Free! Free! Free!

   This has been a bumper year for fruit. We don't have any trees of our own but neighbours and friends have been very generous with windfalls. The freezer is stacked with flat-packed plums, greengages and apple sauce. Our one little red currant bush produced an astonishing amount. And then there's all the free stuff quite literally lying around, free for the taking.
   Here's yesterday's haul. The walnuts came from a huge tree that hangs over the street opposite the school. Unless I'm quick, cars crunch the nuts into smithereens. The hazelnuts are from a piece of waste ground near our house, as are the quinces and windfall pears.
Can you make out the figs? I picked two kinds, the purple ones next to the place where we take our bags of rubbish, and the green ones from a tree hanging over the road on the way out of the village.
    Opposite, on another piece of waste ground, a plum tree has dropped kilos and kilos of purple fruit. It's all lying in the ditch waiting for me to go back with a bigger bag.

Driving Them Quackers and Other Hazelnut Festival Fun.

    Not far from the lunch area was a small fenced compound surrounded by spectators. Dogs were showing their skills when we arrived. Then came the ducks. If a dog that herds sheep is a sheep dog, this was a duckdog. He quietly but very efficiently guided them towards the arena exit, then out into the main part of the fair and then back in again. 

    On our way back to the car park, we stopped to watch "the friends of old machines" making hay. As we drove away, we were stopped at the rond-point by a parade of cattle-drawn carts, and horses. A gendarme re-routed all cars down a side street. Lavelanet has its traffic priorities right. Its one and only parking meter hasn't functioned all summer as the tattered sign shows. And when it does, you have to plug in 20 centimes an hour.

A Healthy Few Hours at the Hazelnut Festival.

  Because our choir had a date in church at 4:15 p.m. (see a later post) we broke with tradition this year by not attending the afternoon-long lunch that's the high point of Lavelanet's annual hazelnut festival. 

    But we couldn't miss out on the event itself so after a successful trawl of the vide grenier in Chalabre, we drove the few miles to Lavelanet where we ran into friends and had lunch. 

   Close your ears, nutritionists, because what we ate is so dietetically incorrect it doesn't bear thinking about. We crowded around an open-air bar watching a man grill sausages and pork belly over charcoal.  Once crisped but still with plenty of good juicy pork fat present, the belly slices were slapped into split baguettes, and topped with frites. Three large dispensers held ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. As we leaned on the bar munching away, we reckoned we'd hit all the four food groups--pork fat, baguette, frites and mayonnaise--with the plastic glasses of rosé meeting our fruit and vegetable needs. Meanwhile, the band played on...

   Not far away, a display of an old-fashioned classroom showed modern kids how their grandparents learned their ABCs. Other teaching aids were the posters showing the importance of good health and what happened to your body if you took the wrong route. 

    

Fête de la Noisette -- the "mosh pit" dance

Over the years, we've attended four or five hazelnut festival lunches so, by now, we know the routine. There's the waving-your-paper-napkin-in-the-air song, the waving-your-hands-in-the-air song, the various initiation ceremonies and, yes, fully fledged members of the confrérie do dress up as hazelnuts. Perhaps most spectacular of all, there's the "mosh pit" dance--I don't know what else to call it. 

At some point in the afternoon, a number of people sit on the floor, legs spread, in a long row. Then those who want to, or those whom sufficient wine has convinced it would be a good idea, line up and, one by one, hurl themselves face forward over the line. 

Standing either side, others take hold of the hurlee's arms and legs and gently ferry him (or her) above the line of floorbound participants who hold up their arms to speed the hurlee's passage. 

This year, Peter did it for the first time. 

Fête de la Noisette--the lunch

The annual lunch that celebrates the hazelnut is one of the high points of September. As communal meals go, this is a record-breaker in terms of size of crowd, and amount of food and wine consumed.

This year 320 people sat down in les halles in Lavelanet and 50 more had to be turned away. As always, the first course was a large slice of foie gras, this year served with pain d'épices and a fig confit. Wine flowed. The young man at the top of this post came around the tables offering seconds. Seconds of foie gras...aren't those words to haunt your dreams?

Next, volunteers deposited cassoulets on the table. As is traditional, we all lined up outside to get servings of meat off the grill, pork this year. Wine continued to flow. After that came cheese and finally dessert. Replacing the usual hazelnut based tarte was a multi-layer cake served, as is traditional, with bottles of blanquette de Limoux and hazelnut liqueur. That's my good friend, Corinne Barthez, serving coffee.