TouteFrance

If you’re stuck as to what to buy a francophile friend this Christmas, there’s some great websites selling an array of French food and French home accessories and I’ve found a few sites to give you some ideas.

French Home Accessories

Lavender & Sage - has a selection of lovely French home accessories from Comptoir de Famille and some unusual Alpine designs from Les Sculpteurs du Lac.

The French House - sells some really nice retro French accessories for the home, plus a nice selection of hardware for fires and doors and other unusual stuff.

French Food

Hampers always go down well at Christmas and some on offer are as follows:

Eat French Food has a range of patés, jams and olive oils.

French Flavour has various gift boxes containing patés, olive oils and wines.

Le Bonjour has some very reasonable gift baskets which include fish rillettes, jams & patés

Dordogne Direct specialises in food from south west France

Wine Lovers

This is quite an easy one as you can pick up some great French wines in your local supermarket or specialist off licences such as Oddbins or Majestic. Some of the French wines found online are as follows:

Bordeaux Undiscovered - wines from the Bordeaux region and other regions, includes a Christmas pick & mix option.

Best Cellars has a box of 12 bottles of French wine for £69.70 - very good value.

The Sussex Wine Company sells a range of French wines from a variety of regions

Vin Vert has a range of French organic and biodynamic wines

Books

Where do I start? There’s plenty of books on Amazon depending on what the recipient of your gift’s interests are from travel to language, culture, classic literature, fiction, cookery! Here’s a few French cookbooks, which is what my money would go on:

French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David, after all these years, her books are still popular and this one is on my shelf.

Ripailles by Stéphane Reynaud - I don’t know this book but the reviews of it look like it’s a good buy

Nobody Does it Better & Trish’s French Kitchen by Trish Deseine - great review on Nobody Does it Better

The French Kitchen by Joanne Harris - more great reviews from the author of Chocolat

Rick Stein’s French Odyssey - great reviews on this book from the popular chef

I like wine, but it doesn’t particularly like me. Just sniffing the stuff can bring me over all headachey, not because I drink the cheapest stuff I can lay my hands on either! If I’m going to enjoy a glass of wine, I like to enjoy it with another wine lover. Unfortunately my husband prefers real ale, so I don’t drink it much at home any more!

However, one wine that doesn’t seem to affect me too much is rosé wine, which I particularly like and it’s nice to see that it’s becoming more popular. Rosé wine is like sunshine in a glass and as long as I don’t overdo it, I much prefer it to white wine!

I recently found out about Jamie Ivey’s blog Blue Sky Living Magazine and was fascinated to find that he’s been tracking down the palest French rosé he can lay his hands on. According to his blog, the palest rosé is Clos Landry from Corsica. He’s also written a book about his journey to find this wine called ‘Extremely Pale Rosé’ with a couple more books written since.

It’s inspiring to see someone changing their whole life from being a professional worker in the UK, to following a dream in France, which I’m sure hasn’t been without its challenges. So why not pour yourself a nice glass of rosé and take a look around the blog and his magazine, available to download from the site (in French & in English, so good practice for you). Santé!