We spent a couple of weeks in the University-town of Aix-in-Provence, about a 3-hour train trip via Marseilles from Nice. Aix is a pleasant town of about 140,000 people. There are excellent restaurants and the town seems to have a more than average number of modern architectural structures. More on both of these in later posts.
One day we decided to take a cooking class celebrating the foods of Provence. We chose Provence Cooking as the vendor of the class and spent a nice day shopping for food and wine, and cooking and eating in a private home about 20 minutes outside of Aix. Provence Cooking is the brain-child of Gilles Conchy, a Frenchman from Marseilles, who runs day long cooking classes in both towns.
Eight of us met Gilles at the tourist office in Aix, introduced ourselves to each other and headed off on foot to local food market in a town square in the heart of Aix. We bought the vegetables we would cook later and our purchases included zucchini flowers (courgettes, in French), eggplant, tomatoes, onions, goat cheese and nectarines. Then we all piled into Gilles’ van and headed to a winery just outside Aix for a tasting and also to purchase wine to drink with our meal.Gilles lives in a single-level house with a large backyard, good size kitchen and large outdoor food prep space. We all gathered around a large table to prepare our meal.
Some of us prepped the zucchini blossoms by puling out the pistils and stuffing them with cheese, some of us scooped out eggplants, onions and tomatoes that would later be filled with a meat stuffing, and the rest of us worked on individual nectarine tartlets with an almond crust. Then we baked ‘petits farcis’, as the stuffed vegetables are known, deep fried the zucchini blossoms that were dipped in batter, and baked the nectarine tartlets. After that we all sat down and ate and drank everything in sight. A very pleasant day – we met at about 9am and Gilles dropped us all off back in Aix at about 5 pm. For a fun experience with the foods of Provence, book a day at www.provence-gourmet.fr.