Nothing like sunshine and sizzling spring-almost-summer temperatures to get me out the door and into the nearest grassy space to loll about on a blanket imitating a Manet canvas (with clothes on!). If I don’t feel like stuffing baguettes with chicken, chives and avocado, filling rice paper rolls with mango and cucumber or skewering strawberries and tucking them into my picnic basket I’ve got a more than respectable back-up for the next month – Relais & Châteaux! Okay, so the Déjeuner sur l’herbe is a bit extravagant at €45 per adult but then look what’s on the menu just an hour or so from Paris. At The Royal Champagne, chef has decided on foie gras and Champagne jelly, asparagus and portions of roastbeef, chicken, ham and sausage for his goody bag, along with ambrosial bubbly and pink, vanillary Reims biscuits to dunk in it. Chef Serin-Mouli at Château de Courcelles thinks prawn salad, cucumbers with mint, bites of chorizo, marinated red pepper and a deluxe club sandwich of duck foie gras, smoked duck and confit orange is the way to go alfresco. There’s cheese, too, and a zingy dessert of fresh peach and lemon verbena. All I need to do is book a basket, pick it up, then plonk down anywhere they tell me: amidst the vines (Royal Champagne) or under a leafy bower by a canal (Château de Courcelles). If I lived closer to Valence I’d be making a beeline for Maison Pic where 3-star chef Anne-Sophie Pic is ladling her special gazpacho into a jar, serving up caillete sausage or Anne-Sophie risotto and homemade macarons and sending picknickers off to pretty, public Parc Jouvet. Weekends through June only. €5 from each picnic basket goes to the L’Institut du cerveau et de la moelle épinière (ICM), the Brain and Spine Institute.
Image: Hostellerie de Levernois, Beaune: Club sandwich with jellied ham and mustard cream, cherry tomatoes with mozzarella, cassis muffin & red fruit soup & local Pinot Noir