stews, roasts, soups, quiches, pâtés, tarts, cakes, preserves, you will be curing and smoking meat or even making your own sausages. It is all flexible, you can do as little or as much as you wish.

Meet Geronimo (the two year old cockerel) and his troupe

What better way to discover the area than visiting village markets and farms, and being introduced to the succulent regional products such as Bazas beef, cèpes, prunes, gariguette strawberries, melon, asparagus, Marmande tomatoes, Roquefort. You will also visit local food events and festivals when they.

At Le Gargantua they think that cooking comes from the heart, and that food should make your belly smile, so they make sure you learn to cook dishes that you will enjoy producing back home for years to come, from fancy dinner parties to every day family meals. Of course they will also make sure that you have great fun in the process. It is your holiday after all!

The purpose-built kitchen has four distinct and fully equipped workstations, each with its own stainless-steel five ring cooker. There is a maximum of six participants per course, to make sure everyone gets individual attention.

Your holiday program:

• You arrive on Sunday afternoon, and are welcomed with drinks and canapés. We get to know each other a bit. Basically, you just settle in and make yourself at home. We meet up for dinner.

• On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we leave after breakfast to go to a market or visit a producer. We come back to prepare a quick lunch based on our findings. After lunch, we meet again in the kitchen, where everyone gets involved in a real team effort to prepare a typical local dinner.

• Friday is free, to give you a chance to relax and visit (If you wish, we can drive you to town). Lunch is provided if you stay at home. We meet up early evening for our "aperitif" and dinner.

• Departure is on Saturday morning.

Depending on the season and on their availability, we will visit some producers among the following: cheese maker, duck farm, game farm, wine-producing château, bread maker, fish farm . . .

Spring

This is the time of year when we have had enough of the cold, when flowers start blooming, lambs and chicks are to be seen all around, new vegetables appear, everything gets colourful again, including our plates. Our Spring course celebrates just that!

Among many other ingredients, we will cook with the organic asparagus grown by our neighbour, we will smoke salmon bred in a local farm, locally made goat cheese, local lamb and veal, and our home-bred guinea-fowl. We will also prepare succulent desserts with the local "gariguette" strawberries (from April).

Summer

Very warm weather, very long days. We will be preparing meals in the coolness of the house, and come out onto the terrasse to enjoy them as the sun cools down. We will make the best of the abundant fruit and vegetable, preparing great dips and sauces to accompany them.

We will get beautiful fruit and vegetable from a farmer down the road, cook home-bred duck and chicken, we will make terrines with locally bred rabbit and the garden herbs, make fresh pasta, soufflés with local goat cheese, tarts with the garden peaches, cherry clafoutis . . . We will smoke salmon or trout, and make some preserves that you will take home, and much more.

Autumn

The scenery is changing, getting ready for winter, so are we. This is the return of the pot-roasts, the season of game. The whole region catches the "blue disease" (this is how they call the hunt for wild pigeons). It also is the time to pick mushrooms, and the "season" of the fat duck. We will enjoy our evenings on the terrace gathered around the outdoor chimney.

We will go to the forest down the road and pick wild mushrooms, we will get our fat ducks from a farm and make our own confit, rillettes and cook the foie gras, we will make game pâté, onion jam, home-bred coq au vin, rabbit in prunes with home made fresh pasta, tarte Tatin, we will cook some Bazas beef . . .

Winter

At this time of year, we need to come back to a cosy home, enjoy the warmth of the wood-burning stove, and give in to our appetite for rich soups, stews and other belly-warmers! It is also time to make good use of the confits made earlier in the year.

We will make the local garlic soup, the unmissable "cassoulet", home-bred chicken "fricassée", we will use Bazas beef for a beautiful "daube" and an oxtail stew, we will make the famous poule au pot (hen), and pot-roast home-bred guinea-fowl with cabbage . . .

French Christmas

This is serious business, pure indulgence! All about quality and quantity combined to feed the people you love. A feel of luxury, but without too much fuss, not to lose the honest quality of the noble ingredients.

We will cook with: Scallops, fresh foie-gras, truffles, lobster, home-smoked salmon, traditional home-bred roast turkey or goose, Christmas log, chocolate truffles . . .

The house, Filou, is situated in the beautiful Lot-et-Garonne, in Anzex, a little village nestled between the sunflower fields and the beautiful pine forests of the Landes de Gascogne. It is a traditionally renovated Nineteenth century stone farmhouse, with plenty of original features.

Wildlife is all around - before the land was fenced, it was not unusual to see deer in the garden. A whole family of them is seen regularly, as they have found a good grazing patch about three hundred metres away from the house. Rabbits, badgers, hedgehogs, pheasants, partridges, birds of prey and herons are the most common representative of the wildlife around the house.

Around here, the absence of pollution and the wonderful clarity of the skies allows you to admire the stars at night. Marc and Marlene were stunned by the sight when they first moved to live at Filou, never having seen them with such clarity before! It is an deal location for the night of shooting stars in August.

All guests have free access to the dining room, the terrace, the lounge with its comfortable sofas and TV, reading area and pool table, with stunning panoramic views of the countryside and of course the two and a half acres of fenced garden. There is also secure off-road parking.

Facilities include:

• tea and coffee making
  
• satellite TV
  
• videos and DVD's
  
• music centre
  
• library
  
• full size pool table
  
• board games + games console
  
• outdoors games
  
• Ping-Pong table
  
• mountain bikes (day rental)