IT HAS been a long time since I saw our little house in France, and I miss it terribly.

Opening the café has taken all our time and effort over the last six months, and we’ve simply not had the time to take a break, so my mind is constantly wandering across the Channel, down through France, to my home-from-home in the Aveyron.

Fortunately, we’re booked to go in a short while, and I cannot wait to see the beautiful rolling countryside once more.

Perhaps more importantly, I cannot wait to get stuck into a few of my very favourite local specialities.

In this land of volcanoes, meadows and forests, food is hearty, cheap and plentiful.

The Auvergne is very definitely a no-fuss sort of place, culinarily-speaking. It’s all very basic, but boy is it good.

The local dairy herds provide plenty of milk for all the many cheeses produced across the region, as well as incredibly tasty cuts of veal and beef.

Pork is cured, salted and air-dried into an amazing array of charcuterie and sausages.

In the potagers, or kitchen gardens, simple crops are grown well. Potatoes, onions, garlic and the local favourite, chard, which is cultivated to enormous sizes – stalks as wide as your arm – all thrive in the rich, dark soil.

And from these basic but top-quality ingredients come the dishes that bespeak the ‘terroir’ of the place, to use a modern term. In this case, it means the food is inextricably linked with the land of its production, and rarely travels beyond the region. It ‘belongs’.

But that’s not to stop us trying a few of these dishes at home. Over the last couple of years we’ve made a few of my favourite Auvergnat treats; the brioche-like fouace cake, the iridescent green farçous, with their pork, prune and spinach stuffing, and the king of potato dishes, aligot.

This fluffy, stringy delight is one dish I’m bursting to try again as soon as I get to the area. It’s a meal in itself, although dolloped alongside a nice piece of veal, or a few sausages, it’s even more gorgeous.

For our recipe this week, the stringy cheese and potatoes remain, but in another recipe from the Cantal region, the mighty Truffade.

Truffade is one of the mainstays of Auvergnat cuisine, a superb golden, sizzling panful of crisp-edged fluffy potatoes, bound with molten cheese, and flavoured with garlic and sweet bacon.

A little parsley adds colour, and the whole thing makes the most amazing accompaniment to grilled or roast meats, even poultry.

It is just the ticket for these early autumn days when there’s a decided chill in the air. It’s proper provincial cooking at its most welcoming and hearty.

The cheese one should traditionally use for such a dish is Tomme Fraîche, a bouncy, delicately-flavoured fresh cow’s milk cheese, but because you rarely see this outside the Auvergne, I’ve worked out that a combination of Caerphilly and mozzarella seems to do the trick both in terms of the lightly acidic flavour and of course the required stringiness!