A Breakfast Menu from Les Trois Chenes Bed and Breakfast

Breakfast is our thing at Les Trois Chenes, along with 'bed' of course, and we take a keen interest in our breakfast menu. Our standard breakfast consists of coffee, tea, chocolate or 'tisannes', (herbal teas) or anything else that we might have. One guest was pleasantly surprised to hear that we had green tea, and we have several things in the garden to make a nice cuppa.

Then we offer cereals, fruit juice, fruit, yoghurt, croissants, French bread, honey from our own bees, home made jam from fruits from our garden and eggs from our own hens (if the little darlings decide to lay!).

We also offer evening meals, and lunch for our painting holiday guests.

On special days we like to make a special effort and these are the menus we've come up with. Bon appetite!

For more of our recipes have a look at the Les Trois Chenes Recipe Book

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We don't offer a 'full English Breakfast'! Sorry all those who love a good fry-up. We are in France so we base our breakfast on a French Continental breakfast. This would normally consist of a bowl of milky coffee, a croissant, or bread and jam. As children, we were often brought to France by our Francophile mother and although I adored the coffee, I found the rest of the breakfast ok but a tad unsatisfying. On the other hand, I've had enough luke-warm, greasy, soulless fried breakfasts in English B & B's to put me off for life. At Les Trois Chenes we put all these together and concocted a breakfast which took into account my cooking abilities and wish to provide a good, healthy meal, the British need for a good, hearty feast, the French need for good coffee served in bowls and home made jam, and the Dutch who like yoghurt and muesli + fresh fruit because it's good for you.

So, what to eat for breakfast? Our breakfast is contintental + choice of cereals with yoghurt + eggs because we have our own hens.

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We opened as a Bed and Breakfast three years ago, mid-season, so 2009 was our first full year and in 2010 we had our first guests for Christmas. Panic. What to serve our guests for Christmas Day breakfast? Of course, I turned to HubPages. The writers there are full of ideas for the best breakfast, drawn from around the world and from these suggestions, amongst others, I drew up this menu:

Buck's Fizz

Fresh Fruit Salad

Cereals and yoghurt

Bread or toast with various home made jams including our rather special Medlar cheese

Home made spicy fruit bread

The German Christmas cake Stollen filled with gorgeous marzipan (we love it)!

A bowl of satsumas

Eggs scrambled with smoked salmon and served on toast

Fresh coffee, tea or chocolate

The down side? How on earth did the guests eat a Christmas lunch?

Want to try to make Medlar Cheese? Here's the recipe: Medlar Jam or Cheese Recipe

Want to know what a Medlar is? Have a look here: What is a Medlar?

For Valentine's day it has to be a 'champagne' breakfast,* and here's our Valentine Menu:

Sparkling white wine with a hint of rose (smells divine)

Fresh pink grapefruit salad in pink champagne jelly

Cereals and strawberry yoghurt from a local farm

Bread or toast with various home made jams

Croissants and French bread

Eggs cooked with red Caviar - pink and totally wonderful

A bowl of fresh fruit

Fresh coffee, tea or chocolate

*We can provide real champagne, and champagne of your choice if you let us know in advance, but we have to ask you to cover the cost of this as our basic Bed and Breakfast prices are very modest. We do not charge commission, though, or mark up the price.

Of course it has to be eggs! For our Special Easter Breakfast, in addition to cereals we are going to be cooking baked eggs and adding brioche and a Pink Grapefruit Smoothie - nothing like healthy smoothies for breakfast!

Menu

Pink Grapefruit Smoothie

Cereals and yoghurt from a local farm

Bread or toast with various home made jams

French brioche, a light, sweet cross between cake and bread

Eggs benedict, eggs served on breakfast muffins with hollandaise sauce

A bowl of fresh fruit

Fresh coffee, tea or chocolate

Other Easter Treats

Spring is a lovely time to visit Limousin and see all the new-born babies; the calves and lambs in the fields, the goslings and chicks at Les Trois Chenes. We try to make Easter special for our family and for our guests and every year we organize an incredibly popular Easter-egg hunt; the children can hold our little chicks if the timing is right, and join in our children’s and adults’ egg painting. If you are lucky, you might even be able to watch our chicks hatching out.

There are pictures and clues in my article: How to Oragnise an Easter Egg Hunt

This is one for the children. When was the last time your child asked you to prepare poached eggs on toast? Not very often if they are anything like my son! Call them Ghosts on Toast, though, and let them add the ghoulish faces with ketchup and you'll have them begging for this nourishing dish. Really.

If you book in for Halloween and jog my memory about the special breakfast, I'll put my thinking cap on for other dishes. In the meantime have a look at these:

How to make the Nastiest Nibbles for Halloween

The Fat Rat Halloween or Birthday Cake

This breakfast special is offered subject to availability only! The locals keep a diary of the weather conditions so that they know when the ideal time is going to arrive for those little lovelies to sprout. We have all sorts of field mushrooms growing, yes, in fields, and around the lake, but also just on the the verges. We often have a few on the lawn or on the paths on the way to the hens.

I also collect little purple fungus, Laccaria amethystea - the Amethyst Deceiver, which are usually eaten in an omelet. If you are very lucky, and the locals don't beat you to it, you might find ceps in the woodlands. These are also called penny buns in Britain, and are a great delicacy. In season they're sold at the roadside in the Dordogne, we are just over the border to the north. The illustration shows ceps collected by a French friend.

I've also gathered chestnuts from the sweet chestnut tree opposite our house and sorrel from the garden, what a feast.

More information and recipes:

Mushrooms from the Wild

Wild Mushroom Tart

Wild Mushroom Soup

Here are just a few more interesting bits and bobs about breakfast at Les Trois Chenes:

1. Our hens are Marans, a local Charentaise breed, famous for their dark brown eggs. If you go to one of the local animal shows, you might see eggs that are dark burgundy in colour
2. The egg yolks are super-yellow. The scrambled eggs are almost fluorescent after supermarket eggs. This is because our hens are free-range (way too free as they roam around the fields and scratch up my garden!) and they eat lots of grass and herbs.
3. We feed them only unadulterated corn and wheat.
4. Goose eggs are great for cooking with. They taste wonderful and are not at all 'strong' in flavour, although I've never tackled a whole soft boiled goose egg.
5. If we have time, we get our yoghurt from a local farm about twenty minutes drive away, Gaec de la Moulde, Lesignac Durand. I like it because it's creamy, (made from full fat milk) and very much alive. When I wrote my first Hub,it was about How to Make Your Own Natural Yoghurt and I tried the commercial brands - they barely worked, but this Yogurt is brilliant. I use one of the natural ones to make pints of yogurt for the cost of the milk.
6. The farm also makes it's own cheese which I serve for dinner
7. We keep our own bees, have a look at my husband tending them in the photos below. click on the thumb nails.

Other ideas that I came across for the perfect breakfast menu were: breakfast burritos, breakfast muffins, pancakes, and a breakfast buffet. Recipes from other Hubbers below: