Yesterday's Feast

Pigging out on charcuterie before the wedding, with my dad.

Despite what my mom Priscilla will tell you ("Ang kinakain lang nila sa France, tinapay na matigas!"), where we live the eating is always good. We're starting to harvest some lettuce and radishes, and just the other day I opened my door and found outside a crate of potatoes left by a generous and gifted-gardener neighbor. Whatever else we lack, there's the twice-a-week market. The vegetables from les petits producteurs are fresh and largely chemical-free. We know the butcher and once gave him an earful when we weren't satisfied with the beef steaks.

Aigues Mortes, being year-round a host for tourists, is home to several good restaurants. Our favorite is Bouzigues, and we almost always get the fixed-price menu, three courses for 22 euros. I start either with oysters or foie gras, move on to a nice cut of meat, and finish with dessert, often something chocolate, but can't resist stealing some of Pierre's cheese, usually Pelardon with honey. When we're in the mood for exotic, we go to Timgad. Karim's mother makes the most excellent meat-and-prunes tajine.

Even with an open-air picnic, you can still have a feast. At the main-street boucherie, get a few slices of chorizo or other charcuterie, a few grams of rillettes, a slice of terrine. Don't forget your bread and your wine. At the cave cooperative, a decent bottle goes for just two euros and fifty.

However, human beings are funny; we always want what we don't have.

Yesterday was our second-year wedding anniversary, and Pierre asked, "So you want to go to a restaurant, honey?" I shook my head no, and instead took out a blue flyer I had been handed the last time I went to the city. Pierre chuckled; it was publicity for Domino's. For some time now, we'd both been craving for a greasy, ingredients-straight-from-a-factory, nothing-in-it-must-be-good-
for-you, hard-to-find-over-here, fast-food pan pizza. It had been at least two years since I'd last had one, three years for him.

So we drove 40 minutes to find the place, drove another 40 minutes back, heated stuff in the oven, and installed ourselves in bed with a film to enjoy our anniversary feast: two pan pizzas, an order of buffalo wings, a big bottle of Diet Coke, and a tub of Ben&Jerry's. For lunch today I'm relishing the leftovers. There's time enough for the rest of the week to go back to good eating.