Slowing the spinning globe

Autumn days shorten and condense, a sort of intense reduction sauce of summer's French Kitchen activities. The keyboard is abandoned to the last garden tomatoes frenzy. Fall market tables crowd deep orange squash between dark, crinkled green Savoy cabbage. Color and flavor jump onto the french kitchen table. It is a favored time, this summer straw turning to fall gold.

Since I wrote last, visitors have come and gone leaving their green thumb prints on the potager as cooking students have learned about October's pumpkin soup, fearless butter pastry, and tender rabbit drunk on wine and prunes.

Since I wrote last, the wild mushrooms growing on the towpath have been harvested, eaten and reharvested again. We have drunk the newest wine, le bourru, and tasted the first promise of armagnac's 2005 vintage- fruity sweet juice, clean dry wine, waiting barrels that will exhale alcohol into celestial parfume--la part des anges.

Since I wrote last, the moon has come and gone and freshly turned fields are being put to bed under a dark Gascon sky. The cheminee has been lit, one friend grows a year older, and another marries in a Gascon wedding celebration that lasts long into the same dark night.

Before I write again, there will be new stories to tell, old recipes to refine and winter bitter greens to plant alongside the grape-hung arbor. I hasten to slow the globe before November's dark days arrive so that I can remember these sweet fall moments.

Retour de la Marche'

This Saturday table is typical- too much food bought by hungry eyes at the weekly market at Nerac. Tricia Robinson (Taste of Provence) trains over from Nice for a Gascon weekend and we celebrate the first fall oysters, cheese from Salers, a jambon glacee, pate de canard, ripe figs, a decent loaf of bread. What a good life! Saturday chores were never like this.

Gascon Alarm clocks- 'coin, coin'

A series of taps on the steel side of this old boat. The morning alarm clock on the Julia Hoyt floats by in the guise of a flotilla of ducks cleaning the moss off of the hull. September waits for no lazy bones and there is much to do here at Camont in Southwest France: mushrooms to gather, grapes to harvest and the last and sweetest tomatoes to gather in from the potager. All of Gascony buzzes around me, a hive of harvest activity this month in my Long Village.

I walk Dupont along the driveway wide road that leads to Camont and hail my neighbor working in his potager.
‘Bon Jour! Vous avez encore des haricots verts?’
‘Beh, oui et plus!’

My fast walk turns into a weight lifting session as I struggle home under a fruit box full of a lettuce, two giant beets, three eggplants, a red pepper and hand handful of fennel flower full of the fragrant Pollen that la Diva in Tuscany calls Magic. Oh… and a couple kilos of haricots verts.
It is easy to cook here in Gascony. Easy to celebrate our ‘daily bread’ and inspire a new generation to cook, really cook with what's at hand. Good food in the French kitchen.