Spent the weekend on the beach in Michigan, where the landscape is perhaps not so different from that of the northern French coast. (Certainly the weather, which was freakishly cool for August, felt northern.) There are even vineyards . . . and lots of old barns and houses along the back roads.
For food, though, we went pretty much all-American--grilled skirt steaks and s'mores one night, plus frozen custard and cheeseburgers for lunch one day. We did have an Italian flavor on the second night, with me making a great amatriciana sauce out of fresh tomatoes (N.B., in my version, I do not use garlic--I like to have the bacon-y flavor right out front). The grocery store even had pancetta--they were well set up for us city folk.
The lovely little cottage we stayed in was well-stocked with vintage cookbooks and other books about food. I picked up this one (you may know Ludwig Bemelmans better as the author of the Madeline books) and read it all weekend. Now apparently out of print, it's a memoir of his life as a waiter and eager gourmand in Europe and the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century. It put me a very pleasant Continental frame of mind, for which I was very grateful.
