Bastille Day

We had a great Bastille Day bash with the Francophile friends we went to Languedoc with last summer. For the regular readers of this blog, that would be my #1 reader and the hard-driving hybrid driving Silicon Valley personage with the personalized plates, who will henceforth be known as The Exec. And their lovely wives, of course. We started off with an aperitif provided by #1. Everyone said they loved the Pastis and it had the added advantage of clearing my slow kitchen drain. When dinner began, I was quite embarrassed that my wife had forgotten to prepare an amuse-bouche, but made up for it by cooking a fantastic Coq au Vin. She wants me to make sure I mention that the chicken was cooked. I haven’t blasted this out to the blogosphere before but I’m pretty famous amongst my friends for a Chicken Sushi dish I made several New Years Eves back. We finished the meal the way the French do, with extra stinky cheese and a dessert wine.

The kids had a separate meal, the way it should be. They had steak and freedom fries. The Exec gave me and #1 a lesson in grilling steak. If thing go south down south, I think he has a lock on a job at any Sizzler in the Bay Area. The old folks also knocked back several bottles of rosé. We were OK with that now that rosé is hip again. I’m not sure if AOL has featured rosé in their lifestyle section yet but we may be ahead of the curve. I was looking for some Mateus, in a nod to some high school girlfriends, but ended up buying a couple French wines instead. We also had few bottles of red, including a top of the line Pique Perlou that The Exec smuggled into the country last year.