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Provence

SeguretUntil a few months ago, I’d never left the United States, unless crossing the Canadian border in a canoe or shopping in Tijuana count.

Kitchens and free time are two words that don’t blend together, and this is more true for me than ever before as I’m the face of the restaurant. Left to my own devices, I would likely never take time off. Thank god I have a girlfriend who had the genius idea for us to go to Provence for a couple weeks.

What we ended up doing is a “walking vacation” If you like to walk/hike, you should definitely check out VBT vacations if you’re going to Europe. Basically you’re with a group of people, along with a few local guides. Every two days you stay in a different town and hotel, most of them beautiful, historic places like Hotel Le Beffroi in Vaison La Romaine.

Chateau Roussan

Chateau Roussan, one of the historic Hotels we stayed at in St. Remy de Provence.

The walking part of the trip is really cool, and gives you a nice balance of structured vs. free time. Each day your tour guides give you an itinerary, and you spend a few hours walking through French hiking trails, going from small town to small town. As I knew we were arriving in mushroom season, you can bet I was excited to get to walk through the country side in sunny Provence for a solid week!

One thing that stood out to me right away was that the trails reeked of herbs. Wild rosemary, thyme, and lavender were like weeds in the country side, There were plenty of mushrooms too, on the trail I spotted white chanterelles, and a new one for me: bleeding milkcaps.

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The real prize was the market in Aix en Provence though, where 20 lb piles of rare species to me like Caesar’s amanita were a dime a dozen, not to mention ridiculously good cheese, vegetables, and what seemed like endless varieties of cured meat.

Scallops in their shells

Scallops in their shells, at the fish market in Avignon.

As you can expect, we ate our way through each little town, it seemed like little bakeries with baguettes, ficelles, and traditional fugasse bread were everywhere, as well as small charcuterie/butcher shops and little grocery stores.

French Salami

Some dry cured salami

Hands down, my favorite meal of the trip was in Grasse, (France’s historic perfume capitol) at the restaurant of one of my favorite chefs: Jacques Chibois. His restaurant, La Bastide St. Antoine is really something to behold. A bastide is essentially an old farm, most are now updated and remodeled.

An abandoned French Vineyard

An abandoned vineyard we walked past-these are everywhere.

His is located in front of a large terraced olive grove, vineyard, and herb garden. Getting to walk through the garden before dinner was like strolling through a dream- I’ve read about it over and over in his book Provence Harvest throughout the years, but never thought I’d be able to actually walk in his gardens, where he has various obscure herbs and plants.

View from the Bastide St. Antoine

View from the Bastide St. Antoine

Dinner was fantastic and hyper seasonal. Every course but one was mushroom themed, which was eerie. Here’s a translated version:

  1. Black Truffle Soup (this was basically half cream soup, half chopped black truffles)
  2. Braised Langoustines with their jus, French pea puree, and fairy ring mushrooms
  3. Seared sea scallops with potimarron squash (a type of heirloom pumpkin) orange zest, and Ceasar’s amanitas
  4. John dory filet with sauteed porcini and parsley puree
  5. Angel hair carbonara with chanterelles and raw black trumpets
  6. Wild duck with roasted figs, saffron carrots and baby potatoes
  7. Dessert was called “The canvas of Autumn, and a boy’s dreams in the woods”- a large plate with chocolate painted in the shape of leaves on the bottom, garnished with three types of desserts in the shape of mushrooms, hazelnut, chestnut, and chocolate, along with pistachio custard, raspberry sorbet, flavored pastry cut into “sticks” and colored oak leaves made from sugar.
Giant Truffle at Jacques Chibois

Truffle at Jacques Chibois

What make the dinner even more special though was that Jacques Chibois himself came to the dining room at the end and greeted every table. Thank god my girlfriend speaks fluent French. She translated our conversation and I got to tell him how I’ve followed him for years and how he’s influenced my food. It was, an experience.

Jacques Chibois

Had to get some signature from Jacques.

All French restaurants can’t be Jacques Chibois though. Surprisingly most of the other “nice restaurants” were unimpressive, and over priced. Things regularly arrived under-seasoned, or over cooked, or both. It’s just like being in America, there’s good food, and not so good food. Funny enough, one of the things I was least impressed with a number of times were the French Fries.

I’m not complaining though, oh lord no, you just have to be judicious with what you eat. Some of the best food we had was homemade, or pre-cooked things like charcuterie, pates, and cheese.

Homemade quiche Lorraine

Homemade quiche Lorraine, at the home of a potter near Seguret.

There was one terrine in particular called the “pate de girolles” (chanterelle pate)  that stood out to me-a pork terrine flecked with chanterelles, reeking of foie gras, and topped with at least 1/2 and inch of pure rendered foie fat. We ate it with our fingers out of wax paper walking down the streets of Aix-en-Provence looking for a baguette to eat it with, but we never got to the baguette. Don’t worry, I backward engineered the terrine for you already, I’ll share it soon.

French cheese and charcuterie

Lunch one day-charcuterie, bread and cheese. Nothing else needed. The chanterelle pate is left, center.

The pates and charcuterie were great, but the cheese was a close second. After years of begging cheese purveyors to source me St. Marcellin cheese, (the favorite of legendary French chef Fernand Point) I got to try some unadulterated by pasteurization, and it’s likely the best washed rind cows milk cheese I’ve ever had. High end grocery stores will get it once a year, usually at Christmas-get your hands on some and you won’t be disappointed.

St. Marcellin Cheese

St. Marcellin Cheese

One more foodstuff. Soup de poisson is a Southern French specialty. It’s a murky brown fish soup reeking of shellfish and other sea creatures you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s brothy, but with pulp from the fish it was made with that’s been put through a food mill, and traditionally served with rouille mayonnaise and croutons topped with gruyere. The soup is served alone in a crock, and you top the croutons with the rouille and gruyere and let them float in the soup. You wouldn’t naturally think of melting cheese and shellfish, but somehow it works, and very well. The best one I had was served in a giant ceramic crock at L’estagnol, in St. Remy.

Besides the food, the other big thing is the sights.

It seems like every street is historic, and each town is an ancient Medieval village with an old castle on top. Every. Single. One.

The Pope's palace in Avignon

The Pope’s palace in Avignon

Particularly Medieval looking were the Pope’s palace at Avignon, and the towns of Seguret, and Vaison la Romaine, which is located on the top of a cliff not looking too different than when it was a fortified stronghold hundreds of years ago.

Even simple things like doors had lots of character. Here’s a little series of some of my favorites.

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There’s something surreal about it really, just wandering around the streets, most of which are older than the U.S. itself. People come and go about their life, eons of history under their feet.

Doors of St. Peter's church, Aix-en-Provence

Doors of St. Peter’s church, Aix-en-Provence

There’s a certain air to the French too. For one thing, I can’t remember seeing a single person who was overweight. The way people carry themselves is different. There’s no baggy clothes, no trashy looking outfits hanging on people dying for you to notice how unique they are, everyone just looks well dressed and in clothes that fit them.

Another interesting point my girlfriend pointed out is that all of the older French women really don’t look it. In America, when women hit “older age” they seem to want to wear plastic bags over their hair and wear velcro shoes. Even the French women who looked like they could meet death tomorrow were impeccably dressed, and looked years younger than they were.

So, in a nutshell Provence is awesome, put it on your bucket list.

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Comments

  1. Andrea Wyckoff

    December 3, 2015 at 11:26 am

    This was so fun to read about your trip! And the dinner you had at La Bastide St. Antoine sounds absolutely divine!! So glad you had someone special to share this trip with! I toured Europe and Southern France when I was 20 on a backpackers budget, but I would love to go back now with my husband, more spending money, and a chance to really take it all in, and dig into the food scene.

    Cheers!
    Andrea

    Reply
  2. Frank

    December 6, 2015 at 6:12 pm

    Sounds like you should take more trips! Any grocer in the MSP area you know to have ST. MARCELLIN CHEESE?

    Reply

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🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Virginia Bluebells (Merten 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is another beautiful spring wildflower that loves to grow in the same habitat you’ll see ramps and spring beauty. 

Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #2 is Virginia water 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #2 is Virginia waterleaf, and, I’m cheating a bit as it’s semi-ephemeral. The plant comes up in spring and goes to flower, but gives a second harvest of fresh growth in the fall, where other ephemerals I know do not. 

This is a great starter wild green-easy to recognize with the splashes of white on the leaves that may or may not be present. After you learn it though, don’t be surprised if, like me, you eventually pass it up for more delicious greens nearby. 

The plant gets tough quick, and the flavor is..meh, so I usually have small amounts of very young greens in blends of blanched and sautéed mixes. 

My favorite part is the wee flower buds, that, if you get at the right time, can be harvested in decent quantity and are good steamed as they’ll soak up oil sautéed. 

#hydrophyllumvirginianum #waterleaf #foraging #fueledbynature #weedeater
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