A Valentine Breakfast Menu

Valentine's Day is a good excuse to go over the top with our breakfast menu and I'm always looking out for good breakfast ideas for our bed and breakfast in Limousin, South West France, especially for special celebrations, when we want to serve the best breakfast ever. I do like to have a healthy breakfast menu so anyone on a diet won't find the calories being piled on, but on the other hand, holiday breakfasts have to be scrumptious too.

For special days we serve spiced bread, eggs Benedict, breakfast muffins, breakfast burritos, pink scrambled eggs with caviar, breakfast pancakes, delicious smoothies and so much more for breakfast, although not all at once of course!

Image: Valentine breakfast at Les Trois Chenes guest house in Limousin, South West France: pink caviar scrambled eggs

This work, including all pictures and illustrations, by Barbara Walton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permission to use must be sought in writing.

Please note that all images, unless otherwise attributed, are the property of Barbara Walton

For Valentine's Day the way to a girl's heart is through her stomach (and I've heard the same goes for guys) so if you're looking for a Valentine Breakfast menu to that gets to the parts other recipes can't reach, then this is the book for you.

I've missed out the cereals and yoghurt! We normally offer coffee, tea, herb teas or hot chocolate, fruit juice, a choice of cereals, fruit and natural yogurt, bread or toast with butter, honey and jam, croissants, brioche or pain au chocolat, fresh eggs from our hens and a fruit bowl. Of course you don't have to eat everything!

Take a look at our site here www.lestroischenes.com, or contact us on info@lestroischenes.com

Red Caviare adds a touch of luxury

SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH RED CAVIARE FOR TWO

Ingredients

4 large eggs (fresh, free range are best!)

small jar of red caviare

Splash of milk

Butter (optional)

Seasoning - salt and coursely ground pepper

2 slices of hot buttered toast

Method

Melt the butter in a pan, (if you wish to add butter; I think the eggs are just as nice without). Beat the eggs in a bowl and add to the butter. Add splash of milk, say two tablespoons and salt. Heat gently stirring all the time as the eggs cook, when they are just firm and cooked add a teaspoon or two of caviare. Cut the toast into heart shapes with a heart shaped cutter, then put the cutter onto the plate, fill with the scrambled eggs and press firmly. Lift the cutter off carefully. Sprinkle with pepper and serve with a rose on the side to decorate!

Shape your fried eggs, scrambled eggs and cookies with these heart shaped egg shapers and heart shaped cookie cutters. It's just a bit of fun!

... nothing like local, traditional produce

The farm where we often buy our yoghurt and cheese, Gaec de la Moulde, is about twenty minutes drive from Videix, on the road to Lesignac Durand. They produce milk and make their own yoghurt and cheese and, if I have time and have a few bookings, I enjoy the pretty drive to this wonderfully picturesque farm. The yogurt is full cream, rich and full of flavour. Their natural yogurt is also brilliant for making my own yoghurt, which I do by the pan-full, and I use their fresh farm milk to make it. No artificial additives there!

Breakfast for two

EGGS BENEDICT

Ingredients

A little white wine vinegar to poach eggs

4 large eggs (fresh, free range are best!)

2 muffins

Hollandaise sauce

4 slices cured ham, pancetta or bacon

Butter

Method

Fry your ham, poach your eggs, toast and butter your muffins. Put the ham followed by the eggs onto the muffin and top with sauce. If you like you can grill them to slightly brown the sauce.

Nothing like a freshly laid egg!

We are fortunate to have enough land to have truly free range hens. It is true that we make a six foot enclosure, but this doesn't stop the hens going wherever they please! Our hens rove all day in the hay meadow, under the hedges and in our flower garden! They eat grass and herbs and this means that the egg yolks are an incredible, bright yellow and they are full of natural goodness.

On top of this we feed our hens just maize and wheat together with a bit of dry bread from time to time: nothing is wasted here if I can help it!

Most of our hens are copper black marans, a local Charante breed of dark coloured hens with coppery necks. They are an egg and meat breed, so we get fewer eggs than we might, but the eggs that we do get are a wonderful, dark brown. At their best the eggs can be a rich burgundy colour, but, alas, I've never achieved this with my tiny flock.

And serve our own fruit when in season

Life is just a bowl of cherries, or that's the way it seems here. If not cherries, which are ready in June, it's plums, then raspberries, strawberries, blackcurants, peaches and grapes, apples and, last of all, medlars.

We also have wild fruits, blackberries, elderberries and sloes. I try to make as much of our own jam, cheeses and jellies as I can, but keeping up is hard work! It's fun, though, going through my Granny's old cook books and finding new and interesting combinations. I had fun making apple jelly flavoured with lavender this year.

Sweets for your sweet ...

We have our own bees at Les Trois Chenes. They have all the wild flowers of Limousin to produce their honey and it tastes gorgeous. We collect the honey from up to three hives in the autumn and extract most of the honey, filter it and put it into jars. That's all. We don't intervene any more than that with the product. Over winter the liquid honey solidifies and crystalises. This is a natural process and while you can gently warm it to recreate the liguid state, we like to just leave ours - it stays on the bread more easily! What could be more natural?

Limoges is famous for its beautiful, translucent, fine and strong porcelain and to this day porcelain is produced in Limousin. You can find some excellent bargains if you visit one of the many factory shops. Why not make a shopping holiday of it? I've written several guides which you might find useful, and if you're thinking of buying a loved one a Valentine gift ...... then what could be better?

A super Valentine's Day gift for anyone who loves entertaining, porcelain or just plain shopping would be a break in Limousin, home of the world famous, collectible Limoges porcelain.

Stay in our B&B, dine overlooking the lake or at the foot of the fairytale castle at Rochechouart. There are superb restauraunts that will cater for a really special meal within a short drive of Les Trois Chenes. Take romantic walks along the riverside at Saint Junien and check out the factory shop there.

Limoges is only 50 minutes away and there you're spoiled for choice when it come to bijou boutiques or factory shops selling some of the world's most beautiful porcelain.

but if you can't make it to Limousin, Limoges porcelain is still only a click of the mouse away and I've selected some of the most romantic porcelain on line.