Cooking with Pascal Volle

The first day we were a little nervous, not knowing what to expect. We had met two others who were doing the whole week with us. Nick and his grandmother Janet are from New Mexico and Texas. We were dropped off from the hotel in to St Remy, the nearest town, at the markets and told to enjoy ourselves for an hour then meet Pascal at the church steps. We excitedly started looking around and at this point a little unease crept in as we realized we didn’t know what Pascal looked like!

We have been looking for something with the bee on it as a souvenir of our trip and it turns out that is the symbol of Provence so we found lots of table cloths and bedspreads in Provence colours and with bees on them. We arrived at the meeting point and this way too young guy with two strangers looks at us and we look at them and he thinks tourists with way to much baggage and we think who are these strangers and he’s too young….. it turns out we were cooking with two more that day and, indeed, this was Pascal.  We met Larry and Belinda Wrun (google them!) and we 6 and Pascal were off with Chef in the lead through the food parts of the market. The fresh veg and small goods were amazing. We picked up a bunch of stuff and without really understanding what it was all going to be used for, made our way backto the Hotel in Pascal’s car. Larry and Belinda were staying else where so had their own car. Pascal gave several gallic shrugs as we packed all our shopping in to his village car but it all fit and we arrived at about 10:30 at the hotel kitchen. As we put on aprons, did the required hand washing and grabbed the tea towel to tuck in the apron, Chef kept muttering we are late we are late.

Pascal has some good English but it is a bit limited. But between Joyce’s French, Larry’s good French, and Janet and Nick’s Spanish, we made do; it was fun figuring out what he said as he whipped around the kitchen. He had been pretty quiet in the market but in the kitchen he just let go in ‘franglish’ and he even had some amusing things to say.

We cooked Chicken for mains with all sorts of vegetables and we made a broth around artichokes and carrots for starters. We chopped and peeled and learned how to do artichokes hearts brilliantly. We learned a salsa that he pored hot oil over to ‘cook’ the shallots and garlic gently. We used fresh garlic, not dried, so you use the whole thing, no peeling, We made these tiny round parsnips and carrots in water oil and honey that were amazing.  We worked till about 12:30 that day then went out and sat at a prepared table under a bamboo cover looking at the gardens, lawns and patio in the Provence sunshine and drank wine while the food we cooked appeared beautifully plated and was delicious! We got a sense of Pascal’s memory because as we were cooking and chatting and we thought he was occupied, we talked about which bit of the chicken we liked and when it arrived it was exactly what we said, even though they were all different. He’s a very clever guy. Dessert by the way was fresh strawberries gently poached by pouring the hot syrup over the berries. The syrup was favoured with lavender!

Lunch was a riot of talk and congratulations on our efforts and Larry entertained with his expectations of bull fighting training in the afternoon with the locals. He had heard they do this acrobatic stuff and kept saying “it can’t to too hard its just physics, you grab the horns and vault over”. To this day I don’t know if there was ANY truth to his plans but it provided a great time.  

In the afternoon Philipe took us (minus Jan ‘cause she wanted a rest) to four hill villages  --the towns of Luberon, made famous by Peter Mayle in his book ‘A Year in Provence’ -- near by and we saw medieval castles and towns. After a return and rest we had dinner at 8:30 and crawled into bed late in the evening.