Summer Time - Salad Time

"Gourmande in the Kitchen" is a deliciously inspiring blog I follow and this morning it just so happened that I could just taste the featured "Zucchini Noodles" and, better still, had all ingredients at my fingertips. Now to me this is more a salad than noodles (being a bit of a traditionalist, as far as I am concerned noodles have to be warm) but since summer has finally reached Provence and today's temperature is 33 C/ 91 F - salad is what we crave now. And this one is as fast as it is delicous! All you need are a few zucchini, a handful of cherry tomatoes, a few capers,  half a lemon and olive oil, a julienne cutter and voilà - a delicious and very pretty summer salad is about five minutes away! Merci Gourmande!

The Oil is in the Can

We had the first frost - quite a few nights below 0°C actually - and in Provence that means go and harvest your olives. Three days and 40 kilograms of handpicked olives later we do nurse aching limbs and smother lots cream on our hands (it is totally impossible to pick olives with gloves on) but are mighty proud: our very own olive oil is now waiting in the wine cellar.

 

This is the old oil mill in Puymeras were we had our olives pressed the traditional way, the only difference being that nowadays a motor turns the squashing stones whereas in former times it used to be a donkey making the rounds all days long.

 The olives are squashed into a paste between huge and fast turning stones

 the paste is then evenly distributed onto straw mats

  that are then piled on top of each other

 and squeezed to extract the oil

 What beautiful color!

Our jerry can being filled!

A Magic Moment

On our way back from the oil mill in Mirabel-aux-Baronnies where we delivered the first big batch of our just harvested olives to be pressed into "the gold of Provence" as our wonderful olive oil is called we stopped for a quick coffee at our much beloved village square in Villedieu. The huge old plane trees had just been pruned and so you can see just how beautiful a day in Provence can be - at the end of November...



Olive Oil - the Gold of Provence

There is nothing much to harvest in our kitchen garden anymore these days - some tomatoes, a few lost raspberries and leftover grapes but our olive trees are dripping with fruit. It looks like we'll have an extremely good harvest this year and I can't wait to pick them, bring them to the olive mill and then get my very own "Gold of Provence". For that is what our precious olive oil looks like - liquid gold!

Nyons - Fête of the new 2010 Olive Oil

Maybe I picked the wrong day, but this weekend's celebration of the new olive oil in Nyons was not exactly exciting. Okay, so there was a tasting of the different varieties of Nyons' A.O.C. oils lined up in a tent on their central square "Place de la Libération" where you could also taste some Côte du Rhône wines, but that was it. No olives or olive oil for sale - nothing!

Tasting Nyons' new olive oil

The only highlight was Alain Berne's cooking demonstration. The acclaimed chef  from Hostun in the Drôme prepared an elegant Olive Tart, very subtly perfumed with lime and lemon zest which I can't wait to try out. Have to buy some olives first though ......

   Chef Alain Berne prepares the pastry   

            

The Olive Tart