True to form it raining, so it must be Monday and it must be La Rochelle airport, after a very hectic long weekend, however not everything went according to plan....
I flew over to France a day early to help prepare for the arrival of our first fee paying real live B&B guests. We did not get off to a great start when on Wednesday our fridge stopped working, so all the food in the fridge had to go in the bin and Franca went out on Thursday to buy a new fridge, luckily we had not done the shopping for the weekend. We are doing that at the last minute so everything is as fresh as possible.
On Friday morning I prepared a boeuf bourguignon and put it in the oven to slow cook, then set about making crème brulee and meringues for desserts for the weekend. I cook meringues by turn the oven up as hot as possible putting the meringues in and turning the oven off to let them cook/dry out. We have two ovens, so guess what I did, I turned up the wrong oven and destroyed the boeuf bourguignon, so the guests got chicken breasts in a white wine and mustard sauce, always a good emergency standby.
Franca had especially ordered fresh croissants, pain chocolate and fresh bread, so she could pick them up at 8:00 on Saturday morning, when our supermarket opened, but the baker did not arrive until 9:30, not good if you are serving breakfast from 8:00. Sunday however was a disaster free day and we managed to serve what we planned when we planned it, and it was good fun too. Did we make any money this weekend, I doubt it, but in this case it does not matter, we covered our costs, and learned a great deal.
So thanks to Eric and Caroline (and Maxsu too) for being understanding guests to two newbie hoteliers (you may as well count me as a newbie, its over 25 years since I worked in a professional kitchen), and also a big big thank you to Gerard who proved to be a patient, willing, enthusiastic and overall fantastic assistant over the weekend, we could not have done it without you, I hope Gerard’s friend and family will recognise this description of him, he has done everything we asked of him and more. I hope you enjoyed your holiday Gerard, and thank you for the music, he can play a mean guitar as well (if the women will just let him play!). Some may say this man is too good to be true, hopefully after this write up he will recognise himself, as you have no doubt worked out we were pleased to have him around.
In between all this being hoteliers I/we (Gerard and I) managed to make a start on room 2 which is supposed to be our summer bedroom, but may turn out to be a good letting room. Having had the new roof installed over this room and new velux windows installed it is looking quite large and spacious. I have cleared all the rubbish from the room including in some places 3 layers of carpet!! It is now ready to start building.
Oh and by the way the weather was amazing this weekend, it is the first weekend since April that Saturday and Sunday were both fantastic with temperatures above 35 degrees on both days, Friday was not bad either, with temps around 28 degrees.
Well time to get on the plane, luckily it has stopped raining so we won’t get soaked on the way to the steps. I’m back on Ryan air again so it’s a later arrival in London, which means a long day whilst I get my 5 hours work in today….
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