Open for visitors

Our first visitors of the year, the oyster beds reopen, and a recipe for a cheesy chicken cobbler – a recipe for happiness

This week, our friend Kate arrived from London. We spent our days walking the dogs in the sunshine, sitting in the Marine Bar, pottering around the house, going to the market, buying miraculous face creams from the pharmacy, watching terrible television (ask us anything about John Kennedy Jr, Caroline Bessette Kennedy, Tyra Banks, we have OPINIONS) cooking (me), or working on a seventh, or is it eighth, novel (her).

Halfway through the week two more friends, Vanessa and Nash, broke their drive from London here overnight. When they were about five minutes away, Vanessa called from the road. “They’re open! The oyster beds are open! I’m getting some.”

Since December, the Étang has been closed for business. Weeks of heavy rains and run off from the land contaminated the waters at the producers’ busiest time of year – you can’t have Christmas and New Year in France without serving oysters as part of the festivities. It was disastrous for the local economy. The beds being open again is certainly cause for celebration, and oysters would make the perfect starter for the chicken cobbler I’d made for dinner, a light distraction before the main event. The cobbler’s the sort of thing you can make ahead and just bung in the oven when you’re ready to eat, it’s very forgiving of traffic delays and an over-exuberant cocktail hour before dinner. It’s a good egg. (Add a chicken and egg joke here, ed.)

Oysters at last.

One of the joys of living in this house is sharing it with other people, and one of the challenges is doing that while we’re still in the middle of this huge renovation, of bringing it back to life and putting some joy back in its bones. I’m sure Bunny Mellon never had to entertain Princess Grace, the Reagans, Hubert de Givenchy and Babe Paley at Oak Spring with only one half-sized bath tub and a shower you have to hold over your head in a bathroom with no functioning lock, but here we are.

You can’t wait until everything’s finished, until everything’s done, to live your life. Don’t wait until you’ve lost the weight to buy the nice dress, until you’ve completed every requirement to apply for the job, and definitely don’t wait until you’ve given your home the whole World of Interiors treatment to have people to stay. If I’d done that, I would have deprived my friends of getting up at the crack of dawn to watch a bathtub fly through a first-floor window, and that would have been a terrible shame. What I’m saying is don’t wait to put some joy back in your bones. Start now.

What are you doing this weekend to put some joy back in your bones? Let me know in the comments.

Chicken cobbler

This isn’t strictly a French dish today, though I know it is one all of my French friends seem to like.

You can use leftover roast chicken to make this cobbler, but the benefits of poaching one for it is that you’ll have a bonus batch of the best chicken stock which you can use later for soups, sauces and risotto. This is also a great method for poaching chicken to use in salads and sandwiches.

In summer I make this with tarragon, but right now, my pot of tarragon is still in its winter slumber. Rosemary, as I’ve used today, works beautifully too. You could also add chopped chives and/or chervil to both the chicken casserole and the cobbler if you have them.

SERVES 6-8