La Rentrée
Blog post
8/31/20268 min read
La Rentrée
Excited! I know we all get a bit sad at the thought of summer’s passing, and maybe a bit apprehensive about the return to work and school. But I love it. Here we are, another new season to enjoy.
This time of year isn’t so clean-cut, however. Whilst I shift my seasonal mindset on 1st September, it’s not fully autumn for me yet. The days have definitely shortened and the summer heat has subsided, but it’s still a bit summery, albeit late summer.
La Rentrée is the French term for the return to work and school — and, more broadly, the return to normal life — after the summer holidays. We’re no longer in the school cycle, our children being in their 20s, so it’s not such a strict Rentrée, but I remember that need to get right back on track as a working parent, shedding the laissez-faire of the summer and getting back into the sharp routines that kept our household going.
It’s a wonderful time for a restart and a refresh. With the change of season, the change of weather and temperature, and the changing amount of daylight we get, it’s a good idea to change your day-to-day routine to better fit the time of year.
Autumn has always been a productive time historically, harvesting and preserving the fruits of nature for the winter shutdown. One day, when I’ve got more time, I will spend time making chutneys and relishes and preserves, but even without all that, it’s a season that’s always been really chocca for me. Everything starts back: choir, classes, and, working in book publishing as I do, the biggest trade fair of the year is slap bang in the middle, dominating everything. At the beginning of September I’m always thinking I need to get my shit together to make sure I’m ready for it all!
I don’t have a massive list of routine changes this year, and there’s nothing brand-new that I want to introduce. For me this autumn, it’s more about tweaks to what I am already doing.
I started a strength routine over the summer. It was great doing this outside, in the bright sunshine but before it got hot. I definitely want to carry on, starting my working-from-home days with it, but I will bring it indoors. By the back doors, though — maybe they’ll be open and I can enjoy the fresh air in the early September mornings.
I do have a self-care routine that I want to get back into, and that’s eye care. Dry eyes are a bit of a bugger as you get older, and all the things that come with a hot summer don’t help: aircon, sea breezes, hot dry air. By the end of our holiday I was suffering quite a bit. Anyway, I’ve got my eye drops to administer regularly — not just when I feel as though my contact lenses are made of sandpaper — and an end-of-the-day routine that is actually rather lovely: a heated eye mask, feet up, for ten minutes before embarking on my bedtime routine. Actually, I should make it a ritual, shouldn’t I? That might keep it going!
Another thing: evening yoga. It’s so good to stretch the kinks out of the day, especially, you know, when you’re getting on a bit and have had two hip replacements. I do it sometimes and I don’t sometimes. Just ten or fifteen minutes before getting into bed would do it. I’m pretty good at getting up and doing stuff in the morning, but I tend to just collapse in the evening! With autumn slowing things down and drawing us inwards, though, it feels like the right time to make it a habit. I think of autumn as the evening of the year, so yeah — again, an on-brand activity! 😂
My meal planning and food shopping are pretty tight, but what I buy will be changing, of course, with the change in what’s in season. I’m definitely thinking about introducing warming foods back into my day-to-day eating. The stockpot will be going pretty much non-stop from now as I look to soups, stews and casseroles.
September is orchard harvest time, full of apples, pears and plums. I’ll be doing loads with apples. I have a little tree and will use one or two every day: crumbles, tarts, sauces accompanying pork dishes, boudin noir. Having holidayed in Normandy this year, I’m going to be leaning into Norman cuisine and using my apples for that. I also love a plum compote to have for breakfast. I’ll be introducing mushrooms and nuts into my cooking, and pumpkins and squashes as the season progresses.
There is one thing I would like to set as a goal for the coming months, though, because it’s nice to have a project. It’s a cooking goal: to cook my way through one of my favourite-ever cookbooks, How to Eat a Peach by Diana Henry.
Diana Henry is my favourite food writer. I have all of her books and they are all excellent, but there is something very special about this one. It’s a book of menus, divided simply into Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter. It doesn’t get more specific than that, but if you read the wonderful, evocative descriptions of each menu and its genesis, provenance and inspiration, you get a very good feel for the best possible moment to serve it.
The descriptions aren’t just informative and evocative and enjoyable to read; for me there’s something actually magical about them. They take you to France, Spain and Mexico, among other destinations. Even the ones about her childhood growing up in Northern Ireland I find quite enchanting: nipping to the petrol station to get ice cream to go with an October haul of blackberries that’s just been made into a crumble. But one of my favourite childhood reads when I was quite small was The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey by Patricia Lynch. I know that is as ridiculous as saying I loved The Little Prince and that’s why I love reading Elizabeth David. My blog, my rules!
Those descriptions are so beautiful that I get a bit lightheaded when I read them, even though I’ve read some of them several times. Whilst I’ve cooked individual dishes from the book, and maybe two dishes from a menu together, I’ve never actually cooked one of the whole menus.
I’ve been thinking about why that is, and I think it’s a case of “one day when” mentality. I think I need the perfect moment to serve this perfect menu, and then I don’t find exactly the right conditions at exactly the right time — if you see what I mean — and so I haven’t done it. But perhaps I’ve also got so much satisfaction simply from reading the book that I haven’t felt I was missing out by not creating the food.
And yet there’s so much deliciousness here. So I’ve decided I’m just going to do it.
If a menu coincides with inviting folks to come and join us — we often entertain and have people for dinner — all the better. But if not, I’ll identify the right moment for each menu and schedule it just for me and my husband on a random Saturday.
I’m already imagining how amazing that weekend will be. The planning; checking when and where to get the ingredients; perhaps finding an ingredient I don’t ordinarily use and having to work out where to acquire it. Maybe it will be a meal that requires a day’s preparation. Maybe it will require me to try a new cooking technique. Just thinking about that is making me so happy right now, so I think it’s a good goal to set, even though ordinarily I wouldn’t add too much to my autumn because of its fullness.
Watch this space. I will no doubt share updates as I undertake it: what I cook, what I learn and, inevitably, what goes wrong!
I’ve added the book to my cookbook tab, so do check it out if you’re interested in seasonal menus. I’m glad to see that it’s still in print eight years after it was first published. That in itself is quite a testament to the book.
What a lot of people might not realise, if you don’t work in publishing, is just how much it costs to produce and print a cookbook. There was a big boom in the 1980s in lavish, four-colour cookbooks, including books providing step-by-step photographs. There’s rather less of that now, because colour reproduction, photography, production and printing are expensive. So if you look at a cookbook and think, my goodness, £25–£30, that’s so much — well, by my reckoning these days, what is that? Six cups of coffee? A couple of mass-produced T-shirts? A few glasses of wine in London? Rant over.
And, of course, that’s before you take into consideration the author’s work, which may have taken a year or two: developing all the ideas and recipes, testing them, writing the text. When you think of it that way, hopefully £30 doesn’t seem quite so much.
In fact, I think I might buy myself a second copy of this one. My original is looking a little tired and a little splattered. The production quality was very good, so it’s still functioning perfectly well, but there are some cookbooks I like to have more than one copy of — such as my Four Seasons Cookery Book by Margaret Costa — in the knowledge that one day they may disappear from the shelves.
So there we are: an exciting goal for autumn 2026.
The wardrobe requires an overhaul just now. I’ll be putting away the summer linens, shorts and tanks and creating an autumn capsule from what’s squirrelled away in cupboards. And maybe I’ll schedule a shopping trip to refresh/update things. Autumn is an interesting season to dress for. The beginning of September to the end of November will see a massive change in the weather. You might still need your T-shirts and tanks at the beginning, but you’ll definitely need the jumpers and cardis by the end.
And a declutter! That is something I’ve introduced to my autumns over the past couple of years: a steady programme of sorting through cupboards and drawers, clearing out and only keeping the essentials. In the dark half of the year we spend much more time in our homes, and it’s with that in mind that I like to make sure there are no corners that will irritate me when I come across them as I’m trying to cosy in and relax in the depths of winter. Some people advocate an autumn spring clean to get ready for the hibernation season. I’m not normally into doing too much cleaning in one go, as I get a bit bored — even though I am aided and abetted by my wonderful husband! I try to tackle it little and often by having a weekly routine. However, the relaxed summer schedule, time away and university-age children at home mean my routine hasn’t functioned that well over the summer, and I’m itching to sort the place out. So, once they’re both back at uni, I will dedicate a day to giving the house a top-to-bottom clean, but take a little-and-often approach to the drawers and cupboards. I have to say, that creates so much satisfaction! Every time I open a decluttered cupboard it makes me smile, and I have a little joyful sigh on the inside. It’s also very much on brand with autumn: the trees shedding their leaves, plants pulling back and storing their energy for the winter. And we like our activities to be seasonally on brand!
La Rentrée also refers to the new season of cultural events that starts up around September. Concert halls and opera houses launch their new seasons, cinemas schedule blockbusters and, for book publishing, it’s one of the biggest seasons of the year. Another activity for me at this time of year is checking them all out and deciding what I’d love to go and see, listen to and read. Creating more to do, hey?!
And then there’s the telly! I watch very little television over the summer. There’s too much else to do, the evenings are light and I’d much rather be outside. But as autumn arrives, so does my appetite for settling down in front of a good series. September is the time I start looking at what’s coming up and making a little mental list of things I want to watch. It’s another small seasonal shift: evenings gradually moving indoors, something good on the television, maybe a glass of wine or a cup of tea, and no feeling whatsoever that I ought to be outside making the most of the daylight.
But lots of relaxing reading too. Cosying up as the weather turns and the light falls, in my reading nook with a hot drink — and, at some point in the season, the candles will start to be lit.
