Food So Good You Follow Your Nose

  Even before you see this stall in Mirepoix, you can smell what it sells from the great heady, indescribably good waft that lures you on, so tempting that it makes your stomach gurgle. Walk round the corner and you see this. Beyond it--and I'll post on this separately sometime soon--is the stall where we buy almost all our vegetables.

 In the foreground, what you get with your couscous (out of frame, in an equally large pan to the right).

  "La Part" means a serving. Parmentier de carnard is shepherd's pie made with duck.

A paella. Get there early enough and you can watch the stallholders building it from scratch.

 Mussels in cream sauce. Also available: moules marinières. Send a comment and let me know what you would order.

Mirepoix's Monday Market

   You have to love alliteration, don't you....Mirepoix's marvellous Monday market is maddening at the moment mainly because of its summer visitors. Glad as I am that they're enjoying our part of the country, it can be frustrating elbowing my way through the camera-wielders. House rule at the moment is that if we're not there before 9 a.m., forget it.
   Some random notes, with prices left on so you can see how they compare with what you're paying if you live in North America.

 Organic heirloom tomatoes. Red, orange, yellow, green, striped, blushing, juicy, sweet... serve yourself, mix and match. Slice on a plate, strew with torn basil, sprinkle with olive oil. There's the entrée taken care of. That price of 2.50 euros a kilo translates to about $1.42 a pound.

 One 500 g portion of paella costs $5.50. Get to the market early enough and you can watch it being made.

Cornus and miches are big crusty, hole-y loaves weighing 750 - 800 g. They're meant to last a week, from one market day to the next. These cost $3.37 each.

    You'll pay $1.70 a pound for the main ingredient for your moules marinières. At some point during the past ten years, the price of mussels rocketed from 2.80 euros to 3 euros. It's been 3 euros now for at least three years. This producer farms his moules in Sète on the Mediterranean coast, not far from Montpellier. He gets up at 3 a.m., leaves his house an hour later and eventually parks his van at Mirepoix on Mondays and Lavelanet on Fridays. Other days he goes to other markets. He told me that he's being doing this for 30 years.
    Behind the shellfish, you can make out the doorway of a smart little boutique. If you leave your moules with the moules man (a few kilos can be a few too many to lug round the market) and you haven't arrived by the time he's on the road home, he will leave your purchase inside the boutique

Monday Market Musings in Mirepoix.

    Let's hear it for "apt alliteration's artful aid". Anyway, just a few mental notes jotted down earlier today as we shopped.

1) Tourist season is starting up again. Check the number of cars parked in the hotel parking lot on the way in, the number of people carrying cameras but not shopping baskets, and the number of people not reading La Dépêche outside the café.

2)  The commune de Mirepoix will be one vast vegetable bed come summer to judge from the hundreds of seedlings being bought.

3) I would like a summer dress in the soft garnet, cream and sharp green colours of new garlic.
4) I wish I'd bought the flowery summer dress that I saw on the friperie (secondhand clothes) stall. It was the right size and cost two euros.
5) I must stop buying clothes at the friperie in Lavelanet as the lady there now not only knows me but knows my taste to the point that she shows me things she thinks I will like. She's usually right.
6) How come I got a chocolate almond in the saucer of my crème and Peter got a small biscuit?
7) How much I love La Presse in Mirepox for playing classical music so that you listen to Bach or Vivaldi while you leaf through the food magazines.
8) How happy it makes me that we park the car in Place Marcel Pagnol, a little square named after the man who created Jean de Florette. I wish I could say that the square was lined with cafés and shaded by plane trees but it's not. It's where we go to pay our various taxes.

9) How this same group stands in the same spot every week--and everyone cheerfully walks around them.

10) How you can buy live trout, artisanal beer and handmade leather sandals from this row of stalls

11) How I purposely detour around beside the cathedral so I can sniff the amazing smells that come from these colossal pans of poulet basquaise and paella. One morning, around 10 a.m., we were there with a friend who was visiting from Canada and the smell hit her so powerfully that she had to buy a serving of bouillabaisse right there and then, and eat it on the spot.

12) How clever it is for vendors to put all the vegetables that go into ratatouille all together.

Laos: Markets in Luang Prabang: the Night Market

     At night, this town becomes pure magic. Around dusk, motorbikes and trucks roar along the main street bearing folk who set up red tents and fill them with gleaming scarves, shawls, jewellery, and crafts of all kinds.

You can just make out the market at the end of the street. Note....no streetlights. 

Embroidery typical of Laos and northern Thailand.

Pressed flowers are sandwiched between two sheets of handmade paper to create these enchanting lanterns. They fold flat so you can pack them in your luggage.

Just look at those colours--and this was one of many stalls selling silk scarves and shawls.

    There's also a narrow laneway entirely filled with food stalls and, partly because of the food, and largely because of the atmosphere, that's where we ate a number of suppers.

Making salad from scratch.

Backpackers heap their plates high at the noodle and vegetable buffet.

My absolutely most favourite thing at the nightly food market were these marinated hunks of pork, sweet, spicy and sticky, grilled over charcoal --and consumed with a plate of steamed vegetables and the inevitable beer.

     

Laos: Markets in Luang Prabang: Phousi Market

   You have to take a tuktuk to this enormous market on the outskirts of town--and this one isn't for tourists. It's where the local people buy everything they need on a daily basis. Some of it is inside a huge building, ill-lit apart from the occasional fluorescent strip lighting overhead. 

     The liveliest way I can tell you about its wonderful crowded chaos is to copy the notes I made as I strolled. Not sorting them out means you get an idea of the glorious confusion--and profusion--of it all. 

If this lady doesn't have it somewhere on her stall, what you're looking for probably doesn't exist. 

 Just some of the fresh vegetables for sale.

      Here's what I scribbled down as I ambled up one aisle and down the other.
       Phousi market. Indoors, outdoors. Enormous. Everything in shiny plastic bags. Loose dried chilis of different kinds. Huge green-yellow papaya. An immense selection of plastic and enamelware, and stainless steel bowls. A truckload of oranges. Backpacks and 4-in-1 plastic holders for condiments. Cel phones and gold watches and silver jewellery. Pale beige-peach-coloured squash. Stacked trays of brown eggs. Almost orange-gold potatoes.

   Trays of woven bamboo heaped with bean sprouts. A tin tray holding one enormous blood clot. Live fish in aerated plastic bowls of water. Fresh rice noodles. Water buffalo feet. Pungent dried fish smelling like overworn underwear. Murderous smell of freshly hacked meat. Knives, tongs and rice makers. I have bought river weed with orange and garlic. Not sure if it needs cooking. The girl who sold it to me was giggling too hard over our lack of communication. 10,000 kip. Another 8000 spent on a tin tray, painted with flowers. Flashlights, steel wool and toothpicks. Ladies with sewing machines stitching up sarongs. Sequinned jeans. Cola and 7up. “Mingwing Weaving” men’s underwear. Locks, keys and hinges.

Spices in the bowls at the front. Fish-sauce-in-the-making in the bowls at the back.

Meat in the raw.

    When I wrote "a truckload of oranges," that's what I meant. I went to this colossal market three times altogether, and still didn't see everything.