Text 33600, 146 rader
Skriven 2015-11-25 03:04:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: bye Lilli 543
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All things must pass; we took Lilli to Brive airport, which
is served by Ryanair and Hop!, so her Star Gold and OneWorld
Emerald don't get her anywhere. It's unclear how the weather
and the GPSes were going to treat us, so we set off pretty
early. Let's see. She wanted to get there two hours before the 
flight; Ian said one was plenty. We compromised by allowing
an hour and a half. Google and the GPSes agreed on about an
hour to get there; Ian said 40 minutes. We went with the
majority on this one. But we were ahead of schedule this 
morning, so we added half an hour to allow for getting lost.
Three hours before the flight, out of there. The GPSes would
have been right ... but there was road construction, which
wasn't so bad, but that our entrance onto the freeway was
closed, and the GPS seemed to want us to turn the wrong way
down a one-way road. I said to just go straight, but we
ended up somehow going (at least with the traffic) on the
freeway away from the airport. Oh, well, that was 20 minutes
wasted. We did get to the airport almost 2 hours before the 
flight, and it was deserted. Not even a coffee shop, and we 
didn't want to settle for the vending machines. The phone 
found a listing for a patisserie called Coste Vincent et 
Sophie in the next town Cressensac. It was open and semi-
inviting, offering a coffee machine, a case of pastry, and
another case with beer and soft drinks. A round of coffees, 
except I had a mixed berry tart instead, pretty decent with 
a good comemrcial pastry cream and a somewhat less good very 
sturdy brown crust.  We took our sweet time over this; when 
we moseyed back there was just over an hour to the flight,
and still no staff in sight. A line was forming at the
empty check-in counter, though. We stuck around until the
counter opened and bade Lilli good travels.

It was still early in the day, so I took Swisher on a tour
that included the beautiful hilltop town of Turenne (we
didn't go to the top) and the peculiar red sandstone
village Collonges (where the Comtes de Turenne kept their
mistresses), which we did walk about for a while, as the
grades were gentle and the sun warm.

On to Meyssac, where we found as usual the church closed,
but it was lunchtime, and there were somewhat nice smells
coming from the Assiette Meyssacoise, so.

The proprietress greeted us somewhat warmly, gave us
menus, took our drink orders (two drafts), and then left 
to talk with her friends for about fifteen minutes.

Later. Beers came, orders taken.

Swisher got the omelet with cepes "with its salad."
which turned out to be a footlong stuffed with quite 
a lot of mushrooms. A big green salad on the side.

I'd been thinking of the local products of the land
menu - gizzard salad, veal head, walnut dessert, but
there was a special of the day avaliable at a very
advantageous price, so I had that.

The starter was listed as avocado mayonnaise. Half a
sizable fruit, perfectly and surprisingly ripe, with a 
big blob of tuna salad, a sandwich's worth, overflowing
the cavity. On the side half a devilled egg and a half
tomato sliced over some greens, your average vinaigrette
on top. It was a lot of calories, and surprisingly
everything tasted pretty good.

After that, the plat du jour, beef stew with red wine 
dit Bourguignon - a bit more than half a pound of 
chuck in big cubes with some bits of fat and gristle
added in because they liked me (or didn't like me), 
and three potatoes of the size of which I'd normally 
eat at most one, in a  tart and salty sauce made with 
some kind of wine that wasn't Pinot Noir. Big flavors 
and heavy food, more suitable for 25F than 25C, to 
which the temperature had climbed. I ended up mashing 
lots of potato into the sauce and eating it all.

A dessert of fromage blanc came with, and I told la 
patronne that I didn't want it, which caused her some 
distress, so she gave me a scoop of vanilla ice cream 
instead.

The bill was not large.

Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne was more or less on the way,
so we walked around that town for a while, admiring
as I have many times the abbey church's charming
tympanum and noticing that some nearby buildings had 
been razed to make way for some modern excrescences
of the sort that I've always described as more bow-wow
house than Bauhaus.

On to Castelnau, the neighborhood's grandest castle,
notable for being the folkloric putative home of the
original Brunnhilde and for its having been restored
by the 19th-century equivalent of a movie star - a
tenor in the Paris Opera. Oh yeah, the view from the
ramparts. We paid the parking fee and were walking up
to the admission office wondering whether we really
wanted to pay E7 for what promised to be a short and
not that interesting visit, when we started seeing
lightning not too awfully far away, so that answered
that - some deity or another had decided that we were
not going to walk the walls of this castle this day.

So back home in thunderstorms.

Ian and Jacquie had prepared an interesting supper,
light but for one dish.

Potage au cresson was just that Parmentier base with
a bunch of watercress pureed into it. They don't 
cultivate watercress in this area (I bet one could
put on waders and find it locally if one tried) -
this had come from Grand Frais in Brive.

Ian had taken part of that foie gras I'd bought and
made it into a torchon and sous vided it for the 
canonic time and temperature (55 to 60C for I don't
have any idea how long, but it shouldn't much matter).
It was served cool with bread, but of course I ate it
straight. Better than restaurant.

He had found a recipe for lasagne with zucchini and 
mushrooms, and I'd agreed to try it, entreating him
to slice the zucchini as thin as possible and cook
it in butter for twice the length of time suggested
in the book, so it would be both brown and meltingly
tender. He acceded to all of this except he used
the olive oil specified in the recipe. I admitted on 
tasting it that it wasn't as poisonous as zucchini
tends to be.

Domeaine des Cros Lo Sang del Pais 11 Marcillac was a 
spicy stemmy wine with notes of green and black pepper 
made from a grape I'd not knowingly run into - the Fer 
Servadou. It went well with the mushrooms and tomatoes 
and perhaps the zucchini too.

Peach sorbet for afters.

With this I had a glass of homemade eau de vie de
mirabelle (from a neighbor or colleague or something)
that tasted rather more like coing.
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