St. Gilles, Les Mejanes, and other spots in the Camargue

Looking for birds.

We spent the day in the Camargue: that is, the delta of the Rhone River. It's a fine spot for seeing birds, including some that are migrating now and some that are nesting. Agriculture here includes raising the famous black bulls, white horses, and quite a bit of rice-growing. Small cities and villages here date from early times, with Roman and Medieval ruins as well as some well-preserved historic structures. We're spending a week seeing and learning.

Storks make a clicking noise with their beaks.

A stilt in the reeds.

A just-fledged baby long-tailed tit. Saturday our guide saw this family still in their nest.

I also enjoyed the wild flowers, especially irises.

A winchat.

A wryneck, a kind of woodpecker, that our guide says must have just crossed the Mediterranean in migration last night.

A turtle dove -- once very common they are now
more and more endangered.

Lunch in a village called Les Mejanes

Camargue salad has the same ingredients as Salade Nicoise, but with rice mixed into the tuna.

One of the other birdwatchers had a croque monsieur.

Another day, another tart au citron, this one garnished with an almond wafer and a tiny glass of sorbet.

The abbey church at St. Gilles was a famous pilgrimage site, now in poor shape.
We had a fascinating lecture about the iconography.
This is a devil waiting to tempt Cain to kill Abel.

Behind what's left of the church is the ruin of the choir and ambulatory,
including just one tower with a famous winding staircase inside.

Avignon to Arles

This morning in Avignon, we climbed up to the top of the city, above
the Palace of the Popes, to see the river and the famous bridge from a
different angle.

We left Avignon for Arles at around noon. It's an 18-minute train ride, unfortunately in this case followed by a long wait for a taxi. Many vineyards and distant mountains make a very scenic trip. The landscape inevitably recalls Van Gough's and Cezanne's paintings of this area.

We ate lunch at a beautiful restaurant called L'Affenage. It serves traditional Provencal dishes and very local specialties. I had a marinated dish of "taureau" -- that is, meat from a bull, with traditional spices of Daube de Provence -- I could taste the orange zest that's one of the flavors of the dish as I'm familiar with it. (The server confirmed my perception of orange zest.)

A hearth in the dining room is used to cook steaks and other meats.

The restaurant is carefully designed to invoke nostalgia!

Clockwise from upper left: waiting to order; snails; ravioli with cepes (fabulous mushrooms) and cream sauce;
lemon tart with meringue for dessert; marinated beef for my main course;
potatoes for both of us; Len's duck with cepes and cream sauce.

Steaks cooking on the hearth for another table.

After lunch we walked in the garden near the Roman archaeology site. We'll be seeing lots more.

We are now in our hotel, and will soon meet our one-week tour, "Birds and Art in Provence."

UPDATE: The full name of the special daube is Gardiane de Taureau. I found a recipe online ... to see it click HERE.

Moroccan Restaurant "Le Riad," Avignon

Moroccan Cuisine intrigues me, and it's widely valued in France, so our
restaurant choice tonight was "Le Riad" here in Avignon.

We ordered rosé wine: Tavel, which grows not far from here.
Notice the spice dish behind the wine shaped like a traditional tajine, the
Moroccan conical pottery dish for slow cooking meat or vegetable recipes.
The dishes themselves are also called tajines.

Appetizer: triangular pastries filled with goat cheese and meat, served
with salad including fabulous black & green olives.

Main course: a tajine of chicken with preserved lemon, almonds, olives, raisins. Len had tajine of
lamb with apricots. The aromatic spices rise deliciously with the steam when the lid is lifted from the newly-cooked dish.

Dessert: oranges with cinnamon and orange-flower water.

The tajine menu. My ambition for a while is to become more familiar with and to learn to cook these dishes.

Sur Le Pont D'Avignon and more

A good day starts with coffee before sightseeing. We were ready to see the two most famous sights in
Avigon: the Palace of the Popes and the bridge made famous by the children's song.

The Palace of the Popes

For several centuries, the Popes owned the city of Avignon and built a huge palace there. 

The town viewed from one of the windows of the great hall of the fortified palace.

On the tower, the famous Mistral wind was blowing especially hard.

On the Bridge at Avignon ... Sur le Pont d'Avignon

From the bridge you see the palace and its towers where we had just been.

Lunch

Salade Niçoise -- a nearly-local dish with delicious Provencal olives, anchovies, etc.

After lunch, a municipal garden ... we also visited the Antiquities Museum nearby.

As Good as it Ever Was!

Finally, we ate dinner at a classic French restaurant, beginning with this Kir, crusty French bread, and a bit of light tuna spread.

Appetizers

Asparagus with various garnishes.

Seared tuna with carrot puree and spiralized celriac.

Main Course: Fish

Cod with little vegetable quenelles.

Sea Bass on a pilaf with sauce

Dessert

Cream-filled tart with fruit

Creamy mousse with bergamot-flavored jelly square and
streusel base

Interior of the restaurant in an old cloister.

Avignon at Night 

There's much more here, but we had a delightful evening walking around the streets where lots of people were dining or drinking indoors and at sidewalk tables, and there's lots of fascinating architecture.

Long, Long Day

Red-eye flight from Detroit to Paris last night.
Delta's snacks now have cute sayings on them.
In the bag: still the same old mini pretzels & peanuts.

On international flights, they still serve a hot meal.
It tasted better than it looks here!

Unfortunately, we had a 6 hour wait for the train from Charles deGaulle Airport to our first stop: Avignon. Earlier trains were all full, as was ours. Very tiresome. The TGV train ride was beautiful. We are now checked into a very appealing hotel near the old center, and will soon start actual tourism with dinner in a nearby restaurant.

Meanwhile, the above photos are all I've really had to eat this weekend!

Hotel is on the ground floor...

... seems quite nice.

Oysters: A Challenge!

The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark, published over 50 years ago, is a highly detailed combination of natural history, informal anthropology, personal experience, worldwide history, and maybe a few other things. The rambling narrative revolves around the life cycle of oysters and the people of one small town in Brittany who cultivate them, dipping in and out of many oyster-centered observations from prehistoric times, Roman times, modern times, and (sometimes it seems) on and on.

The attendees at my Culinary History Reading Group last Wednesday who had read or tried to read Clark's book agreed that it was a very difficult book to read. A couple of us had read it many years ago: we felt that our memories were better than we found the book this time, perhaps because so many following publications have combined the natural history and observations of people so much more effectively. Two such better and more recent books that the reading group has read are Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters and Mark Kurlansky's Cod.

Every one of us was delighted with a review from a couple of years ago, titled "The oyster climbs the Great Chain of Being: Eleanor Clark’s Locmariaquer." This passage from the review seemed to summarize our reactions:

"...while The Oysters of Locmariaquer is a book one would certainly be glad to have read, it is not always a book one will enjoy in the midst of the reading. Clark’s style is discursive in the extreme, and at times she seems hellbent on making sure that the reader works hard to follow her meandering sentences. Then, too, there is the matter of how well she integrates the science of oyster biology within the story of a small area of Brittany where they used to be cultivated .... The honest answer is that ... Clark sometimes seems to get slightly lost in her detailed explanations of Belon biology – and as a result, so may her readers."

We were glad we tried, but found it very hard!