Skiing – Hotel or Chalet?

I’ll apologise now for the length of this post. It’s meant to help advise those who are planning on a ski holiday and don’t know whether to go for a hotel or a chalet. It’s a little wordy but I hope it helps!

I’ve been skiing around 7 times now and until this year I’ve always stayed in hotels. For those of you who’ve been skiing before, you’ll know it can get REALLY expensive. You can expect to budget around £1000 all in for a week skiing – ouch.

If you’re staying in a hotel, you can definitely expect to spend closer to the higher end of that budget, if not above it. With our wedding to pay for this year, we wanted to go skiing but couldn’t afford the huge price tag of staying in a hotel.

Our friends were interested in going skiing with us, so we got researching and my friend found a deal through Ski France to stay in one of their chalets, Chalet Mongellaz in La Tania, France (in the ski area of the Three Valleys).

The following is my experience of staying in this particluar chalet. The price was very reasonable, at around £500. This included flights, accommodation, transfers and food. The food was a continental and cooked breakfast, afternoon tea (a freshly baked cake, french stick, jam and butter), canapes, a three course evening meal, cheese board and unlimited wine in the evening.

The price for all of this is fantastic; the transfers alone were around £100 per person. We didn’t need a lot for lunch because we had so much food for the rest of the day, and we only went out for one meal whilst we were there, so this meant that our spending money budget went right down. I think in total we spent less than £100 each for the whole week, on food, drink and general bits and pieces.

By comparison, when we’ve stayed in a hotel on a B&B basis I’ve had to budget a LOT more than this, purely for food and drink. It’s not uncommon to spend £50 per day on food and drink, so from this point of view we saved a lot of money. You can easily pay £500 just for a B&B hotel, without flights, transfers or food.

So, onto the actual experience itself. Because we were staying in a catered chalet, we had a lovely chalet host looking after us for the time we were there. Her name was Vari and she was 18. Her role was to do all the cooking, cleaning and generally look after us.

She did a fantastic job, especially as she had two vegetarians to contend with. At 18 there’s no way I would have had the skills or maturity to cope with her job. The chalet was well kept, tidy and clean, and, as chalets go, fairly modern. It states on the website that it’s a 4* chalet. I’m not sure whether I would agree with that. It’s nice enough but quite basic, and doesn’t have any wifi. It has a TV and DVD player, but considering that when you stay in a chalet you’re in a lot of the time, it would have been nice to have some DVDs and games provided.

My main issue with the chalet was lack of sleep. If you ever book a chalet, try to pre-book which room you’re going to have. Our chalet slept 10 people, and luckily they were all a bit older than us, so it wasn’t a young, rowdy crowd. Even so, you could hear EVERYTHING through the walls. Our room was on the same level as the dining area/kitchen/social area, which meant that even if we went to bed early, we couldn’t sleep as we could hear everyone else who was still up. It also meant that as soon as the chalet host got up in the morning, normally around 7am, we were woken up by her preparing breakfast. She wasn’t being particularly loud, but there was no getting away from it.

I am someone who needs their sleep, especially on a physically tiring trip such as skiing, so needless to say, I wasn’t happy with the lack of shut-eye.

My other main bug-bear was the food. Not the quality of it, but sometimes the quantity. It seemed that, along with our chalet host, there were sometimes up to 3 other hosts bunking down in our chalet – once we even found one asleep on the floor in the storage room! There were times when there wasn’t enough cereal, bread, yoghurt or juice for our breakfasts, and our chalet host admitted that these other people had eaten too much food, so there wasn’t enough left for us, the paying guests! I found this outrageous.

A general issue with staying in a chalet, any chalet, and you know this before you go, is that you’ll be sharing with people you don’t know. It’s pot luck who you get; we were so lucky that we had all middle aged professionals, who were good skiers and just wanted to get on with it. If you don’t mind who you stay with, that’s fine. But think carefully if you’re worried about staying with kids, rowdy groups of 18 year old etc.

Despite all of the above, I enjoyed my time in the chalet, and it’s definitely the cheapest way to ski. However, if I wanted to have a really nice holiday, or money wasn’t an issue, I would book a hotel for sure.

Here’s a quick overview of the main points…

Hotels
Pros
Generally better decor and facilities
Freedom to eat where you please
Quieter
More privacy, able to relax more
Cons
Normally much more expensive
Confined to your room
Less social

Chalets
Pros
Much cheaper – food and wine included
Advantage of chalet host and resort rep to assist with buying ski passes, organising ski school etc
Our chalet was ski-in, ski-out, fantastic!
Cons
Concern of who you may be sharing with
Noise
Not as nice facilities as hotels, rooms small and no wifi
Sometimes unable to relax due to having strangers around you

PS… Caption competition?!

Christmas Mincemeat Fruit Cake Recipe

I love mince pies. Or mint spies. Or whatever you want to call them. 1st December comes and I just can’t help myself. Mince pie binge begins for one whole month!

But I’ll let you into a secret… I’m not a massive fan of making them. Pastry just isn’t my thing. Maybe I just need more practice but I always end up with a soggy bottom and, as I’ve said before, I may be the world’s laziest baker. And to be good at pastry you’ve got to be un-lazy and good at following recipes! Which I’m not.

Once a year or so, I get all excited about homemade mince pies, and forget how rubbish I am at making them. So I buy some mincemeat and make them…. I then have half a jar of mincemeat left and no motivation to make a second batch. I trawled the internet looking for inspiration of what to do with my leftovers and, after an amalgamation of recipes came up with this Mincemeat Fruit Cake.

It is, like a lot of my baking recipes, a bit of a chuck-it-all-in-and-see-how-it-goes kind of cake. But hey, it worked pretty well. It’s got a fairly heavy texture, not as heavy as a Christmas cake but it’s definitely going that way. I have baked these in the past to give as gifts to hosts/friends around the Christmas period.

I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any foolproof mince pie recipes let me know – As Paul Hollywood would say, no soggy bottoms allowed!

Ingredients

150g butter, softened

150g light brown sugar

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

225g self-raising flour

225g mincemeat

100g raisins

100g sultanas

Zest of one orange

1 tsp mixed spice

Approx 20 whole blanched almonds

Method

— Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius and line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

— Place the butter, sugar, eggs and flour into a bowl and mix until combined. I used my KitchenAid stand mixer with the beater attachment, on level 2, raising to 4 then 6, for a total of around 2 minutes. You want the mixture to be fully incorporated until it’s a thick and smooth consistency.

— Once the mixture has reached the correct stage, add the dried fruit, orange zest and mixed spice. You can adapt this cake to whatever you like – I’ve used dried cranberries in it before and it was lovely. Mix until everything is combined then spoon into your loaf tin and place the almonds on top for decoration (see picture).

— Bake in the oven for around 1 hour 10 minutes. You’ll need to check the cake after about an hour to see how it’s doing. It will be quite dark in colour and firm to the touch. As soon as a skewer comes out clean get the cake out of the oven, otherwise you’ll risk it going dry. Leave to cool out of the tin.

This cake is freezeable, just take it out of the freezer a couple of hours before you want it and let it defrost naturally. It’s is best eaten the day after baking when the flavours are really strong, although nothing’s to stop you from testing it out straight away! I like mine with a little butter on it… Is that weird? Or you could tie a nice ribbon around it and give it to a loved one as a thank you/Merry Christmas present.

Never again will you have leftover mincemeat in your cupboard come January!