My French Holiday Diary- Day 1

Before the MA started, we all went on a fantabulous holiday to the South of France. As things are getting busy right now, I'm going to upload sections of my gastronomic diary. Highlights include LOTS of food, markets and Roger in a hammock.
This is MY little Marcilhac sur Célé kitchen. My empire. Eat your heart out Rachel Khoo.

Day 1- Saturday 15^th September 2012.

A surprisingly easy journey to the airport, chauffeured by taxi rather than our usual hellish airport car park experiences of the past. Even the wait in the departure lounge seemed to fly by. ’Scuse the pun. Of course, when we flew over France and saw it was covered in a layer of puffy grey cloud, our spirits began to droop slightly. But that’s only because Dad-y began his usual “well, the holiday’s ruined” talk. When I asked “Is this what we’re going to get all holiday?” he mistook my rage at him, thinking I was as angry about the weather as he was. Yeesh.

Guarding the manhandled but still in one piece bags, I waited in the breezy airport car park as the parents got the keys to our holiday car. Our beige holiday car. Oh yes, beige is coming back. Only the coolest people are allocated a car that’s beige. It’s actually pretty good. A Renault something or other. The main thing is, for once, Dad-y can actually drive this car. No more fear that the car is too wide and we’ll career into oncoming traffic in an attempt to avoid hitting the kerb. Or falling “down a cundie” as Dad-y would put it, if he weren’t in such a fluster. Seeing as we’d all eaten, we didn’t even shout at each other on the journey. Not once. This is a family record. Daddy always does something that drives us up the wall. Usually driving into European pedestrians. Memories of the Ponte Vecchio incident come seeping back…

We drove through fields and fields of dying sunflowers. Silent zombie armies, weighted heads bowed, bodies grey and crumbly. From the zombie flowers, suddenly the sun came out. Hoorah! Acres of vineyards, heaving with dark purple grapes. Covered plantations of apples and pears. Dark prunes lying on the ground underneath stubby trees. In the sun! The SUN! Seriously, for Mum-y and Dad-y, this is the first sun they’ve had since we all went to the Scilly Isles in March.

Cute little chateaux, dotted about through the trees. We drove through avenues of silver birches feeling like kings, or jammy buggers knowing that we’d left the rain behind us. Following the road to Cahors, we stopped off at our usual haunt; a little supermarket in a sleepy town to stock up on a few snacks. Walking across the car park I did feel like a bit of a freak; for one, there don’t seem to be many people under fifty walking about, but also everyone we passed was on their own to pick up supplies. As a group of three admittedly fat and decidedly un-nineties in fashion sense, we stuck out a bit.

 

We ogled huge croissants in a boulangerie’s window before buzzing around the little supermarket, stocking up on lunch supplies. A loaf of bread, “Macedonian” salad (green beans, flagelots and chopped cooked carrots smothered in mayonnaise), some tasty-looking salami and our favourite cheese that disappeared from the counter at Hebden Bridge’s cheese shop, torta de gorgonzola; thick layers of soft gorgonzola cheese layered with cold, cool mascarpone cheese. To. Die. For.

Just being in the tiny, provincial supermarket was a welcome culture shock. The most basic of retailers selling food, even Waitrose or Marks, can’t seem to get right. It was great watching Dad-y enjoying himself. He was just walking around the place laughing. Yes, he’d stocked up on a three euro bottle of wine, but he was just beaming at piles of crevettes on the fish counter. Here’s the thing: good food makes us happy. Really happy. Happier than an alcoholic clutching a bottle of whisky.

We sat in the car, not even bothering to drive away with our dignity intact, simply shoving in bread, salami and cheese without giving a fig at the stares we got. I kept thinking to myself, if they were to ask us what the hell we were playing at, all we’d need to say was “Nous sommes anglais!” and they’d nod their heads and walk on.

With our savoury gorging complete, we moved on to the “sweet course” of a coffee eclair before driving on to Cahors. The journey from the airport to the house actually takes around three hours. In our excitement we always forget this, and could never really complain driving through the amazing countryside, the meadows of vines and walnut trees transforming into hills and cliff faces the more we travelled towards Cahors.

Supermarket number two: Cahors. Huge. The size of a warehouse, but full of food. How could we resist? I can’t even talk in detail about the carnage that took place as we ripped food from the shelves. Chicory, Roquefort, pears… Burgers made from pork, Armagnac and figs! Prawns and mussels piled high up in our trolley. Cakes that just had to be bought. Croquenbouches- little profiteroles stuffed with crème patissiere and slathered with a crunchy bitter caramel. Little strawberry and raspberry cups filled with fruit coulis and rich custard… Jams, mayonnaise, dressings, crisps, potatoes, the list is endless. So was our receipt. But who cares? We’re on holiday!

 

I sat in the back of the car in the sun as we finished the last hour of the journey, surrounded by shopping bags of food, surreptitiously plucking muscat grapes off their vine, sucking their soft juicy innards out of their chewy skins, discarding their seeds and savouring their amazing perfumed flavour; a mixture of plum, fig and lychee.

At long last, after driving through our old haunts we reached the house. The door was already open but no one in the village cared. It was dark with the shutters closed and dusty as hell inside which caused Mum-y to tramp around cleaning everything while I packed the food away into the cute little French kitchen. The house used to belong to the Doctor of the village in the old days, so it’s a roomy little mansion, still intact with all its old turn-of-the-century features, my particular favourites are the doors. The French window leading out onto the terrace is just so typically French it doesn’t even need description. The same goes for the little door with simple art nouveau carvings and inlaid glass that separated the kitchen from the cold little larder.

After we settled in and I remembered through cost that the stove’s as slow as hell (my poor moules took an age), we sat out on the terrace in the last of the sunshine, devouring plates of mussels before moving on to some amazing prawns. Dunked in a simple marie rose sauce made only with a bit of ketchup and Dijon mustard mayonnaise, we ate them with hunks of bread before moving on to a customary after-dinner cake. Having washed down with an episode of Dr Who, we soon found ourselves nodding off and decided to call it a day. One thing’s for sure, we’re going to put on a lot of weight in the next three weeks.