Happy Bastille Day

It’s Bastille Day here. They’ve got the guillotine set up in the town square, and after I’ve had my morning tea, in honor of the day, I’m going to try and round up an annoying comte or our local purveyor of asphalt.

A friend of ours from San Francisco, who just retired to Italy, spent the night here Sunday. Monday night we ate at the newly asphalted restaurant down the road before we took him to catch his midnight train to Paris.

The food was sublime. Amazingly, within stumbling distance of our farm, there is now a gourmet restaurant in a village where the only other businesses are vintner caves and another very bland, family style, restaurant. If it just had a bakery the village would have the perfect mix of shops.

This assortment of businesses highlights the many wonders of living “in the last forgotten part of France.” We have the most amazing restaurants, in towns that don’t even have bakeries or gas stations. The local music festival in the other little village near us presents us with a week of world-class cello concerts. And to think that Balzac thought and the Parisians think that their compatriots down here in the provinces are all hillbillies: hillbillies that make the finest wines and food in the world, and spend their evenings listening to cello concerts.

The first year we arrived, I sat in the church listening to the concert, and realized this was exactly what I was looking for by coming to France: To sit in my little village, in a beautiful ancient building, surrounded by my neighbors, listening to cello concerts. As I constantly repeat, the French know how to live well on very little money: good food, good music, good wine, surrounded by family and friends.

Back at the asphalt palace, we started our dinner with an assortment of amusé bouches: caviar on top of a fish mousse, smoked salmon on tiny crepes, sautéed mushrooms in little pastries, and a light green gazpacho. The first course was a mousse of foie gras with figs on a bed of lentils. That was followed by a real slab of melt in your mouth foie gras with pumpkin bread and a sweet chutney of exotic fruit. The main course was roasted pork tenderloin with a light Armagnac sauce. Dessert was a clever crepe purse filled with vanilla ice cream surrounded with sliced oranges and drizzled with an orange glaze. Then to push us over the gastronomic cliff, they brought out a plate of cookies. All of this for the extremely reasonable price of 28 Euros. Our bottle of local wine was an astronomical 20 Euros.

The ambiance was formal and the peach walls made me feel as if I was in the southwestern United States at a Holiday Inn, and I was a bit edgy knowing that I was surrounded by all that newly-laid asphalt, but my displeasure with the decorating was overcome by the sublime food. So here I find myself being a hypocrite again as I support the paving of my beloved France.