Good dinner

Sometimes I really get to enjoy my job - like evenings when I have to prepare and share dinner with an interesting and diverse group of intelligent and likeable people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

Tonight was one such occasion and all thanks to the inability to find a decent restaurant for guests to go to on a Monday night slightly out of season in France - well in Carcassonne anyway, but I suspect it applies to a wider group of similar small provincial towns across the country.

Now that we are into October, all of the restaurants that I recommend for guests who are looking for something slightly better than a basic brasserie, are closed on a Sunday and Monday night - actually some of them are always closed on those days even in the height of the Summer tourist season.

So my Mexican guests who arrived late yesterday were asking me this morning about dinner tonight and I was struggling to advise them. "Can you do dinner for us?, asked Antonieta. I couldn't say no in the same way I couldn't resist her original email asking "I want stay your luxury hotel". I'm not criticizing her English at all, it was sweet. My Spanish is rubbish.

My Australian guests arrived late this afternoon after a long drive across country from Tours. I could tell that they were weary and needed looking after - I offered and they jumped at the chance to have dinner at home so to speak.

When I woke up this morning I was going to be eating on my own tonight - finishing off the coq au vin that I prepared yesterday - by 6pm I was cooking a dinner for five.

They were all young - by which I mean under 40 and probably well under 40 - a corporate lawyer with his own firm employing 30 or so qualified staff, a specialist in pacemaker surgery and defibrillators who recently won a 'clinitian of the year' award, a graphic designer turned art therapist and a architect turned health care worker. Both women had designed their own homes - both men built what they were told to build - that sounds horribly familiar but very successful as a formula.

Naturally with Australians in the house the conversation turned to Skippy the kangaroo!

Naturally with Mexicans in the house the conversation turned to swine flu ( we all agreed that it wasn't their fault) and the new trend for premium grade sipping tequila.

We also discussed at some length why Central America celebrates Columbus Day (it was today by the way) as a national holiday when he bought the misery of European invasion onto the indigineous peoples of the region. Funnily enough, they hadn't really thought of it like that. I guess they focus on the positive benefits - whatever they may be.

Well you get the gist of it all - it was varied and intelligent and serious and light hearted - and the very essence of a good get together around the dinner table.

I just have the washing up to finish off.