Sud de France 2.1: A First Meal.

After the jet lag comes the crash. Thursday we arrived functioning on automatic although with 24 hours of travel behind us we are only pretending to be A-Ok.

We are really feeling like zombies looking for brains to eat. 

Then I slept for perhaps 34 hours of the first day and I’ve finally arrived. That is to say my mind and body have merged into a semblance of a whole person. With that feeling of unity of being I thought that perhaps a nice dinner would be in order to celebrate our arrival.

I’ve always shopped in the European style--that is shopping daily and letting the market fresh food drive my choices for meals. You buy what looks best and plan around it. 

So for our first meal in France I went (no giggles please) to the local Hyper U supermarket for food. OK, OK I know it is a supermarket and like shouldn't I be being pure and going to the local fishermen or whatever. Well, my excuse is that Wednesday morning is the market day in Clermont l’Herault and today is Saturday.

What I ended up getting at the (super)market was moules, or mussels. These are the lovely small mussels from Meze, a town just down the road by the Med--some fifteen minutes away. I got a kilo of mussels for 1.70 € (metric translator’s note that that is 2.2 lbs of mussels for 2.25 USD or $1.02 per pound). 

Talk about fresh! Geez these elegant little puppies were just plucked from the sea and haven’t even had the time to realize that they are out of the water. I steamed them in a local white wine (1.99 € or $2.58 a bottle) with shallots, bay leaves, some provencal herbs,. Then had a lovely bottle of Saint Chinian red to go with them (4.50€ or $5.85).

Warning: For those who will scrunch their noses about pairing red wine with seafood let me just say, screw it. This is France and I drink red wine with everything--mussels, oysters, veal and my pain au raisin at breakfast. 

Back to the mussels, served them with a good baguette from the local boulangerie (.60 € or 78 cents) and made a side dish of local velvety soft and tasty lettuce and local tomatoes. Whole meal for two people with wine cost us about $10.

We haven’t done any sightseeing. We will have plenty of time to do that over the next dozen years. But we did visit a friend who is selling a village house. It is priced around about 200K € (250K US.) It has four bedrooms, rooftop terrace overlooking the village, beamed ceiling, built in the 1600s and with a great old wine cellar. Renovated with modern appliances it has a motivated seller. But no one’s looked at it in the six months it’s been on the market. Housing market here is as dead as in Miami. Good for us I guess in the long run, sad for a lot of other folks though.

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer