January 2, 2010

Well, it is high past time we were in touch since for the last six weeks these biweekly blogs have been trumped by Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations and travels. Imagine yourself back at November 26, 2009....

Like true old fashioned Europeans we made twenty shopping stops as we prepared a Thanksgiving dinner based on the Indians' point of view modified a little to accommodate our French guests. So you might call it our French/Indian Thanksgiving dinner with a menu that included a few items that were simply not available to the Indians and the Pilgrims, like clean water (they drank beer instead) wine which had been consumed on the way over by the Pilgrims, baguettes and pie crust made of white flour, and sugar.(They would have used maple syrup)

While shopping in the medieval center of Montpellier the day before Thanksgiving, I was overwhelmed by the sheer physical presence of 600 national police lining the streets, waiting for the 3 PM demonstration by the 4,000 viticulturists (small wine growers) who are unable to cover their costs since demand and price for inexpensive table wine has plummeted. This year’s grapes were harvested in August, well over a month early; quantity is down. At 3 PM some of the angry wine growers would have been drinking since noon so there has been some property damage in years' past. Consumption of French table wine is down 40% over the last ten years in part due to an active campaign to reduce alcoholism. Each advertisement and bottle states clearly that drinking wine may be made for your health.

The protest was uneventful in terms of process and outcome.

Thanksgiving evening, our guests were invited to come at 7:30. (Are you kidding, I am usually asleep by 9 PM). They left at 1:00 AM after five and a half hours. Gilda's (our French teacher) husband offered the most sincere thank you we have ever received on the way out the door and a request that we get together again. Guests? Gilda and her biking husband, “Fish,” Marie-Laure our Servas friend, a young "single mother" and Tom her son, a senior in high school. We were not as bleary eyed as this picture would indicate.

It was easy to restrict the guest list to six since we have only six chairs and four matching plates! In contrast, the Pilgrims invited three Indian families and 90 showed up since their families were big, so the Indians went back home and brought back enough food to last 150 people for three days. Now that is a lot of hunting and preparation!

Our French/Indian menu:

Appetizers: smoked salmon with goat cheese on baguettes, pureed tomatoes on biscuits and green local olives.

Entree: marinated mussels steamed with white wine and onions.

Main course: sea bass with anchovies, onion and lemon, wild rice and squash baked with three kinds of cheese: regional goat cheese, parmesan and compte, the last the most popular cheese in France.

Salad with radishes, onions, and Marie-Laure’s dressing.

Cheese tray: three goat cheeses, selected from the 100 goat cheeses made in France: one covered with ashes, one wrapped in the leaves of the chestnut tree, and one from this region. (You can see them on the cutting board) The Indians and the Pilgrims did not have cows or sheep, so all their milk was from goats.

Dessert: squash pie. The French have no dessert like this. This pie was for them a truly American touch!

Coffee with a square of chocolate from Fabrique de Chocolat, 25 Rue st Gilhem, the best value for chocolate in Montpellier. A husband and wife team offer—he creates and she sells—these melt-in-your mouth delicacies.

Since the first Thanksgiving lasted three days and had entertainment we sang "Blowing in the Wind" and played a guessing game about what was on the menu that was not available to the Indians or the Pilgrims.

I won't talk much about what a bad attitude the pilgrims had toward women and the Indians. Just one example..can you believe that the Pilgrim women stood while the Pilgrim and Indian men and the Indian women sat as co-equals around the table? Forget the good old days!

Bob settled on sea bass as the main dish after we "pretested" a recipe and loved it. The day before Thanksgiving, full of good humor, Bob biked an hour to the Mediterranean to buy fresh bass at the pier. They were sold out of everything including sea bass when he arrived at 11 AM. Calm but persistent he returned and then walked 3 miles to 3 different markets, no sea bass. the next day he started again. Again he biked to three separate markets but this time first thing in the morning at 7 AM before his French lesson at 9:30. No sea bass at two, the other was just opening. Back he went an hour later to catch them right after opening, and there, nestled in the ice, were three sea bass. Success! Nine stops to get the fish he wanted for dinner!

We learned about what seasonal and local really mean. We learned first hand about over-fishing. We learned that farm fishing is similar in France and the US and that 2/3 of the fish eaten in Europe are wild. We learned that some CIRAD scientists recommend Atlantic fish because the currents are stronger and therefore the water cleaner than the Mediterranean. We learned because you can find it today, you cannot count on finding it tomorrow when it is truly local and seasonal. We learned that persistence pays and the early bird gets the worm.

At the end of an evening filled with laughter, Fish and Gilda consulted their tram schedule and found that on Thursday night the trams stopped running at 11:30 PM. Gilda literally fell on her knees begging Marie-Laure for a ride home and off they went, the four new friends, with Marie-Laure driving a half hour out of her way to take Gilda and Fish home.

We managed to participate in a steady stream of events even as we hustled to get ready to leave for the USA in mid December. We listened to Jean-Louis Etienne, a famous French explorer of the Antarctic and attended two of the six free nights of choir concerts at the Maison des Choeurs de Montpellier, an old church remodeled for exclusive use by Montpellier's hundreds of choirs. We watched the film Who Killed Liberty Valance, but did not stay for the discussion group that started at 10:30 PM.

We also broke bread with two groups of friends.The first was a dinner with the NPA, a new party on the far left, ironically located on the rue de Commerce during which two Frenchmen presented their slide show of their visit to this year’s olive harvest in Palestine. Second, Marie-Laure and Tom sent us off in style for the Christmas holidays by inviting us to a Sunday dinner. Tom is so thrilled to speak English (he is first in English in his school) that we gave him, as a Christmas present, the entire five hours dinner in English. He and Bob— the 17 year old and the 70 year old —laughed and giggled as if they had known each other all their lives.

Then off to the USA for Christmas. What luck we had with the weather! We left France as snow closed trains between Montpellier and Paris. We beat the storm to my brother Mike’s house that closed the three Washington DC airports as well as those in NYC. We left Mike's as another storm threatened NY from the Midwest. Only a few days later, on our return to JFK, NYC had just finished a day of gusts of wind of 50 mph. The next day, snow again blanketed the city. In summary we skooted in and out of France and the USA playing tag with five different storm systems.


At my brother Mike’s in Hyde Park New York we shared a winter solstice on a farm with the nun-owners while sampling their 14 types of cheeses. I enjoyed long talks with Mike’s daughter Lizzie about her research proposal on recycling and her thesis on community gardens, as well as a cooling walk across the Hudson on the new and popular 13 million dollar walking bridge that took 25 years to complete.

15 hours and one uneventful continent trip later, we arrived in San Clemente to share Christmas with my sister and her husband. So much to share, a visit to Hoag where the staff has been so kind to Kiki for the last 14 months...swinging under a warm clear sky on the beach as the sun set,

Traditional Christmas turkey dinner with dressing on a table covered with my mother's silver, tinseled trees and presents all dressed up for the holidays,

Barry's new hanger and pad at the airport with its granite covered counters,

Too soon, time to go...Bob’s brother Carroll and and his wife Perla consoled us by treating us to the best Mexican food we have ever had, a tiny family-owned restaurant in Glendale. Our friends Kathy and Mussa in Berkeley shared a walk with us in Cesar Chevez park in Berkeley, CA.

before we we flew back to Montpellier where we enjoyed a windy New Year's Day walk as the the sun was setting.