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MIAM MIAM COOKERY COURSES:
THE GREAT TASTE OF THE SPICE OF LIFE
Have you seen the limp melted watches in Salvador Dali’s painting?
Good, here in my village in the Cevennes, between two introductory spice cooking courses I’ve seen more and more people pass through, former city dweller with urban stress, backpacking or slowly walking with a donkey (here we are close to the R.L. Stevenson trail) who want to sort out their life in a languid way, to calm down, to ease their burden.
Not hippies, not nonconformists. Just travelers who’ve come away from the fast lane. The walkers! My word, it’s full of ramblers. There are more and more ramblers, 15 million in France apparently. Going their own way on the footpaths, collecting mushrooms and flowers, they are gardeners – often lady gardeners- out for pleasure. The pleasure of cultivation and good eating, not frozen or tinned micro waved fast food. No, eating fresh vegetables they have grown, and they come to me to ask my advice about cooking them or about a suitable pinch of magical spices. It’s like a large soft wave of tranquility, a luxurious wave, one of peaceful insurgents, deserters who have left the big cities for the market towns. Who take their time and value their liberty.
I’ve seen this wave lapping near to my stone built kitchen, under its 12th century arches. Inexorably marching on, it really gives you an appetite. The vegetables, once they are grown, we need to prepare and simmer the little onions in curries, with saffron, with paprika and with cumin, in a wok for healthy eating. The mushrooms, we want to liven them up with a clove of garlic, some ginger and some coriander.
My students do not devour the food, they taste, they savour. They don’t watch television while eating; they converse and share a drink. They don’t get indigestion from eating too fast and they stroll calmly into the garden for a siesta under the hundred year old yaw trees.
Ok. I’m exaggerating , apparently you must exaggerate to make yourself heard. The Miam Miam students, as you will know, are not fast food enthusiasts, not fighters nor winners who want to change the world or adolescents with pimples on the end of the nose. They are people who are rather careful about their pleasures. Couples sharing a present, families meeting up for a weekend around some tasty recipes that I can help them to savour.
I don’t know how fare the wave will go but for the moment there are more and more surfing down here, tranquil, watching the sunsets and looking around the surrounding countryside. From the gite I will rent for you, you can contemplate a view that stretches for 60 kilometers, a bird’s eye view without catching sight of a single man made structure.
Welcome aboard, when you want
Patrick du Cros
Quartermaster
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