A Bilingual Kitchen

Talk about luck.....................an already extremely competent English cook being transported to a French kitchen! The best of both worlds in a tiny Minervois village..........and she's my sister-in-law so I got to hang out almost daily in her domain.

All those years in London it was the same ~ canning, preserving, bottling, call it what you want, Alison did it all, along with fabulous nightly dinners prepared with the freshest ingredients.

Alison's pantry stocked with soups, sauces, vegetables, chutneys, jams, all from this year's garden harvest, and those are her awesome homemade flavored aperitif wines on the top shelf.

Alison is also a great from scratch baker. On the afternoon my niece ordered homemade cakes for her school fundraiser...................there were, within a couple of hours, these four yummy cakes ready to be carefully transported to Carcassonne the following morning!

Well I must be fair here and tell you that my brother, John, spends an awful lot of time in this kitchen too. Not only does he wait tables, wash dishes, make coffee and act as sommelier when it comes to choosing, opening and pouring the local wines, he helps prepare the harvest from their fabulous vegetable garden.

Freshly picked tomatoes and the best lettuce ever ~ still coming from the garden in October!

What to do with all those beautiful tomatoes? John making sauce using the Italian 'passatutto'. I bought one of these amazing kitchen helpers (available at Williams-Sonoma) when I saw this one in action in their kitchen in the Summer of 2006. It's so easy to use and removes all the skins and seeds from the tomatoes in one fell swoop ~ definitely worth the price which I believe is only around $25.00.

China cabinet and table made by a local craftsman, the cabinet painted and aged in traditional French colors by my brother. To sit here enjoying fresh food, lovingly grown and prepared by one's own family beats any fancy meal in a posh restaurant.