A weekend trip to France

Figs and Mirabelles

The last post was complicated by issues with my Irish fraudband but thankfully I have been upgraded to intermittent poor service and can now type and save without too much difficulty. Last weekend I went to France to be with Corrine to help her out. Having arrived in Paris, I had a few hours to occupy before catching the TGV to Frasne not far from the Swiss border. I normally try to visit a small street market called the Marche de Ternes situated close to the Rue de Ternes and Porte Maillot. A good breeze coming up the Seine meant that the temperature would never be too stifling and I could walk around in comfort. The market is quite compact and occupies a portion of two small streets that radiate from a "v" shaped intersection. Street traders operate from stalls in front of an array of specialist shops and stores selling an assortment of produce including fish, meat, cheese, green grocers and fruit merchants.

Girolles

Turning the corner and arriving at the market with damp cobbles under foot I was confronted with a scene of busy preparation as the last additions were being placed on elegantly prepared displays of seasonal shellfish and fruit. Large tables of cool yellow girolles required little immediately caught my eye before it quickly travelled to the vast quantities of diminutive blushing golden mirabelles, adjacent to plums and gages and ripe figs. Bunches of opalescent pale chasselas grapes signalled the early season harvesting of grapes. In Dublin we are still picking artichokes and I thought the European crops had come ot an end by the early summer but I spotted an enormous variety of artichokes with large fleshy leaves dwarfing bunches of suedes and cauliflowers.

Artichokes and suedes

August is also one of the best months of the year for shellfish and despite the annual evacuation of the Parisians at this time of year to the South of France and Guadeloupe a great variety of shellfish was set out in well crafted icy displays grouping together vast mounds of langoustines, amandes and cooked shore crab.

Quite close by is one of my favourite places in Paris; Maison Pou on Rue du Ternes is not Fauchon, and never will be, but it essentially does the same thing cooking and preparing classic meals, dishes, meats and pates causing the havoc with the decision making skills of the hungry Parisian. The shop's style shirks the modernity and the crisp neat shapes and abstract forms that one might expect from Fauchon. The cooking and presentation of the food is easily recognisable as what I would consider to be classically French.

Delicacies of Maison Fou

I purchased my tickets in Gare de Lyon and wandered about for a while trying to find somewhere to eat. Eventually, I happened upn a neighbourhood restaurant of Reu Didertot and was put through my paces with the chef's foie gras to start, Lapin au moutard for main course and mirabelle clafoutis to finish. By this time the warmth of the sunshine needed to be suppressed and I allowed myself a refreshing glass or two of rose from the Pays du Gard.

I awoke the next morning in the small village of Couvieres. With warm sunlight flooding in through an open window that also allowed a comforting breeze circulate the room I breakfasted on coffee, toast with a reine claude plum jam and peaches fresh from the tree. Courvieres is immediately surrounded by pastures where the Monbelliard cattle graze and horses roam. The pastures are bounded all around by vast forests of tall straight powerful pine trees.

Horses near Couvieres

On Sunday morning we went for a short walk in the forests to hunt down a few mushrooms. There had not been much rainfall in the past few weeks in Courvieres, and we did not expect to find much. However, through one stretch of forest we doscovered a proliferation of Phallus Hadrian or stinkhorns; some spent and fallen down on the ground from where they literally hatched, others still proudly standing to attention freshly emerged from their embryonic sack with pitted and ribbed caps at the tip. If and when the rains arrive there may by a mycological explosion but it will not last long because the frosts will begin to become quite severe at 850 meters above sea level by the middle of September.

Phallus Hadriani emergging from the forest floor

Reading the newspapers it is difficult to escape the difference in the news reporting; the Irish media dwells upon one crisis followed by another where we have apparently been the author of our own misfortune (in reality a series of disasters created by a select few). In contrast the L'Est Republican carried a front page story on the announcements of various wine producers that they were in the last throws of preparing for the start of the vendage, or the picking of the grapes for their annual wine production. Elsewhere in the paper, my eye was caught by this full page add heralding the arrival of the Mont D'Or cheese. This cheese available during the Autumn and Winter months is one of my personal highlights of the year and launches me into new world of goumandises and a few weekends of gluttony.

The arrival of the iconicly seasonal Mont D'Or cheese