France: 7e Jour

Déjeuner

Day Seven was our transfer from Cavaliere to the town of Les Baux, near Provence. Along the way, we stopped by the town of St. Remy for lunch at a cafe.



I decided up to this point I'd been eating quite a lot for dinner, so I thought I'd cut back on lunch by having a light salad. The salade caprese (salad, mozarella cheese and tomatoes) seemed like a good option.

Unfortunately this was not a very good salad. The vegetables were limp, the tomatoes were not fresh and the cheese tasted kind of funky. No, it must be said this was one of the worse meals I had in France.

On to dinner.

Dîner

Dinner was at La Cabro D'Or, a restuarant that was part of the family that included the hotels we were staying at.



We started dinner with an amuse-bouche of a melange of local vegetables with a poached quail egg. This, I felt, was not particularly creative or special, and serving diced fruits and vegetables in a narrow glass to eat with a spoon is not exactly the most practical of ideas.



I decided to order some pan-fried foie gras with chutney. Now, rich foods go with sweet things. This is one of those time-honoured traditions in cuisine like bread and butter. This is why chocolate isn't served with lime and you don't find vinegar creme brulee. Apparently this tradition has gone unnoticed by the restaurant, because the sauce and chutney was sour! Who makes sour chutney? This just ruined my foie gras - it was dreadful.



Sweetbreads again, this time with some risotto and vegetables. The sweetbreads still tasted a bit chewy and starchy, not at all how I remember them to be. Either something is very wrong with my memory of having sweetbreads in London, or in France they're done differently.



Now if there's one thing the French are good for, it's their treatment of chocolate. The chocolates and chocolate desserts I had throughout the trip were uniformly excellent. Here I was presented with three types of chocolate with a sorbet to cleanse the throat of all that cocoa. There was chocolate mousse with whipped cream, chocolate ganache with red fruits and chocolate with caramelised praline, which I was only too happy to finish.

I think it's been a while since I've served chocolate as a dessert, and I've forgotten just how wonderful it can be. Soldier on, comrades, only four more days to go.

Technorati Tags: France, Food, Saint Remy, Les Baux