Cevennes Food

Here is the terrace where organic farmhouse vegetarian meals are taken in clement weather, with potted lemon and lime trees and a glimpse of the surrounding mountain forests of the white oak which is evergreen.

Upon fields and orchards

Growing towards harvest

There look with blessing

The spirits of heaven;

And their gaze searches

Our hearts for ripening' 
From 'August' by Adam Bittleston

Smiling tomatoes, fluffy little peaches, crowned pomegranates, and developing figs and olives...

...prepared in our own miniscule kitchen, local sausages fried with rosemary, pasta salad sprinkled with wild flowers, cucumber salad with sheeps milk yoghurt and wild mint dressing.

We also ate pourpier sauvage (purslane) as a green salad and grilling herb.  It's a wild plant which grows in between the rows, much hated as a 'pervasive weed' by the FDA and horribly killed, but in fact delicious, medicinal, and rich in vitamins and Omega 3.  On the farm they feed it to the hens to make their eggs rich in omega 3. 

In the shop selling local produce, we found 'brebis' (sheeps milk cheese), excellent sausages from pigs which trot between the chestnut trees, and everything you can think of to make from chestnuts with their sweet fruit and bitter flower.  We particularly enjoyed herb and flower 'syrops':  thyme, rose and lavender.  All you have to do is make a strong herbal tea with a good lot of flowers/herbs and 500 mls water, then add 500 mls of 'sucre complet' (whole sugar) and boil up into a syrop.  Can be used  to make drinks diluted with iced water, or to flavour yoghurts.   We invented 'honey rose' sheeps milk yoghurt, with mountain honey and syrop de rose food for the Gods.

A hot smoking southern rosemary...

A pumpkin turning golden, ready for harvest when the umbilical stalk is dry and no longer feeding, kept for winter soup, or if particularly big and beautiful, kept as decoration and doorstop to remind us of Jupiter's largesse.

www.lemasperdu.comgite ferme biologique