You wouldn’t think it would be too hard to have a barbecue – all you need is a barbecue, a fine day and a bit of steak. Wrong! Getting these three things together almost proved to be an impossibility!
I think there was a barbecue in the courtyard of our apartment in Paris but the snow was somewhat of a deterrent.
Spain was full of fine days, but the places we stayed in were lacking in barbecues.
Our little house with the castle in the backyard had a lovely bit of lawn in front of the river, a couple of fine days and a boulangerie around the the corner, there was even a pair of tongs, but no barbecue. ( what is about the French and Spanish that they don’t have tongs? We did manage to buy something that looked a bit like tongs, but they were just not the same!)
The first couple of days at Watermeadows were fine and we sat in the sunshine in the backyard eyeing off the Weber and discussing what we would buy to barbecue. For the remaining 8 days the Weber sat forlornly in the rain while we sat inside in front of the fire.

Our last stay in France is in the ‘little summer house’ in Landreville, it has a lawn and a barbecue but on arrival the long range forecast was basically ‘cloudy with rain’ for every day, apart from one day which had the interesting forecast of ‘rainy with some showers’. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that our next barbecue would be back home.
But on day 78 a glimpse of sunshine through the blue-grey sky brought with it our barbecue window of opportunity!
A 20 minute trip later and we were standing in front of the meat counter at the Carrefours supermarket. I don’t think the French do a lot of barbecuing, there certainly isn’t a section with a delicious array of meat suitable to slap on to the old barbecue plate. In fact there didn’t seem to be anything at all suitable, but finally we decided on entrecôte and I managed to explain to the butcher what I wanted.

A quick stop to buy some champagne and I couldn’t resist stopping at the Jean Louis Fays cellar for a Champagne Réserve and a Champagne Rosé

Back to the little summer house to see if we could beat the ever threatening grey skies!

Half an hour later we were enjoying a delicious meal of steak, salad and rosé champagne, finishing just as we felt the first drops of rain!