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

Many moules

This is the always smiling man who sells mussels at markets, also oysters, and occasionally tellines and clams. Mondays, he's at Mirepoix, Fridays at Lavelanet. Today we bought four "bons" kilos from him, "bons" meaning he weighs out far more that. The result was one very heavy plastic bag so we left it with him as we often do while we did the rest of our shopping. And, as he often does, he pretended we hadn't paid when we went back to collect it. 

  These aren't well-mannered cultivated mussels but wild ones, clumped together and covered with seaweed and barnacles. 

  Six of us for supper tonight and warm enough to eat outside. An easy dinner. Pâte, cornichons and a salad of roquette and shallots to start. Then the moules, steamed with onions, with a bowl of the tiniest imaginable new potatoes to mash with the back of your fork to soak up the moules juice. Cheeses with walnut bread (also from Lavelanet market) and fig jam. Fruit salad and cream to finish. 

A Truly Impressive Paella

Being geographically so close to Spain means this classic dish is sold at most local markets. Usually there are a couple of sellers at Mirepoix. This morning, one of them had outdone himself with enormously fat fleshy mussels carefully arranged to flaunt their plumpness. Interestingly, he also uses fillets of fish instead of the usual chicken legs.

Petite sea shells

I am nuts about the tiny shellfish called tellines. You only see them occasionally and when you do, you pounce. We'd already planned to buy mussels from the mussel man who is always at the markets at Lavelanet and Mirepoix. He's a cheerful bearded m'sieu who provides "un bon kilo" for the price of an ordinary kilo (which has been three euros for two or three years now). He also sells oysters and, because it's now in season, asparagus making him the king of aphrodisiac foods. 

  Yesterday he was also selling tellines. Because they're pretty expensive, I only bought a few hundred grams. The original plan was to serve them as a first course but, in the end, it was simpler to cook the shellfish at the same time in two different pots. A glug of vermouth was all the tellines got. The moules had a hot bath in that plus chopped onion, garlic and tomato. Both got a sprinkle of fresh parsley as the finishing touch.

   Here's a shot of the tellines straight from the market, no two the same, and looking exactly like beach pebbles. The biggest are roughly the size of an almond in its shell. As you can see, they're considerably smaller than mussels. Their flesh is pink, a little salty and sweet and I could eat hundreds at a sitting. And have. 

Mussels...

I've got sloppier and sloppier about cleaning the wild mussels we buy here. Unlike the cultivated kind, these big roguish bivalves flaunt their marine origins. Cluster of barnacles like miniature pale grey volcanos, dark green hair-like seaweed, a strange white graffiti-like scribble like a fossilized worm...they ain't pretty but they're real.

At one time, I would spend hours scraping each one to smooth perfection. Not any more. Now it's off with anything large and non-clinging, a swift beard removal, a check that they're tightly closed. Any mussel that dares to gape is set aside on the edge of the sink and given a chance to shut up. 

I can't think of an easier dish to cook. You could probably just throw them into a dry pot, clamp on the lid and crank up the heat. I've never tried it. Usually, I simmer a couple of glugs of white wine or beer with chopped onion and garlic. This time I began with a sheen of olive oil. Not much. The onion and garlic went in and about 10 cm of roughly diced hot chorizo. All cooked for about five minutes. Then in with the mussels. Lid on. Seven minutes about or until they all opened. I chopped some chives from the garden over the top and we had them with bread for dipping and a green salad to follow.