Saturday, 11 July 09, Martin's here

We’ve had an eventful couple of days. Saturday morning we didn’t plan anything because the appliance repairman was coming at 11:00 except that (MIRACLE!) he showed up early. This was truly a surprise; the only problem was, I sort of wasn’t exactly dressed to meet strangers, if you know what I mean. It turns out that the problems with both the washing machine and the oven were that we didn’t quite know how they worked. The washing machine is “semi-automatic”, which means that it doesn’t necessarily go all the way through a complete cycle, which is why we’d been having to turn it off after the wash cycle, move the dial, and turn it on again to get it to do the final rinse and spin.

He told us the dryer was a piece of junk that should be tossed into the “poubelle”, which we basically already knew, as it takes about 2.5 hours to actually get it to dry anything. Electricity is rather expensive over here, to boo

t. And then there is the oven, or “four”. The problem there (we couldn’t get it to light under any circumstances) is that you have to turn it on, wait between 5 and 10 seconds, and THEN put a lighted match in the hole. Welcome to “safety” measures in France (for the washer, when it’s done, you have to (a) turn it “off” by pressing the button again, and wait two minutes until it “clicks” before you can open the tub, yet another safety measure).

After he left (this all cost me 20 euros, and it was a real challenge understanding that 20 euros was what we owed him—I never did; he had to show me), we ate some lunch and then

decided to go to Monbazillac, very near Bergerac, where they make sweet white dessert wine, not unlike Sauterne. Not nearly as expensive. You have to pay to visit the chateau (16^th century, about 1560), but then there is free tasting of a lot of wines. Martin didn’t like the Pecharmant (an AOC in the Bergerac region) red, at all, but the Bergerac red a little, and he liked the Monbazillac we tasted, the sweet white wines, perfect for dessert or to eat with that other local product, foie gras.

We ended up buying a “case”, in this case a six-pack, of the chateau Monbazillac 2002, which was in a box (one of the issues here was that we wanted the box). It’s supposed to be great to lay down for 25-30 years, by which time I will almost certainly be dead. We also bought two bottles of Pecharmant (can lay this down up to 10 years) and Bergerac Rouge (up to four years). These are all years that are generally beyond our ability to appreciate the quality, but hey, the Pecharmant was 6 euros 50 a bottle, and the Bergerac 4 euros 50 a bottle. The latter would cost at least (AT LEAST) $20 in Kentucky.

For dinner we had garlic soup which I made (trying to emulate the stuff we’d had the night before at that restaurant), escargots (snails) in garlic butter (one of Martin’s favorites), bread and wine. The garlic soup was good, except it wasn’t garlicky enough, even though I used 9 or 10 cloves for 1.5 litres of water worth of soup, and it wasn’t thick enough. It disappeared, though. Next time I will use MUCH more garlic, and MUCH more flour; what you do is sauté the chopped up garlic in duck or goose fat, slowly and not until it is brown, and then put flour on it and cook that for a bit, and then add water, and let it cook for rather a long time. So if you mess up and don’t have either enough garlic or enough flour at the start (OR BOTH), you have a problem. It was good, though. I will try again. The snails I bought at the supermarket frozen. So there.