Confidence

Thursday morning brought an end to the cooking part of the cooking week. We concentrated on fish and shellfish, a couple of simple salads and we finished off the week long French sourdough experiment.

The bread was good, much better than my last attempt, better texture and taste. We pan fried some red mullet fillets and served with tomato and black olive and finely chopped lettuce. We made classic French lunch salads of lardons and frisee and roquefort, pear and walnut. We sautéed some white fish fillets in noilly prat, lemon, cream and parsley and we finished off with a classic moules mariniere.

Gary used to eat mussels a lot when growing up in Holland but a bad experience had put him off and he hadn't touched them for years, but he said that watching and helping me with the whole process of making the dish - buying, washing, cleaning, sorting, discarding and finally cooking - gave him the confidence to try them again - which I thought was just brilliant and, by itself, made his whole cooking week worth while. As it is also one of his wife's favourite dishes, she should benefit too.

I've had an upset stomach for the past couple of days and I don't know if it was a mussel (probably not) or just an excess of rich food and drink this week (most likely) but I haven't mentioned it to Gary because I really don't want to discourage him now.

The final part of the week was one of VinEcole's excellent wine tastings. The weather at the end of the week was superb and we had the full benefit of a roof down motor out to Gayda, the majestic sweep of the snow-capped Pyrenees glistening in the sun before us and a good bit of fun and laughter and knowledge from an interesting mix of people at the tasting and the usual charm of our hosts, Matthew and Emma.

All in all, I think the week was a success and I hope Gary goes back to the UK armed with the confidence to try things out for himself.