France: November 4 -- the first day

I am traveling with my good friend Stig, who I pick up dutifully at the incredible hour of 5 in the morning, to drive over to the airport. We are flying to Toulouse via Brussels, which in the end is a good way to get to the Southwest rather than flying to Paris and taking a long drive down. Toulouse is a worth destination in the middle of the Southwest where Toulouse sausage and cassoulet figure prominently, but we have decided to stay in Toulouse the last night, so we will drive right up to Sarrazac today.

We set off in a rental, a gray diesel Renault Megane, one of those French cars that feel like you're sitting in a big sofa. I plug in my GPS which promptly doesn't understand that the airport roads have been redone and rerouted, and head off in the wrong direction.

OK, we figure that one out pretty quickly, and are off towards Sarrazac. The name of my import company is indeed the same as the village where my American/French friends Malcolm and Nicole have a house, or small farm. It is just a two hour drive, and as the clock gets closer to one, we are ready for some French lunch.

Finding a place off the road to eat lunch is always a gamble. You can always eat at the big roadside cafeterias, which in France are not bad, and offer an array of courses, cheeses and even wine, but it is much more fun to find a little café in some little town, and you never know, it might just be a jewel in the rough, a "find". We head off to a place called Caussade, which turns out to be a little bigger than first imagined. I drive around the little roads trying to find a place to park so we can search further, dreading the idea of parallel parking a car with a stick-shift that I'm not very accustomed to. We eventually find a wide open parking space in a side street. I still think my GPS is so nifty that I take it with us and let it lead us to a restaurant called "Les Galois". (They really should put restaurant descriptions in those things -- we had no idea what kind of place we were heading towards.)

Les Galois is a pizzeria. But upon closer examination, it has pretty interesting pizzas. With snails, with smoked duck breast and with gésiers, or confit of goose gizzards. Cool! We both had a three-course lunch: a Salad Landaise, which is a typical regional salad with lettuce, tomato, smoked duck breast and gizzards, a pizza and an ice-cream for dessert. The salad was simple but big and good, and most could have stopped right there. I ordered the "Pizza Quercynoise", with no tomato sauce but instead a crême fraïche topping with goose gizzards and cheese. Rich doesn't begin to describe it. Now I can tell all my customers to buy my goose gizzards and put it on their pizza! Halfway through I deserted the effort and asked for "le doggy bag". An ice-cream sunday for desert goes in its own stomach, though, and so, stuffed, we rolled back to the car. Welcome to France.

A couple of hours later we are in Sarrazac, after stopping at a convenience store to get some essentials. (Amazing how even the convenience stores here are great little supermarkets -- with cheese, fresh rillettes, local wines, good bread...) After some confusion at the local hotel who supposedly had the keys, we get in the house. It is a nice stone house with some simple and tasteful furniture, and despite a few cobwebs everything seems in order. Stig chases down a monster spider while I go to the much more important task of trying to find the keys to the wine cellar. (I need a drink! and I have a great deal of good wine that has been maturing slowly in this cellar....) A little more time goes to figuring out where to turn on the power and the water. Finally we are settled, and I pour a nice glass of Domaine du Prince, a cheeky little Cahors wine, and we munch on a couple of the best walnuts in the world.

Around 8 o'clock we pretend to be hungry again and mosey down to the local restaurant/hotel, La Bonne Famille, a really charming place with good home cooked food, red checkered tablecloths, and a communal cheese board. It's Saturday, so they get out their big menus. The place is filled with frenchmen, as it is not really tourist season, and I expect many of them came there to celebrate a birthday of good night out. This little place is known among the locals for its unpretentious fare.

The menu is made up of a couple of 4 or 5-course suggestions with traditional dishes like cassoulet or confit, and in addition a set of dishes of the day which can be substituted. This is where the good stuff is. I order the 5-course menu, so I get first a little soup (velouté) of pepper and chestnut, smooth, warm and delicious, while Stig watches me eat. Then comes for me a cep (steinsopp in Norwegian) omelet and for Stig a dish of duck rillettes and foies gras with a nice salad. The waiter asks me how I want my omelet, if I want it "baveuse", which is a word I don't understand but am too embarrassed to ask, but simply say "not too much cooked" as I am in the mood for a light, runny omelet, the best kind. I am not disappointed. It is so light and delicate that I start to wonder what I do wrong when I make omelets at home. And it's filled with meaty mushrooms, a huge omelet that fills to whole plate. Stig's paté was creamy and delightful.

We are both pretty full already when we are served the dish of the day, a wild boar stew (civet). It comes in a big pottery crock which has obviously been in the oven, enough food for three (but we get one each, of course)! The bits of boar are so tender they can be mashed with a spoon, and have been thoroughly infused with the flavor of the stew: red wine, carrots, onions, a bay leaf, and presumably some chef's secrets. It is a delightful struggle.

No meal is complete of course without cheese and dessert. The cheeses are simple and local, and it is for me nice to recognize all the cheeses on the board. I zero first in on the essential local cheese, a "cabicou" which is a small round goat cheese which can either be very fresh (as this one was) or more mature depending on how many days it has been kept, as it matures very quickly. The other local cheese one finds everywhere here is Cantal, a cow cheese made near Auvergne (the mountain range to the east of us), a mild semi-hard cheese. A little crême brulée and (for Stig) raspberry sorbet for dessert and we are ready to go home when the lights all go out! Candles are lit, a birthday song is sung at another table, I suspect just because the candles were lit and they felt like it, and everyone takes it in stride. After a while we struggle out of our seats and waddle home like overfed geese.

A nightcap and a few minutes later we are in bed. It has been a great day already and I'm looking forward to the rest of the trip!