Mediterranean Summer Read Online Free Page B

case the link involved only vicarious travel to France during my childhood. In our home, as in most American homes, Sunday night television with Disney was a ritual. But as a child of two off-camera television professionals, I also watched some shows that were not what you would expect a kid to be watching. One, aimed at an adult audience, mesmerized me. It was called
The Galloping Gourmet
and was hosted by the happy, funny, and well-dressed gourmand Graham Kerr. It ran in our area just about the time I usually came home for lunch.
    The Galloping Gourmet
was a show about a flamboyant but skilled chef going through a hectic routine each episode as he deftly prepared a grand gourmet meal inspired by some exotic locale or classic technique. His hammed-up facial expressions and zany ways, along with his interactions with the live audience, made for an amusing show. I was captivated by the way he transformed raw ingredients into finished dishes—peeling, chopping, slicing, then pots and pans jangling on the stove, working two ovens as he made a meal around the main event, like roast duck with a sauce of pinot noir or shallow-fried turbot with lemon and parsley butter sauce. But what I remember most vividly were the short segments devoted to his sojourns overseas, mostly in France and Italy—the famous harbor of Marseille, where he bought the fish for bouillabaisse, the Burgundian countryside as he spoke about dishes
à la dijonnaise,
and the open-air markets where he shopped for fresh ingredients. Even if I had no idea what he was talking about when he referred to what went into dishes like
escargot truffière,
it did not matter. What did matter was that he always made cookery fun.
             
    On the train from
Paris to Provence, I obsessed about the possibility that Alice had told Nathalie about my fiasco in London, going over all my failures of service that night, one by one, as she had with me. And so I was relieved when Nathalie met me at the Avignon train station with her son Jerome, greeting me with a hearty, “Welcome to Provence!”
    She looked different from how I remembered her—she stood a little taller than she appeared at our first meeting, but was thinner and balanced her weight on a cane. She pointed to the cane as the reason for the two-month delay—knee surgery. Swiss by heritage, Nathalie had discovered Provence in her twenties and adopted the region’s sun-drenched lifestyle with the same dedication as a native. Her long, free-flowing auburn hair, angular features, wise brown eyes, and wide smile may have been a nod to the gypsies of the Vaucluse valley. She had even named her home after one of their patron saints, but since we met in Berkeley, she had moved into an apartment in town.
    As we set out in Jerome’s little Peugeot station wagon, she told me that we had to make a few stops on the way home. “We must pick up some wine,” she announced, “then visit a
huilerie
for some olive oil and a nursery to get starter plants of basil and parsley. It’s unfortunate when all I need is a sprig or a few leaves that I have to buy a whole bunch. Unless I am making
pistou
”—pesto—“and I need a lot, it’s wasteful. Plus, the flavor is best when you can go to the source.”
    Jerome drove swiftly through the valley as we passed meadows of bright red poppies, asparagus fields, vineyards, and cherry orchards. It was too early in the season to see the famous purple rows of lavender that Provence is known for. But its nascent fields were everywhere. I could just make out the medieval hilltop villages—Lagnes, Gordes, Ménerbes—far off in the distance. They all shared a similar architectural style of stone and terra-cotta except for Roussillon, which rose from the red rock of nearby cliffs. “You’ll get a chance to visit them during your stay,” Nathalie said as she watched me gaze in awe through the open car windows. “We have to move fast because the vendors all close at noon for their